From what You write here I think You really need to update Your knowledge on Lotus Notes.
Your comments shows that You have no clue as to what’s happened in the eight years since You last used it.

Well, I use Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Standard as a client.
No modifications at all.
I use Outlook 2007/2010 as well as GroupWise (Long term customer projects makes it so that I use all three on a daily basis).

I really can’t see what would make anyone claim that the current Lotus Notes client is in any way less user friendly than the current MS and/or Novell offerings.

Of course, if I comparing Outlook 2007 to an eight year old version of Lotus Notes, the Notes client would feel less “current” in layout/colours/look&feel.

But that would be as unreasonable as comparing Lotus Notes 8.5.x against MS Mail 3.5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Microsoft_Mail.png)

As far as functionality/UI/Security goes, Notes 8.5.1 is above and beyond Outlook 2007 (and 2010).
UI wise its of course a matter of taste and the default MS look never appealed that much to me in the first place.

Lotus Notes includes an email feature yes, which some people like and dislike.

But Lotus Notes is also a rubust collaborative systems platform for a whole universe of other collaborative features, including replication, security & encruption, role based workflow, integrated instant messaging, web development, rapid integrated development environment (with a free designer), automatic software updates, execution control, electronic signatures etc. etc.

Collaborative applications in Lotus Notes run without change in both a Rich Client and a Web browser interface and code that was developed back in version 1 still runs without problems with the latest release 8.5.1. (over 20 years later).

The same Lotus Notes code base runs on Apple Macs, Windows and various Lunux environments without problems and the same applications can run in a tiny self–healing LINUX compliance, all the way up to a huge mainframe or a a complex mixed OS cluster with hundreds of processors. It’s untra- relable as well, since 1993 I have personally never lost a single byte of data in a Lotus Notes database.

Limiting your perspective of Lotus Notes to it’s email features only, is like comparing Microsoft Excel to the Windows Calculator.

You like many other poorly informed commentators just don’t seem to get it.

Ian Randall

so what is your suggestion for the replacement of Notes. Please don’t mention a MS product because then your whole article can be taken not serious.

Dig a little deeper with your writing.

Phil, the point that isn’t being said directly in the comments about Notes progress — sites like “lotusnotessucks.4t.com” are years old. They are based on version 5 or 6 or maybe 7 of the product. Version 8, shipped in 2005, was a major rewrite of the Notes UI. This version works well and that is the point of the first commenter. You don’t have to necessarily look to our future roadmap to see a usable version of the product today. See
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/notes/
for screenshots and other details.

I’ve worked extensively with Notes and I agree with your points.

Plug-ins sound chaotic, and key features like search are better built in.

As for the notes mail user experience. The latest version is still not on par with the competition. Its cleaned up UI was accomplished adding a complex layer of eclipse java components which “mask” the old school C++ client underneath at the cost of performance, and added complexity. The result is Notes R8 runs slowly on the average corporate desktop, takes too much disk space, and has many times the failure points.

That said, Lotus Notes as a rapid application environment STILL after all these years cannot be beat. You can deploy very effective work-flow applications, quickly, with low development and infrastructure costs. Also the Domino server software really is a joy to manage compared to other products. It works on just about every platform known and even plays seamlessly across multiple platforms.

For so many years now I wished IBM would resist trying to sew yet another mismatched arm on Frankenstein and build from the ground up a streamlined version with the best of Notes, renewed, and all polished to perfection.

To me, the odd thing about this thread is encapsulated in these key sentences:

“… the product has for years not done things that many core users expect.

Take a product like Gmail. While it may not have all of the capabilities of a product like LN, it certain makes searching emails pretty straightforward.”

Yes, GMail does make it easy to search email. In fact, GMail is the the first email client I’ve seen that made it almost as easy as Lotus Notes did — in Notes 3.0 in 1993! You see, that’s when Lotus introduced a full-text search engine as a built-in (no plugins) feature of Lotus Notes.

The idea that this “for years” is just simply false. It may be the case that many Notes & Domino system admins don’t enable it because it requires extra disk space and CPU, and it may be the case that most companies that use Notes don’t give their users the training they would need in order to get around their admins’ restrictions by building the index on their local hard drive — but surely it’s not a flaw in Lotus Notes that it was a decade ahead of widespread acceptance of the idea that users should be able to keep all their email and search it easily.

By the way, though I’m a Notes guy at heart, for the past 4 years I’ve been an Outlook user. For the first two, I had to use a plugin to get half-decent searching in Outlook 2003, but Outlook 2007 finally solved that by integrating Windows Desktop Search, and finally made searching my Exchange and Outlook data in some ways better than the experience I had had since Notes 3 — though still in some ways not as easy.

So while there are certainly things that a plugin like FewClix can do today to improve the presentation of Notes search results, IMHO the basic search capabilities of Notes are still very competitive with GMail. That’s without any plug-in, and in some ways, Notes search blows GMail away. E.g., Notes gives me all the results, and lets me scroll them, whereas Gmail only gives me 20 results at a time Also, Notes gives me the ability to select different criteria for ordering of search results, whereas GMail returns results in only one order. (Now, maybe there are some “Google Labs” extensions for GMail search that I don’t know about, but those would fall into a category similar to plugins, IMHO.)