Google hits Lotus Notes users

"Once migrated, Gmail will open Notes links with the Notes client."

Anybody knows if this is correct? What'd be the point then? I would migrate to Google Apps if I could get rid of Notes/Domino. But if Gmail needs Notes client to open DocLinks, it would seem that after the glorious migration, I would end up with Notes/Domino AND Google Apps.

Hi Nick, you often mention that Opera has two users and that Lotus Notes has two users too. That may make some people think that you are talking about four different people. That's inaccurate. I am one of the two Opera users, but I also happen to use Notes. So there's only three of us.

The PC in Steve "Totally Clueless" Ballmer's office has Lotus Notes and Opera. He's just too busy being silent to notice. So he is the other one.

There are only two then.

The other 144,999,998 people are just using their PC monitor as a place to stick Post-It Notes. Much better use of a PC.

"but a lot of them still have to face a migration to Notes 8 which has been on the market for nearly two years"

"8" "Eight!" The lucky ones are on Notes 6, with a few smug bastards on 7. Before most of us can migrate to Notes 8, we'll have to learn to breathe air and then evolve feathers.

I am always surprised to hear of an organization that still uses Lotus Notes. It was a good product before IBM acquired them but since then its been dead or should have died out by now.

Clients dont want Lotus Notes either it was good for the Windows 3.1 days but not since.

Its also an Administrative nightmare and only people who admin lotus notes want lotus notes because they are too lazy to learn something better.

Good luck finding training for it which translates to high administrative costs because its a specialty product now since its dying off. All the major and mid sized training facilities no longer offer training on it.

If I ever had someone who suggested Lotus Notes over Exchange/Sharepoint I would have to fire them.

Mitchell I'm always amazed that there are people so clueless out there they repeat ms marketing bs that went out with windows me.

If you actually read groupware reviews you'll see it usually wins when compare to anything else. Not that anything else can do what Notes and Domino does. It's not just an email/calendar solution but an entire enterprise level app dev. platform available on multiple OS' with powerful mature admin tools.

The client is now based on an elegant extensible platform (Eclipse) that allows it to be integrated with anything (Including other class leading products like Lotus Quickr and Sametime) It's light years ahead of the pile of products MS tosses together and calls SharePoint especially in deployment and administration.

What clients want (Whatever that is today) doesn't matter. At large companies where competent professionals evaluate software, it dominates the market and isn't going anywhere. There are millions of applications built on it that work well which would take many years or decades to port to something else.

There are large amounts of training materials and courses available for it, as it's much more established than MS' offerings. If you were my supervisor (Doubtful) I would probably leave as it would take too long to educate you.

I can tell by your name Old Yeller that you are antiquated and like antique software like Lotus Notes. Probably a lifer to Lotus Notes and embed it in a way that your company cant easily get rid of it securing your position to bilk a company out of its money for years to come because of this.

You quoted
"There are millions of applications built on it that work well which would take many years or decades to port to something else."

Isnt that the way of any IBM product, service, or application is to embed itself into a company so that it cannot be easily removed or replaced? Cheaper to continue to support an embedded application than to go to something else. All the more reason to get off or never use IBM/Lotus/Domino sooner than later so that you aren't forced into their high costs of renewal.

One would get the same from any custom written application but those who sign off on one with the IBM name on it arent out to better your company but to embed IBM into your companies checkbook.

Echoing the comments above, the only people I have heard who like Lotus Notes are the people who administer it. The poor users all know it is software spawned from Satan's own sphincter.

It doesn't matter how good the server is, any communication software is only as good as the client and the Lotus Notes client is and always has been bobbins. It is the only piece of software on my system that has to have it's own companion app to kill all its orhpaned threads when it goes wrong.

If it were up to me I would take inspiration from your namesake and take you and your abomination of a application out to the woodshed.

PS: And no the next version will not be better. I'm not falling for THAT one again.

I have to side with mitchell here. I've been with Lotus 7 years ago (for 3yrs), went to another company and back to the same(another location) and back to Lotus and my god I absolutely hate it the same as before.
I wont go into the details of each app of the suite or their possibilities. I'll stick to their email client interface for this. I've used Notes 6, 6.5, 7 and 8 (as beta) and their interface is absolutely horrible. There's nothing intuitive to it. Almost everything you right click on gives you the same menu set which obviously gets you nowhere. And in 7yrs I have yet to see any major progress. As pointed out it must have been great with Win 3.1...

I just wish I could get rid of it forever. Much like I wished I could make facebook disappear...
That article sparked some hope.. now to wait

..Lotus Notes still remains, and is growing, in total corporate seats...almost a dead tie with Exchange...

Gmail has this effort not because of corporate world, but because they are going after the University world, with has a high degree of Notes.

Corporate world uses Notes as an application platform, not just email. The odds of Gmail gaining share in that is zero.... they have been pitching their story everyone, and winning exactly ZERO... while the email is nice, it's the apps that drive the decision.

The concept the any credible corporate entity will board their jewels and data on Gmail is a joke. Corporate America entertains them to use their 'free' price point to leverage down Notes and Exchange pricing...not to replace them.

Once users are well trained Lotus quickly converts from being a hated interface to actually being a useful tool. This requires a serious Lotus Notes Administrator who takes the time to provide the training for those users and keep up with administrative requests on a timely basis. I have spoken with old users who moved on to other companies and they find that they miss the abilities and ease of use of Lotus Notes. On the other hand I find that users who suffer under a less helpful admin will end up hating Lotus Notes forever.

I feel compelled to address all the silly stuff above. It's an excercise in fultility, because there are none so blind as those tat will not see..

Can you tell me if you've ever used Notes or Sharepoint to develop anything? Most likely you use outlook to read your mail and heard from somebody who has to use Notes at work (Probably version 5) and says it sucks. Whatever...

Antiquated? How so? Is the software like produce that rots on the shelf if left too long? Perhaps it's more like wine which improves with time as more users discover problems and suggest improvements.

Is it better to have a developer who has experience with a product and used it successfully to solve real business problems, or some newbie who took a class, memorized answers to multiple choice tests and is sure they know it all?

Your choice of the word "embed" (Three times) is curious. Microsoft is the company that requires you to use all of its products if you want to use any one of them. To build a workflow app in Sharepoint, you must run Windows as the server and desktop OS, Active directory, Outlook (And the rest of Office) SQL Server, Visual Studio, Biz Talk server, Exchange, etc. MS is like a malignant cancer that you'll never get rid of. The "Software Assurance" tax will continue forever.

If an application is built, works well for its intended purpose and adds business value, how is this a problem? If redoing it in MS is impractical then why would I feel guilty? Who is "bilking" who? The person guilty of providing the best value?

Specifically what is wrong with the client? It's running fine here (8.5) on Windows and Linux. Name calling is not a persuasive argument to anyone over 12.

I know, but we build up so much frustration using Lotus Notes that we need to vent as much as we can when we get the chance...

I seriously don't understand the need for a reasoned debate. The fast majority of users think it is an absolute turd of a program therefore it is. The fact that developers think it is all just spiffing is irrelevant.

We users all know you have N reasons why YOU think it is fantastic but we don't care because we are users not developers. Our communication software is supposed to make it easy for us to communicate first, and for you to administer second (that's why you get trained to do it and we don't).

When an application gets so hated that people start creating their own websites for it...

http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/

... maybe you should start thinking that there 'might' be something wrong with the software rather than all these people being stupid.

Nope, it's like the bottle Retsina that someone brought back from Cyprus.

You didn't like it the first time you tried it and swore you'd never try it again. You didn't ask for it, but now you have it again you can't get rid of the stuff. You know that every time you use it it will make you sick, but you can't pour it down the sink because the people who gave it to you would be pissed off.

We are currently running Notes 8.5 and it is pretty good. Not only all our apps written for Notes 5 do work but the server is humming quite happily on a relatively weak server running CentOS Linux. Very easy to administer, very little problems with the server. The client has some issues - the biggest being it's UI speed.
But - try having your 9-years mail (that's) some 5 GB full-text indexed and ready for instant search in Outlook!
And if you really cannot live without Outlook you can use it as a frontend to Domino server, you just won't be able to run all those custom apps...
As for the migration from Notes/Domino - good luck with anything more complicated than mail/calendar/contacts!

Anyone that uses Notes as *just* email/calendar/contacts is using a spreadsheet like a calculator. What a waste of time and money. But they can buy the fancy calculator (Exchange) w/ all the special scientific buttons that'll never increase their efficiency, but adding 2+2 will be soooo easy.

Email in Notes is an app on top of a Rapid Application Development system w/ lots of features (PKI, web, encryption, etc.). A competent Notes developer can create apps in weeks vs months or months vs years in a MS environment because all the plumbing is in place and they don't have to graft stuff together.

Seriously...if no one invented Visicalc, your accounting departments would still be taking weeks to do the month's payroll...and your competitors would eat you alive w/ your extra overhead of inefficiency... :-P

And stop using version 1.0 of Visicalc and griping that it sucks compared to Excel 2010. At least use the latest 8.5 version before making bad judgement calls so we don't think you're clueless...

Basically what some are saying is the Notes client is the worst thing ever inflicted upon the world, though nobody can actually give any reason why it is so bad. Apparently any example must be indescribably supernatural.

Unlike ms, Notes blogs publicly about the client's development process:

http://www.notesdesignblog.com
/NotesDesignBlog/NDBlog.nsf

Perhaps you can make the world a better place by dropping by and telling them what they are doing wrong instead of "venting" on the ihatenotes (Insert whatever, works just as well) page.

Why would Corporate and Government departments even consider moving to Google from Notes?! OMG perhaps an idiot would do it. There are no bennifits at all and a few very big problems arrise.

What happenes when the Network link goes down to Google? What happens to privacy issues? What backup issues are there and can you manage and access those backups at any time and are they stored in different locations?
I could keep going but I won't. Last thing, did I mention only an idiot would do this?

@Ken Yee, WTF planet are you on? Have you ever worked in the corporate workplace and have you ever done ANY IT support or Admin? BTW, You sound like a troll, your experiance running and administering linux at home on your lan isn't a big acheivment and doesn't make you an expert.

I have to use Lotus Notes every day and I hate it. Give me Outlook please!

What on earth would I want a "development platform" for when all I want to do is read my mail?

The mail client did use to suck rather a lot, though, although I believe it's improved since the last time I used it on version 4(!). Still, Notes is a lot more than just a mail client - a point most people on ihatelotusnotes.com fail to understand.

In any case, you still don't have a point. It isn't a company's job to provide you with applications that are supremely easy to use - their aim is to create a process that has a suitable cost/benefit tradeoff. Basically it's often cheaper for you to whinge at Notes than them to fix it.

Likewise, it is not the job of a sysadmin to make life easy for you. The first priority is keeping the systems running, the second is rolling out new services that help the company achieve its aims and the distant third is making users desktop experience pleasant. A few minutes thought will illustrate why it has to be this way.

With decent management, IT personnel have time and resource to keep the users happy but this is not always the case.

Users generally only see the interface. They don't understand the infrastructure, the underlying technical, administrative and business requirements and the capabilities of the software. Other products may look or operate more effectively in certain areas whilst failing to achieve the overall desired aims.

If you hate the software, ask IT to fix it. If IT refuse - usually because there is insufficient resource/money, complain to management. If that goes nowhere - congratulations, you've just found out your company doesn't think you're worth spending time and money on.

It should be noted that Notes can work with Outlook, so that if that's the main objection and mail really is that bad, the reason is probably commercial.

Note that this is also a two way process - if users continue to treat their work machines as their own property (it isn't) and private Internet access as an inexhaustible resource don't be surprised if the IT department is less than prepared to be friendly. Hold back on sending those multi megabyte 'funny' e-mails, and they might be more prepared to help.

'Very easy to administer, very little problems with the server. The client has some issues'

I think that sums up my argument against it very nicely. The users hate it but they are just users so they can get stuffed - should by an IT department motto.

While I'm flattered that some people here rate my opinion so highly that you won't recognise any faults in the client unless I personally list them, I'm afraid I am far too busy*. I'm not paid to make Lotus better, or to provide useful communication tools to
your users. Google if you must.

*I would be less busy if so much of my time wasn't wasted by Notes but c'est la vie.

'I don't like this, wahwahwah' is not a constructive argument if basic complaining isn't getting anywhere. You need to understand the reasons and work to change them.

There are reasons behind 'the users are just users so they can just get stuffed' as I outlined in my post above.

If you're too lazy to understand or don't like the reasons, that's not my problem. Either accept the arguments or offer a reasoned argument as to why I'm wrong - which I'm not.

You could say with justification, that not keeping the users happy is short sighted management policy and I'd agree, but without suitable resource or policy change things will remain the same.

Not your problem? Not mine either, for the reasons detailed above.

I'm not disputing your reasons why you think Notes is wonderful. I'm sure they are all perfectly valid but they don't matter to me any more than my reasons for disliking it matter to you.

Administrators insist the software is wonderful despite the fact that most users despise it. You calling me lazy for not understanding how wonderful it is inspite of the dire client is no more productive than my 'wah wah wah' (as you put it).

You are still only seeing the software from a developer/administrator perspective and I am looking at it from a users perspective. Software has to be used, therefore it needs a user interface. If the user interface is bad, the software is bad regardless of how peachy things are in the back office. Most other software developers seem to grasp this fundamental concept and put a little effort into their UIs. I suppose the real genius of Notes is to realise that the users normally have no purchasing power.

I hate Outlook. I can never understand how to get anything done with the tool. Reading email in it is painful to my eyes. The UI was vomited on the screen. The tool is just dumb. I cannot do half the things with my email in Outlook that I can in Notes.

Please take off your blinkers and actually read what I've said. This is NOT about Notes - it's a more general point.

You're wrong - if the user interface is bad, the software is not necessarily bad. Neither is the software always good if the user interface is good.

Let me be more blunt : imagine you're the purchasing manager for a company. You're using A Package that wastes 20 minutes of the user's time each day because the UI sucks. Other than that, it achieves all necessary aims, brings in much needed revenue and at the time was the best option.

The users don't understand this, they only see that function X is poor. Fixing function X would involve buying new software at large cost, installing software on each and every client machine, training users and admin staff and fundamentally do little other than present an easier user interface and perhaps save 20 minutes a day.

The company is not so constrained that the cost vs/20 minutes is a viable choice.

Tell me what the business case is here other than 'it makes some people a bit happier, even though they can still do their jobs'.

You're exhibiting wilful tunnel vision here - things are more complex than the interface you see.

I'm also talking in general.

The user interface is a necessary part of any software. If what you were saying was true then you could just dispense with the development cost of the UI and use a command prompt. This doesn't happen because most people understand that good UI design is an important contributor to the overall quality of a system (SAP is an exception but we can have that argument another day).

The business case is that the 20 mins (or an hour, or a day) lost across the company also costs money unless all your users work for free. Even worse than that tangible cost is the effect of bad or late information.

Imagine your patch didn't get picked up because a someone from the delivery team pressed the wrong button in some incomprehensible form where 'save' means send, 'cancel' means save and 'close' means quit.

Or maybe your patch didn't get picked up because of an incorrect setting for your client. You wanted to solve it yourself but couldn't because the error message was useless and all the IT staff have pissed off down the pub.

Or maybe your patch didn't get picked up because your client just crashed, taking out the operating system and trashing your system partition in the process.

You now have to wait for the next release cycle or even worse - ship hold.

Clients are important, and so are UIs.
Just because the costs are intangible doesn't mean they are not real. Maybe things are more complex than you can see?

I support about 350 users with Lotus Notes and I can tell you first hand, Lotus is very flaky. I hate it.

And yes, I do have a lot of IT experience...do you? Or are you just Mitchell posting w/ an anonymous name? :-)
Look me up. I'm using my real name..I run the Lotus Notes FAQ and have been an IT consultant (not just Notes, but Java/J2EE, and ASP.Net) for 13 yrs now and I'm old enough to have programmed firmware for routers and designed chips. What have you done? ;-)

My comments stand. It's a development system w/ lots of APIs. If you're using it as just email/calendaring, it's a waste of time and money. If you use it the way it was meant to be used, you can save your company a lot of money by making it more efficient...

You're not wrong - and neither am I. Sometimes the twenty minutes matters, and the cost/benefit works in favour of a better UI. Sometimes it doesn't and you have to suck up the UI.

Whether the cost/benefit is actually right in a specific case is an argument I definitely don't want to have..

Still, the priority remains sufficient stability and functionality. UI design and administration bring up the rear.

If pressing the wrong button means a patch not being shipped, there are already severe difficulties with the program functionality or organisational problems.

Bad UIs can be dealt with by training, however much everyone may dislike the system. Bad use of the system as a development platform is dealt with by hitting the developers until they use it properly. Crap error messages are handled by getting managers to allocate enough admin support to help users. Taking out your system partition is dealt with by backup computers and procedures.

Program functionality issues that can't be worked around? Now /that's/ due to the software supplier, or whoever ordered it.

I'll grant that some costs are intangible, but they will have to be dealt with on the next software upgrade cycle when systems are re-assessed. No-one sane is going to authorise a new, highly expensive system, unless it provides more tangible benefit than hoping it sucks a bit less in a couple of areas.

but I still hate it :-)

Sounds like we got a bunch of wankers on here.