IBM thinks Notes and Domino can rise again

Is this an improvement on IBM's usual business strategy?

I can't tell if IBM has learned anything here. It smacks of the usual IBM mess -- throw good money after bad, by deluding yourself about the problem.

The fundamental problem with Notes is that for all the talk of it being collaboration software, 80-95% of its use is as an E-mail client, and it is a bloated, slow, generally horrid E-mail client. It sucks at the one function its users will employ every single dreary day of their lives as office drones.

But IBM has turned it over to HCL, so they aren't rolling the dice with their own money anymore. That seems to be something of an improvement. They've moved on to ruining other companies' businesses rather than merely their own. That has to count for something. But the story is still dismally familiar.

I think Notes i an attempt at fixing a problem.

I just forget what the original problem is now, overwhelmed by the Notes problems.

In other news

Lazarus of Bethany may rise again.

My moneys on Lazarus. Sure he may smell a bit now but he's still more pleasant to interact with than Notes/Domino...

Hungry

Great, now I and 2000 others want Pizza after hearing about Domino rising dough.

But alas, no pizza until Saturday!

well good luck with that...

but

a) The days of the one size fits all application has gone. What people want now is different tools, but better data integration.

b) A UI that wasn't designed by a intern on a window 95 machine would be nice

c) Is there really anything that lotus notes does which could not be replaced with a LAMP stack and a Node.js server at less cost

In the end, despite its power most people only used it as a glorified email client, which it sucked at (even compared to Exchange, which is saying something). Be better off, ditching Notes, create a better exchange (not hard) and call it Note-next-gen or something and provide some sort of import utility

Flashbacks - not nostalgia

One of those products that creates hideous flashbacks, particularly if you had to train people on it. Please, just let it die quietly. (Or drag it screaming down to hell, I'm not fussy).

Is nothing sacred these days? I thought grave robbing was a crime...

What's this Lotus Notes thing?

I remember about 20 years ago my Dad brought home a shiny new laptop from work. I had a go on it and couldn't believe how fast it was especially in comparison to the home PC we'd had a couple of years at that point.

About a week later I tried it again. Lotus Notes had been installed. It was slower and came up with all this crap on startup.

I said, "Dad, what's this Lotus Notes thing?" and his honest reply was - "son, I've got no idea". Nobody in their company did, and none of them cared enough to find out. I think they used it for many years, even when people were demonstrating better ways of doing tasks they were supposed to use it for. The mindset was always "it will work, trust us, it will work". It never gave exactly the results they were after.

Some things are better left in the past.

Lotus Notes and node.js

Why not package just 1 shit thing when we can put both together? This is like retro and modern shit being combined to make something worse than either!

I use Notes at work and it is truly appalling. I have been objective and built a list of its faults which currently has 120 entries.What is the worst? Maybe that I cannot read webmail on my smartphone because most on my email is filtered into folders and Notes actively prevents you from reading them.

Ughhh!

Started using Lotus Notes before they were taken over by IBM, back when the only supported server platform was OS/2. It was used in-house for running various internal databases for the support, sales and admin departments, and we also did some development work for elsewhere.

My general experience was that it was fine for certain types of database which required just a few users, but bad for implementing E-mail; the latter confirmed by discovering the arcane process that ran nightly to purge attachments from deleted E-mails.

At one point my workplace developed an intranet produce that used the web-server component of Notes to serve documents internally, with a few third-party libraries thrown in for document conversion. The Notes web-server was singled threaded back then, and the search mechanism, whilst thorough, was somewhat slow, resulting in the server being potentially unavailable for minutes whilst handling a search query.

I can also recall other quirks, such as embedded Word attachments gaining the page dimensions of the form that they were embedded in when printed, which caused no end of fun with some printers.

Notes fitted our need quite well

We needed a document workflow tool. Documents could be generated, passed along, signatures added, and all under control. The downside was Domino running on Windoze. (The Lotus FE told me that the most stable Domino platform was Solaris/Sparc and Solaris/Intel was next.)

Notes about Notes

Once upon a time, a long time ago......I worked for a "Big Six" consulting firm. I got some Notes training, and it looked pretty good. Then I tried to find out about the Notes databases available as implemented by my company. There were HUNDREDS of them. Some sounded quite useful. But every one had a different administrator and needed a different signon and password. In the end I gave up.

I always thought Notes was alright

Given the right problem. Except at email, it was horrible for that. But at $PREVIOUS_JOB 15-odd years ago we built a document management system on it which is still more effective than anything I've seen since (admittedly I now work for UK.GOV so it's entirely possible our problems implementing a sane document management system are - ahem - not technical). And our sales force had all kinds of little product databases and whatnot they could go all road-warrior with and sync up later.

I mostly worked with it as a user rather than administrating or developing, though. Perhaps I missed out on the fun bits.

Notes was worth the trouble back in the day.

Well, Notes was the crowning achievement in software development for Ray Ozzie and his crew of developers at Iris Associates. Ray had worked at Lotus where he also created Symphony. At one point Lotus could not keep track of all the licenses it sold for Notes and cut a deal with Ray Ozzie for approx. $186M in royalties. Later on, IBM paid one-third of its cash on hand, which was $3B to buy Lotus. By this time Lotus had acquired Iris Associates.

It was the pre-internet "groupware" era, and the only serious contenders were Novell with GroupWise, which is alive and well at Micro Focus with its current GroupWise 18 release. The other contender was Microsoft Exchange with its Outlook client which is still widely deployed and sits alongside Microsoft's cloud offerings.

One of the issues with Notes was that it did not have all the functionality needed for a development platform. There were lots of third parties with Notes apps, but Notes as a development environment only gradually came into being, but by then the Internet was destined to become the new platform for groupware applications like Gmail and Google Apps. As for a Notes revival, I would not bet on it happening. Too much time has passed since the heyday of Notes and today.

This crap is still big in Hong Kong

You think you have problems until

you are supporting Notes and Exchange in the same company.

SmartSuite Updated?

I would pay for an updated "SmartSuite".

Approach DB worked and didn't force you into SQL commands, but has it as an option.

Organizer still has more options then what you get online. Needs updating in shared module to Web Services.

Freelance Graphics does most of what you need, but needs some completion.

Wordpro needs export with HTML5 and CSS updated.

Fastsite also needs export with HTML5 and CSS updated.

"Team" functions needs updating to Web Services, but everything else is OK.

Don't care for Notes, but this would be a help.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to get the current version working first

Notes is the most hateful, bug ridden pile of horse shit I have every had the displeasure of using/administrating.

I quite enjoyed developing for it,

It was/is a really good Rapid Application Development platform.

I could knock up a functional change control system within a week and have all the bells and whistles done in 3 months (even with weekly specification changes).

Several times I was asked to write a quick application to fill a gap while the Java/C++/Oracle team were busy doing the proper Enterprise Ready version over the next 6 months.

I'd come back 5-6 years later and my application was still there running because it did the job adequately, and cheap code that works okay beats expensive code that doesn't work at all.

No market for it anymore and I'm doing PHP/Python these days. I don't mention that the application i've spent 6 months (and counting) writing could have been done in 2 weeks in Notes.