If you're looking to gain respect for your gear as a serious business-class tool, there's no better way than to infiltrate those Big Four accounting firms still using Lotus Notes. According to a piece carried by the
Associated Press, Lotus Notes eMail is coming to Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. We kid you not. The announcement is expected as early as Sunday the 20th, the day IBM's annual Lotusphere conference kicks off in Orlando. The software is free for those with existing licenses which means IT is going to have a hell of a time keeping it out of users' hands. If true, the application would presumably be the first official, third-party app developed with Apple's new
iPhone SDK. IBM is also expected to announce their free Lotus Symphony flavor of OpenOffice for the Mac at the same time. An IBM spokesman seemingly confirmed the announcements by saying that Apple and IBM have, "a lot in common. We're going to cross-pollinate." Let's just hope they manage to untangle that jumbled Notes UI for finger-friendly navigation during the mating ritual, eh?
[Via
MacRumors]
posted January 17th 2008 7:33AM
@Jeftek, I would wait until after the announcements at Lotusphere next week before you comment any more about what IBM Lotus will be supporting on the iPhone, because so far you have it woefully wrong.
Your comments about 'standard Windows keys' (such as F5) have already been debunked here.
Not many Notes shops will have upgraded to 8.0 yet because a) it was released just 5 months ago and b) most companies wait for the first point release (due in February).
"Also get rid of those stupid logon symbols. They were a silly thing back in the 80s, and really have very little value now." ... Actually they do, they remain as a prevention method against password capturing devices. Do some research on it, you'll find they do have a purpose, and their effectiveness continues to be confirmed in usability studies.
Eric, there are people defending Notes because they understand it's business value and they also get annoyed about other people damning it based on misconceptions or out-of-date info.
I'm puzzled by MS Exchange folks don't understand that Notes includes all of the infrastructure that you need to have secure and scaleable workflow applications (and mail is one of those apps). It includes private/public key support, encryption, signing, etc. which is pretty painful to do in the MS world. It includes secure IM (yes the data is encrypted). It includes application deployment tools via replication. You may say you can get all these things in the MS world, but you still have to set them all up on different servers and integrate them all and then by the time you're done w/ all that and set to write apps, the Notes developer will have finished the same app (yes, Notes includes a rapid app dev environment as well).
I've done web dev (J2EE, ASP, ASP.Net, CFM) and windows dev (C++, C#) and Notes is a far more productive environment for writing your typical company applications as well as maintaining them (including deployment).
At any rate, back to this cool iPhone app...it's part of 8.01's support for push email so yes, it'll now be part of the Domino server and will support more gadgets than Exchange does :-) Last I heard, it supports C&S and contact sync as well, so it's a great reason for any company running Notes to upgrade. All the reasons in the previous paragraph are reasons companies should look to add Notes to their network, even if just for apps.
Any application that needs another application to shut down their processes needs to die.
Ever heard of Notes Reloaded? I use it daily. Ever heard of Outlook Reloaded? No, you haven't.
Please make Notes go away.....
Now I figured it out, the Notes haters just can't read!
"Any application that needs another application to shut down their processes needs to die."
Now, who said that?
Please get some education before rejoining the civilized world
@NotesBlows - "Ever heard of Notes Reloaded?"
Actually no, and I've been a Notes user for 16 years. I know what you're getting at, that Notes leaves some processes open if it crashes. And Notes is the only product on Earth that does that? Get real. I've seen Outlook crash many a time on exit leaving a task that needs to be killed off.
Furthermore Notes 8.x is a 100 times better at reloading after a crash and doesn't need task kill-off. So you'll probably say "ah-ha, so Notes does crash on you". Yes, very rarely and it's because I'm in permanent beta test mode, one release ahead of what the public has available to them. I usually go weeks without having to shut down or reload Notes 8. If you're having to kill off Notes tasks to reload every day I'd speak to your support people.
My 2 cents. I have been in charge of corporate Notes/Domino systems since about 93 ( Version 2 ). I have always either worked for a Fortune 100 company or consulted to Fotune 500 companies. Here is my take.
Just need email for a few hundred employees, Notes is not the first solution to consider, heck it is not even the second. The UI is unique, the learning curve is a little longer, the server requires reading the manual to set-up, and quite frankly the Maill Client is just OK. Need to support tens of thousands of users on several continents. Start thinking Notes. Need those nifty distributed databases to support Business Functions, now your even more inclined to look at Notes. Want fully integrated workflow that can be configured to match your Business Processes with direct access to DB2 or Oracle, there is no other platform that can "Bring it to the Glass" as quickly or cleanly.
Look as an IT guy, supporting Notes is work, as a Business Analyst or Systems Designer there simply is no other tool that meets my needs, as a VP with my job hanging on the line I want the scalability and dependability of Notes. (I also like the fact that I have never had a virus in my Notes environment ) Good programmers ARE hard to find, if you have one pay them well. However once you have them the speed at which you can prototype and deliver workflow based aqpplications is unparralled by any thing else I have ever tried and I have been in this business for a very long time.
We are 1 1/2 revisions back at my current company, why? Because there was not a real reason to upgrade until recently. We are now looking at integrating a lot of Notes functionality directly into some Websphere products we have developed and that will move us to R8.
I say, don't knock it till you have tried to conduct large corporate business on something else. Got a little company to support, make sure to look at all the options out there first, Notes might not be the best fit. I will say that I have never had a client tell me they wished I had installed some other product after I have gotten them up on Notes. It is all in how YOU do your job.
We are a Notes r7 shop--and I can tell you two key reasons why we haven't upgraded (unrelated to budget and time): running the full r8 (eclipse) Notes 8 is unstable and a terrible memory hog (not unlike Office 2007 or Vista). We're hoping 8.0.1 improves both of those issues, because even if we had loads of time to deploy the software--we don't think it's ready to deploy. I mean, it isn't uncommon for Notes (including all of the IBM executables and eclipse) to use 300MB on my system!!
I think the new interface is great--a massive improvement over older versions in most regards. There are still lots of Lotus quirks (but I've never used a Microsoft product w/o quirks...), but when we upgrade everyone's memory and Lotus makes it more stable--we will probably upgrade.
I've been a Notes admin since 1997 and actually read this entire thread. it's funny how most Notes critics seem to latch onto misconceptions and "feelings" for a product and don't actually offer any substance to their arguments. Most of us are called upon to use other systems that have vastly different interfaces, is that a reason to torpedo them? We learn, we adapt. Press F5 in your ERP system and then cry to your IT dept because it doesn't refresh your screen. Cope!
The one thing that our organization has benefited from with notes is the cost. All educational licenses are free to use. In a large college environment, how can you argue that!
I would also say that simplicity is key. I have never supported a client-server based application (in 25 years of IT support) that is more flexible, stable, portable, and customizable than the Notes client. It's actually awesome.