6 ms·

Excerpt: on Notes for years, and never thought it lived up to the hallowed Lotus name. It was a fabulous product if you were an IT person, but so poorly de

by pdenya 14y ago

Excerpt: on Notes for years, and never thought it lived up to the hallowed Lotus name. It was a fabulous product if you were an IT person, but so poorly designed from a productivity standpoint It's amazing how far you can get by pleasing the IT people who as far as I can tell are the only group that's pleased with the current version of Notes. My first experience with Lotus Notes was in 2005 and I found it to be a bloated piece of crap with archaic email rendering, barely functioning search, and long wait times for even basic operations. I was hoping to see news that IBM was sunsetting the entire product along with the Domino servers it runs on.

grannyg00se 14y ago
It has been disappointing IT people for a long time now as well. The eclipse based designer client in particular was a difficult transition. And the move to Java based Xpages hasn't been all sunshine and glory.
thelibrarian 14y ago
Every IT person I know of who had to deal with administering it has hated "Bloated Goats", as some of them call it.
smackfu 14y ago
I don't know, it's kind of fun to use as a programmer too. I can redesign my personal email view to anything I want.
- gadders 14y ago
  This. Designer access to your mailfile, and a full text index and it was a pretty good email client that you could tailor how you liked.
  - Peaker 14y ago
    I think the Lotus Notes as a GUI platform is so horrid that it couldn't possibly be good at anything: * It comes with a program "Zap Notes" which is supposed to kill it when it hangs (Wat?). A bit funny since "Zap Notes" doesn't even work for me, and I have to use a combination of greps and kills. * The UI rendering is slow and visible. These guys haven't heard of double buffering. You see little GUI components being rendered slowly. This is extremely annoying and sluggish. * Every little UI operation you do in this program can take seconds on relatively modern hardware. During these seconds, the UI is of course completely blocked. * When someone at your corporate IT wants to move a Notes mail server or such -- they actually have to coordinate a reconfiguration of all the users' mail server addresses! You have to go dig in a huge, badly designed preferences dialog to make this change. This is nuts. The list goes on and on, but I can't fathom anyone liking this software.
    - smackfu 14y ago
      Run "nsd -kill" from your notes dir. ZapNotes is very 2005.
X-Istence 14y ago
Just don't ask the guys that were/are doing Lotus Notes to SharePoint migrations ... we loathe it as much as its users.
- manys 14y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure your paychecks don't reflect that.
scrumper 14y ago
Notes does one thing that nothing else on the market does: custom workflow. Its calendar and email suck elephant balls, but the workflow stuff is pure gold to any kind of process-oriented business (ie most of them.) You can design a completely bespoke workflow with custom documents, forms, actions and events and have Notes manage everything for you. IT guys love it. Management loves it even more, at least until they try to report against the data it holds... What you can do with it is really, truly impressive. Sure, the user experience utterly stinks: it's dog slow, primitive to look at, wilfully oblivious to any UX developments in the last 15 years and, worst of all, it actively prevents data sharing and extraction. The functionality, though, is second to none in the right hands. There is nothing else that allows a small to medium sized company to construct a tightly-integrated business operations system for so little money. Your alternatives are, what, SAP? Siebel? Expensive, doesn't do all the workflow. Salesforce? Great CRM but functions fall off pretty fast afterwards. Hiring Accenture to build something? Not if your revenues are in the 7-8 figure range. I have worked at a couple of Notes shops. One was a software company where Notes did everything. Bug tracking, product backlog, development tasks, timesheets, vacations, sales CRM, you name it. We had a full-time staff of 5 Notes developers to keep it running. The business would have collapsed instantly without it. It was our entire lives. The second was a surveying company which put up cellphone masts. They used Notes to manage the entire process from site search through to landlord negotiations, contracts and operator billing. Every step was a document with a status, every change of status triggered some action, all carefully worked out. The reporting problem bit us hard though. We had to hire people to suck data out of Notes' flat file structure into SQL so we could do management reports. Then we had to hire more consultants to implement new workflows as the business changed, as new cell operators came online (this was in the '90s mobile gold rush), as all the variables and data points associated with a fast-moving market changed around us. Eventually the consulting bill to extract data from Notes for management reporting bankrupted the company. Shortly afterwards the owner had a stroke and then died. It's the only example I've heard of a software system actually killing someone. The problems with it are a function of its age. Back at the vendor, if I needed a report on, say, bugs submitted in the last week, I'd have to submit a ticket to the Notes gurus to have them create it for me. The data was right there on my screen, but if they hadn't previously conceived of exactly the 'view' into the data that I wanted then I was reliant on them to produce it for me. I remember once complaining to my father about the madness of a system that captured every tiny detail of everyone's daily work but prevented managers from doing even the most basic reporting. He just laughed and told me stories about MIS people and his former company's Pick mainframe. I really, really hate Notes. Like, personally hate. I respect it, I admire its vision and persistence, and I really liked my 5 Notes developers from India, but the software itself just has to go. If a business buys into the workflow aspects (rather than stupidly using it for email/calendar) then by the time you realise its limitations it's so deeply bedded in that you can't get rid of it without blowing up your company. Anyway, I think I might just have had a startup idea...
flomo 14y ago
It's funny, because when I first encountered Notes way back when, it was something the department installed without IT approval. Semi-technical users could easily build little tracking and document databases and publish them on the network. People actually liked using it! (I've always suspected that Gmail was inspired by the old Notes mail interface, which had no 'inbox' and was based on conversation views and tagging.) Once Notes turned into IT-managed 'groupware' and became a bad parody of MS Outlook, it became completely intolerable. End-users could no longer create databases (or even edit their inbox columns) as most systems were completely locked-down. My last two encounters with it, they didn't even use the DB/workflow side of it, it was only for mail.
wsc981 14y ago
I've developed in Lotus Notes for about a year and I thought it was kind of interesting. The distributed databases were kinda cool, as was the Designer. Perhaps it reminded me a bit of HyperCard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard But that was like 6 or 7 years ago. Wouldn't want to develop in Lotus Notes anymore, but I don't have any bad memories of the software.
tytso 14y ago
As far as I can tell Notes is designed to appeal to CIO's who write large checks --- it certainly doesn't appeal to the users or IT people.
dagw 14y ago
I used Notes and Domino in 97-98 and quite liked it. We used it to develop in-house workflow and documenting tools and at the time it was really quite slick. Doing web interfaces to the tools was amazingly quick (relative to most other things at the time) and generating custom spreadsheet reports was quite quick and easy assuming you where also using Lotus 1-2-3. Never really used the email functions though.

by pdenya 14y ago

grannyg00se 14y ago

It has been disappointing IT people for a long time now as well. The eclipse based designer client in particular was a difficult transition. And the move to Java based Xpages hasn't been all sunshine and glory.

thelibrarian 14y ago

Every IT person I know of who had to deal with administering it has hated "Bloated Goats", as some of them call it.

smackfu 14y ago

I don't know, it's kind of fun to use as a programmer too. I can redesign my personal email view to anything I want.

gadders 14y ago
This. Designer access to your mailfile, and a full text index and it was a pretty good email client that you could tailor how you liked.
- Peaker 14y ago
  I think the Lotus Notes as a GUI platform is so horrid that it couldn't possibly be good at anything: * It comes with a program "Zap Notes" which is supposed to kill it when it hangs (Wat?). A bit funny since "Zap Notes" doesn't even work for me, and I have to use a combination of greps and kills. * The UI rendering is slow and visible. These guys haven't heard of double buffering. You see little GUI components being rendered slowly. This is extremely annoying and sluggish. * Every little UI operation you do in this program can take seconds on relatively modern hardware. During these seconds, the UI is of course completely blocked. * When someone at your corporate IT wants to move a Notes mail server or such -- they actually have to coordinate a reconfiguration of all the users' mail server addresses! You have to go dig in a huge, badly designed preferences dialog to make this change. This is nuts. The list goes on and on, but I can't fathom anyone liking this software.
  - smackfu 14y ago
    Run "nsd -kill" from your notes dir. ZapNotes is very 2005.

X-Istence 14y ago

Just don't ask the guys that were/are doing Lotus Notes to SharePoint migrations ... we loathe it as much as its users.

manys 14y ago
Yeah, I'm sure your paychecks don't reflect that.

scrumper 14y ago

Notes does one thing that nothing else on the market does: custom workflow. Its calendar and email suck elephant balls, but the workflow stuff is pure gold to any kind of process-oriented business (ie most of them.) You can design a completely bespoke workflow with custom documents, forms, actions and events and have Notes manage everything for you. IT guys love it. Management loves it even more, at least until they try to report against the data it holds... What you can do with it is really, truly impressive. Sure, the user experience utterly stinks: it's dog slow, primitive to look at, wilfully oblivious to any UX developments in the last 15 years and, worst of all, it actively prevents data sharing and extraction. The functionality, though, is second to none in the right hands. There is nothing else that allows a small to medium sized company to construct a tightly-integrated business operations system for so little money. Your alternatives are, what, SAP? Siebel? Expensive, doesn't do all the workflow. Salesforce? Great CRM but functions fall off pretty fast afterwards. Hiring Accenture to build something? Not if your revenues are in the 7-8 figure range. I have worked at a couple of Notes shops. One was a software company where Notes did everything. Bug tracking, product backlog, development tasks, timesheets, vacations, sales CRM, you name it. We had a full-time staff of 5 Notes developers to keep it running. The business would have collapsed instantly without it. It was our entire lives. The second was a surveying company which put up cellphone masts. They used Notes to manage the entire process from site search through to landlord negotiations, contracts and operator billing. Every step was a document with a status, every change of status triggered some action, all carefully worked out. The reporting problem bit us hard though. We had to hire people to suck data out of Notes' flat file structure into SQL so we could do management reports. Then we had to hire more consultants to implement new workflows as the business changed, as new cell operators came online (this was in the '90s mobile gold rush), as all the variables and data points associated with a fast-moving market changed around us. Eventually the consulting bill to extract data from Notes for management reporting bankrupted the company. Shortly afterwards the owner had a stroke and then died. It's the only example I've heard of a software system actually killing someone. The problems with it are a function of its age. Back at the vendor, if I needed a report on, say, bugs submitted in the last week, I'd have to submit a ticket to the Notes gurus to have them create it for me. The data was right there on my screen, but if they hadn't previously conceived of exactly the 'view' into the data that I wanted then I was reliant on them to produce it for me. I remember once complaining to my father about the madness of a system that captured every tiny detail of everyone's daily work but prevented managers from doing even the most basic reporting. He just laughed and told me stories about MIS people and his former company's Pick mainframe. I really, really hate Notes. Like, personally hate. I respect it, I admire its vision and persistence, and I really liked my 5 Notes developers from India, but the software itself just has to go. If a business buys into the workflow aspects (rather than stupidly using it for email/calendar) then by the time you realise its limitations it's so deeply bedded in that you can't get rid of it without blowing up your company. Anyway, I think I might just have had a startup idea...

flomo 14y ago

It's funny, because when I first encountered Notes way back when, it was something the department installed without IT approval. Semi-technical users could easily build little tracking and document databases and publish them on the network. People actually liked using it! (I've always suspected that Gmail was inspired by the old Notes mail interface, which had no 'inbox' and was based on conversation views and tagging.) Once Notes turned into IT-managed 'groupware' and became a bad parody of MS Outlook, it became completely intolerable. End-users could no longer create databases (or even edit their inbox columns) as most systems were completely locked-down. My last two encounters with it, they didn't even use the DB/workflow side of it, it was only for mail.

wsc981 14y ago

I've developed in Lotus Notes for about a year and I thought it was kind of interesting. The distributed databases were kinda cool, as was the Designer. Perhaps it reminded me a bit of HyperCard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard But that was like 6 or 7 years ago. Wouldn't want to develop in Lotus Notes anymore, but I don't have any bad memories of the software.

tytso 14y ago

As far as I can tell Notes is designed to appeal to CIO's who write large checks --- it certainly doesn't appeal to the users or IT people.

dagw 14y ago

I used Notes and Domino in 97-98 and quite liked it. We used it to develop in-house workflow and documenting tools and at the time it was really quite slick. Doing web interfaces to the tools was amazingly quick (relative to most other things at the time) and generating custom spreadsheet reports was quite quick and easy assuming you where also using Lotus 1-2-3. Never really used the email functions though.