Having to defend the notes ui/mail - rant

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

OK,I wasn’t going to do this but…I had a quite long and heated discussion about this last week in the pub, people seem to hate lotus.

Why do people hate it, they never give it a chance (I dont work for IBM btw)…

Right…

A long time ago, like Notes 4.6 or something, the UI wasn’t that great.

With the advent of later versions…its fantastic!

Notes 7 does everything I need it to:

  • The views can be configured to show a preview of a mail or not;

  • Comes with a fully integrated reliable calendar system

  • Ability to auto-spellcheck mails

  • You can put flags on things like priority of whatever

  • You can have different colour emails from different people

  • Its real easy to create fun / useful features like buttons in emails, voting things, etc.

  • It comes with a built in tool to create and distribute custom-built databases which the company I work for find incredibly useful

  • Mostly everything can be configured in your Inbox, you can change the way meeting invites are displayed

  • It has an integrated and very useful search engine for emails built in (ok maybe you need to index them but still

  • It has features that people seem to like like notes minder or flashing an alert when a new mail comes in

  • Avaliablity of Inbox locally is great feature and easy to use.

I’m just tired of people slagging it off - I really think the later versions are gr8t.

Just because its not Microsoft people don’t like it.

see

http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/dave-delay-loves-lotus-notes-?opendocument&comments

Cheers

Generic

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Subject: Having to defend the notes ui/mail - rant

I totally agree, most of the time when I talk to people who don’t like notes as an e-mail tool it’s because:

(1) It’s not exchange / outlook which they use at home so things aren’t where they expect them to be.

(2) It’s too expensive vs exchange. Well, exchange doesn’t offere all the other functionality Lotus Notes offers. But they don’t care because they think notes is only mail.

Also at the client I support I have two more HUGE problems, that frustrate me to no end.

(1) The client doesn’t train the user community to use the tool. Therefore, it frustrates the end users when they don’t know how to do something in notes mail, and therefore they assume it cannot do it. (Again vs Exchange which a friend told them how to do something neat which, In there option notes can’t do -like set-up a rule to out filter their mail)

(2) They cannot read their Lotus Notes Mail via the internet. Yeah, WE all know of DWA/iNotes. But the client (Management - Corporate Security) doesn’t want to open this functionality concerned about web security. Therefore, I am again trying to justify notes to people (down the chain of command) while they point at Outlook Web Mail and say Notes cannot do that. (ARGH!!!) So what are people doing, forwarding their mail to gmail, hotmail, yahoo and violating corporate guidelines because they want internet mail! (Excuse me while I go and hit my head on a brick wall for a while.)

Of course when I try and point out the flaw in their arguements. The people down the chain of he command assume there must be a problem with Notes Web Mail Security and that’s why they don’t turn it on OR I’m just saying all of this to try and Save Lotus Notes / my job.

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Subject: RE: Having to defend the notes ui/mail - rant

The Notes UI is pretty awful - I haven’t been able to upgrade to R8, but one of the techies who has, muttered the line “you can take my Notes R8 from my cold dead fingers…”, and as he is a MSCE it my be good!

My favourite party trick is getting the project owner to sit next to me while we create a date driven view. We’ll knock out the columns, get it looking OK, then I’ll just ask if he would like it in calendar view - yes? - OK, it’s done. The more knowledgeable then ask how long it will take to compile… “No - it’s done and ready to test”. That usually seals the deal round my way.

Outlook isn’t a problem - lots of the user base are on Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail and everything else on the web from home, so the only time they use a client based email package is at work.