I Love Notes… bring back os/2
I love Notes 8 a LOT!
Well, face it…all fans of Notes are yelling that email is only 5% of Notes and you should know the rest to appreciate it…but in most companies, Notes is forced onto the users as email client and not as multi application envinronment anyway.
And as a user I don’t care about beautiful tools and applications and secure servers and what else: I use it for email and calendaring everyday…I have used Pegasus, Eudora, Outlook and Thunderbird and they are ALL better email clients than Notes.
Why does Notes archive my entire folder structure if I explicitly told it to archive one folder only? Why can’t I drag and drop folders to an archive. Why doesn’t Notes show more than 1 archive file??
It is the CLIENT that is used most in companies; only a few people manage the server. So if the client UI is bad and not intuitive, a company looses more money on that side than employing extra people on the server side. IT must also think very carefully about making the user’s life easier, because I don’t know about your company…but here IT is not making the profit… so if 99% of the users tell you that the email client stinks, they are right and it’s time to change.
Simon Templar, unlike you, those of us with real marketable skills can do just that – quit a job just because they use a shitty email program. Life is too short to work for a company where they’re too cheap and/or stupid to deploy a real email application. It is the 21st century, you know, and calling Lotus Notes a dinosaur is insulting to those great extinct beasts of the past! Seriously, do you really want to work for people whose IT dept is that retarded??
Funny how all defense arguments for LN are simply wiped off this forum, if any. Most of the people actually liking LN only can say “I love Notes” and “you should find out all there is before judging” because there is really nothing to say about ANYthing Lotus Notes has to offer. Clientside as well as serverside (or Domino for that matter). My users here are all complaining about LN how annoying it is and that there is really no logic in it. Except for 1 person. She actually “likes” LN because she doesn’t know anything different than LN and Hotmail. She’s cool so I’m having a problem calling her ignorant, but if she only knew…
I can’t stop… Just one more example which occurred recently: signatures; looks professional, handy when you want people to be able to click on a picture, whatever. In Outlook you have this easy box where you can tune up your signature to whatever your heart desires. In LN? No, they think that’s no challenge for the users. They NEED an HTML file if you want to be able to put a linked picture in. So in other words: you have to be a damn coder yourself just to be able to use a linked pic in your signature? Like… EXCUSE ME GENTLEMEN… Some users aren’t exactly geniusses over here. I have found some stinking way to do it with a free (thank god for that) tool. Asks you a couple of questions before it actually sends the email, but only when you want it to. IBM definitely has its own definition of userfriendly. One that the rest of the world doesn’t share, that’s for sure!
I fully agree with Original Name’s statements. A better word instead of dinosaur would probably something like “fly”… Makes you wanna kill every now and then.
-cheers-
LN SUCKS! LN SUCKS!
I found this site by accident while - of course - Googling how to do something ridiculously simple that LN makes complicated (moving mail out of my Sent folder).
I’m sure I’m stating the obvious, but IMHO the only reason LN still exists is inertia and money. I’m using LN at my new job, the first time ever in my life. I work for a large medical device manufacturer, and everyone hates LN and wishes we used Outlook. The only (chuckle) reason we don’t is justifying to management and IT why we should spend X gazillion $$ to convert the entire company over when “nothing’s broken”. They missed the opportunity when there were only ~100 (or even 1000) employees, and now it’s an insurmountable task.
Long live the cockroach.
oh and eh… @FuzzyJJ
It’s really nice to have more applications within LN. That sounds real redundant. Hell, let’s just crash the whole company we support! Maybe afterwards we can setup Exchange and Outlook after all. NotesHater, this sounds like a perfectly good solution for all your LN your problems hahaha!
My company recently converted from Outlook to Lotus Notes 7.0.2. Our only experience is with the email interface, and the interface is not good. It is unattractive and in some cases cumbersome (I won’t repeat previous usability complaints). This is a poison pill for users of LN, and it creates irrational dislike toward the product. The application itself seems to run plenty fast.
I agree with the comments about LN as an application platform - .NET and related technologies are a big hammer for a little nail in most cases. I would rather see our smaller corporate apps written in LN than MS Access.
My only hope is that IBM will hire Apple to redesign the web interface, then everyone can be happy.
With the flexibility in Notes for coding web interfaces and UI, it would stand to reason that if the interface is not well received then it would be the developer that is writing the interface and not the platform itself. I have been writing in Notes for about 10 years now and I love it and so do most at my company, yet everything still is Notes fault, if the network hiccups and they can’t reach their mail file I get “why isn’t Notes working”. Don’t get me wrong we still have some devout Microsoft pushers that would like to see it gone, but Lotus Notes has it’s place for quick, flexible and secure applications.
The Lotus Defenders STILL DON’T GET IT!
How many times does one have to say that the end user experience (ie the UI) is pretty atrocious? Really, when I interface with the email-like view of the database, I expect certain things to exist. Searching in Notes is not nearly as simple as it should be (take recent versions of Thunderbird for a clue as to what is easy). Though, I admit that it’s easier in 7.x than it was in 6.x.
Sorting by an arbitrary column, in either ascending or descending order is impossible, UNLESS someone at your company has provided the template to be able to do that. I still chuckle at the day my (very large) company pushed out the new feature of Notes 6.5 to let me sort email like documents according to subject.
I hear that a threaded view is available in 8.x. That sounds good, but other clients have been doing that since the late 90s/early 00s.
By the way, the highlighting of messages by holding shift and dragging is … TERRIBLE. Imagine, if you will, a server spews out thousands of emails to you (in error) due to some other misconfiguration issue. You have 12000 of these emails, and few of them seem to have any reliable way of distinguishing them based on a searching criteria. Click and drag through 12000 of those emails, and tell me that’s better or as good as selecting the first one, scrolling down to the last one in the list, hitting shift-click to select all the ones in between. Why does (nearly) every other application (not simply email, mind you!) implement the UI standards of CTRL-click to select one, Shift-click to select a range, but Notes does not? This is NOT a Microsoft thing, BTW.
Right-click context sensitive help would be really nice (I dont’ want to see Document Properties when I right click on a Memo Message - it doesn’t seem appropriate to me).
I started out using a nice X-term based environment (*nix), and grew to really like the focus follows mouse behavior. I’ve found mini-apps to mimic that behavior (TweakUI, etc) in Windows. Notes automatically pops up when it receives focus. That’s horrible. Granted, other applications are guilty of this too.
I dislike how when someone sends me an email with an web address (say http://google.com), and it’s not identified as a specific web link, when I click on the underlined link, I get a document not found error. What does that mean?
Notes also doesn’t like multiple monitors. It isn’t particularly good about choosing where to display things when you use muliple monitors (hover-help appears in a strange place, if your second monitor is to the left of your default monitor).
Now for the good parts. I like the Calendaring, I like how it interfaces with resources (ie rooms for meetings, resources in a room like a projector etc). I like Sametime (in fact, I’d be willing to say that I REALLY like Sametime). I’m not too fond of the contacts, however.
The collaboration capabilities of Notes appears to be pretty nice. But only if the people you’re collaborating with also use Notes. And only if those two people can actually access the same databases. Which they can’t if you are collaborating with another company. Or a completely different organization within your large company. Or some other government agency that isn’t sold on Notes. Or sold on using your Domino Server to facilitate collaboration.
Understand, Notes Defenders, that I am NOT criticizing the back-end capabilities of the Domino system, simply the end-user experience (which, since I am not a Notes developer, nor a Domino Administrator, I have to use the Notes interface). THAT is where Notes really really needs to improve. I haven’t used Notes 8 yet. Oh, I noticed that IMAP functionality has it’s own set of problems and incompatabilities…
I can’t believe this post is still alive. My company uses Notes for project (bug/feature) tracking and document sharing and, like almost everyone else here, the users hate it mostly because it’s unintuitive and slow. Why are there two ways of searching for information? Why does the entire UI hang when you update the information?
It isn’t just Notes that is really bad. The support page is awful. First I get an error message in Notes saying that there was an error opening a window. Now this message is less the helpful. They might as well say a dingo ate my mother. So, I click the search IBM button and it comes up with an article about the error message I had just received. Great, I think. Well, I was wrong. The article blames conflicting software. They go on to say that they had traced it to a video driver on one system but none the less it is OS specific. Now this is basically a direct quote from the IBM support page. Again, less than helpful so I start checking my system. I did find the conflicting software. There were two processes still running that IBM’s wonderful programmers did not shut down. They were ntmulti.exe and ntaskldr.exe. Both of which are part of Lotus Notes. So, you guessed it ladies and gentlemen. IBM was right it that it was conflicting software. It was their conflicting software. I told them that they could contact me to arrange payment for finding their problem.
OK the end user experience is not like Outlook. But you can’t rapidly build commercial applications (web enabled) in a few days using one developer in Outlook can you. Notes is a database platform not an email program like Outlook is. Most criticism of Notes is based on ignorance and parrot fashion chanting.
lotus is very slow, hangs up the pc, is not intuitive, the address book sucks so i use text files
says there are new emails in my inbox after i have already read them
tells me i have missed appointments when i was actually at them.
ok i shall start again.
lotus application messed up my post.
i wish to send an email not build a database so why does lotus insist on bundling it all together.
i can open ie, log on to my webmail, write and send an email, all in the time it takes lotus notes just to send the email i had previously written.
i find it easier to just put all my emails in a text file and then copy and paste them one after the other. then spend 20 mins watching the screen.
if i want to build an application then i ask IT to do it - i dont care what they use but to use the excuse that lotus notes is good for applications and is more than just an email client is not helpful when all i want to do is send an email.
the digital equivalent of being kicked in the groin upon arrival at work every day
I have to say it: this is the best description of Lotus Notes (and Domino…) I’ve ever seen!
I’m a knowledge manager, and have worked in two Notes environments for large corporates in the last 10 yrs (latest one version 7.) Thankfully have now escaped the hell - and yes I am good mates with a domino administrator.
My god it sucks! We all know about the clunky email/calendar but can I give you a little insight into the user experience of the databases? My last company’s KM program is basically going down the toilet because they cannot afford to get out of the contract with Notes and move across to Microsoft.
The benefit of notes is that it is quick and easy to set up a database. this was ground breaking 8 - 10 years ago…but fast forward and the firm has literally thousands of small databases with poor search, loads of duplication, no standard taxonomies across the piece. So - they need to throw even more at expensive search solutions like Autonomy.
OK - you could argue that this is a fairly standard info. management issue; that if the dbases were better managed we’d avoid alot of it; that if we stuck shiny front ends onto everything it would be better…but it still doesn’t negate the fact that we have a population of users who HATE notes, have been turned off by the dreadful email functionality and don’t want to engage with it at all.
I had users who would come to me wtih information management requirements and the first thing out of their mouths would be can we find a way to use something else instead of Lotus Notes?. They would BEG me to get sharepoint in, or instead try upload info to external servers e.g. Huddle.
oh and I’ve seen some of the new stuff - Lotus Connections makes a good corporate facebook - but development is sloooooooooowwww…
thousands of small databases with poor search, loads of duplication, no standard taxonomies across the piece…is that Notes’ fault or the person/people who designed the applications?
Personally I don’t blame IE when I come across a bad website…
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