4 ms·

A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. I worked for a 300-ish employee company spread over 4 countries and 2 US states around 2001-2004 and

by topspin 10y ago

A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. I worked for a 300-ish employee company spread over 4 countries and 2 US states around 2001-2004 and we used Notes for all internal document management, email and later even web content management. The thing just quietly kept everything in sync; distributed servers, mobile users and their laptops and traditional desktops, and never lost a byte of it despite flaky VPN connections, ISP service, change conflicts, abusive use cases, multiple Notes client and server versions, etc. I haven't dealt with any Notes systems in years, but my memories of the one time I did are largely good. The client had its quirks and Lotus could have done themselves a big service if they had adopted more conventional behavior and terminology, but the end user experience -- judging by easy adoption by new employees -- wasn't as bad as is frequently alleged.

slantyyz 10y ago
I used to work for a company that built Notes apps in the mid 90s, and while the UI was clunky as hell, it was a great tool. I was a big fan of the Domino back end too, in spite of the ridicule it got. When Couch and Mongo came out, it was kinda refreshing to me to see "document" oriented dbs come back.
- open-source-ux 10y ago
  "...the UI was clunky as hell..." The Interface Hall of Shame website (a now defunct, but once popular website with examples of badly designed UIs) did a critique of Lotus Notes back in 1999: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=original http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=or...
  - stan_rogers 10y ago
    Most of what's listed there is about bad application development (error checking and so forth). Many other complaints come from the fact that Notes was multi-platform (Win, Mac, OS/2, many Unices) and was consistent across all clients, rather than trying to look native in any one of them. The thing about that site that gives me the greatest kicks is that the pages of application tiles on the workspace has since become the way to do things, the only real changes being colour depth, screen resolution and vogue colour choices. (About F5/F9: F5 didn't mean "refresh" to anybody until MSIE came along; F9 did.)
- codeulike 10y ago
  Aha! I worked with Notes a few decades ago, interfacing it into PeopleSoft. I got it to work but I never really got a grip on the slippery concept of what exactly Lotus Notes was, and why it was so terrible at one-to-many data structures. But thanks to your comment I now get it! It was a document oriented nosql db, years before we had a name for that.
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    If I'm not mistaken, I believe IBM at some point ended up moving the Domino back end to something relational like DB2 long after I stopped using Notes. I was a MacOS (8 or 9) user when I got that job working with Notes. The thing that I found that helped me learn Notes very quickly was my background using Filemaker Pro. This was before Filemaker Pro had "gone relational".
    - sk5t 10y ago
      Yes, a DB2 storage option for Notes existed, but it didn't do anything to solve the basic mismatch between Notes and a) performance of Notes views in databases with hundreds of thousands or more documents, b) one to many relationships / transactions / RI, or c) support SQL or other non-script approach for query or update.
swedish_coder 10y ago
Can I contact you via email? Would love to ask you some questions about Notes.
Havoc 10y ago
>A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. [...] 2004 Well then its become progressively worse since. Been using it for 3 years now and each version has gotten progressively worse (unstable, slow, bloated). Random people's Notes crashes multiple times a day, others have mysteriously slow ones, sync issues etc. Its only redeeming feature is SameTime...
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Agreed. The eclipse client made everything worse IMO.
  - topspin 10y ago
    Apparently the Eclipse based client appeared in 2007 with Notes 8, long after my last contact with any of this. Someone pointed out that the old UI is a subject of the Interface Hall of Shame. It was weird, no denying that. But it was also fairly efficient; you got a lot of function out of it on a circa 2003 laptop. It was also stable if the host itself wasn't a mess. Not surprised to hear the Eclipse based client isn't loved; I imagine you'll see a 5x memory usage increase right off the bat, and every operation will take 1k more CPU cycles than it should. Anyhow, mostly I limit my praise to the trouble free and robust replication and distribution of content through Domino, the server side of the platform, a name this thread reminded me of after 12 years. A client could dial in to any Domino server in the company, efficiently and quickly sync all of their databases with the global network and immediately and get to work using their fast local storage. No drama, no glitches, no calls to the help desk. Good stuff. It obviated the need for shared file systems anywhere, which would have been next to impossible anyhow given the degree of distribution and poor connectivity available. It mostly obviated the need of backing up clients and several of the further flung servers; Domino naturally does multi-way replication, so the backups at the best resourced sites are sufficient.
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  > Its only redeeming feature is SameTime... Which started life as a re-skinned AOL Instant Messenger.
brazzledazzle 10y ago
UI/UX is so important. When I was involved with a migration from Notes/Domino to Exchange/Office several years ago you would have thought, based on their reactions, that hundreds of employees were being set free. It doesn't matter how technically superior something is if people don't like it.
- taurath 10y ago
  It felt like you were using a point of sale system from the 1980s - the business folks all liked it because of how powerful it was but to the end user absolutely nothing made sense and you just wanted to get back to common paradigms. It required F-key hotkeys to advance in most workflows for gods sake!

by topspin 10y ago

slantyyz 10y ago

I used to work for a company that built Notes apps in the mid 90s, and while the UI was clunky as hell, it was a great tool. I was a big fan of the Domino back end too, in spite of the ridicule it got. When Couch and Mongo came out, it was kinda refreshing to me to see "document" oriented dbs come back.

open-source-ux 10y ago
"...the UI was clunky as hell..." The Interface Hall of Shame website (a now defunct, but once popular website with examples of badly designed UIs) did a critique of Lotus Notes back in 1999: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=original http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?file=lotus.htm&mode=or...
- stan_rogers 10y ago
  Most of what's listed there is about bad application development (error checking and so forth). Many other complaints come from the fact that Notes was multi-platform (Win, Mac, OS/2, many Unices) and was consistent across all clients, rather than trying to look native in any one of them. The thing about that site that gives me the greatest kicks is that the pages of application tiles on the workspace has since become the way to do things, the only real changes being colour depth, screen resolution and vogue colour choices. (About F5/F9: F5 didn't mean "refresh" to anybody until MSIE came along; F9 did.)
codeulike 10y ago
Aha! I worked with Notes a few decades ago, interfacing it into PeopleSoft. I got it to work but I never really got a grip on the slippery concept of what exactly Lotus Notes was, and why it was so terrible at one-to-many data structures. But thanks to your comment I now get it! It was a document oriented nosql db, years before we had a name for that.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, I believe IBM at some point ended up moving the Domino back end to something relational like DB2 long after I stopped using Notes. I was a MacOS (8 or 9) user when I got that job working with Notes. The thing that I found that helped me learn Notes very quickly was my background using Filemaker Pro. This was before Filemaker Pro had "gone relational".
  - sk5t 10y ago
    Yes, a DB2 storage option for Notes existed, but it didn't do anything to solve the basic mismatch between Notes and a) performance of Notes views in databases with hundreds of thousands or more documents, b) one to many relationships / transactions / RI, or c) support SQL or other non-script approach for query or update.

swedish_coder 10y ago

Can I contact you via email? Would love to ask you some questions about Notes.

Havoc 10y ago

>A well run Notes system was a real pleasure to deal with. [...] 2004 Well then its become progressively worse since. Been using it for 3 years now and each version has gotten progressively worse (unstable, slow, bloated). Random people's Notes crashes multiple times a day, others have mysteriously slow ones, sync issues etc. Its only redeeming feature is SameTime...

m_mueller 10y ago
Agreed. The eclipse client made everything worse IMO.
- topspin 10y ago
  Apparently the Eclipse based client appeared in 2007 with Notes 8, long after my last contact with any of this. Someone pointed out that the old UI is a subject of the Interface Hall of Shame. It was weird, no denying that. But it was also fairly efficient; you got a lot of function out of it on a circa 2003 laptop. It was also stable if the host itself wasn't a mess. Not surprised to hear the Eclipse based client isn't loved; I imagine you'll see a 5x memory usage increase right off the bat, and every operation will take 1k more CPU cycles than it should. Anyhow, mostly I limit my praise to the trouble free and robust replication and distribution of content through Domino, the server side of the platform, a name this thread reminded me of after 12 years. A client could dial in to any Domino server in the company, efficiently and quickly sync all of their databases with the global network and immediately and get to work using their fast local storage. No drama, no glitches, no calls to the help desk. Good stuff. It obviated the need for shared file systems anywhere, which would have been next to impossible anyhow given the degree of distribution and poor connectivity available. It mostly obviated the need of backing up clients and several of the further flung servers; Domino naturally does multi-way replication, so the backups at the best resourced sites are sufficient.
Jaruzel 10y ago
> Its only redeeming feature is SameTime... Which started life as a re-skinned AOL Instant Messenger.

brazzledazzle 10y ago

UI/UX is so important. When I was involved with a migration from Notes/Domino to Exchange/Office several years ago you would have thought, based on their reactions, that hundreds of employees were being set free. It doesn't matter how technically superior something is if people don't like it.

taurath 10y ago
It felt like you were using a point of sale system from the 1980s - the business folks all liked it because of how powerful it was but to the end user absolutely nothing made sense and you just wanted to get back to common paradigms. It required F-key hotkeys to advance in most workflows for gods sake!