IBM has unveiled a major upgrade to its flagship platform with the launch of Lotus Notes and Domino 7. Lotus D7 includes new collaboration features and tools designed to improve productivity for IT administrators and corporate developers, as well as new productivity enhancements to help Lotus Notes users work more efficiently. They are available for multiple platforms including AIX, Solaris and Linux.
this java based email client is such a pain, we use it at my work place and supporting it is so much harder than outlook. hope they have fixed it
Since when is Lotus Notes client java based?
It’s not. It uses it’s own cross-platform toolkit.
It does have a JVM inside, as it allows you to code custom database apps in Java iirc. It’s been a while since I’ve used it.
Yes. The JVM is included. But the client is no way a JAVA client.
Lotus rocks!!!
Ibm almost destroyed lotus, but now i think this the way.
I had to deal with that thing for the las t3 months.
Please put an end to our suffering IBM. Terminate that damn thing. Improve upon outlook or start from scratch but please give workers their life back..
I have to agree. We use it at work and it is a major pain to use, it must be the most horrible UI of any collaboration platform i have ever seen. It just feels like no thought went into it in terms of usability, the UI is such a mess, administration is painful and the Notes client is painfully slow. Kill the damn thing!
It has been heaven working for a company that does not use Notes. Pine works quite well with Exchange’s IMAP. Anything is better than Notes.
Too many painful memories. I cannot continue. *sniff, sniff*
We just complete a corporate migration to Lotus Notes v6.5 from Exchange 2000 Server and outlook 2002. Notes is painful to use. Ibm should hire a few developers who have a clue on how to program a email client interface. Hey wait!, take a page out of Microsoft’s play book and just copy the outlook interface and functionality!. No really!
please! ..
My users have created some interesting acronyms for what N-o-t-e-s actually stands for and it’s not pretty.
I’m ready to go back to pop based email.
We just complete a corporate migration to Lotus Notes v6.5 from Exchange 2000 Server and outlook 2002. Notes is painful to use. Ibm should hire a few developers who have a clue on how to program a email client interface. Hey wait!, take a page out of Microsoft’s play book and just copy the outlook interface and functionality!. No really!
please! ..
Lotus Notes/Domino is very very flexible. If you are so hot on getting a Outlook interface with Notes, then why don’t you use the Lookout Express Mail Template?
Look at this screenshot:
http://www.openntf.org/projects/pmt.nsf/4a3f81aa5bbd6afe85256c71005…
Here you find more info about the porject:
http://www.openntf.org/projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectHome?ReadForm&Query=…
cheers
Steve
i have been working for more than 7 years with it, and is way better than anithing else. outlook is just a supped up email client. it can’t even compare.
Too bad that the much anticipated DB2 integration was not incorporated in the final release.
The UI of V7 is basically the same as V6.5, but IBM is working on a new and improved UI : check out the screenshots of Lotus Notes “Hannover” at:
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/hannover—-announcing…
Actually the “Hannover” screenshots do not look bad at all … hopefully they also will have changed the keyboard shortcuts and other little ‘annoying’ unexpected behaviour.
Of all the ones that cry foul, which release are you using?
Currently using 6.5, but luckily i am changing company soon and as far as i know they don’t use notes (-:
here another former notes user… no words to describe the horror that is notes. if you really hate your users, install notes for them.
there are so many other alternatives, notes should never be used because it’s so “flexible”. true, it IS flexible, it has hundreds of ways to annoy users!
When are IBM going to opensource Lotus Notes.
When IBM stops supporting/selling it.
Hopefully, the answer is that they will NEVER open-source it. Notes deserves to die, not to live on as opensource.
Simple… don’t use it.
Lotus Notes isn’t only a email client, it’s a rich client and mail is only one database, and there lots of diferent templates.
I will admit R4 – R5 was pretty clunky. I work a small company that using Notes. I walked into my first day of work and was lectured on the perfection of Notes by the president of the company. He was pretty convinced it could do anything including Word processing spreadsheets…. etc. If your going to ask the spreadsheet was achieved via add on program that even IBM discontinued because it was crap. I danced joyously when it stopped working in R6. Only time it was ever used is when the president made someone use it. I digress that not the point of this post. I have over the years I have used most of your clients including Outlook (a client that Domino will also support, try using anything except Outlook on Exchange and your using POP or IMAP) and found the modern (R6 and above) Notes clients very usable and powerful. In my personal experience I have found that most guys who have an extreme hatred of Notes are either using R5 or “MS or die” type guys. (not that I am accusing anyone of being that) Its not outlook but is that a bad thing? I used outlook for good while and have found most email clients to be equal if not better. One of my reason I initially disliked Evolution was that it was just like Outlook. Yes Notes is different, but having supported a company of Notes users, I would gladly work with Notes again. Actually I am looking to do that at another company as soon as the opportunity arises. Cheers guys
Will we finally get a Linux-based Lotus Notes Client instead of having to use the Java-based e-mail/web client or having to configure WINE to run the Win32 client?
Survey says…
Supposed to happen with Hannover which hopefully will be Notes 8 coming out next year.
A few years too late.
A company I used to work for were big Notes users and developers. When most of the staff switched from Windows to Linux, the lack of Linux client resulted in Notes being phased out. I seem to recall more than a few of our clients went in a similar direction as they began to adopt Linux within certain departments.
I use Notes under Wine. It’s not horrible, but then again IBM’s own deployment has been tweaked quite a bit. With regards to running under Wine, the only problem I have is that I can’t use the highlight-middleclick paradigm for copy/paste.
The Hannover client is supposed to be Windows/Mac/Linux, and, yes, it might be too late for a significant handful of lost deployments.
The thing I hate the most about Notes is the missing features on the client side. I can’t configure Notes as a newsreader, there’s no RSS, and the client feels really slow. Running under Wine doesn’t help the performance, but it’s slow under Windows, too. Getting 200+ emails per day from daemons doesn’t help either…
Domino, on the other hand, is hands down the best enterprise collaboration backend. If Evolution had Domino support I’d be a very happy guy.
The Hannover client is supposed to be Windows/Mac/Linux, and, yes, it might be too late for a significant handful of lost deployments.
Hannover will be probably a Java based application (the thin client) and IBM will continue to produce a fat client for Win and Mac (no Linux so far for the fat client).
The thing I hate the most about Notes is the missing features on the client side. I can’t configure Notes as a newsreader, there’s no RSS, and the client feels really slow. Running under Wine doesn’t help the performance, but it’s slow under Windows, too. Getting 200+ emails per day from daemons doesn’t help either…
sorry to dissapoint you here, but Notes and Domino can read newsgroups (did you mean that, when you used the word newsreader?).
Regarding newsgroup support; it is shit, the quoting is broken, the margins are so broken that the words aren’t corrected alligned when it comes to line length.
I can continue on listing all the faults with the newsgroup function that don’t work rather than what does work.
In a nutshell, Notes is broken, kill the damn thing, and put it out of its misery.
I’m using Notes 6.0.4 here. I don’t like it. It’s takes forever to load, it’s sluggish, interface is terrible, etc. It’s almost as slow as Websphere, but I don’t think that anything I’ve used to date is as slow as Websphere.
Will it ever stop! Its like an affliction the IBM keeps pushing on poor businesses. Microsoft Exchanged eclipsed Lotus notes over a decade ago.
Is Exchange 10 years old? Honestly not an apples to apples comparison anyway. Notes/Domino is so much more.
If lotus Notes is a crap, why notes creator is working now at Microsoft????
What I hate the most is that the “Sent” Folder is a “view”. Its such a pain. Why can’t it be a simple folder from which one can drag a mail to another folder, and it moves out.
How many times did you hate the thing for not being able to just drag and drop an old message off the trash into a folder.
You have to “recover” it back into the inbox and then drag it back to the folder for savings.
I also lie the “duplicate” of databases which don’t make any sense at all. Same file 2 sizes???
Or the duplication which do not work on sending when you plug your PC in a different location.
I have 2 offices, and the only way to send e-mails is to dial up??? while I have got network access in both.
I hate the damn thing.
“How many times did you hate the thing for not being able to just drag and drop an old message off the trash into a folder. ”
Never, selecting what I want restored and hitting the restore button never caused me trouble. Wow nit picking here.
“Or the duplication which do not work on sending when you plug your PC in a different location.
I have 2 offices, and the only way to send e-mails is to dial up??? while I have got network access in both.
I hate the damn thing.”
Huh? I think you might be referring to replication and sounds like you need to have your admin help you setup a location for both places. Its not that complicated.
Or the duplication which do not work on sending when you plug your PC in a different location.
I have 2 offices, and the only way to send e-mails is to dial up??? while I have got network access in both.
Your issue is network configuration (incl. DNS) or user error. Notes simply uses TCPIP. If your network can route it to the right place, and your server IP addresses can be resolved then you should have NO PROBLEM connecting from anywhere.
recently blogged on LN @ botlove.com//
Lotus Notes v4-6.5
I realise now that I am somewhat seperated from the torturous by-phone technical support life I arduously lived for several years, that there was some pleasure in fixing people’s computer problems. Lotus Notes was always the center of my knowledge in those years, with good reason, It is an extremely complex application. Lotus Notes tried to be everything from a mail client to a full blown database infrastructure and repository. The end user wishes to have an email client that is simple to use, the advanced user wishes to have integrated scheduling, meeting planning, to-do lists, reminders, automated and integrated mail forwarding, etc. Lotus Notes is a catchall application that integrates an email client, personal organizer, calandar, etc, but comes off as quite unwieldy to the casual and even the advanced casual user. Above and beyond the basic usable function of managing your day to day commuication and schedule management, the designers integrated a full database functionality, the ability to open and edit many varied types of documents within the client, archiving of both mail and documents, and things like integrated communications with teleconferencing companies to schedule and book conferences for example.
Most people that have never worked for A large 50k plus employee company probably haven’t encountered Lotus Notes, as most small to medium sized companies use Microsoft Outlook for their primary mail client and another solution for database management, and yet another for the other needs that come up in business. I cannot pass judgement really on the application itself, but some things are undeniable from my use and support of LN throught the years: 1) it is a worse resource hog than any other application that a person would be expected to have running in the background of a normal business day. 2)whether by the fault of the database designers, the custom template designers, or the developers of the application itself, It requires significant levels of support and has more conflicts with external software than any other application I have encountered. 3)While serving as an email client, a database client, a database backend, and a custom interface into company and intranet applications as one entity, it can run quite slowly in data retrieval and create conflicts within itself that are of a level of complexity that no end user without a lotusscript background could begin to understand. 4)the error codes are extremely cryptic more often than not, which generally in my experience can be attributed to bad code writing by template tweakers. 5)It crashes alot, and more often than not it crashes in a way that isnt clean, meaning the processes dont terminate themselves. In fact, most companies that use LN install a program called Killnotes or usually rebranded as Zapnotes with LN which will clean the dead processes from memory so the machine doesnt need to be rebooted to restart the client. 6)the developers know all this and are laughing thier way to the bank as well as the support and salesman at IBM.
I’ve been stuck with Notes as our corporate email platform for 7 years now, and it is simply and unforgivingly awful. Anonymous’ post above (“LN Experts”) is too kind. It is evil, and if I could drag it into the street, kick it ’til it bled and then run over it with my car, I would without a twinge of guilt.
It is slow to load. It is clunky to use. The only redeeming thing is that the newer versions don’t crash as much, and you no longer need to use zapnotes to kill all the processes and avoid a reboot when it does. And I can still consistently crash it (v6.5 on my desktop at work) 80% of time whenever I try to drag an attachment from one message into a new memo. Did I mention it’s awful? It has just enough html support to frustrate the hell out of you with it’s lack of total html support, and always seems to find a unique and creative way to mangle html emails. If you’re really feeling masochistic, try forwarding a received html email from a non-lotus notes client. Just watch what whacky and zany things Notes will do to it.
I never thought I would say this about MS in particular, but I would jump handstands and summersault through the air if our company standardized on Exchange. I’ll live with proprietary standards and their bastardization of open ones just to be able to read emails people send me in the format they sent them. I had a taste of it when I used Microsoft’s Outlook Connector for Domino. Using Outlook to access my Domino account, I could read and send messages as if I was using Exchange. Heck, I could even open attachments people sent me without having to pry them out of that winmail.dat file many non-Outlook people have to deal with. And if it hadn’t corrupted several hundred of my stored emails on my Domino server, I’d still be using it. I know that’s not Lotus’ fault, but I blame them for forcing me to try and use Microsoft’s dodgy products to compensate for their shortcomings.
Oh, and the worst part? The real kick in the balls, as it were? All the wonderful collaborative / groupware apps we were using on Notes (well, all 4 of them anyways)… have been migrated to freaking SharePoint! Except email. No, couldn’t have that, could we? We’ll use XP on the desktop, SharePoint for our intranet, Office for productivity but we draw the line at email. Wouldn’t want to be too dependent on Microsoft, would we?
Notes sucks. Stick to the telephone, faxes or smoke signals if you have no other options.
Grrr.
I’ll live with proprietary standards and their bastardization of open ones just to be able to read emails people send me in the format they sent them.
Did you ever stop and think that maybe what is being sent to you is non-conformat HTML in the first place.
You’re complaining about not sticking to a standard and then openly embracing proprietary and bastardized ones. Makes no sense.
HTML is a moving target, different clients support different versions and most have their own interpretations. The term “standard” is abused in this respect.
Oh and that winmail.dat file that Outlook alone can use. It’s a proprietary encapsulation format (TNEF = transport neutral – hah what a joke) that Microsoft created that all non-Outlook users have to suffer.
standardize on Exchange is about the best oxymoron I have seen lately.
then you can use whatever email client you want to.. omg