IBM’s Lotus Software division is taking a bigger bite of Apple’s Mac OS X. The company on Dec. 28 formally rolled out the latest version of its Lotus messaging software package, dubbed Notes 7.0.2, which will include e-mail, calendar management tools and instant messaging that is specifically designed for Mac OS X users.
For reference, the announcement (Nov30) from IBM can be found here http://www-306.ibm.com/software/swnews/swnews.nsf/n/nhan6w2pmq?Open…
It’s good to see some competition for Microsoft on OSX (No, OOo:X11 is not competition). IBM have been on a real ‘anything-other-than-Microsoft’ drive atm.
it works really nice … i’m new to the mac platform, and as notes user, i couldn’t wait for 7.0.2 (i was using 6.5).
Now you Mac people have to endure the garbage that is Lotus and Domino too….what joy. MS may have a lumbering albatross in Windows, but I think their Office products are right on the money. Even Office on the Mac is a good product, but Notes is plain horrid. We’ve had to endure it ever since our company got bought out and had to switch from an Exchange environment to Domino and Notes. Ugh. It’s been 4 years of email-hell. Every night, as I check my mail in Thunderbird, it reminds me just how bad Notes is.
Just my opinion, but there’s nothing Lotus Notes can do that Outlook and Access can’t do as well, or better.
FYI: Access doesn’t run on Mac OS X.
Yeah, I guess you’re right. No VB for you, huh?
…and neither so does Outlook… Even though it’s getting better, Entourage is but a shallow attempt to satisfy Mac users when compared to its Windows sibling, Outlook.
6 in one hand half a dozen in the other… I can say the same thing about Exchange. I like notes and im happy to see them continue with this version.
The choice of two evils, then, I suppose.
Again, maybe it’s the version we’re using….who knows. I think it’s 5, if that makes any difference.
it’s just so obvious when people talk about “email” that you don’t understand lotus notes. I have 500 accounts. Never before used notes admin client. Have no problems so far. Notes/Domino is not a “mail” system. Is a colaboration application and development system.
Yeah…except the majority of the office folk use the “collaboration” aspect to look up the posting for the company holidays, or (as we do) put the work instructions on it or check the corrective action list. Like it or not, the email function gets used the most by everyone.
In defense of IBM, maybe it’s the rev we’re using, either 5 or 6 I think, but I’ll be glad when we’re off of it.
it’s just so obvious when people talk about “email” that you don’t understand lotus notes. I have 500 accounts. Never before used notes admin client. Have no problems so far. Notes/Domino is not a “mail” system. Is a colaboration application and development system.
Notes is a powerful collaborative-type application development, although it’s big and bloated and showing it’s age, I’m not sure if it isn’t a bit archaic in a web-app driven world, though it was pretty ground-breaking at the time.
Aside from that, the majority of Lotus implementations are simply for email. We’ve been running Domino as our messaging platform for longer than any employee should possibly have to endure, and it is absolutely awful for email. I’ve suffered through client crashes since 4.x, though I’m not sure why the version numbers increment because each version looks and acts the same. The biggest single improvement I’ve found in all those years is that I no longer need to use that killnotes.exe app that a domino dev developed and posted to the lotus.net support site, the one that allowed you to kill still-running notes processes after a crash. Because up until recent versions you were forced to reboot every time notes crashed. Seriously, don’t get me started on what an awful program Notes is for *users*.
Interestingly, my gf was using Notes 6.something for OSX on her powerbook for a while. It was equally awful to use and crashed even more frequently. They’ve since migrated to Exchange, but I do suspect that this announcement is good news for OSX users that are working within a Domino infrastructure. I assume this version is based on the eclipse application framework similar to the linux version, which I assume should bring much better stability and a nicer GUI to look at.
The kick in the @ss, for me anyways, is that our IT department migrated the handful of “collaborative” apps we were using on Lotus which mostly amounted to generic intranet type purposes. We’ve standardized on SharePoint for that, and now Lotus is strictly email and calendaring. *sigh*
The *ONLY* people that push/root for/actually *like* Lotus Notes are the developers that have sunk time and money into training courses to actually learn the damn thing, and consultants trying to make a fast buck.
I have yet to come across a user who says “Yeah, I really loooove Lotus Notes”. Notes these days is mostly used ONLY for mail & calendar stuff, and those things it does laughably, horrendously bad. It makes you wonder what the UI designers are smoking. It may actually BE the be-all, end-all, all-singing all-dancing “collaborative enterprise-y development super-platform” that the devs (and consultants…) all praise it to be. Trouble is, there are smaller, easier-to-use apps out there that might only offer a fraction of what Notes does, but I’d rather use little apps that do ONE thing VERY well, than buy into the monstrosity that is Notes. Heck, I can’t stand Microsoft stuff, but give me an Outlook/Exchange setup ANY day over the dead, tortured, rotting corpse that is Lotus Notes.
PS: Friend of mine mentioned it’s a reason for him not to accept a job position if he sees the company is using Notes, regardless of how much money they’re offering him.
100% AGREE. IBM as usual is hopping on a train they see moving. Apple is coming to the corporate desktop and IBM would rather pile on rather than start something themselves. One day IBM will wake up and realize that they cannot keep selling expensive applications running on free software. I predict IBM will actually start to fall apart before 2010.
R/
I completely agree. I left my last job for a couple of reasons, but the biggest one was that the company ate, breathed, and had a general love affair with Notes.
I hate Lotus Notes! I hate programming for it and I hate using it. The interfaces for it (programming and user) are awful on every level. There is nothing redeeming about it whatsoever.
I’m sure IBM does some things really well. Notes is not one of those things.
Oh boy! The same old garbage! We use Notes/Domino and not just for email. And the thing is a breeze to install and administer. I have two Domino servers running on Linux and they work great. If you happen to love Outlook you can use it with Domino for email etc, just fine.
Yes, I agree that the underlying structure (API) etc. is a bit complicated with formula, Lotuscript, Java and Javascript, but hey – you get full backward compatibility back to V3, at least.
As for the crashes – they did happen in V4, less in V5 and now in V7 they are almost nonexistent.
The great thing about Domino is that you can do almost anything with it.
Plus it has a Linux client, though not really production quality ATM – see my blog:
http://dococonutsmigrate.blogspot.com
And the new client will be based on Eclipse and will have support for Opendocument built-in.
Well, not being a big fan of Lotus Notes myself (use it at work 5 days a week), and agreeing with you that Outlook is much more refined product, I still think that it’s a good move for IBM. With competition being so tough on Windows platform, they have to try and get into other markets. So, OSX seems to be a logical choice… Would be interesting to see what will be the acceptance rate
How can outlook, a mail/calendar application compare with lotus notes? I don’t get it.
“How can outlook, a mail/calendar application compare with lotus notes?”
it doesn’t. Exchange however does and as bad as Exchange is it is still less borked than Notes. Not that that amounts to much though, it’s kinda like being the tallest midget.
Tallest midget……I gotta remember that one. That’s pretty good.
Actually, I said “Outlook and Access”, but someone else pointed out that Access isn’t supported on the Mac. Too bad, huh?
Maybe it’s me, but the comparison is made when every employee in a Notes shop uses it primarily as an email client. Ask anyone outside of your IT department what Lotus is and I’ll bet 99% of them respond “It’s how I get my email”. Of course, that answer may come after a few off color remarks about your mother and some vulgar adjectives, but that’s what the everyday corporate user will probably say.
well, that your company has bought lotus notes to use it as an email app, is probably their mistake.
I currently have 119 applications on my workspace, and only two inboxes.
We do 95% of our work using lotus notes.
I have use lotus notes since version 4.5, and with each major release, less crashes. I have almost no crashes on version 6.5, and barely a crash on 7.0.2.
Regarding on how awful lotus notes is at email, i really don’t see the problem. Its 100% customizable, but i really mean 100%, you can do whatever you are pleased. It gets no virus (try that on outlook), and you can make it look/act as you wish, even as outlook, if you know how to program it.
Having Lotuscript, java, javascript, and @formulas to customize it, is one of the strenghts, as you can choose your preferred language.
Also, look at the lotus.com/ldd forums, and you would see one of the most active developers comunity.
Lotus notes my not be perfect, but i’m sure is the greatest colaboration tool. Way more advanced than anything MS can have now.
And MS has seen something in it, in fact, he grabbed is creator, and is now working at IBM.
Maybe one day they’ll fix the NNTP facility so that basic things like quotation, text wrapping and the likes work properly – or better yet, setting up accounts is as easy as it is in Outlook.
Lost notes ID files (authentication), database replication (synchronization), workspace and database corruptions, …. oy! You have never felt the pain if you haven’t used notes configured in a remote access situation.
I worked at IBM for a while, and I had to use and support accounts that had domino setups. Notes is a database first, that was adapted to do email and calendaring. It isn’t a half bad database, a little ugly, but it works.
I do have to reflect the sentiments of most of the other posters in that it has been extremely unstable up through v5, and is primarily used outside of IBM as an email/calendaring system.
Edited 2006-12-29 18:12
Yes, using Notes/Domino ONLY as a mail system is sort of an overkill…
I’m working for IBM on contract, supporting a huge client that has probably the largest Windows domain in the world using MS Office to the max – 3rd party apps / plugins to Excel / Access. Sharepoint portals , Exchange / Outlook Web Access for 90,000 users in North/South America and Europe and I’ve learned to despise Office and Active Directory.
Trust me, remote access users on Office are no picnic either and Cached Exchange mode is so damned unreliable it makes me sick – MS has to improve the stability of large OST / PST files.
About the only problem we’ve seen with Notes in that time ( used by the entire support desk and a small number of the account’s users ) is either a misconfiguration, slow performance client-side – usually fixable by deleting the Lotus cache file ( a .NDK ?) and the dreaded loss of the Notes ID file.
However, when a user is first set up for Notes, they are warned ( in our case, REQUIRED ) to have at least one external backup of their Notes .id file.
Outlook, OTOH, is responsible for 75% of our 750 – 1000
calls daily ( that doesn’t include issues submitted over our Web ticketing system – I assume the percentage is similar but the number of issues is MUCH smaller).
I thing I must say is that I think the Notes interface blows goats – I find it very counter-intuitive. I’ve often thought that they couldn’t have made it worse if they tried.
Also, opening a database blocks the entire client until the database either opens or returns an error.