Notes with Internet Explorer

I had a frustrating problem this week.

I converted a Lotus Notes application to a Domino/Web application. Testing went well for a while but then I had an interesting complaint.

The user was using Microsoft Internet Explorer within their Notes client. Granted… I’ve always thought that a browser “inside” of your email client was a bad idea… but I had to live with it as a developer.

I digress…

The user was using IE within his Notes Client. My application has a few modal dialog boxes. One of those boxes was used for text entry. The user’s complaint was that they could not navigate to their email (or other Notes databases) with the dialog box open.

At first I couldn’t believe it. “Notes with Internet Explorer” is a dumb idea but would a dialog box really freeze up the entire Lotus Notes application? Yes. I would have figured that just the tab would freeze (I can’t confirm what happens in R8.0.x).

What can I do? I can’t stop using dialog boxes just because of these few users. I wondered if I could do some sort of Ajax/DHTML dialog box that “pretends” to be modal.

My initial response to the user was that we program our applications for Internet Explorer (company standard) and they we don’t program for IE inside of the Lotus Notes client.

My response (at first) was rejected… we’ll see where negotiations go.