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IBM Technology

Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes? 171

CWmike writes to mention that IBM has launched LotusLive iNotes, a system designed to compete with GMail and Exchange that offers email, calendaring, and contact management. "Pricing starts at $3 per user per month, undercutting Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 per user per year. IBM is aiming the software at large enterprises that want to migrate an on-premise e-mail system to SaaS (software as a service), particularly for users who aren't tied to a desk, such as retail workers. It is also hoping to win business from smaller companies interested in on-demand software but with concerns about security and service outages, such as those suffered by Gmail in recent months. LotusLive iNotes is based on technology IBM purchased from the Hong Kong company Outblaze."
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Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?

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  • by 3waygeek ( 58990 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:27PM (#29620329)

    Lotus Notes, no way in hell will it succeed. Lotus Notes was pure crap, and I say that as an ex-Lotus employee.

    • Lotus Notes takes a very interesting approach to generic databases. I laud Lotus for their design philosophy and I know IBM has put a lot of work into it, but the implementation of Lotus Notes leaves a lot to be desired. Making all documents generic databases wasn't a bad idea.

      This iNotes seems to be a subset of Lotus Notes functionality based on an all-new codebase. Probably a good thing.

      • As soon as I saw the topic "Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?", my first thought was: Is 'i' the new IBM euphemism for Lotus? Because, if it is, we don't need to go any further.

        IBM can't take on Google and Microsoft with anything based on traditional Lotus Notes, because Lotus Notes is the only software worse than Microsoft Exchange Server, and the reason Google's enterprise services exist and are popular is specifically that it frees people from Lotus Notes and Exchange. If iNotes is anythin

      • It's also racist (Score:4, Informative)

        by Beek Dog ( 610072 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @04:54PM (#29621691)
        When I type webapp, Lotus Notes spell check suggests I change it to wetback. Ver 6.5. I wish I was joking. On further investigation, the 'big one' isn't in the dictionary, but gook is. Wow. Just wow.

        How about when you have a message selected (but not opened) and try to export it? Starts exporting the entire mailbox with no cancel.

        I offer this poll, Why does Notes suck so much?
        *Search don't search
        *Sort don't sort
        *Cut and Paste from a webpage means grab some coffee
        *UI stands for User Interference
        *Blazing Speed
        *Hit Yes to send with comments, No to send without comments, and cancel to bring you back to this same dialog
        *Contextual nonsense
        *Reply All to "undisclosed recipients" discloses the undisclosed recipients

        I could go on for days, but I just copied this text into Notes to try to spell check it. Time for coffee.
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) *

          The only person I ever knew through work who committed suicide was a Lotus Notes administrator. Maybe it was just coincidental, but I'm just sayin'...

          It's a sad but true story..

        • Version 6.5 is what, 4-5 years old? 8.5.1 is being released this month - if you're going to criticize, at least be running a reasonably current version.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:39PM (#29620445)

      Lotus Notes, no way in hell will it succeed. Lotus Notes was pure crap, and I say that as an ex-Lotus employee.

      I second that, as a current IBM contractor (hence my anonymous cowardness) that's been inflicted with this sorry excuse of a mail system. How is it that IBM has the ONLY big name e-mail system that can't reliably deliver e-mail? Frankly, all their software is crap because IBM is all about getting it out in time for the quarterlies, regardless of quality. I'm really getting tired of shipping off untested software to customers.

      • they don't reliably deliver mail.

        They're the only ones who deliver IBM brand DRM in the form of onerous document control/locking/deletion. This is why enterprise likes it.

        Meanwhile, it's a turd of a program and our workplace is thankfully moving to allow Thunderbird soon.

    • by Cyner ( 267154 )

      Lotus was remakably innovative... 20 year ago. And then they stopped innovating. Heck they stopped stealing others good ideas even.

    • by MadCow42 ( 243108 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:43PM (#29620475) Homepage

      >> Lotus Notes was pure crap, and I say that as an ex-Lotus employee.

      Actually, Lotus Notes is pure crap. I say that as a current Lotus Notes user. It's a reason unto itself to find a new employer.

      Two simple examples:
        - we just "upgraded" to v8.5. It takes 127 seconds to start up. It takes 38 seconds more to show me my inbox. It takes 47 seconds to bring up the editor to reply to the first mail of the day. This is all on a fairly new Dell D630 laptop.

        - Sort by subject: "Hello world" does not get sorted with "Re: Hello World", nor with "Fw: Hello World". All your "Re:"s and "Fw:"s get sorted together.

      There are many more.

      MadCow.

      • by PotatoFarmer ( 1250696 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @03:10PM (#29620739)
        At least it has rock-solid stability and a highly intuitive user interface going for it. For example, if I just tab over to Notes and hit Shift-CTRL-F9, it will automati
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

        Lotus 123 is pure crap, too. Long ago, before IBM got hold of it, it was a good, arguably the best, spreadsheet. But last year I started getting Lotus spreadsheets, so I had them get me a copy (I have to use Quattro and Excel as well). The damned peogram loaded a ton of crap, and had the ton of crap loaded on startup, even though I only use the spreadsheet portion and then only once every few months.

        I had to do a lot of googling to find out how to make the crap stop starting at startup. It wanted to become

      • by tjwhaynes ( 114792 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @03:13PM (#29620773)

        Two simple examples: - we just "upgraded" to v8.5. It takes 127 seconds to start up. It takes 38 seconds more to show me my inbox. It takes 47 seconds to bring up the editor to reply to the first mail of the day. This is all on a fairly new Dell D630 laptop.

        You're kidding me, right? Or you're making up numbers. Or you are running the Windows version amid the antivirus scans...

        Linux box, Fedora 11, T60p, 5400rpm drive - hardly a world beater laptop these days. Times are all intervals.

        • Time to password screen - 3 seconds
        • Time to interactivity with the welcome screen (the one that displays all the mail, calendar and to-dos) - 10 seconds
        • Time to display Mail window after clicking mail tab - 2 seconds
        • Time to show contents of the top mail message - 1 second.

        Release 8.5 Revision 20081211.1925 (Release 8.5) Standard Configuration

        So either you've got the CPU clocked down or something is eating your cycles. I hardly hold Lotus Notes in high regard but its improved performance significantly in recent releases.

        Cheers,
        Toby Haynes

        • Well, maybe my corporate IT dept. has borked their standard image, but those are real timed numbers. After all, I have little else I can do with my computer while waiting. :)

          Nothing else running, fresh boot (after waiting for all other startup crap to finish). Windows XP professional, 2GB RAM, etc., etc.

          Our older version wasn't great (no sort-on-subject at all), but easily 3x faster.

          • If you've moved up from Notes 7 to Notes 8.5, you've just changed from the native Windows client to the Eclipse client. Folks like me who got our first taste of the Eclipse client at the Notes 7 native Linux release still shudder with horror (although it did allow for an extended coffee break at the start of the day). Certainly Linux Notes 7 -> 8 -> 8.5 has been a journey of performance improvements.

            Now I hear colleagues in the corridors moving from Notes 7 to Notes 8 on Windows XP. They aren't too

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by DXLster ( 1315409 )

            "maybe my corporate IT dept. has borked their standard image"

            Not exactly, but it is they're fault. Here's the scoop...

            1) The entire Notes 8.x codestream is now an Eclipse RCP application.
            2) Eclipse is incredibly powerful and flexible. It's also a huge collection of JAR files that have to be unzipped to run.
            3) You anti-virus software is probably configured to scan every one of those JARs every time they're accessed.
            4) Like every Windows machine on the planet, your drive is probably also highly fragmented.

        • I've just upgraded from 8.01 to 8.5 this past week. My PC at work is a Dell Precision 380 Workstation (circa early 2005) with a single 3.06GHz Prescott P4 and 1GB memory, running 32-bit Windows XP Pro SP3. The full Lotus 8.5 Client (Eclipse version, not the C++ "basic" version) starts up and gives me my inbox, ready to open emails in under 20 seconds. That's not too shabby for a vintage PC that's pushing half a decade old, and running all kinds of other crap in its startup settings.

          I'm still running the 8.0

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        It may be crap, but that doesn't imply that it's not going to succeed. As the ex-Lotus employee can probably attest, software development in IBM rarely involves making products faster or more stable. It's all about features, and making sure that your product has more feature-list checkboxes checked than the other guys. "Starts in under 127 seconds" is not a sell-able feature. The only thing the PHBs buying this stuff see is that iNotes has 100 features, and product X only has 75. The only time performa
      • by barzok ( 26681 )

        Lotus Notes was pure crap, and I say that as an ex-Lotus employee.

        Actually, Lotus Notes is pure crap.

        Actually, Lotus Notes sullies the good name of crap.

      • I like having Notes over Outlook for one reason only - Lotus Notes can be a nice all round communications platform for companies.
        Be it, your hours claiming, your bookings of different sorts, your status reports and so on. With Outlook, I can barely run all those applications in parallel on a new ThinkPad T400 2GB RAM and C2D T8400.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I keep an XP virtual machine solely for Lotus Notes. When I turn on my computer, It takes less time to resume the VM than it does to start up Lotus Notes fresh. Also, when Lotus Notes crashes (which we know it *never* does) I don't have to restart my computer to coax it into working again.

      • by Bungie ( 192858 )

        Also, when Lotus Notes crashes (which we know it *never* does) I don't have to restart my computer to coax it into working again.

        To get past the "error opening window" after a crash, open Task Manager and end ntaskldr.exe and ntmulti.exe. There is also the KillNotes [lotus.com] tool which can kill off all the processes that use the Notes DLL automatically.

    • by rs79 ( 71822 ) <hostmaster@open-rsc.org> on Friday October 02, 2009 @03:05PM (#29620687) Homepage

      Google brings out Wave and IBM clones Gmail?

    • by jimpop ( 27817 ) * on Friday October 02, 2009 @03:26PM (#29620903) Homepage Journal
      Lotus Notes and Lotus iNotes are 2 different client products that both use the same backend Domino services. LotusLive iNotes is neither Lotus Notes nor Lotus iNotes. LotusLive iNotes is based on the OutBlaze product built on top of MySQL and Linux and does not use the Domino backend.

      LotusLive iNotes screenshot: https://www.lotuslive.com/en/services/inotes [lotuslive.com]
      Lotus iNotes screenshot: http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/inotes [ibm.com]
    • OMG - I remember running Lotus Notes on OS/2 as a Compaq Partner because that's how they communicated with us all at the time.

      Everything synced through a V.32bis modem with sometimes literally hours of waiting when new floppy images or a new schema was released!

      At the time we all shrugged our shoulders and enthusiastically 'dug into' the Notes way of doing things because we held some rose-tinted view that it represented 'the future' in terms of group-wide communication, even though it was a right pain in th

    • by Draek ( 916851 )

      What has always amazed me is that even security-conscious, Microsoft-hating geeks sing praises to Outlook after using Lotus Notes.

      Can it be really *that* bad? I hope I never find out.

    • Can we start calling this Lotus iWave yet?

    • Lotus makes me want to hurt myself. I've never seen back end code like in R5. It's fucking openly hostile to the user and the administrator alike.

    • by Fred_A ( 10934 )

      Lotus Notes, no way in hell will it succeed. Lotus Notes was pure crap, and I say that as an ex-Lotus employee.

      Lotus Notes has always seemed to me the perfect example of that old saying about principle and practice. In principle, it's an interesting idea, whereas in practice, well, it's Lotus Notes...

  • by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:29PM (#29620345) Homepage Journal

    Lotus Notes is closer to Shit on a Shingle than it is a service.

    -Rick

    • i have a "shit on shingle" web service for you to try, it is closer to a web service than a service, but its cheaper than Google's equivalent product and has a 98.9% positive discovery rate for any type of shit on any type of shingle... $30/month/user... interested?
    • Have you ever tried to find information on any of IBMs websites? They seem to be unavailable frequently, and when they're up, they're very difficult to find information on. They seem unfamiliar with the concept of a link. Most of their content seems to be generated from print versions of documents. I like the competition, but I think pretty much anyone else could do a better job.
    • To help define the quality product that is Lotus Notes, my wife had cancer, and decided to name her tumor "Lotus Notes". (She does not work in IT.) She even has shirts and a baseball cap her family had made for her that have the words "Lotus Notes" in a circle with a big slash through them. She wore the shirts to many of the chemo treatments.

      And she still occasionally wears them to work.

      (She recovered, and is doing fine, if you care.)

    • Hey. Show a little respect. A few of us are veterans and have fond memories of SOS [recipezaar.com]. I don't want anyone besmirching the reputation of a Food that Fed Freedom by associating it with Lotus Notes in any form.
  • Costs Less, But... (Score:4, Informative)

    by rshol ( 746340 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:37PM (#29620413)
    For $36/head you get 1gig of data storage vs. Google at $50/head gets you 25gig of storage. I have no idea how Notes has survived as long as it has. Crap hardly begins to either the notes client or server.
    • Or your usage of verbs... ;)
    • Do you really think storage space is going to be a deal-breaker for most organizations?

      Really, 1 GB is enough for most users. The only exceptions are users who need to send and receive large attachments, and they are probably much better served by a document-sharing system than email anyway.

  • by Arainach ( 906420 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:37PM (#29620419)
    This will not take over the role of Exchange for the same reason Google won't take over the role of Exchance - for a lot of companies, having local control of their data and communications is key. Storing confidential data in the "cloud" (how I hate that term) is a security and privacy risk and a potential source of liability. Thanks to this, there will always be a demand for locally-run and locally-administered mail servers, and nothing really competes with Exchange in that realm.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by trevorrowe ( 689310 )

      Storing confidential data in the "cloud" (how I hate that term) is a ...

      Lots of users say they hate using the term "the cloud", but they continue to use it anyway. Why not just say "other peoples servers"?

      • by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

        Lots of users say they hate using the term "the cloud", but they continue to use it anyway. Why not just say "other peoples servers"?

        Ignorance and laziness. People say "the cloud" because 1) they don't have a clue what it is, except that it's a buzzword that people think you're smart if you use and 2) "the cloud" has two syllables while "other peoples servers" has six. Maybe we should start a new acronym -- OPS?

        "What's 'OPS'?"

        Nobody is going to ask this, any more than they asked what the cloud was; they're

    • by BobMcD ( 601576 )

      While you're somewhat correct, I don't think your prediction will pan out. I think the cloud will win eventually due to factors such as:

      1) Cost. This drives all sorts of non-logical decisions every day.

      2) Availability. An increasingly-mobile work force is really going to want this. While there are solutions (Blackberry), they don't often keep pace with trends (iPhone) whereas an online application could be far more mobile.

      3) Security. If/when your internal servers are breached, your rear-end is on the

    • Since you can get Google on premise now, as well as this I would say your argument is worthless

      • by rsborg ( 111459 )

        Since you can get Google on premise now

        Do you have a reference for this? Can't google it for the life of me. I'm only asking because it is much more interesting to my employer now

    • This will not take over the role of Exchange ...

      Perhaps not, but that's not to say Exchange is without problems of its own.

      The infamous case of lost Whitehouse emails during the term of GWB, for example, occurred after the IT folks successfully transitioned from Notes to Exchange. During the subcommittee hearings on the foulups (and continuing problems resurrecting the lost emails), the head of IT authoritatively pronounced Notes as "obsolete technology" when asked about the reason for the transition. The

    • Actually, the reason it won't is Active Directory. You have the same authentication internally for your e-mail as you do for all the other systems you authenticate against AD for, not to mention the Exchange integration for e-mail that many internal systems have. That's tough to break.

      The only way it will work is if you could give companies the advantages of not having to manage and run hardware for internal e-mail systems (a catch-all basically) whilst giving them a managed appliance they don't have to
    • Lots of Lotus-using companies already pay IBM for off-site management of their data. I would view this as more of a stopgap measure to keep their current user base from fleeing to the competition.

  • by jkyrlach ( 1076609 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:39PM (#29620435)
    Lotus Notes makes it clear where MS got their evil genes from. Because Lotus notes was released as both email client and MS Access equivalent, companies that adopteded it have found themselves hopelessly locked in. In the spirit of "getting things done" my company has allowed its users to create thousands of apps in our Notes system, making it impossible to ever switch to anything else. IBM has nice reliable income, and employees everywhere suffer.
    • Notes was just one in a long line of supposed Wndows "killers". You were supposed to make apps in Notes and ignore Windows.

    • That's because nothing else can do it! I can build a working Notes application in a week that would take months to develop as a standalone app.

      Microsoft likes to present Sharepoint as their "solution" to this... Just look at the response thread to the last Sharepoint article on Slashdot for an idea of how that goes.

      • Bullshit.

        You can do that in, for example, Filemaker (if you hate Microsoft) in less time than with Notes, and your users won't hate you for it. And (unless they've changed recently) it's cross-platform.

        Or if you're ok with Microsoft, try an Access front-end tied with a MS SQL back-end. You're not going to be able to beat that combination with Notes, and as an added bonus MS SQL isn't shitty.

        And, seriously, .net is so damned easy now that there's nothing wrong with using it for RAD, and, again, your users wo

  • Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?

    No, because they branded it Lotus, thereby invoking a ton of dreadful baggage. If they'd called it some else, they might have had a chance.

    P.S. Why is Slashdot slower than an old age pensioner snail crawling up a cliff covered in wet tar today? And why did Slashdot totally ignore the Google outage a week or so back?

    P.P.S. From the article:

    It's unlikely that IBM's pricing strategy will cause competitors to lower fees for their offerings, according to Cain. For one thing, Microsoft already has a $2 per month Exchange Online option called "Deskless Worker," Cain noted.

    • It's unlikely that IBM's pricing strategy will cause competitors to lower fees for their offerings, according to Cain. For one thing, Microsoft already has a $2 per month Exchange Online option called "Deskless Worker," Cain noted.

      Referring back to the "Diskless Workstation", I can already see what this is going to get nicknamed as...

  • My company is an IBM partner, and for political reasons we try to use lotus notes, or like we call it lotus jokes. The thing is the most un-user friendly piece of software I have ever used. Email addresses are stored like directory structures that make no sense. The calendar does not integrate with other meeting requests I get. The list goes on and on. Could be just how my company implemented it but man it sucks to use. Its not even close to google apps like gmail. or outlook and exchange, feels about 10 ye
  • by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:46PM (#29620503) Homepage Journal
    "All the stability of a Microsoft Product, All the User Friendliness of Lotus Notes!"

    I'm sure it'll be an instant hit!

    • "All the stability of a Microsoft Product" would be a blessing for a Lotus-branded product, and on top of that Lotus is usually still loading before Outlook even has a chance to crash 3 months later.
  • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:55PM (#29620587) Homepage

    n/t

    • And Microsoft's "Live" moniker.

      It's as if someone picked Apple + MS + IBM brands and baked them together.

      MAXIMUM RECOGNITION FOR A NEW SERVICE, yeee-haw!

  • Bwahahhahahahahah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @02:56PM (#29620591)

    . . .hah haha hah hah.

    Oh that was good.

    Lotus Notes, iNotes, and all over it's incarnations is the most convoluted and insane system I've ever used (and this is after 4 years of admining a 400+ user Lotus Domino server). I've often heard the joke that Emacs would be a great OS if only it included a decent text editor. I've never felt it applied since I actually like emacs for text editing, but boy does the same type of line apply to Notes: it'd be a great OS if only it included a decent email client.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I've never felt it applied since I actually like emacs for text editing, but boy does the same type of line apply to Notes: it'd be a great OS if only it included a decent email client.

      That'd be like what, Windows ME with a decent email client?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by NoYob ( 1630681 )
      I can't help but have this image of you at work, hair a mess with several days worth of beard growth, wearing a bathrobe and bunny slippers, walking around with a coffee cup with god knows what in it, and answering technical questions with Shakespearean quotes. They won't fire you because they can't find anyone else and they're not sure if you have a WMD planted somewhere in the city.
  • with concerns about security and service outages, such as those suffered by Gmail in recent months

    They better be able to offer guarantees stronger than Google's. I'm not sure what Gmail's Premier outage guarantees are, but for a new-comer to offer better would be surprising.

    Also, $36 vs $50. $14 a year difference hardly justifies any potential UI frustration or maturity of product problems this may have.

  • by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @03:05PM (#29620689)

    ...we'll call it eLotusLive iNotes. Dot com.

    • ...we'll call it eLotusLive iNotes. Dot com.

      You forgot the "My" on the front, which is of course required for any website that includes any variable other than the a datestamp in the underlying programming code. my dot my-eLotus-eLive-iNotesCom dot com would be perfect for that. Now all they need is the linkless "Best experienced with Adobe Flash" background for the mandatory Flash file that redirects to a hostname on completely different domain than the entry page, and it will be completely innovative and fresh. (And I'd even use it if the only

  • by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Friday October 02, 2009 @03:16PM (#29620797) Homepage Journal

    The "you have new email" icon looks more like you have a new burrito waiting. Seriously, who designed this thing? It still looks like the Lotus Notes I used back in '95 with the primitive looking GUI.

    • by CannonballHead ( 842625 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @03:23PM (#29620863)

      The "you have new email" icon looks more like you have a new burrito waiting.

      Dude, if I had a burrito for every new mail I got, I'd be happy...

      • That is all

        • Moderation is broken by design: if your comment is at +5 and you get modded funny and offtopic, you just lost a karma point. Moderators who mod comments "funny" are thus doing the poster a disservice, and should moderate it with the positive adjective that explains why it was funny, i.e. Informative or Insightful. You've been here longer than I have, you have no excuse for not knowing this by now.

    • You're looking at the "your burrito is waiting" icon.

      The "new mail" icon looks like a woman wearing fruit on her head. Duh.

  • Cell phones (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sunderland56 ( 621843 ) on Friday October 02, 2009 @03:19PM (#29620831)
    Businesses have become used to smart phones, the majority of which work with Microsoft Exchange. Phones have pre-loaded clients for Exchange, not for anything from Lotus. If iNotes can't play with current phones, it will be a non-starter.
    • by Belial6 ( 794905 )
      Domino 8.5.1 to be released within the next couple of weeks can use the Exchange protocol to talk to phones. Domino has had IMAP for years. As for web based email on PCs, Domino has had offline access to the web based email for years. Well, actually, it has had offline access for ANY web based application running on Domino that the developer decided to implement offline access for.
  • The person who wrote this story cannot even normalize the pricing, if they work for IBM they don't have a chance at all.
  • Let's see: This IBM guy in the article is making noise about Google's uptime record versus "what you'd expect from IBM in terms of security, reliability and privacy" with Lotus Notes branded products? Wow. It's like he actually aimed before he shot himself in the foot.

  • Beating Microsoft products on usability is not exactly a tough achievement. Personally I'd rather use post-it notes than Outlook.

  • Notes has come a long way. On the server side, it's vastly superior to Exchange - fewer servers required, true clustering for 100% uptime, lower hardware requirements with each version, runs on many platforms. The client got a bit bloated with the move to Eclipse, but the basic client is still available if you want speed over functionality. And it runs on open standards on several platforms. Why the hate?

    • The people espousing the hate actually, you know, USE THE PRODUCT.

      I had to support the ball of shit. It loved to crash Palms by making calendar items that ended before they began. Notes had been around approx. 20 years at the time, and it never occurred to anybody at Lotus that, hm, maybe you shouldn't be able to make a meeting end before it begins because that makes NO FUCKING SENSE. But no, Notes was perfectly ok with it, and our poor Palms suffered as a result.

      And that's just one tiny example of how Lotu

      • As an experienced developer and admin, I can assure you that I also actually use the product.

        It is certainly possible to craft a calendar entry with a negative duration - calendar entries are documents just like any other, and the field values can be manipulated as such. However, you can't create a negative duration calendar entry through the UI directly - this hasn't been possible since at least 2003, which is the oldest mail template version I still have on my machine. Regardless, Notes surely can't be to

        • So this leads me to believe that either your Notes configuration was poorly managed, or this was so many years ago as to be irrelevant to any current discussions of Notes.

          Oh fuck off.

          I always hear this from Notes supporters. "Your configuration was poorly-managed." Did it ever occur to you that maybe the fact that SO MANY people here have problems means that ALMOST ALL Notes configurations are "poorly-managed?" Why do you think that is?

          For the record, this was bog-standard Lotus Notes 6.5. Definitely newer

  • Zimbra gets underplayed. It's the Exhange killer that works well, easy to addminister, cross platform, mac/win/lin/winmo/web/outlook/etc. compatible. It has antivirus, antispam, archiving, clustering, scalable to nearly any size, ldap/AD integration, shared calendars, should I continue?

    THIS IS IT, FOLKS!

    Why doesn't it get more press?

  • Here's something to think about, to all of you declaring that Notes is crap.

    The real enterprise class messaging world is split about in half between using Microsoft Exchange on the back end and using Lotus Domino on the back end. Different analysts will split it in different places, and different parts of the world will also vary the numbers a bit, but generally the market for enterprise messaging is about split in half with everyone else taking up a very small percentage.

    So, the product that you're calling "absolute crap" seems to be one of the few in the software industry holding its own against a relentless Microsoft push for years on end. Why is that? The answer is because it is VERY good at doing what it does -- which is providing a messaging platform that is manageable and secure across really large enterprises with tens or hundreds of thousands of users.

    Lots of products are better than Notes or Domino at one or two things, but no product has the breadth and scope of its features in an enterprise manageable application server. The closest thing to it would be an entire linux distro, with various packages performing roles similar to the tasks on a Domino server. It's not a great match up but it's a hell of a lot closer than comparing it to "Gmail" which is pretty good for EMAIL or to Exchange. Maybe if you compared it to Exchange + Outlook + Sharepoint + SQL Server + Office + Visual Studio. That's a fairly expensive comparison and totally unmanageable to deploy across tens of thousands of users.

    What amazes me are the predictions of failure. Hello? It already succeeded! It makes a TON of money and keeps a LOT of people employed. I can certainly understand if you don't LIKE the product. There are things that are long overdue to be overhauled, for sure. Predicting the failure of something that has already succeeded though -- that's fairly moronic.

    As someone pointed out, however, LotusLive iNotes is not Notes, not Domino based iNotes (which has won awards, by the way, for its user interface), but is in fact an entirely different platform specifically built to be a hosted mail environment that has nothing to do with the old Lotus Notes or the Domino server. So far, I don't recommend it.
     

    • by FatSean ( 18753 )

      This isn't the first incarnation of a web interface to Domino backend servers either. That function (such as it was) was available for years. At least as far back as 2005. Now the 'rich text format' they used...ick!

    • So, the product that you're calling "absolute crap" seems to be one of the few in the software industry holding its own against a relentless Microsoft push for years on end.

      The two things are not mutually-exclusive, you know.

      Also, what people say is "absolute crap" is Lotus Notes. And it *is* absolute crap, so, you know. You seem to be talking about Domino, instead... Domino may or may not be any good (I don't have the experience to judge), but as long as the part that the general public sees is Lotus Notes

      • ...and often very badly managed. The biggest problem it has on the desktop is that it's big and powerful, but cumbersome and heavy as well. If you try to use it for just email, and your company isn't writing good applications on it, then its like trying to use an 18 wheel tractor trailer to go grocery shopping.

        People don't like it. Then they get switched to Exchange with Outlook as the front end and they get shocked by how bad that is, and how little it does in comparison -- and then when there is downt

        • If you try to use it for just email, and your company isn't writing good applications on it, then its like trying to use an 18 wheel tractor trailer to go grocery shopping.

          I've yet to see a single Notes application worth running. The email client, as bad as it is, seems to actually have the *best* UI in the Notes ecosystem-- the whole product is so amazingly bad, I literally think it's impossible to make a good UI, no matter how much effort you put into it.

          Kind of like Java, in that respect. Sure, it has to

  • The responsiveness and clarity of Notes plus the reliability of Web 2.0

    Let me kill myself now. Please.

  • ... it's time for a new version of Wernstrom's killbot. [google.com]

  • No, seriously, hahahaha!

    Words fail me.

    Bloatus Goats. No way.

  • The Lotus Notes experience is somewhat like delivering your email via shouting out the window, while a midget punches you repeatedly in the balls. And that's BEFORE the Domino admin decides to move your profile to another server and fuck everything up even more.

    I bet iNotes will be just as good. No, seriously.

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