I know this is a very generic question, but I just inherited the maintenance and redesign of a Notes application. I don’t know Notes, and I’m using this forum to learn a lot of things (I like it!)
I just read this post: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/55c38d716d632d9b8525689b005ba1c0/7ffa16a18e3883a585256cd900171d5c?OpenDocument
And I noticed that at the end it says: Notes is primarly used to manage knowledge, not to manage financial data or stock control.
What does it mean?
Until now I only knew (small) companies that either use Notes for email, database much more, or don’t use it at all.
Reading that post looks like using Notes to manage numbers is not a good idea.
Any comment?
Thanks,
Stefano
Subject: What is Notes for?
It really depends on the scale and scope of what you mean by “manage numbers”.
Notes and Domino can do anything, period. Let’s get that out of the way first. I.e., it can “manage numbers”.
There are things it doesn’t do very well, however, and some of these things can be quite problematic for any application that has two requirements that many people think are very basic to tasks like “managing numbers”: a) seeing the results of every update operation immediately, and b) having all information for all users complete and consistent at all times. Because Notes and Domino are often used in a loosely-coupled fashion, with users working on multiple serverss, and some users only occasionally connected to any server, these two requirements easily end up conflicting with one another. For applications of reasonable scope and scale, it is, of course, possible to simply set user expectations to not include meeting these two requirements simultaneously, and this might meet your needs. The application just won’t be used for mission and time-critical information.
Furthermore, Notes has always been weak on advanced reporting capabilities. I have never seen an application for “managing numbers” at non-trivial scope and scale that didn’t have some reporting requirements that Notes doesn’t naturally handle well. Of course you can get past this by doing additional programming of your own, or by investing in one of the various 3rd party reporting tools that are on the market, or by using the export facilities in Notes to create spreadsheets that you can format into reports to your heart’s content! But the point is that getting the information you really want out of Notes in a format that is easy to work with pretty much always requires extra cost, extra work for programmers, or extra work for users. And the greater the scope and scale of the application, the more extra cost or extra work will be incurred.
And one last point: Notes stores all numbers as floating point. It doesn’t deal with integers or fixed point numbers, so in any application dealing with numbers for more than just simple addition and subtraction, you will have to be very careful about precision and rounding to avoid seeing long decimals and/or totals that don’t quite add up. And the builtin rounding function follows scientific rounding rules rather than accounting rounding rules, which is a source of confusion for many people even though it is not a bug.
-rich
Subject: What is Notes for?
To assist with your Lotus Developer education, you may find this book of some worth:
http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf/d6plinks/GELD-6VZ74K
You can also take advantage of some Redbooks (free) here:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/portals/Lotus?Open&page=popular
Subject: What is Notes for?
Notes as a whole is as good as any other system. The problem that there are so few Notes users/companies lays more in marketing than in the quality and functionality of the product(s). Microsoft is much better in selling their products to their customers than IBM is. They also know better how to approach new potentional users.
I have experience with many larger and smaller IT-products and systems and I cannot name a single one that is really poor. Each system has its benefits and area of usage. None of them is perfect.
To stay more at home: I have written a wide range of applications based on Notes, varying from traditional electronic card-tray via tools and complex relational databases to even games. It is all possible to be developed in Notes.
There are of course things that can be wriiten easier in a different language and with better performance, but never was Notes a limitation.
I think it comes more to the skills of the developer than the tool she/she is using. To the extreme: I have written programs in assembly language (= the lowest you can get) in a structural way and excellent to maintain.
So to answer your question: yes, Notes can be used for your purpose.
Subject: What is Notes for?
Subject: What is Notes for?
Ultimately I think what is meant by “not to manage financial data or stock control” is: Notes is not a SQL-type database package like Oracle or DB2, and will not replace them. It is not designed to enforce data constraints (like unique key, for example). Also, as has been pointed out, number are stored as floating point, which can cause rounding and totalling issues. Replication conflicts can cause duplicate records in totalling. Reporting options are limited compared to SQL.
Notes can be used, however, as a front-end for those kinds of databases, in order to create user-friendly interfaces.
Subject: RE: What is Notes for?
Thank you all,
Finally a few words different from the usual “Lotus is the best, you can do all with it” or “Lotus is horrible, forget it”.
Your comments are going to be a good reference from my future plannings.
Stefano