Lotus Notes: Survival of the Unfittest

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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?
LET ME SAY IT - OUTLOOK SUCKS! It’s a personal viewpoint, not an industry standard that people dislike a particular product.

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.
Don’t make me go near Outlook on search. It SUCKS!

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.
Or you could select all documents, and use the click and drag to DE-select the docs you won’t want to include . . . . (and shift-click has been available since well before your post, when R8 was released)

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).
May not seem appropriate to you, but it is to many. Context-sensitive right click again has been available since well before your post.

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.
So, Notes is behaving the way Windows dictates and it’s Notes fault?

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?
Means you need to hire a new Admin. I’ve met many MS Admins who suck too.

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. WRONG. And only if those two people can actually access the same databases. Which they can’t if you are collaborating with another company. WRONG. Or a completely different organization within your large company. WRONG. Or some other government agency that isn’t sold on Notes. WRONG. Or sold on using your Domino Server to facilitate collaboration. WRONG.
Now you need to hire new developers as well as a new admin. You can collaborate usngi domino with anyone who can use a browser. Anywhere.

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 won’t waste any more time ripping on Outlook/Sharepoint/OCS/SQL etc (which I had to suffer for almost a year) in comparison with Notes/Domino/Sametime - they don’t come close. The Lotus suite has been a collaboration platform since BEFORE Outlook existed, and continues to expand and improve on its functionality and usability. I can set up a fully functioning collaboration environment for 500 users in less than one day (including server build and user creation) that include document sharing with check-in/check-out, versioning, workflow, email, calendaring and instant messaging. On ONE server.
Can you do that with M$? I think not.

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When Reoccurring meeting is change notes keeps asking to save. When saved same questions are asked by notes to save. the meeting are not moving to the new time on (user’s) calendar

This is the help desk ticket that I get from the call center every other day. Why? Because Notes is a disaster of epic proportions.

WTF? I might off myself soon if this doesn’t stop.

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Heh. I feel the same way about Outlook - and come to think of it, all of Microsoft Office - as many commenters here seem to feel about Notes.

The two biggest problems with Notes/Domino I’ve seen over the years since R2 are:

  • Poor deployments. Either business policies restricted the hardware or networking too much (giving end users the perception of poor performance); or IT staff doing the rollout caused problems (either because the IT staff didn’t have Domino skills yet, and tripped over common problems; or because the IT staff didn’t like Domino themselves, and thus projected mental doom across the project).

  • Feature schizophrenia. Domino itself tries to do too many things all at once, and at first blush, seems to do them poorly. Yes, you can write cool field @formulas that call both LotusScript and Java agents to update the DXL that’s XSLT styled to create HTML for your web clients - but that’s not really the best way to do it. Likewise for anyone who wants the Notes client to be just a simple and straightforward email client, nothing else: you can’t get away from the fact that the Notes client does 50 million other things for you.

In any case, at least 80% of the arguments for or against Domino are simply the result of upbringing. I was raised on Lotus products, thus I love them still. Most of the folks here were probably raised on MS Office products, and thus love them still.

What we should really do is refuse to participate in proprietary software anymore, and all donate just a few hours to improving OpenOffice’s features and performance. That’d show the world! smirk/

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LN Design is the most powerful and userfriendly tool.

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Lotus Notes is such a torture I suffered previously in a Fortune 500 company. Surprisingly, a company huge like this could ever tolerate such a hug “Bug” dominating its daily operations. All it can do is to slow down your pace and foster your patience.

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Just horrified/frustrated/digusted with Lotus Notes (sucks)… the Auto Save does not work! I lost 2 hours of work after Lotus Notes crashed. All i could do is use enough swearwords in a minute to last a decent man for a lifetime.

What sucks most is that Autosave only works for new drafts… once you manually save it, it is no longer Autosaved.

ho designed the crap UI?

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I wouldn’t say that I would quit my job because we use Lotus Notes (6.5), but it is such an impediment to my productivity I fear losing my job. Why would would someone devise an email app where organizing the messages, which takes only a few clicks and seconds of my time, be so obtuse and take a half hour with Notes? And the program itself is just plain slow. Even our own IT department hates it but we are apparently stuck with it.

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I meant to say only a few seconds of my time with Outlook or Netscape.

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Ok, so why after, organizing emails messages to various folders, does Notes insist on putting them back into the orginal folder, when I refresh? Why should I have to archive just to move mail from the server to my local drive (I can drag and drop with Outlook)? Why is Notes not able to figure out which folder to put mail into when I do archive. Why does Notes make the most simple tasks so mind numbingly complicated and unreliable? I must spend a half an hour a day screaming this lame POS program.

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No wait… it copied them back to the original folder. Now the emails are in both places. Even the messages I had moved 2 days ago.

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What is the matter with you people. Is this some form of late twentieth century social psychosis? Grow up and get a life will ya!
Notes is just a mail box program with some added and useful functionality. Listen carefully…It was and is not a Data Storage technology…The way you all sit around here and bitch about this makes one wonder…Quit a job over it? You really need to stop all this prattle…

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I have the misfortune to use this crappy application on a daily basis. Why, when I reset my email client password does it not immediately set my messaging password to the same? I could understand if there was somewhereb else to change my messaging password, but there isn’t. So I have to wait until it “replicates” my password. God I hate notes. This application wastes so much of my life. If companies actually did a study on the amount of time wasted versus saved by using Lotus Notes, they would have a fit.

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Of course notes admins and proponents will say “notes is more than just email”, etc. What they don’t consider is the impact on productivity. The impact of productivity for notes users as opposed to outlook users is scary… crashes, freezes, intolerance to blips across the network, inconsistant and cryptic GUI design. I’ve been using notes for over 10 years and absolutely hate it. Show my the application that cannot be used effectively unless you have training and I’ll show you lotus notes. Fortunately my company is upgrading us all to outlook in the not-too-distant future then it will be bye bye stress.
All the best
Oram Plus
http://oramplus.net

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I love finding things like this - couldn’t be any more fun to read. Just like a Harley Davidson vs. Anything (esp. Japanese) debate.

So - who in the room works for companies that use Lotus Notes as an email client? Who in the room works for companies that use Outlook as an email client?

Great. Next Questions.

Who here experiences:
1 - missing messages
2 - odd errors that turn the inbox into gibberish
3 - difficulty in attaching documents
4 - limitations with linking files or web pages to email
5 - Who here had to roll out an extra GB of memory to their machines, their corporate standard, dual-core machines, to make the latest update to their email client (8.5) work without dragging the machine down?
6 - Who here JUST REALLY USES NOTES FOR EMAIL?

Hmm, none of the Outlook users raised their hands.

1 - Who here can attach a link to an email and double-check what they have posted into the body of the email?
2 - Who here can find messages easily, seeing the entire message thread?
3 - Who here can click on the “X” in the upper right corner of an email message and not have to relaunch the entire application?
4 - Who here can see properly rendered HTML messages - that print just fine too?
5 - Who here has been able to do that since 1995?
6 - Who here can quickly and easily make mailing groups?

I’ll stop there to stop confusing the Notes lovers. Get with it - most corporations using Notes ONLY use the email portion. For the life of me, for my 28 years of IT Experience, from programming, to the beginning of networks, to the C level management position I have now, WHY, WHY are we using this piece of garbage. Oh yeah - we have invested WAY too much into the software, hardware and support to move to something else - ANYTHING else. As a programmer, we strove to make applications look, feel and act similarly - because - DUH - it makes using the app easier, training quicker, thus it COSTS LESS TO IMPLEMENT AND USE. The Notes UI people should be forced to use Outlook 97 ONLY for the next 2 years. Then let them go back to Notes for email. Maybe, just maybe, they will get it. And before we go crazy with what notes can do compared to Outlook - I still want the question answered - HOW MANY PEOPLE USE THE THINGS DESCRIBED BY DomiNotable? I can personally speak for more than 5 fortune 500 companies that use Notes 98% for email, and have very, very, very few if any apps built around it’s document functionality. People just don’t WANT to use the icons on their workspace to view shared information. Document versioning? I’ll turn on change tracking at the AD level via policy, and properly setup my network shares - I can do that (including the server build) in about 5 hours, wanna race?

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I love finding articles like this that are now 4 years old, and even with a relatively new version of Lotus Notes I can still nod my head and agree with everything thats said.

Yes, Lotus Notes is the bane of my working existence!

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Sorry guys, as a user I seriously hate Notes. In my company we use 8.5 and the benefit I’ve seen from previous versions is that the mail system got even more sluggish. We’re about 5k employees. But there is good news. We will finally drop the crap and move to the 21st century by moving to MS. This move have been postponed for 5 years due to an IT department that don’t have a clue about other corporate systems. Hey, did I mention Baan? Same story there.

I feel I am getting furious when just thinking about Notes. This is the most user unfriendly application I have ever used!! And believe me, I’ve been around the block. Why is the UI random in this application. Despite all UI rules, this dino still keep frustrating millions of users.

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I agree in most opinions I was able to read but I would ask every one of Lotus Notes haters, if you create an application using another development language are you able to create a complete and secure application so quick as in LN? If a user needs an urgent change, are you able to do it as quick and easy as it can be done in LN? Companies had to choose between big investments on maintenance using other tools or very low using LN, I think paying expensive licenses are worthy.