Campaign to Open Source IBM's Notes/Domino 255
Ian Tree, an IT consultant from the Netherlands, has started a campaign to convince IBM to open source the code for Notes/Domino. Hoping for results similar to the push for Sun to open source Solaris, which finally saw success in 2005, Tree makes the simple point that it won't happen until someone asks. "By being an open source product, Tree is also hoping that Domino becomes something schools use to teach groupware and application development concepts, which is the holy grail for future market adoption. This is how various Unixes, relational databases, Linux, and a raft of other products eventually became commercialized. While the idea of open sourcing any proprietary program is appealing, in as much as it sets a program free to live beyond the commitment (or lack thereof) of its originator, it is hard to see why open Notes/Domino would have any more impact than OpenSolaris."
uh, no? (Score:5, Funny)
Speaking on behalf of the poor bastards that have played with Notes: Please don't put him on our team. Really, Notes is like the last kid to get picked when we're making teams. He drops the ball lots and he cries even when we play tag only. We only let him play at all because the teacher makes us.
Re:uh, no? (Score:5, Insightful)
The patents linked to the products, makes it a no-go. Besides, IBM still makes a lot of money from Notes/Domino.
Re: (Score:2)
How long ago was OS/2 developed? It's got to be getting close to that 15-year limit...
Oh God NO! Not Lotus Notes again! (Score:3, Informative)
I should know. I WAS a Lotus Notes admin/developer/E-mail admin until '03. Boy, did I pick the wrong horse! The malfunctioning Domino Web server, which would render only some of the Native Notes elements requiring me to create parallel HTML/XML code for every single database form, the bloated Web Mail Java Applets that refuse to download/upload, and a total mess of the Email/database system.
I still cringe when hearing references to progr
Re:Oh God NO! Not Lotus Notes again! (Score:5, Insightful)
the bloated Web Mail Java Applets that refuse to download/upload, and a total mess of the Email/database system.
The Domino Web Access client was one of the very first commercial AJAX implementations and didn't use any Java whatsoever. It came out in 2001 with release 5.0.8, and could be implemented by applying a new template to your mail -- a process that could be performed by a competent administrator in about 15 seconds across an entire server.
I still cringe when hearing references to programing in Lotus Notes. The native language to Lotus Notes is the Lotus Formula language, where no looping allowed and certain functions could not be put before others for no good reason (or unpredictable side effects will occur).
False. The native language to Lotus Notes is C, and there is a comprehensive C API that has been made available since version 1. The original end-user programming language was @formulas, and was styled after the 1-2-3 formula language back in 1989. In 2002, IBM released Notes/Domino version 6, which included a comprehensive rewrite of the @formula engine to dramatically improve performance and flexibility. It also added looping constructs.
However, it's not like you couldn't do loops before. Notes 4 came out in 1994, and included Lotusscript -- a VB-like scripting language, which provided a sophisticated class model and extensive OOP capabilities. Lotusscript remains the dominant language in Notes/Domino development worldwide (though many devs on the platform are moving to Java & Javascript with the latest versions.)
Then the dreaded DbLookup function. That one function alone caused so many intradatabase dependencies that I could not remove out-of-date documents in fear of causing problems in other seemly unrelated documents in bloated Databases.
Wow. Sounds like you kept top-notch entity relationship diagrams.
If you were running a MySQL database on the backend, would you know every single application in your environment that queried every table? Would that be MySQL's fault?
Please, somebody kill Lotus Notes with FIRE!
Yeah, let's kill a platform because zildgulf doesn't know how to write and document a computer program. So it must be bad!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Please, get Notes out into the open! That way we can shoot it.
What a horrible, horrible abomination.
Or as this page calls it: "The Asbestos of Enterprise IT" [innovationcreators.com].
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's rumored that this same consultant is trying to get a footer placed on every outbound email that says "Don't print this email. Save a Tree."
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But if a consultant falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear his recommendations, does he make a sound?
Thank you, I'm here all week.
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Only if he is getting paid. Preferably in advance.
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Has it really failed? Don't companies still pay IBM lots of money to use it?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Has it really failed? Don't companies still pay IBM lots of money to use it?
Yes, they do. My company (Humana) is one of them. If it were just a matter of switching email systems, we would have gone to Exchange long ago, but we have hundreds of workflow forms and other crap built on Notes databases which are unfortunately integral to a lot of business groups.
Never in a million years could I have imagined I would be longing for Outlook and Exchange until I started at this company!
Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
That is a reason to open source it, so it will be easy for others to develop better UIs which keeping the same database (and therefore compatibility).
Note: I am an IBM employee, but this is my personal opinion. I am not involved in Lotus Notes in any way beyond using it.
Re:Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a fair reason in general, but the only reason I know of to interoperate with Notes is to export the data to something else.
Re: (Score:2)
That is a reason to open source it, so it will be easy for others to develop better UIs...
Like Blender? (I kid, I kid)
Blender (Score:2)
The UI was created while Blender was still a commercial (non OSS) app
Acknowledging you're joking, 3D design is hardly a perfect fit for a standard interface - so there are not really conventions to be broken. Some 2D conventions are sacrificed to reach into the third dimension. Other 3D apps also differ significantly from Word or OpenOffice ;-)
Re:Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Gimp is open source and it's UI sucks too.
Re:Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Precisely because Gimp is open source that someone was able to tweak its GUI and make GimpShop [gimpshop.com]. That's qbzzt's point.
Re: (Score:2)
I wholeheartedly agree, but that's the point; there's no downside to open sourcing Bloated Scrotes because it's thermodynamically impossible to make the interface worse than it already is.
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it will be easy for others to develop better UIs
You mean...like... OpenOffice?
No thanks... :)
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Band-in-a-box is wonderful software. It serves the real user needs.
In this case it is quite obvious that the request is a 'troll' from competitors.
Re:Open source and Lotus Notes? (Score:5, Interesting)
Disclaimer: During a different stage of my IT career, I was a certified Lotus Domino Application Developer -and- System Administrator.
The Lotus Notes UI WAS overdue for a significant overhaul. For years, it wasn't horrible interface design, but LACK of design that led to the meandering mess that most people experienced in the last two decades.
As of August 2007, IBM finally released a truly well-designed Lotus Notes mail client: Lotus Notes version 8.0, which is, IMHO, the most comprehensive remaking of the Lotus Notes client and its e-mail interface since Notes began. Every client release up until now had UI changes that were evolutionary at best.
The new client itself now sits on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Framework, and will consequently run on Windows and Linux (Mac support coming shortly with 8.5). And you can still access all the same Lotus Notes corporate applications that range considerably in quality. And in fact, the Notes 8.x client can still access Domino 7.x mail files, and they will look exactly the same as they did before (although client menus have changed).
But if you run Domino 8.x servers, with the 8.x mail template, and are using Notes 8.x, the e-mail UI is a ground-up redesign that is far superior to anything that came before it. If you've ever whined about Lotus Notes mail in the past, you should check it out - that complaint is now outdated.
My 2 bits...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, is it bad that I read that as "the new client sits on top of $FASHIONABLE_STACK and runs on $FASHIONABLE_OS_LIST...".
Well yes but its a fashionable open source stack that they happen to have a large hand in developing. Its also a very nice stack. So yeah its bad, but its probably your fault, not the grand parents.
CouchDB (Score:5, Interesting)
CouchDB [apache.org], which has been generating some [eflorenzano.com] hype [blogspot.com] lately (especially among Rails fans), is by Damien Katz [damienkatz.net], who did work on LotusNotes and Domino, and claims CouchDB is inspired by that.
According to him, Lotus got a lot of things wrong, but it got the database right.
I don't know if there would be anything to gain from the original (even just to read through it), or if we should all be focused on CouchDB now, but it would be interesting to find out.
The database is the problem with Notes... (Score:2)
It's been a while since I've done Notes but I seem to recall that the database was the central problem with Notes. I seem to remember best describing it as a slightly multiuser filemaker pro flat format with a lot of hype to rip off IBM for a few billion dollars. Notes is infamous for its email client being terrible but if it had had a good database to begin with, then, 3rd parties could have salvaged a good groupware database product with add on tools or even clients. That few have emerged speaks volume
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I seem to remember best describing it as a slightly multiuser filemaker pro flat format with a lot of hype to rip off IBM for a few billion dollars.
I'm really not sure what it's got to do with FileMaker Pro, as I don't know a lot about Notes. I could compare FileMaker with CouchDB, though:
CouchDB is schema-free. There are no predefined columns. Each record is any JSON object, with no constraints other than that it be valid JSON.
Older versions of FileMaker are, indeed, one table per "database" -- but it was very much a fixed-schema table. Each record had exactly the same fields. I've seen more than one nightmare database which would have been vastly imp
No, the database does suck. (Score:3, Interesting)
My problem with Notes was that a lack of a relational structure made it awkward to do something like a document management system in it, where you would want to have a table of authors recipients and other persons associated with documents in a relational sense. The hope was that you could use a notes database to represent the rich document stuff, which it could kinda do, but also, have some sort of a relational, at least more strongly typed nested collection representation with it and you simply couldn't.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Notes "database" was one of the strengths and weaknesses of Lotus Notes.
Background - speaking strictly about the native Notes Storage Facility (.nsf) format (and not to newer options for RDMS virtualization or or DB2 backend for custom development):
- Everything in Lotus Notes is stored in a "note", each of which has an XML-like data structure. Keep in mind that there was no such thing as XML, or even the internet, when Lotus Notes was first developed.
- User data notes are usually called "documents".
- T
Re: (Score:2)
Wow -- I've just been reading through CouchDB's overview, and that's definitely inspired by Domino. :P
Of course, I like it for that very reason.
Re:CouchDB (Score:5, Insightful)
And your own appeal to authority would work better if you had a little more respect for the most popular LISP dialect in the world. Seriously. [crockford.com]
But consider two things: First, the storage is JSON [json.org] (not JavaScript), and I don't actually know that it's the on-disk format (I doubt it), only that it's the format exposed to developers. What would you use in place of it, for a schema-free database? XML? ASN.1? Serialized objects in $my_favorite_language?
And for what it's worth, JSON is not just Javascript -- it's also valid notation (as in, you can pipe it through eval, if you really want to) for Python, Ruby 1.9, and probably others I don't know about.
The only better candidate I can think of is YAML [yaml.org], which is more complex to parse, and a superset of JSON anyway.
Second, the views (sort of a query language) aren't necessarily Javascript. It's true, Javascript is the default view format, but it can actually be any language that can operate on text sent via a Unix pipe. I hear Python developers are using it with some success.
But given the choice, would you rather write SQL than JavaScript? Really?
Of course, it also has the nice side effect that you can write an entire application in JavaScript, using AJAX, talking directly to the CouchDB server. But I'm guessing that's a side effect, not the real reason Javascript was chosen.
Re: (Score:2)
And your own appeal to authority would work better...
On second thought, maybe it's not an appeal to authority. It is, however, based on a false premise (that Javascript is bad), and further begs the question (that a database designed around Javascript must be bad).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Please stop confusing people. Having lambdas and eval is not enough to be a Lisp dialect, otherwise half of existing scripting languages (including e.g. Python) would be that. Lisp is about S-exprs and code-as-data, the rest is secondary. A language can be reasonably said to be a Lisp dialect when its implementation of eval can be written in itself with roughtly the same effort
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Having lambdas and eval is not enough to be a Lisp dialect
No, but it's enough to be quite a bit ahead of many other languages. For that matter...
Lisp is about S-exprs and code-as-data
Granted, it's not as clean, but most Javascript implementations include a toSource method on the function object. Is that enough to build what you want?
S-expressions.
Somehow, I like the JSON syntax better. But it's also a reasonable representation of a data structure, such that I would think it would be easy to store sexps that way.
side-effect free, lenient evaluation, no guaranteed evaluation order - all very important to enable advanced query optimizaters.
In other words: Performance. Got it.
You realize that CouchDB scales to an arbitrary number of nodes, righ
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In 2008, not really. The only two big players left without lambdas are C++ and Java. Of those, C++ is getting them in the upcoming major revision of the standard, and Java has an erzats called "anonymous inner classes", which is actually close enough for many practical purposes, even if extremely verbose. Perl, Python, Ruby all have first-class functions. C# has had them for 3 years now. Heck, even VB has had them for more than a year!
*ring*ring* (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi, can I talk to the product manager of Outlook? Thanks, I'll hold.
Hello? Hi, I think it would be spiffy if you would consider open-sourcing Outlook. No, the whole shebang, not just the client. Yeah, server side components and everything.
I think it would prolong the life of the product since it would allow it to exist beyond your commitment to it. And you know, as the saying goes, more eyes lead to shallower bugs.
So what I'm proposing is that you open up the source and give it away for free. Then you could...
Hello? Hello?
Re:*ring*ring* (Score:5, Funny)
You certainly do live up to your username. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, that's the Office product manager you'd want to talk to, and they can't speak on behalf of the Exchange product manager. Go figure.
Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumb idea. Whether you love Notes or hate it, open sourcing it would just be dumb when there's already 800 engineers working on it inside IBM. The number of developers that would contribute to it would drop dramatically.
If you want to develop open source applications ON TOP of Notes/Domino -- you can just look to http://www.openntf.org/ [openntf.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Dumb idea. Whether you love Notes or hate it, open sourcing it would just be dumb when there's already 800 engineers working on it inside IBM.
I've worked for IBM in the past. IBM has some very smart people, but also plenty of idiots. I wouldn't assume that 800 programmers = 800 average-or-better programmers.
Re: (Score:2)
What about 8000 college students who has no obligation to put quality code or no clue about real life/business needs adding "features" each day to a billion dollar/year selling product? Business people getting kicked/banned from IRC channels or looking up dictionary trying to understand what "RTFM" is?
People should think why businesses buy IBM software/services and why IBM is called "Big Blue" before asking them such things.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. We actually use Notes here (fuck knows why) and I can't imagine our 3rd level tech people (i.e. me) wanting to spend time trying to get support for Notes on IRC because IBM support isn't entirely sure what the last seven checkins did (what the fuck feature are you talking about again? We didn't add that!)
Re: (Score:2)
there's already 800 engineers working on it inside IBM. The number of developers that would contribute to it would drop dramatically.
Question: Is Notes still actually being sold? As a consumer application?
If so, I can see your point. If not -- if it's not being sold, or if it's being sold as an enterprise-level app -- I see no reason IBM would take those 800 engineers off the project, once open sourced.
More simplistically: If open sourcing it means less money for IBM, I can see where this would be a bad idea, because IBM couldn't afford to have as many people on it. If open sourcing it means no change, or more money for IBM, I see no rea
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Notes/Domino product line generates somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars a year for IBM in pure software sales (not services.) It's also recorded 15 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, and has grown by over 50% since 2004.
You can see more at the long-running blog of Ed Brill, former worldwide head of sales for Notes/Domino, and currently Director of End-User Messaging and Collaboration. He just finished a year-in-review post http://edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/2008-the-blogging-year-in-review [edbrill.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know very much about the consumer/client side to notes, but I work on quite a bit of web apps that use the Domino (server-side) part, and I'm telling you, I wouldn't work with anything else. The ease at which I can create a system using Domino leaves something like ASP (which I've worked with too) in the dust.
And it's not even anything fancy to do with UI -- just the security aspects of building a web application with Domino is by far the easiest thing I've ever done. Heck, just the individual use
Re: (Score:2)
I work on quite a bit of web apps that use the Domino (server-side) part, and I'm telling you, I wouldn't work with anything else.
Have you seen CouchDB [apache.org]?
The ease at which I can create a system using Domino leaves something like ASP (which I've worked with too) in the dust.
Have you seen Rails?
Just curious -- I haven't actually worked with Lotus.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, apparently open sourcing an application now 'requires' that you fire/reassign all of your developers! We've all been misinterpreting section 5 of the GPL for years now!
BBH
It's hard to imagine... (Score:2, Insightful)
...the horrors that must lie waiting within the source code for Lotus Notes.
Schools could use the Notes source to teach the basics of how to build slow, confusing, fragile applications with utterly non-standard user interfaces. Notes is by far the worst piece of software I use regularly. On the other hand, opening its source would let me fix that bug that keeps reminding me I missed the same meeting reminders over and over again.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
opening its source would let me fix that bug that keeps reminding me I missed the same meeting reminders over and over again.
If you could find the bug :)
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The Domino server is one of the most reliable server systems ever built
That may be. The main point here, however, is that Lotus Notes has a horrible UI 99.9999% of the time.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's a command line?
What we want? Isn't it? (Score:2)
Haven't we been asking for an exchange replacement for years? One that connects to outlook and does all that exchange does? Isn't this (and a sharepoint replacement) what's needed in the "linux portfolio" of office apps?
Re: (Score:2)
Notes+Domino may or may not do everything that Outlook+Exchange does (I don't know, I'm just a user, not an admin). However, I'm not sure that there's perfect compatibility between Notes and Outlook, so, even if Notes were to be open-sourced, all we'd get is another Zimbra, at best.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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Actually you're reminding me that comparing it to Solaris is the wrong comparison. It's closer to netscape/mozilla. Take commercial product tired of (maybe not-so) successfully competing with a Microsoft product, open source it, and get it in use everywhere. Bang, instant developer platform.
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As far as I understand (from third-hand experience only), the biggest problem with Notes is that it does way more than Outlook, which justifies the insane complexity.
PS: I believe Notes already has something along the lines of Sharepoint, but you'd be better asking someone who's actually used it.
Re: (Score:2)
I do agree that the Exchange/Outlook/[Sharepoint] replacement would be a huge boost to the open source movement. What I don't get is why everything seems to just insist on chasing one part of the Microsoft ecosystem.
So there's a plethora of mail servers. Outloo
Companies open source unprofitable products (Score:3, Interesting)
As I state in the title, companies only open-source unprofitable products. As I understand it, Sun was willing to open-source Solaris because it was no longer profitable by itself - instead, it was just driving sales of Sun hardware. Until I see some similar evidence regarding Notes (showing that its unprofitable on its own and only drives sales of other IBM products), call me a skeptic of this effort.
Re: (Score:2)
But Sun open sourced Java, and Jonathan Schwartz claims that Java is Sun's most profitable software product.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that Sun never sold Java. I'd say that the reality is that Sun makes its money off Java support, and platforms like JCAPS. And open sourcing Java doesn't preclude either of those two things from happening.
Yawn (Score:2)
In the event that Notes is open sourced, I doubt this will greatly impact the reach of the product further into the enterprise.
Notes is such a horrid development platform who only seen the Web as a medium a few ages ago. The last major release closed some of the gap but it has a far, far way to go.
There's a difference between open sourcing OpenSolaris, and open sourcing Notes which the article fails to mention. Sun has something to gain by open sourcing OpenSolaris: to sell more Sun hardware. Notes can run
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if you consider 1996 to be a few years ago. Domino's biggest problem is that it has been too far ahead of it's competitors, so it is common for people not to understand the benefits that it offers, and by the time the rest of the industry catches up, the features have been rebuild a little different, and the people who now start to understand it complain because the feature that Domino had a decade earlier doesn't look just like the program that was developed this year.
Please, No! (Score:2)
(And don't give me that crap about
Re: (Score:2)
7.5 brings it up to date, and 8 is supposedly better.
Meanwhile, since sametime is used on old-ass corporations that upgrade slower than a dead turtle crossing the desert, most people are still stuck on 6. /running 7.5.1.2 right now, it's "okay". I don't know how people can live on 6.
I do actually hope Lotus opens up, it'd be nice. Would be a hell of a lot easier getting it running on Ubuntu for sure.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, right. We got that song-and-dance from IBM/Lotus when 5 came out. "5's just as good as Outlook!" It ain't. Then when 6 came out. Oh look! Version 6, someone at IBM finally heard of this thing called a "scrollwheel" and it works... about a third of the time. And hey, guess what, it only took IBM until version 6.5 to get Notes working correctly on a multi-user Windows OS. That's only 10+ years after multi-user Windows OSes came out! Lightning development pace.
The number of extremely trivial, basic featu
What was it before there was Firefox? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, Netscape. I was never a fan of Netscape. I thought MSIE was better and faster for the longest while. Netscape was, at one time, very closed. But once things got going, Firefox came out of it. Perhaps the same might happen with this? People WANT an open source groupware server and the ones that exist now seem to lack in one way or another. But perhaps a project that starts with working code, just as Firefox started out, could turn into something a lot better... something that could kick Exchange and MS Office to the curb.
Re: (Score:2)
I understand this point perfectly.
I loathe notes/domino and yet I'm forced to use it every day(from another companys servers).
I'd love to fix certain idiotisms in it to fit my preferences if it were opensource.
Seriously, which f*cking application locks screen after pressing F5 on email screen, instead refreshing the screen?
I hate domino aswell, but if I had option to use it for free, I'd deploy it companywide without hesitating.
It just works, and since I'm working at small company with limited resources, we
Re: (Score:2)
I think its a perfect comparison, but remember that the Mozilla team tried working with the Netscape code for about a year before they just decided to scrap it all and start from scratch.
It might almost make more sense to do that, but the problem is that I think it needs either/both a dedicated core group of developers and a corporate entity backing the process.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems, if not downright improbable, at least less probable than with a web browser; a lot less people willing to work with a second-best groupware server without professional support than their would be for a web browser.
Have you thought about this? (Score:5, Funny)
You not only want to expose the source code of Bloated Goats to the world but intentionally expose young people to it? Good Lord, man, have you no mercy in soul at all?
Re: (Score:2)
But with quality source code from Its Been Mangled engineering, there is much for young people to learn!
ÂQue? (Score:2, Funny)
"open source Solaris which finally saw success in 2005"
What? WHAT?? How? When?? By whom?
Why didn't I get the memo??
No way (Score:2)
If IBM open-sources a piece of crap like Notes and doesn't open-source a masterpiece like Workplace Shell, that's it. I'm out.
Oh wait, I'm not really an IBM customer in the first place....
Most of Notes 8 is Eclipse/Java anyhow (Score:2)
So there's a point to be made here. And while IBM makes mad loot from Notes, the latest version, Notes 8 has sufficient problems that they could use more eyes on it
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
database vs mail (Score:5, Informative)
What a great idea.. NOT (Score:2)
Good Idea (Score:2)
Upside for me.... (Score:2)
Being stuck in an environment where opensource projects are rejected out of hand, and stuck in an environment where notes is the standard for "collaboration" (which is a funny way to spell "e-mail system that no one, anywhere within the company, can stand. Especially the people who implement and support it.") , I'm in a win-win. We either start looking at open source projects, or we ditch Notes.
If this actually happens (which it won't, but a girl can dream right?), I'll be the guy dancing in the streets.
Why would the open source community care? (Score:2)
What does Notes offer the Open Source community?
SmartSuite (Score:2)
Please, please, please IBM, open source Lotus SmartSuite.
Especially WordPro and 1-2-3. Specifically the InfoBox.
That way the developers of OpenOffice maybe throw away their bloated, badly designed imitation of MS Office.
You know... because you can't expect them to do anything creative by themselves, because of the childr... eehem... I mean... those who are used to MS Office.
Replace one of them by me (including the income at Sun), and I'll give you an UI that's so great, geeks and Joe Sixpacks can jack off t
Ugh (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't use it if it was free!
I had to use that POS back in my days working for a DoD contractor.
Who cares if the underlying db is sound, the client exposed way too much of the db and as a result was a user interface clusternightfuckmare. Yes, it was so bad I had to make up a word for it.
Even Outlook with it's Russian Nesting Doll configuration options*, is a way ahead of Lotus.
*If you're not sure what I mean, follow these instructions for an extreme example from Outlook 2003:
Tools->Options->Mail Setup->Send/Receive...->Edit->Account Properties->Advanced->Remote Mail->Retrieve items->Filter->Advanced.
You'll now be six modal dialogs deep in it's options, past two Advanced buttons!
Further, did you know it's possible to change your domain password from within Outlook's nesting dolls? I'm not kidding! But good luck finding it.
Notes? Please no!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been forced to use Lotus Notes at work for 10 years now. If you don't understand why people hate Notes just Google "Lotus Notes sucks" and you'll find plenty of detailed explanations of the several million things that are wrong with Notes.
Notes must die.
Open Source This... (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of us would like to see IBM "open source" other stuff, like OS, VSE, VM. Heck, they can keep the source, just give us a hobby, or a "not for profit" license...
And they can keep the current stuff, the stuff they make money on today - like z and ESA. I'ld be more than happy if I could run something like the 20+ year old VSE/SP on my PC at home, under Hercules...
But no, we're stuck with 40 year old "public domain" software, stuff like DOS 26.2 from the System/360 days. Hey, it was fun, I was the "Sysgen Kid" back then. But it only remotely relates to what an, even 20 year old mainframe, is all about today, stuff like CICS...
CICS is a perfect example. Back in the 1.x days, you had 100% of the CICS source code, as long as you had a license. Today "transactiuon server" is a big secret...
Sorry for the OT rant, but it ticks me off. IBM has dumped billions into Linux, but us old greybeards, those of us that wrote those countless lines of Assembly and COBOL and RPG, and yes, CICS code, custom code, without which IBM would have a great OS and nothing else. Those of us that worked shift after shift of unpaid OT, tweaking that demo, making it perfect for the guy that will be spending the IT budget. Those of us that helped make IBM what it is. Those of us that truly enjoy what we do, as a job and hobby...
We can't play with our toys at home, legally that is...
I'm going to retire in a few years. I won't be a licensed user any longer. And I surely can't afford the 4 figure monthly "commercial" software license fee, let alone the 6 figures to "buy" it...
Come on IBM, great "open source" promoter that you have become lately. Do it for us original geeks, we need something to do in our old age...
Open source this - VSE/SP 3.1
Re:As an Outlook/Exchange fanboy.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I fail to see how making Notes open-source would help this aim. After all, the main obstacle to people using calendaring and groupware apps is that said apps are difficult to use. Given Notes' horrible record regarding usability, I fail to see how making Notes freely available to all would spread the usage of calendaring amongst the general computing public.
In fact, I think that GMail and Google Calendar are doing more to spread automated calendaring than open-sourcing Notes (or even Outlook, for that matter) ever could.
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Re:As an Outlook/Exchange fanboy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
So press decline (Score:3, Insightful)
The "decline" button is there for a reason.
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But Rails, that's great stuff [zedshaw.com]!
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Because when I want to get real, unbiased information on a community, and where it's going, the best source is a blog called "Zed's So Fucking Awesome". Right.
In other news, Rails and Merb are going to merge. The Rails team and the Merb team decided that they really wanted the same things, and Merb had done a lot of things right, so there was no point in keeping the projects separate. That's pretty mature -- last I checked, GNOME and KDE are still separate projects, and people still frequently write "GNOME
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And speaking of Rails, check out this job posting [clearancejobs.com]. Requirements are TS/SCI, Lotus Notes, and... Ruby on Rails experience. Seems like some high security clearance government folks may be converting some things from Notes to Rails.
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Well, nobody ever said the .gov was particularly bright. Either for using Notes in the first place or Rails now.
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I admit it. My old company migrated away from Lotus Notes and I rejoiced. But six months into using Outlook/Exchange, I surprised myself when I found that I missed it. True, Notes doesn't have the most modern UI in the world, but it's a solid piece of software.
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Have you ever actually used Lotus Notes, or anything from Lotus for that matter? Let's just say I don't think they're going to be winning any UI design awards anytime soon.
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Never having used Notes myself, I wonder if it had a problem with a certain version that people have fixated on or if poor administration commonly caused some problems that have given people a phobia towards it?.
It does get sold to large scale sites where management will supply the minimum resources to get the system working. So it gets a reputation for being slow, while sneaking into the SLA requirement by 1%. Thats a good way to earn long term hatred from the users.
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So, seriously, why such hatred?
Maybe it is better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Applications with a lot of history accumulate a lot of hatred. In the installation I saw 10 years ago the fact it ran on windows 98 and OS/2 may have contributed to the bad reputation. Additionally our site was trying to run the server side on AIX which was apparently a brave thing to do at the time.
I didn't have to use it much but the people who did referred to it as "scrotus notes".
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Fuck IBM and their hidden agendas. Fuck WebSphere, DB/2, ZSeries and all the rest of their crap.
Can we fuck ClearCase while we are at it please?
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