“… 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.)

As for comparing Lotus Exchange with Microsoft Exchange, I think that TCO should be taken into account. Using apps built 20 years ago on the latest version of Lotus is unmatched…

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.

For one, it’s certainly not fair to “blame” IBM if its clients have clung to much older versions of Lotus Notes that may not have some of the improvements that Ed has mentioned.

On the other, it’s probably understandable that many clients have not upgraded if, as some have mentioned, they have used LN as a development platform for other applications critical to the enterprise.

Perhaps that’s where plug-ins can come in, although I don’t know enough about the ones mentioned in the earlier post from FewClix to say that they will or will not work with LN v 5, 6, or 7.

I think that the core issue here is if IT departments are reluctant to upgrade LN when there are other factors at stake behind “user-friendliness.”

Thanks for the comment.

I was only suggesting that Notes’ user-friendliness and search feature are improved such that plug-ins aren’t required. I know that we’re dealing with personal preferences here. MS Outlook has its pros and cons as well.

If LN were a new product with some core deficiencies, that would be one thing. It’s not. To me, 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.

Of course, to quote Dennis Miller, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Dig a little deeper with your writing.

I did acknowledge the other features of LN in the initial post but, for many people, they only care about email and it’s really hard to defend LN on that point, in my view.

I like the Excel analogy, but what if your organization didn’t permit you to use a calculator and Excel had a really user-unfriendly one?

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

We have lots of testimonials from people who now love Notes because they got eProductivity, so it’s amazing what can result from a focus on the end-user. IBM recognizes this too, hence why they’re partnering with us (and other 3rd parties). They’re also doing plenty of internal work on Notes 8 to make it more user-friendly. Notes improvement is happening…