LepoLand - A Blog by Alan Lepofsky | Comments

Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts

Prithwis — Thu, 2 Sep 2010 07:41:54 AM -0500

Lotus Notes was more than just mail. It was a full blown workflow application development platform ... but very few people ever understood that. They would only compare the mail component of LN ( which was just about 20% ) with other pure-play mail products .... and that was the source of the clunkyness. If you are using a big truck to take your children to school, it would obviously be clumsy compared to a normal car .. but then the truck was meant for something else ... not just to drop your son at school.

The second difficulty with LN was that it was designed for a earlier, low bandwidth era when the store-and-forward mechanism was essential. When the internet arrived and it was time to move to a more agile architecture, LN was saddled with a leadenfooted management team imported by IBM and lost the game completely to the browser based systems.

I have used LN for more than 10 years but do i regret not having it anymore. Absolutely not. It was a great product for a different age ... the age passed and it could not change itself .. so now I will see it in a museum.

Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts

Sacha Chua — Thu, 2 Sep 2010 07:16:20 AM -0500

And buttons! I like being able to make buttons in e-mail. =)

You want to talk about things being done decades ago? ;) I'm still waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with Emacs Gnus' adaptive scoring, contact database integration (add notes to your contacts with keystrokes!), programmable signatures, and general flexibility...

Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts

Luke — Wed, 1 Sep 2010 12:13:54 PM -0500

Excellent Post --- Our company recently moved from Lotus Notes to Google Mail, and the huge success was due to its ease of use, and same user experience no matter where you are. Lotus Notes and iNotes will always be different experiences (I have to do "that" in the client and "this" in the web), and at the end of the day, there isn't value in building a training program for it.

Gmail might have only 99% of the features that Lotus Notes has, but users understand 75% of those features. A Lotus Notes user that understands 10% of its features is considered an expert consultant. That's the unfortunate reality.

The Greatest Vacation Ever

ghd straighteners — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:22:16 PM -0500

nice

Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts

Eric Mack — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:13:34 PM -0500

Some of that is starting to change, Alan. For starters, our customers (when permitted) download and apply new eProductivity templates and apply them. While we make some of the above easy - there's more that we can do to help make Notes a productivity powerhouse. Probably most relevant to this post; however, is the fact that the categorized inbox is hidden from mortals in Notes. We've surfaced that with a simple button to allow the user to choose which categorized inbox they want.

Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts

mark — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:32:38 PM -0500

Great post

Maybe Project Vulcan will help transform Lotus Notes into an easy and intuitive e-mail client.

Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts

Chris Pepin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:16:50 PM -0500

Elijah - great points. The "next generation" isn't using PC's or email. Most are texting on mobile devices and using Macs.

Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts

Elijah Lapson — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:52:16 PM -0500

I just think about what a difference a few years make. When training an end user on Lotus Notes now we ask have you used Outlook or Gmail before? If they reply yes we say "It is just like that, except the Calendaring and scheduling is much more robust.". In the past we had to convince end users that Lotus Notes was great now with the new ui the transition to Notes from other email systems is seamless.

Another interesting/scary thing is that the current generation of new employees coming out of college have not even been exposed to the "Lotus Notes, ick I hate that." talk. Man am I getting old. I am outliving the anti-Notes sentiment which has been prevalent for so long. :)

Elijah

Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts

Frances Wheeler — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:02:59 AM -0500

PeopleCube also appreciates Lotus Notes.

In fact, it made a point of integrating Resource Planner with Lotus Notes because it wanted to create an interface that would be familiar to users in order to accelerate the adoption of its customers' alternative workspace programs.

See { Link } for more info. And thanks for pointing out the capabilities of Lotus Notes.

Remove or Delete? Folder or View?

Christina — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:57:50 AM -0500

I forgot to mention that we are on Version 8.5

Remove or Delete? Folder or View?

Christina — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:56:10 AM -0500

I want to know if I am cleaning out my Sent items, and when prompted to 'remove' or 'delete' the item, I always select remove, as I am not 100% sure if I have a saved copy of that document in another folder. If I always choose the remove option, and if it was the only instance of that document, I believe that it is still be shown in the 'All Documents' view. So by removing all these documents from the Sent view, am I actually reducing my mail size on the server at all? I mean, the whole purpose of cleaning out your Sent view is to do some housekeeping, but I can't distinguish which of those emails have a copy in another folder, and which ones I can delete entirely, as I am removing in mass by selecting many documents at a time. Would this method 'catch up' to me one day? What would you recommend for cleaning up those type of emails.

Lotus finally bundles business applications!!!

Per Andersen — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:03:52 PM -0500

Yes great to have access to small business applications on the LF...We actually have another great app Crossware mail Signature that customers that buy LF could benefit from. Do you know how at Lotus we should be talking ???

Scheduling meetings between calendar systems

Rahul — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:17:06 AM -0500

Hi,

My client has Lotus Notes as his email client. When he sends an appointment, it is delivered as .ics attachment and it all works perfectly. However, as the initiator of the appointment he does not get any "Accept" button in the ics file nor does the appointment get added to his calendar. Any suggestions. ?

Easy to use Notes Database Links

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cosplay — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:53:02 AM -0500

Hi Spike, sorry for the delay. I don't have an answer for you, but hopefully by now you've discovered the Notes/Domino forums on IBM developerWorks. People there should be able to help you.

Product Catalog For Notes/Domino

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Product Catalog For Notes/Domino

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Creating a simple HTML signature file

Nushrat — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 06:31:39 AM -0500

Can I have more information on Matthew's "For those who have noted issues with the image not displaying (and a box with red x instead) - try opening your signature file with a text editor instead of in Word. I did that and found that the image reference was incorrect (pointed to a notes_signature_files directory or similar). I simply changed this to the correct path and file, and the image now displays in my signature with no problem" please?

Thanks

Nushrat