Hello everybody! What are the advantages and disadvantages of notes?
Thankx in advance.
Subject: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
What are you comparing it to?
Gregg
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
I just want to know the advantages and disadvantages of lotus notes in common (without comparing to any others). Thankx for ur help
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
Well, one advantage is that the name is short and easy to spell. A disadvantage is that it is difficult to drink from.
That’s about the level of information anyone can give without knowing in what context you are trying to assess the product. Are you looking for an email platform? A collaboration environment? A workflow control system? A web server? A shared document store? A secure platform for custom applications? Notes and Domino is all of this and more. There are very few things one can’t do with Notes and Domino, but there are a number of things one shouldn’t do.
So we need to ask, what are you hoping to accomplish? What other products/platforms have you been considering?
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
Stan is right. Notes is wonderful for lots of applications, but I certainly would not use to process all the checks that Bank Of America does. I have used it for accounting, payroll, finance, inventory control, order entry and the such.
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
Remind me to tell you guys the story about a Bank I was consulting for several years ago, and the accounting dept was using the Excel filter with Notes to open XLS attachments vs saving them and opening them with Ms Office. The result was several thousand balance sheets with decimal points bumped over two spots because of an error with the Excel filter. Opps - Must be Microsoft’s fault.
I also like the way Notes 6 takes up to 90meg per session on my Citrix boxes (3x-4x the size of Outlook), but according to Notes gurus it’s ‘really not targeted for e-mail use’. Guess I’ll use CCmail then for legitimate E-mail and convert my transactions servers from SQL to Domino for improved performance 
Best thing about Notes it it keeps my skills up editing INI files and recursive database pathing that were obsolete in Windows 3.1. At least Notes will recognize a printer name\path more than 16 characters now.
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
See, that’s the kind of thing that comes from failing to do a needs assessment ahead of time. You had a usage problem, and apparently still have an implementation problem (and a poor understanding of the aim and scope of the platform).
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
Well, Notes 7 consumes about 50% less memory, although Lotus is cautious and promises only 25%.
However, I would not use Notes as an user application, for me the Notes Client/Domino Designer is a pure web application compiler and development system. Users should use Internet Explorer only to access Domino Web Applications, also for mail use.
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
Notes is also the best database server, best web server, and best web application development platform on the market.
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It does lightning fast queries (=Views), where conventional database systems like Oracle and DB2 take ages to deliver the results. With Domino the result is quite immediate (unless you want a very big result with hundreds of thousands documents, then it might take a few seconds).
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Domino can handle fully dynamic records (=fields), with no fixed size requirement like in conventional database systems, or the need for the existance or data type of field. You can of course add those limitations if you want programmatically at any time.
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Domino puts the relational database concept to a whole new level. You can not only link fields which are same data type and same value, but you can also make virtually any relational link between any field. This is made possible with LotusScript where you can program the relational logic yourself, also with LotusScript you can replace the conventional Query (=View) concept and make the results fully programmable, and even with a better performance than normal Views.
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Domino supports replication on database and field level, this gives vast advantage over conventional database systems also, as you can let the users connect to the nearest Domino server on the network, instead of having the users connect to servers which are far away and have poor network connection.
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Domino supports Readers and Authors fields on server side, which means if you hide a document from the Web, there’s no way the user can hack into the server and find the document, it basically does not exist for him, so there’s nothing to hack. Also the web pages Domino presents, do not physically exist but are rather a projection of the real data, this gives additional security so nobody can hack or delete your web pages - as they don’t exist.
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Domino supports nested access right groups, which makes it possible to project the real infrastructure of people in a company, even for huge global companies.
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Domino also takes care of any logic of your web application server side, so there’s no need for Java, ASP, JSP, PHP, which can be easily hacked and are very slow in performance compared to real server side execution of programs. With Domino you just need JavaScript, Formula language, and LotusScript.
JavaScript for the Client side UI operations, and Formula and LotusScript for the server side operations.
Subject: *Most useful answer so far (although I understand Stan’s objections to question)
Subject: RE: *Most useful answer so far (although I understand Stan’s objections to question)
It’s also somewhat misleading. While Notes/Domino is all of those things, one should not, for example, think of Notes as a best-of-breed database for handling large quantities of atomic data, nor is particularly good at managing “child tables” (independent, typed multivalue fields aligned on stored positions). While it is a web server, it is not the be-all and end-all of web platforms either; other platforms may be better suited to some application types.
I believe that it is just as important that a prospective customer is aware that the Chan-L-Loc pliers he’s looking at aren’t going to be satisfactory for tightening 9/16" nuts all day every day. I’m a Notes zealot, but I’d rather see the platform avoided than have it implemented where it doesn’t belong. (I spend wa-a-ay too much of my time trying to patch innapropriate applications.) On the other hand, if Notes can do it and do it well, I’d be all over that. At this point, though, I just don’t know enough.
A better overview of the product, including good and bad places to use it, can be found here:
http://www.keysolutions.com/NotesFAQ/
That’s still just a satellite’s-eye view, though.
Subject: RE: *Most useful answer so far (although I understand Stan’s objections to question)
Can you elaborate a bit on that, Stan?
Why is notes not suitable as a database server for handling large quantities of data, as far I know databases can be up to OS size limits (16 Exabyte at the moment). I’m also not familiar with the term “child tables” (independent, typed multivalue fields aligned on stored positions), what is their purpose?
What comes to other services of web servers,
I’ve also made some tests with Microsoft IIS (W2003Server) using the mms: protocol (which is supposedly the fastest way of streaming video on the web - Windows Media player shows the “Optimized streaming experience” state), however Domino’s normal HTTP streaming for the very same video file was faster (from file system), and buffered the video way in advance, so the user could watch for example 50MB movies without any loading time (initial buffering takes around 10 secs). The benefit of Domino here is also that you can stream other than wmv files, for example Apple Quicktime .mov files, or Real Player .rmvb files.
Subject: RE: *Most useful answer so far (although I understand Stan’s objections to question)
Not large quantities of data, per se, but large quantities of “atomic” data. Notes is great at big chunks of vaguely-defined information (rich text, large text fields, attachments, etc.), but it isn’t very good (comparitively speaking) at handling vast quantities of small, well-defined chunks of data (think rows and rows of numbers and short strings).
In general, streaming content servers should not also be application servers. Bandwidth will be the eventual limit, and it’s probably more important (from a business perspective) that applications stay up than that videos remain available. That’s not just a Domino thing. It’s not that you can’t, but that you probably shouldn’t.
Domino can be a poor web choice if the majority of your presentation is based on gluing data together. Techniques like Ajax, “Treat as text/javascript” and iframes can bring the limitation down somewhat, but the data assembly needs to be client-side. Real-time server-side joins mean agents, and agents are unnecessarily slow and expensive compaared to pages, views and documents. That means that Domino would essentially have to function as a servlet container, and that’s not a good use of the platform.
Again, I’m not anti-Domino, but customeres will be if they’re using it for the wrong things.
Subject: RE: *Most useful answer so far (although I understand Stan’s objections to question)
Gluing data together (it sounds like related also to those relational database links to me), should be done on server side, with LotusScript. Domino can easily scan through 5000 documents per second, and by using lookups it’s of course as good as instant. I have an application which does about 20 lookups to different databases to present the combined data to the user in a Web Form, and that WQO agent takes less than a second to run (around 0.10-0.30 secs).
Many people also fail to see the programmability of Domino, and believe that the radical application design features are only viable way to design domino web applications (talking about views (for users), image resources, framesets, pages, and other stuff which is not good for professional use).
I’m also working on new FullTextSearch engine for Domino, as the default engine is not fast and functional enough for certain professional application needs. Domino has lots of easy to use, and quick to implement design features, but it does not mean you should not go out of the box and continue from there, or think that Domino can not do something, just because it’s not in the standard box.
Subject: RE: *Most useful answer so far (although I understand Stan’s objections to question)
If you want to build applications that don’t scale well, then there’s not a lot I can do to change your mind, I guess. Minimal real-time processing and minimal request methodologies will trump LotusScript any way you care to measure it – if you care to measure it.
Subject: RE: *Most useful answer so far (although I understand Stan’s objections to question)
I am happy if each page of the application opens in 1-2 seconds. And so far I have not encountered any of my Domino applications which did not meet that requirement. It’s not real-time, which would require analog computers :P, but as long the response time is fluid, Domino gives the most advantages over any other web/database application system.
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
I have picked up Notes 6 months ago and here are my uneducated views on Notes 6.0.1I have only developed Notes apps for LN clients (not web).
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I haven’t seen any benchmarks (thoeretical or actual) to say Notes performs queries faster than any versions of Oracle.
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Opening a doc with lots of embedded UI events in LN client takes a lot of time (no faster than Web forms)
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Comparing to a n-tier platform Lotus Notes is easier to start off. But considering its UI and weak database (compared to Oracle), I would hesitate to use Notes as a platform to create complicated UI or relational dbs.
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
Stan:
Well put. But so far, it looks like answers to your questions are not forthcoming.
Gregg
Subject: RE: Advantages & Disadvantages of Notes
Haha. Good post. Wait you mean I can’t use notes as my chalice? That’s an outrage…IBM will be hearing from my attorney.