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Definately Domino/Lotus Notes.

go to http://www.notes.net/ and download a trial and then go to http://www.openntf.org/ and check out some of their projects.

Obviously, you are an email admin, not a developer.

First... Notes is more than just email, in fact email is just a tiny part of it. Consider that the record-breaking websites for several Olympic Games were run on Notes/Domino. ("The Nagano Olympics and Wimbledon sites served record numbers of hits per day (630 million).")

Notes/Domino has been a model for incorporating standards into a development platform. They were one of the first to start using OLE/DDE over a decade ago and one of the first 4GLs to incorporate HTML and Java in the 90's. Right now, it has everything from XML/HTML/Java/J2EE to actually being an LDAP server when you want it to. Oh, and they don't implement these standards the way Microsoft does, they are actually very, very open. Which reminds me, they support Linux, OSS and there are even personal efforts on that front.

Oh, and I think you misrepresent what your article link states.... Notes is not 'hard to get rid of' because of thick clients, it's hard to get rid of such a valuable development platform.
p.s. Websphere Portal was moved UNDER the Lotus Software division, it's not dead, it's growing !

Please learn a bit more, then get back to me ;)

To be fair, Lotus has taken great strides toward making their software easier to use. The differences between versions 5 and 6 are astronomical. If you haven't already, download the demo at notes.net

Technically speaking, I'm very familiar with the server platform they use (Domino) and it's extremely secure (NSA, CIA, etc use it). For them to characterize this as a 'break in' is stretching it a bit. Domino provides security from server level down to individual user roles and fields. It's very simple to secure a file or page. Additionally, the standard procedure is to not replicate data you don't want made public to an external box, just in case you forget to secure a document.

For those of you interested in the technical/legal issues of 'publishing' the link, let's not forget that Domino has a few well-known powerful facilities to search and index content on a site... (ie: ?SearchView)

Domino Developers Site
Search URL Syntax
Documentation on R5 Search
Documentation Library

Yes, it can be bloated and slow, but what isn't nowadays, taking into consideration that people need things like calandaring, meeting scheduling and collaborative tools? What else can run on multiple platforms? Outlook?

If you get to know it, understand it and use it, you never know, you might like it.

I run a Domino server. In fact I run lots of Domino websites. And this "Denial of Service" issue that is reported is really due to Admins who don't know what they're doing.

Any system can try and forward to 127.0.0.1 if it is set that way. There is so much information available at all the normal locations that it is really the Admins own fault. Why they should take it out on somebody who has done as all a superb service is anybodies guess.

Where to look for info:
Lotus
Notes.net
DominoHive
SecurityTracker for Domino

"BT may be claiming hyperlinks among resources distributed across a network."

Does anyone know if "PLATO Notes" (a mid-70s competitor to Usenet) supported hyperlinks across a network? The later commercial version, Lotus Notes, certainly did, but that wasn't until the mid-80s or so.

http://www.notes.net/history.nsf/ says you could "Link notes files with other Plato systems".

And yes, there is a Linux version.

Tim Massey

For what it's worth, I've basically come to the conclusion that Users don't give a hoot about Exchange/OpenMail/Notes/whatever. What the USERS want is "the Outlook experience".

People point to "usability studies" and "feature reviews" that support their assertions of the superiority of &lt$Platform_A&gt over &lt$Other_Platforms&gt. When you get down to the bottom of the matter, it usually boils down to "I use message collaboration, so I like Outlook" versus "I use work collaboration, so I like Notes".

If your employer is bound and determined to run Outlook (mine is), one option for a Notes/Domino shop is to install the iNotes product along side of Domino...it allows for (basically) 100% Outlook usability, so your users are getting what they want...the aforementioned "experience"...while you get to avoid installing new servers/painful migration/Microsoft Tax/whatever. See Lotus iNotes for a quick run-down on iNotes. To sweeten the pot, the next version of Domino called (imaginitively) "Rnext" should have most of this functionality included. See notes.net/rnext" if you're interested (including beta server downloads for Linux/AIX/Solaris/Sparc/WinNT/Win2K).

With the client delt with, your only remaining problem is now to deal with the relatively few "server" bigots in the equation. While they (I?) am just as prejudiced in their views as the next guy, never underestimate the power of *accountability* to influence the actions of knowledgable people.

don't overestimate it, either!

Usenet history is great, but yes you are correct about your point that this story has been multiple posted by sloshdat. If only they had a UI that allows you to sort by date, responses, recent updates etc, something like these people

Thanks for listening !

Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes is the head of the Groove P2P product mentioned in the article. And it's a very interesting product at that (try it!).

I seriously doubt that this is anything more than a very casual marketing thing... Please don't use Ray Ozzie's creations in the same context as the Evil Empire, it pains me physically !!!

Thanks.

I know for a fact that the United States CIA, NSA, (most)DOD and SSA all use Lotus Notes and I believe that the White House does as well. This is why they weren't hit by LoveBug or several other bad little email virus events when the rest of the online world (eg: Britain's Parliament) was.

It would be interesting to see if they move from the security of Notes to something like Outlook now that a minion of the evil empire is in there.

One thing to realize is that by 1987, a hypertext/"docuverse" product was already on the market -- Lotus Notes (which had it's roots in a older centralized system called Plato Notes that dated back to the early 70s).

However, Lotus was sold to large corporations for 'knowledge management' and it's, uhm, cultural impact was primarily felt there as a project management tool. It never had the social impact that Xanadu promised or the WWW achived, and never gets any credit for envisioning much of the tech that we see now with the WWW.

History of Notes -- v 1.0 had hyperlinks (or "DocLinks") in 1987.

What's your goal here? Are you totally unable to consider a non-Linux server, or do you just want to avoid maintaining an extra OS? If the latter, Domino is not a good trade-off. You'd be better off getting an old Sun box -- easier to learn the differences between Solaris and Linux than to learn all the weird groupware features of Domino.

You might also check out Bynari

It is interesting that there's there little commercial activity in this area. A Google search reveals a lot of people working on standards, etc. But the serious commercial products are iPlanet (Solaris and NT, and when they get divorced from Netscape, I bet they drop NT) Exchange (NT only of course) and Domino.

On the one hand, you lucked out because IBM is heavily into Linux these days. On the other hand, IBM couldn't just write their communication/scheduling servers from scratch. Instead they had to salvage all the money they wasted on Notes by turning its server into a general purpose monster.

Imagine being able to add a new person to a single database and instantly give them the rights that they need to do their job across a network that spans the globe. :) Oh yeah, and it has to support single login.

Sounds much like Lotus Domino. Now there's a security architecture that would work well at the OS level.

The remaining 1% are "corporate" sites such as notes.net that for some odd reason think that you need javascript to implement a plain hyperlink.

Hey, I haven't seen any of those yet. Maybe it's because I surf with Javascript turned off. And with 99% of the sites, I won't lose anything. The remaining 1% are "corporate" sites such as notes.net that for some odd reason think that you need javascript to implement a plain hyperlink.

than Lotus notes
with which you're forced to send Attachments, HTML mail, where the mail ID are changed when received by the server .....

In the unlikely event that someone really wants to know how Notes replication works, try this article on Notes.net.

Replication is complicated to get right. Notes manages because it is not relational and does not try to be. Because Notes is based on documents, all the information relating to the document is stored in one place, and if a conflict occurs in replication it is relatively simple to deal with it (either by merging the two conflicting documents, or by creating a new documenty and flagging it visibly as a conflict).

I have no great experience with relational dbs, but the little I know suggests that this would be a whole lot more difficult using Oracle, MySQL, etc. The equivalent of a document would be stores in n different tables, leading to a possible n different replication conflicts (where n varies depending on the application and database design.

I'd be interested to know why xcaster thinks Notes is 'horrible software'. I've been using/developing Notes and Domino applications for years now, and I think it is pretty nice. You can develop apps quickly and efficiently, you can replicate, apps will work via a Notes client, or over the web (as long as they are written appropriately). Problems tend to occur when you use Notes to do things which it is not appropriate for (e.g. anything that doesn't fit in the document oriented paradigm).

In the unlikely event that someone really wants to know how Notes replication works, try this article on Notes.net.

Replication is complicated to get right. Notes manages because it is not relational and does not try to be. Because Notes is based on documents, all the information relating to the document is stored in one place, and if a conflict occurs in replication it is relatively simple to deal with it (either by merging the two conflicting documents, or by creating a new documenty and flagging it visibly as a conflict).

I have no great experience with relational dbs, but the little I know suggests that this would be a whole lot more difficult using Oracle, MySQL, etc. The equivalent of a document would be stores in n different tables, leading to a possible n different replication conflicts (where n varies depending on the application and database design.

I'd be interested to know why xcaster thinks Notes is 'horrible software'. I've been using/developing Notes and Domino applications for years now, and I think it is pretty nice. You can develop apps quickly and efficiently, you can replicate, apps will work via a Notes client, or over the web (as long as they are written appropriately). Problems tend to occur when you use Notes to do things which it is not appropriate for (e.g. anything that doesn't fit in the document oriented paradigm).

ACLs (Access Control Lists) are handled either by an operating system, or by an enterprise level application, ie Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino Servers. They provide to control freaks a near-total grip over who can access which bits of data. Granted, that much control can lead to headaches, since every IT department in the enterprise needs a good sense of what they're doing in order to avoid getting locked out of the data they need for doing their jobs.

A year or two ago, The Salvation Army, whose International Headquarters is in London, made an enterprise level decision to deploy Lotus Notes as their mail-and-database vehicle throughout every Territory on the planet. It's amazing, everything from directories to hymn books (containing nifty little MIDI accompaniments) can be replicated across the globe, with record by record synchronization.

Forget POSIX. Focus more on all the little bugs distros are introducing that give root permissions to processes that shouldn't need them.

Domino for Linux does exist!

I've worked with domino for 6 years now, but I wasn't able to figure out how to configure it ;)
Hopefully, this has to do with me being too used to the [insert bad word here] installation/configuration method it has.

I've found this on the "Domino 5 for linux feedback forum" on notes.net, maybe it's useful for you also:

------------------------------------------------ ------------------------

Main Topic: Getting Domino Running using RedHat 6.0
Author: Category: Build:
Massimo Montecchi
on 08/16 at 07:35 PM Domino Server -- General Administration Build Sneak Preview

------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------

Message Content:
First : thanks to Lotus for this wonderful sneak preview.....

Here are the steps to getting Domino running using Linux RedHat 6.0

1. install Linux (RedHat 6.0).
1a. Login as root !
1b. install jdk 116 from IBM alphaworks
2. create a user called notes in the group notes
3. download the .TAR file from Lotus.
3a. if you have downloaded the multiple files: cat *.tar > 5011lis.tar
4. un-archive the .TAR file: tar xvf 5011lis.tar
5. cd to the directory where Install exists (same as where license.txt is)
5a. run ./install
6. answer the questions, notes is the user, notes is the group
7. change directories and start the setup program
7a. cd /local/notesdata
7b. run /opt/lotus/bin/http httpsetup
8. you should see something that says that the HTTP Setup is running
9. From Netscape open http://your.server:8081
10. Install the notes server ( I assume you know how to do this )
11. The server will stop.
12. change directories and start the server
12a login as notes
12a. cd /local/notesdata
12b. run /opt/lotus/bin/server

I hope I remembered everything.

Good luck!

- Massimo

------------------------------------------------ ------------------------

This is for the old sneak preview, but I hope it helps (especially the download jdk bit... I don't know if it works with blackdown)...

Ciao,
Rob!

Was it with irony aforethought that you posted this on Slashdot?

Compare Slashdot to (for example) this page from Iris Cafe.

Are you really trying to argue that the above site is better than either Slashdot's discussion model, or what your typical NNTP newsgroup provides? (You probably are, and therein lies the gap between your high praise, and other's flames). Remember though, that Notes.net is a Domino showcase site. Is this the best they could do with all the resources they could bring to bear? Where's the context in that page? (I won't even bother to detail the painful performance issues).

The fact of the matter is that, yes, Notes has some good features in an environment where you control the client, the server and the pipe.

However, as far as usability on the web goes, Domino is not competitive at all (and that was already true more than two years ago despite rumours to the contrary). Simply grafting the Notes model onto the web was a fatal design choice.