Why shouldn't I use spaces in Lotus Notes user group names?

Question

My company uses Lotus Notes and Active directory. Our Lotus Notes groups used to have spaces in them. Recently, our IS department has switched to using underscores instead of spaces in the group name, making them irritating to type. When asked, the IS representative said that they failed an audit due to having spaces in these lotus notes groups.

What's the problem with spaces in group names?

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any issues with having spaces in group names. If you are assigning external email addresses to the groups, maybe they want the external address to match the Notes name for the group?

If they are mapping the groups directly into active directory, that may be why they don't want spaces, but as far as I know, there isn't any reason not to use spaces in Notes specifically.

Answer 2

One thing I can think of is file names:some operating systems are less/not tolerant of spaces in file names. It could be that your organization is using a backup or management system that saves group data to disk with a file named after the group, thus creating various strange errors for that software.

Another case I've seen is naming Amazon S3 buckets. There, the bucket name ends up being a part of a future URL, and must therefore contain no spaces or other special characters.