Lotus Notes: Survival of the Unfittest

Hey anyone have a link for that .NET drag-drop thing ?

We looked at doing this a TINY bit at my previous job. It looked really difficult, so we dropped it…

Vince - I’ve been trying to get IBM to document their clipboard formats and expose APIs for accessing data in drag-and-drop operations for quite some time now. My focus was doclinks rather than attachments, but similar issues probably apply with the current version. They have announced an approach that will help me: they’ll be putting a “notes://” URL on the clipboard during drag-drop operations. I don’t know if it will help you, though, because I don’t know if they have a syntax for referencing attachments.

I recently (well a year ago) switched into a notes environment for the first time since R4, and I really must say it’s impressed me. Especially the server side, but even the client, I think the important part that most people don’t consider is that Lotus isn’t really an e-mail platform. It’s an excellent application server that just happens to ship with a e-mail app. Process managment applications, things like equation based, help desk type, all run great. You can get an app web ready without any effort. Granted the e-mail interface sucks, but I’ve read a number of usability studies trashing Outlook’s design, it’s just that people are more used to it. so who knows… personally I’m a bit of a convert, but certainly if you are only going to use the e-mail functions and nothing else, then you shouldn’t use lotus. But really, what business couldn’t benefit from easy apps? Expenses forms, vacation requests (at the most basic level). Notes can replace sharepoint, access, and tons of other cusomter apps.

Select one or more emails, then from your mailfile (6.5) action bar:

Folder\Move To Folder… (dialog includes options to create new folders).

Or if that’s too much effort, drag and drop the selected documents to a folder.

If this takes you half an hour then yes you should fear losing your job.

Further to Owen’s comments… if Notes 6.5 is truly “painfully slow”, then it is your IT staff that should be in fear of losing their jobs. If the infrastructure and software are properly installed and managed, there’s no reason Notes should be slower than any other program.

a href="http://www-12.lotus.com/ldd/doc/domino_notes/Rnext/help6_client.nsf/855dc7fcfd5fec9a85256b870069c0ab/3fb601045e9b8a7785256c1c0037d7e8"http://www-12.lotus.com/ldd/doc/domino_notes/Rnext/help6_client.nsf/855dc7fcfd5fec9a85256b870069c0ab/3fb601045e9b8a7785256c1c0037d7e8/a

I think a lot of you miss the point.

Lotus Notes is NOT an email appplication. Email is just one of the the things it does (albeit poorly).

It’s the application development. I challenge you to find a rapid application development enviornment that allows you to create an app as quickly and easily as Lotus Notes.

Someone mentioned that I.T. buys products that make things easy for I.T.

Think about this - you have a business - it NEEDS things from I.T.

With Lotus Notes I can have one guy on staff to create every little custom app that the business needs.

In .NET, I need to double or triple the number of programmers just to get the same result.

Not to mention that everytime a .NET app comes up, the amount of verticals that need to be installed and setup is ludicrous.

I’ve got one app that runs on Lotus Notes that to convert it to .NET I need to install the following:

  1. SQL Server
  2. IIS Server (THE most insecure webserver ever made…)
  3. BizTalk
  4. Exchange Server
  5. Share Point Server

So here’s the conversation with the CFO:

“I can give you this app with the existing infrastructure using the current staff on Lotus Notes. Or I can build it in .NET, hire a couple of new programmers, hire a new server admin to handle the 5 new boxes, buy a new rack to put them in, but 5 new servers, pay Microsoft licensing fees for all 5 of those servers, etc…”

There’s more to this than the e-mail UI…

Like it or not, Microsoft has created a de facto interface design standard. It’s not a matter of “Lotus Notes had it first”. If you want end-users to be happy with their applications and have less training time to learn their applications, then give them applications that have the look and feel that “they” are used to, not what “you” are used to, or what “came first”.

I really don’t like Exchange/Outlook, I absolutely HATE Lotus Notes interface, which ruins the rest of the product for me, I’m just pissed that there’s not a 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc. choice that allows Notes data to be migrated into it. I took over the IT department at my company recently, and if it wasn’t for the years of databases STUCK in Notes, we’d have migrated the day I got here.

Notes is like the bad decision that no one wants to admit to, so it just keeps going and going and going and … gunshot… (maybe someday)

I have to say that this is certainly an interesting thread.

I ended up here because I was on a search for keyboard shortcuts to use with Lotus Notes 6.5.5 on my Macintosh. Needless to say, i did find two shortcuts here, but alas they are targetted towards Windows installations of Notes.

I don’t know about any other facet of Notes besides its email facade . . . or perhaps veneer would be a better descriptor. I have to agree with virtually every comment here about Notes as an email GUI . . . they all pretty much equal the same thing . . . painful.

On the interesting topic of keyboard shortcuts, I found the bit of Notes history interesting and certainly it seems to be grounded in a reasonable precedent. However, the balance of the keyboard shortcuts range the gamut from “That makes sense” (CMD - B for BOLD; CMD - I for Italic) all the way to “Who thought that made sense?” (ESC to close a message window paired with Shift - ESC to Send a message). How are closing a window and sending a message related, aside from the fact that the New Memo window disappears when you send the message?

Notably missing from the shortcut list are such staples in other email GUIs (Eudora for example) that make life really much easier. I’ll just list those that ought to have a shortcut but don’t that am aware of: Reply; Reply - All; Forward; Forward - All, but I am certain there are others.

As for observations about the speed of the program, 6.5.5 on the Macintosh is painful in that area as well. It is completely executed in Java, but almost as an after-thought of some type. When I come in in the morning, I start up Notes and then go get a cup of tea. When I come back some five or 10 minutes later, Notes is still engaged in some internal struggle to decide which part of the program is going to win the battle to control the interface for the next few hours. This is always marked by it taking 20 to 25 seconds for it to respond to any input . . . and before anyone advises a beefier machine with more RAM, I am running a G4 667 with 1GB of RAM and 100 GB HD that is less than half-full.

Oh, and a warning for those of you who may be deploying an SSL VPN gateway of some type in your environment, there is one HUGE gotcha that resulted from a code change made between 6.5.3 and 6.5.4 that results in a pop-up dialog asking the end user to install some nebulously referenced “Internet Certificate.” Contrary to the hard to find article on the IBM website, the situation occurs when a Notes email message has been replied to with history at least twice, with at least one of those replies occuring through the SSL gateway, and then a Notes full-client (6.5.4 or higher) user attempts to open the message . . . voil . . . odd dialog box to confuse the end-user.

For those Windows users out there, a single click on the Cancel button will dismiss this dialog and the observant user will discover that the only item missing from the display is the little piece of paper icon that indicates that the message several tiers deep in the thread is a document within a Notes store.

For the Macintosh users out there, it is a slightly different state of affairs. One will be required to click Cancel 55 times for EACH item that makes a reference to the SSL gateway (i.e., a message that has been replied to in the manner describe above three times will require 110 clicks on Cancel, four times - 165 clicks, etc.). One of our Notes developers opened a technical case with Lotus. There response was “Oh. Sorry about that.” with NO indication of a fix date . . . or even the intention to fix.

Sorry if I’ve gone on. Notes frustrates me terribly because even if it’s only the mail UI that is bad about the entire application . . . it IS the only part I get to see.

Came across an interesting quote from Jack Ozzie (Ray’s brother), c.1997:

“…we’ve always had a great relationship with Microsoft. We worked with Windows 1.0 and found a lot of bugs for them, and they changed a lot of things in Windows for Notes, because our server really pushed Windows.”

Read the full interview here
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-Jack_Ozzie/index.html

Even more interesting is (Lotus Notes progenitor) Ray Ozzie’s recent meteoric rise to power in Microsoft. He’s now to replace Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect.

Also remember that David Cutler is still active in Microsoft. Cutler who was the progenitor of Windows NT (now xp), oringally came from Digital Equipment Corpoaration (DEC), where he was the lead developer of their RSX and VMS operating systems. Many articles have been written about the VMS legacy within WinNT, and then there’s the urban myth of “WNT=VMS++” (increment each letter), which would follow the convention of “B, C, C++”.

Before Lotus/Iris, Ozzie came from Data General (an offshoot of DEC). I’ve always been aware of some trace elements of VMS within Lotus Notes eg. the F5 logout, “Access Control Lists”, “Privileges” (now referred to as ‘Roles’).

What we have here is the alignment of an axis of evil :wink: It’s like a secret society and F5 is the secret handshake. Soon the whole world will use F5 logout F9 refresh. Be very afraid.

I don’t get it…I use Notes at work and Outlook at home. I am certified in Exchange Server, and have taken Notes Admin and Development courses (V4) but who cares? I don’t find either interface better than the other…just different. Perhaps I have just been using Notes too long. But when an enterprise email system manages to keep up with l-users that insist on keeping 5GB mailfiles on the servers, with little to no degradation in performance, I sit up and take notice. The Notes/Domino architecture has been fantastice for me and my organization.

I was asked to do a little notes project by my boss. I thought nice another little tool in my resume box. That was the last positive thought I had about this product! In 20 years of IT there is only one product I’ve found to be worse! I’ve gone to 4 different bookstore chains looking for Notes books…guess what…none to be found. Although there are rows upon rows of Java, php, and .NET books… hmmm.

I have been using Notes for 15 years; I am the administrator. And yes, I use it at home as well as work; why should I have two different email clients? I do not have any complaints about Notes other than sometimes support is a little slow in responding to issues and questions. My system starts-up quickly, there are no delays in processing and the system is rock-solid. Thank you.

wow ! wonderful thread ! had to start using Lotus notes , dint like it that much , esply because of shortcut keys, and google isnt of much help.

is any of you guys here aware of a shortcut for “reply with history” ? i tried googling , but in vain.

Thanks in advance.

Arvind - the answer to your question of short-cut keys for reply with history is to highlight or open the mail then hit Alt-2-e. (hit the Alt key to see the shortcut #s for the menus buttons, then use the underlined letter for the menu item you want).

I have another shortcut key question that I’m hoping someone will have the answer for since I don’t like switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse. I want to be able to create an email, appointment, or to-do item without having to “open” the corresponding application. So while reading email, I want to be able to create a calendar entry or a to-do entry (or vise versa) using keystrokes. I know you can do this using MS Outlook and i found it really handy cause I could add stuff as I thought of them while reading mail without any mouse involvement. I’ve since changed jobs, and now I have to use Notes and I can’t find anything on this shortcut - UGH!

This is a funny thread. I happened across it trying to find a way to convert NDL’s to Notes URL’s and I have to put in my 2 cents…

I have been on both sides of the Notes sucks battle.

I was subjected to Notes in 1997 and used it (and administered it) until mid 2005 when I got to experience Exchange/Outlook/SharePoint.

Happily, that phase of my life is over and I am back to a world with powerful replication, easy database access, wonderful archiving, easy customization, actual security, and best of all, as someone else pointed out, no spit and gum holding it all together!

Great to see that so many people know so little about a product, maybe that is also why IBM paid so much for the code for replication and the compound document (true one) that still micro$ has not copied despite having access to the replication code.

It does not take a brain cell to work out that you do not been to use notes for email derrrrr…

Look at the posting and then try on a domino server

load imap
load pop3
load smtp

RTFM guy’s

:wink:

I’ve been waiting for 45 minutes for notes to remove a calendar entry. That sucks no matter what manual you read.

I just stumbled across this thread after typing “Lotus Notes 6.5 suck” into Google. :slight_smile: I’m glad I did as I’ve learned a couple of useful tips that have been bothering me since I had to move from Outlook to Notes. So, in that spirit, I’m hoping you Notes experts can help me overcome these annoyances:

  1. Why is there no ‘notes’ feature in Notes? I really miss that feature of Outlook.

  2. When a colleague sends me a contact from his Address book, how do I accept it into mine? So far, I have needed to create a new contact and copy-and-paste the fields one at a time.

  3. I received a meeting update today, but I can’t deal with it because Notes says, “You cannot process this notice because this meeting is not in your mailfile or has not been accepted.” It was in my calendar but now it’s not. I did not remove it. It was originally a single meeting event that became a recurring meeting. When I got the update to make it recurring, I got the same message. Since then, every update I get about this stupid meeting gives me the same message.

  4. Yes, the F5/F9 foo drives me nuts. Also, Control-N/Control-M still catches me when I want to create a new ‘memo’ (Hello, Lotus…The rest of the world calls these “email messages,” not “memos”).

  5. I created a rule to forward emails from a specific sender to another email address. It never worked. I found out that IT had disabled rules due to security concerns and because “Out of Office” auto-replies were bouncing around in a feedback loop (Notes still has that problem?!). So, I deleted all my rules. Now, every email I get from that sender is automatically dumped into one of my folders and I cannot figure out how to make it stop doing that.

  6. Thank you for that click-drag to select tip! It was driving me crazy to do the hold-the-shift-key-while-hitting-the-arrow-keys trick. I just wish now that the selection would stick after an action, such as hitting Insert to mark the selection as read. Frequently, I want to select multiple messages, mark them as read, and then move them into a folder. As it stands, it seems I need to select the messages, mark them read, reselect them again, and then drag them to the folder.

That’s all I have time to type right now. Thanks for your interest.