Still using Lotus Notes? My condolences.
Where Notes does win praise is from those who administer it, who say it is secure, stable and flexible. Databases can be tied together, and there is even a "bridge" to Microsoft's Outlook.[...]
Delay's remarks brought one sharp user retort, who observed that "Notes's backend functionality has no bearing on us 100m or so end-users. As far as we are concerned the GUI is the system. And boyo... is the GUI client a heap of ill-conceived, non-intuitive rubbish."
I used Notes years ago and found it painful even for the most simple of tasks. This was about the time when we were starting to build collaborative software over the web, and Notes became far too painful to use. Replication alone was a huge waste of productivity, especially from a hotel room over dialup.
While Lotus Notes claims that its strength is collaboration, I've typically seen it used only for email and calendaring, sometimes in situations where the companies also use collaboration products like Documentum.
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posted by Larry at 12:42 PM
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I am still using Notes but the last thing I need is your condolences thanks. I'm very happy with it - it does everything I need it to, it's fantastic as a mobile off-line client, and it's never delivered a virus to anyone. I can store attachments in a document library more efficiently than dumping them in the file system. The integrated Sametime-based presence-awareness and instant messaging is a huge productivity bonus.
If you've "typically seen it used only for email and calendaring" then you don't get out enough.
I am an end-user who's forced to use Notes for Calendar/Newsgroups/E-mail, and it blows chunks. Everything about it, right down to the simplest tasks -- selecting several messages, replying to an e-mail, creating a folder -- flies in the face of convention and intuition.
I've heard Notes fans lecture about how solid the backend is, but why should I care? All I see is the frustrating and confusing frontend, which managed to freeze up during the very first day I started using it, immediately forcing me to discover the niche market of 3rd-party Notes-restarting tools.
So now all the Notes fans are anxiously awaiting "Hannover", which will apparently fix all the UI problems that should've been resolved in 1995. All I can say is that it'd better be one hell of a makeover.
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