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Notes is a real mixed bag. On the plus side, its open-ended, fully customizable document database is a phenomenally powerful tool for creating information manag
by scrumper 10y ago
Notes is a real mixed bag. On the plus side, its open-ended, fully customizable document database is a phenomenally powerful tool for creating information management systems that map very closely to the unique workflows and structures that arise in any business. As an expression of the promise of office automation, it's pretty compelling.
On the other hand, it's the world's worst email & calendar client and much of its bad reputation stems from users having to put up with that when there's really no need for it ever to have been installed. (EDIT: given that, it's interesting to see the prominence that email receives in the design doc. I'd always thought it was a post-Lotus bolt on, but it was a day zero consideration.)
But far, far worse than that is the stuff you don't realize when you embark on the Notes path. It's a very powerful tool, but a dangerous one too: I saw a telecoms company in the late 90s/early 2000s blow up partly because it relied too heavily on a custom Notes solution that became prohibitively expensive to change as the business evolved. Management got hooked on formalizing all their business processes inside Notes, seduced by the promise of total transparency and operational control. The system got big, and Notes scales badly. Reporting runs that took a few minutes with a few hundred attributed documents in 1998 took over four hours by 2000; I helped put in a SQL Server instance to create a relationally structured copy of the unstructured attributed documents to reduce that time, but of course that was more money. The poor chap that owned the company ended up having a stroke and the company was wound down. That's an anecdote, but on the other two occasions I've seen Notes used for its real value (as a document DB with associated processes) it's ended up in a similar, sprawling and unmaintainable end state.
I guess one way to think of it is as a kind of Excel for processes and documents. End users can do things with it very easily - you can set stuff up that exactly reflects the flow of information and control processes unique to a business, and that's a great tool for helping a business mature and control its operational risks - but its limitations and the systemic risk it introduces are not well understood and only become apparent when you've gone too far with it.
- k__ 10y agoI come from 7years with the email/cal-client. Even gmail, which is quite outdated today , beat this thing...
- EvanAnderson 10y agoI really like how you characterize it as "Excel for processes and documents". I can attest to seeing Notes-based applications built with the best of intentions collapsing under their own weight.
- scrumper 10y agoI was in good company - Mitch Kapoor says something very similar in the design doc: "Notes should stand in relation to word- and idea-oriented tasks as 1-2-3 stands in relation to number-oriented tasks."
- derefr 10y agoMy theory is that Notes email was there for the sake of being the all-things-to-all-people discovery mechanism for the documents (apps) people author. Like search engines are for the web. Receiving documents-nee-apps in your email does make sense for one-off apps (Google Forms-like stuff: one could author a poll on where to get lunch, and then send it to their coworkers, who could then respond without ever having installed said polling app before.) But I think they mis-considered the "hierarchy" of users: for every 1 person who can write such a poll in Notes from scratch, there's 100 who'd be willing to use a pre-programmed poll template document, but who would never even consider authoring such a thing themselves. Instead of Notes having an email client "home page", they could have had an "app store": a directory of all the templates published to your Domino server, which you might configure and then send out. Like the opening screen of a word processor or spreadsheet program. And, with the discovery mechanism out of the way, Notes wouldn't need to "absorb email" at all. They could have gotten away with just sending the resulting .nsf files over SMTP, reading them back over POP3/IMAP, and then distributing a Notes Outlook plugin that would render MIME-multipart messages that contain an application/x-com.lotus.nsf part using Notes.
- codingdave 10y ago> solution that became prohibitively expensive to change as the business evolved That sounds like bad coding. The downfall of many Notes systems is that it made it so easy to write simple apps, you ended up with a lot of poorly written apps because you did not need to be a proficient coder to deliver a working product. I, too, have seen downright horrific apps. I've seen teams of consultants hired just to maintain one form. And I've come in, re-written those apps (still in Notes), and turned them into self-maintaining, scalable apps that are 100% maintained by the business owners. At the end of the day, it is a technology stack. People can use it well, or they can use it badly.
- scrumper 10y agoIt was more that you had a set of Notes documents and associated workflows which conformed perfectly to business operations when created, but then gradually got heavier and harder to change as they were adapted along with the business. There was nothing wrong with the coding as such, more the accrual of features and exceptions and new types of related document. It's a kind of tech debt for which a re-write is the appropriate solution, but that was the prohibitively expensive part.