IBM plans to unveil this week a version of its Lotus Notes desktop collaboration software for Linux. Lotus Notes on Linux 7.0.1, which will be generally available July 24, is based on the Eclipse open-source framework. That technology will also be used in the next update to Lotus Notes, code-named Hannover, which is expected to ship next year.
It’s nice that they’ve done this so that users don’t have to go through Hell getting it running under wine, but does anyone outside of IBM actually *use* Lotus Notes anymore?
The organisation that I work for has several hundred thousand Notes licenses, all of which are on Windows, as far as I know.
Notes is still very big in *large* corporates. I don’t know about SME’s though.
We use Notes, and we still qualify for a “Medium” enterprise (around 250 employees).
Don’t discount Notes, it is still a popular program (despite it having one of the worst UIs ever conceived…)
>>>It’s nice that they’ve done this so that users don’t have to go through Hell getting it running under wine, but does anyone outside of IBM actually *use* Lotus Notes anymore?<<<<
Just do a job search on Monster.com for “Lotus Notes”… your results will exceed the 1,000 return limit.
In sum, the answer to your question is: “yes.”
It was actually meant as more of a tongue-in-cheek comment…maybe I should have made that clearer. Most of the enterprises I’ve worked with that use Notes have been looking to migrate away from it. Notes usage has been declining, but *of course* people still use it.
Wash your mouth out with soap! I work with Notes/Domino on a day to day basis.
Lots of people use Lotus Notes from government, big media groups (The Guardian Media Group), insurance companies, accounting firms (Price Waterhouse) etc. If you use Notes for e-mail alone then I feel your pain because the Notes client is not very intuitive but used in the right way Domino is fantastically easy to administrate and develop applications for. It’s always been said that the Lotus Domino server is great it’s the client that’s the problem. The next version of the Notes Client is codenamed Hannover and IBM are trying to address some of the (many!) complaints. It will truly be a thing of beauty as shown in the screenshot link.
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/hannoverscreenshots.ht…
Also if your server hardware fails you just reinstall Domino and your backup of the domino data directory and away you go. Try doing that with Exchange!
Edited 2006-07-10 18:33
“Also if your server hardware fails you just reinstall Domino and your backup of the domino data directory and away you go. Try doing that with Exchange!”
I feel you there. I’ve never been much of an Exchange supporter (although the AD integration is nice).
Everyone, my first post was a jest. I know people still use Notes for crying out loud.
I did Notes development for 10 years and gracefully exited to do ASP.NET, C#, and LAMP some time ago. I couldn’t agree more that this is more than likely a dead-end product. A lot of the advantageous collaboration features have been folded into competitive products at this point. Also answer this question. How many software applications, OSes, and IDEs has IBM championed into success? How many have they killed?
Add to this the fact the primary inspiration behind Notes, Ray Ozzie, has already defected to Microsoft and i think you have your answer.
also, after working with every version of Lotus from its inception through v.5 +, I can say from experience that working with it is far from worry free and comes with its headaches. I developed systems for fortune 50 companies and did some server admin as well. when i left, a lot of those guys were looking for software engineers to port their Notes apps to other systems.
it’s sad. At one point, Lotus Notes was a groundbreaking tool, but at this point, i think its user base will continue to shrink.
you haven’t used notes enough then.
Have they FINALLY fixed their god-awful NNTP client, which seems to lack even the most basic of fetures such as the ability to limit text to 67 characters per line, and actually loop the setences as you type rather than one long sentence?
I’m sorry, but Notes, (6.x was the last time I used it), needs ALOT of work to be done to it, more importantly, IBM needs to make downloading it ALOT easier than it does now; any one who as ever tried to download something of IBM knows what it is like – question; does IBM wish to stop people from evaluating their products? to me, they don’t want a single new customer to purchase it by their lack of making it easy downloadable.
Totally agree. I remember FINALLY managing to download Java for x86/Linux (Sun’s kept crashing) from their website. After using Google, IBM’s own search and just clicking through random links, I could finally get it done. I hope they fix their website soon.
This is great news for me. Here I sit in my office at my IBM-supplied Thinkpad running Gentoo with a VMWare session running Windows XP just for Lotus Notes. I used to run it using Wine, but every version of Wine newer than 20041019 doesn’t work for me, and that old version doesn’t build with my newer toolchain for some reason.
There used to be an internally maintained version of Notes made especially to run under Wine, but they stopped maintaining it citing the Workplace client would soon provide Notes on Linux. That was about two years ago.
There are plenty of Lotus Domino/Notes deployments outside of IBM. The more important question is whether the collaboration suite is winning any _new_ contracts. At this point, it might even be easier to find a skilled Cyrus admin than a skilled Domino admin, and for straight email (no calendaring or other funny business) you cannot beat the huge balls of Cyrus.
but does anyone outside of IBM actually *use* Lotus Notes anymore?
Having used Notes in a previous organization, I think the proper phrase should be, “Does Lotus Notes use anone anymore?”
Most everyone I was associated hated Notes as a client. It was clunky, error-prone and very non-intuitive. However, as a developer, it had great potential in simplifying the creation of Client/Server/Distributed applications that would have been extremely difficult to create in most other development environments. The omnipresence of web toolkits (Java/.NET/LAMP) have probably lessened this impact somewhat.
but does anyone outside of IBM actually *use* Lotus Notes anymore?
Sadly, yes.
I have never met (in person) anyone, who didn’t hate Notes.
>>>It’s nice that they’ve done this so that users don’t have to go through Hell getting it running under wine, but does anyone outside of IBM actually *use* Lotus Notes anymore?<<<<
I am a developer for a company that has close to 100,000 licenses, several Domino servers and an in-house custom Notes application for close to 30,000. Notes is far from dead. I look foreward to using the Eclipse-based client on Linux.
Ok…. if I were a SysAdmin and had Lotus Notes on all machines, I would switch in a heartbeat to the Linux version.
I bet you that IBM will release a version of Linux containing all software needed to do “office” sutff. OpenOffice if need be (rebranded probably) and Notes. Can you imagine how much money a company with 1000 computers when they have to go from XP to Vista, instead they go from XP to Linux, and carry their main application with them?
The article sited above says you can switch from a Win license to a Linux one for free. Nice.
just my thoughts
It blows my mind to see the so called security minded people loving OL and not knowing the facts about Lotus Notes and Domino. I am very happy to see this development. As for Lotus losing market share yes that is true how ever the people switching just do not know any better. Sorry for them.
Never put all you egg in the same basket.
It blows my mind to see the so called security minded people loving OL and not knowing the facts about Lotus Notes and Domino. I am very happy to see this development. As for Lotus losing market share yes that is true how ever the people switching just do not know any better. Sorry for them.
Never put all you egg in the same basket.
Security? Bah. On the client side it uses IE for it’s rendering engine and defaults to running scripts in html-based emails. Even disabling web options in my settings doesn’t prevent it from automatically rendering html emails by pulling content from the internet, which is a PITA since I use a preview pane and Notes has an annoying tendency to bounce around with the selected email, I have to rely on ZoneAlarm for that by blocking ntaskldr.exe from external access.
If you’re going to embedd internet communicating services in your product, you’d better damn well keep them up to date in terms of default behaviors or at least make them configurable. I was amazed after upgrading to 6.5 last year that there was still no thought to html-cleansing or blocking for emails on the client side (unless there’s a server setting I’m not aware of that our IT people are ignoring), they haven’t changed anything there from 5.x a few years back. Even Microsoft figured that out with Outlook. I can’t think of another modern email client, free or otherwise, that still does that.
I don’t mind HTML for structured layout and rendering of emails, particularly since Notes doesn’t speak Outlook RTF, but I shouldn’t have to use a firewall to prevent my enterprise-oriented mail client from pulling down internet content automatically.
EDIT: After reading my rant, felt I should point out that I am looking forward to the linux client, though. If I have to live with Notes, it may as well be on my platform of choice. Right now my only alternative to Windows is Wine, Citrix or webamil, and none of those is really attractive. So I am looking forward to trying this.
Edited 2006-07-10 21:15
I doubt alot of people will use it on Linux. It just looks like a “bonus” for their etablished userbase. Well, unless they opensource it 😉
As good as a Domino set up can be in certain areas, Lotus Notes is the worst client I have ever seen for e-mail and groupware. It is truly awful, and it does some pretty inexplicable things to users.
Yes, people still use Notes but I don’t know of anywhere where it isn’t living on borrowed time. I don’t know of anyone who is looking to upgrade to a new version, is excited by any new features and I don’t know what IBM is actually doing with it.
Bring back ccMail, that’s what I say.
If this is just a pretty UI with none of the functionality, count me out.
I try not to dig deeper other than just clicking on my inbox when using the Lotus Notes client simply because I can’t FIND IT! Other than that, we got a pretty bad ass ticketing system built around Lotus Notes/Dominos and that’s something that I don’t think Microsoft can’t touch with a stick, although I may not be sure now with MS and all it’s .Net initiative.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but Outlook is a pretty bad-ass product. Hell, setting up a rule is a hell-of-a-lot easier than an “Agent” from this user’s perspective.
>I try not to dig deeper other than just clicking on my
>inbox when using the Lotus Notes client
>…Hell, setting up a rule is a hell-of-a-lot easier
>than an “Agent” from this user’s perspective
Maybe it’s because of the timidity demonstrated in the former statement that explains why you are SO WRONG wrong in the latter
To setup a rule: how about clicking once on the tools icon below your inbox > rules > new rule.
From the “safety” of your inbox you can go via the menubar: via Actions > Tools > Mail Rules and then click on a button to create a new mail rule.
Where does this “Agent” rubbish come from?
Maybe this is too complex or demanding a task for someone like you but I feel the overwhelming majority of OSNews readers aren’t as intellectually challenged as you are by such tasks
Is this FUD? Probably not. Your own words leads one to conclude it is pure ignorance