Slashdot Mirror
IBM Challenges Microsoft With an Ad Campaign
Rytis writes "IBM is about to spend $300 Million dollars on a campaign to win customers and to convert them from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes and Domino under Linux. IBM is also said to offer resellers a bounty of $20,000 for switching customers to its Linux-based e-mail programs from Microsoft server software. It seems that the concurrence Microsoft Corp. is facing is getting tighter and tighter. The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had."
Sometimes I'm not sure what IBM is thinking. I don't "get" this campaign. IBM is spending $300M on a campaign to convince customers to switch from MS' propietary to their propietary message product? Wow!
From the Seattle PI article:
I'm not sure I see this as a clarifying move. I see it only as another product offering. I've used Lotus Notes and worked with it many times. It has lots of interesting features, but I found it obtuse and overloaded at least in the context of an e-mail/calendaring product... the business world probably doesn't need or care about yet another e-mail.
And, IBM is couching this under the comforting and (maybe) enticing siren of Linux and open systems? Wow! A paragraph from the Bloomberg article:
I find this invitation disingenuous, dishonest, and ethically bankrupt at best. I'm a huge fan of Linux, and hope for its eventual place in the business world (which I would submit it already has... except we all still have to whisper about it), but I think IBM is miscalculating on this.
And even if they are dead on in their marketing campaign, I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable they piggyback so strongly on Linux. I know IBM has been a contributor to Linux -- has their backing been that strong?
I've worked with IBM throughout the years and my experience has been they are not too much different than Microsoft in their commitment to Unix platforms, i.e., it's a pill they'll swallow or pretend to swallow if it makes them look willing to play in the Open Source community.
IBM has diverted Unix technology before (anyone played with AIX before???), I fear they're using it today for personal (corporate) gain. I know corporation's responsibilities are to be as profitable as possible, but this smacks of lip service.
I think MDaemon poses a significant threat to exchange also. All the same functionality and more, better performance and security, much easier to admin, and much cheaper.
IBM thinks that linux is the way to go, I wonder why Microsoft doesn't?
Being a former Domino/Notes admin, I can honestly say that the system sucks. It's counter-intuitive, poorly documented, slow and overly complex.
Unless you have a killer-app that only runs under domino, I'd stay away from it.
Hmmm. Last time I used Lotus, I thought, arrgh, what a POS. Clunky clients, flaky servers. Why are they pushing that, and not investing 1% of that 300 million in developing/extending some server based on Groupware.
Exchange is good for what it does, and users scream loudest when their email goes down. So I expect companies will be loath to change their entire messaging system. Especially to Notes.
Get your own free personal location tracker
It's 12:05AM. Last year *every single story* for about 24 hours was a lame joke.. how am I to believe this one?
Probably will avoid slashdot for about 36 hours just in case.
The fallout is that getting companies to switch to a linux mail sever will help out OSS anyway.
Whoa, IBM wants people to switch from the at-least-ok proprietary MS solution to their own we-have-the-worst-software-in-the-world, a-thousand-interface-designers-sacrified-every-day , lotus-notes-making-your-brain-melt-since-1996, interface-standards-are-not-for-us-goddamit Lotus Fucking Notes?
Woohoo, fucking win, that's not even being between a rock and a hard place, that's being in an erupting volcano and seeing a frigging Chicxulub-class asteroid falling on you (that'd be a 10km diameter asteroid, 6mi for our metrically challenged american friends).
And don't listen to anyone telling you that Notes is great and that it rocks your socks, it's been proven that only Notes developers can utter praises for that piece of donkey poo, they're merely trying to keep their jobs.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Though i have no first hand experience in this, i have it on good autority from my friends who do corporate server installations for both lotus notes and exchange, that lotus notes is not particularly friendly or... whats the word... good. but like i said i have never installed either package.
As soon as anyone actually tries to use Notes, the evaluation will be over.
Concurrence?
I imagine that competition was meant. You don't talk about "tight concurrence"--"tight" is usually used in conjunction with "competition" to describe particularly a particularly fierce and aggressive competitive environment. Of course, the sentence which immediately follows is also a fragment, adding grammatical insult to the vocabulary injury.
I know it's hard to moderate the thousands of user submitted articles we get here, but these are concepts taught in English classes at the elementary school level.
Salesmen will push what they make the most money on, period.
We sold Apples to folks who wanted PCs cause we'd make $100 spiff on a Mac box but 5% of the profit off the sale with PCs. Considering stuff was sold at or near or sometimes under cost, it was flog the extended warranty, sell Macs or starve. Got good at selling Macs....
Our Dell rep came in with squishy toys wondering with his rah rah speech why we weren't selling all Dells, to which we said sorry pal, we make nothing off selling a Dell, show us the money and we'll flog as many as you can make.
This was lost on him, he was trying to sell Dell on its technical merits... what the hell did the other salespeople care, they knew nothing about computers, and their customers wanted the "Color TV" one where the "hard drive" lay flat so you could put the "TV" on it.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Maybe it would make more sense for IBM to build an exchange replacement that is actually good, and then advertise the hell out of it? I think if they spend a lot of money on calling peoples' attention to Notes, it will just backfire.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Really, did anyone even try to implement an exchange environment for more than 10000 users? Next to the license cost it brings, Exchange is not capable of handling lots of e-mail (gigabytes/minute). I have worked at a MS-certified ISP who was on a test project for a hosted Exchange project. The cost charged to the customer was about 4x the price as for a similar IMAP box and that was WITH MS-funding. The SPAM had to be handled by a separate SpamAssassin/Postfix server (ok, I can accept that) but for the rest we needed 4 DUAL XEON's with 4G RAM just to handle about 5000 e-mail boxes (100-500M each) and management was thinking about implementing an extensive linux-based fibrechannel storage because the Windows boxes couldn't safely handle that amount of data (several software related storage issues). That was while our IMAP solutions were chugging away 10000 accounts per single P4 server. And yes, Exchange CAN handle also shared calendar data etc. but so can IMAP and that was wat a lot of customers used it for while Exchange had performance problems when a secretary opened more than 3 executive calendars at the same time.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Oops, guess I forgot the tag in the subject line. Notes is an intriguing concept of storing information in hierarchical "documents" but a number of things make it difficult to use. I spent months at my last company converting Lotus Notes applications that someone had written into an Oracle database with a web front end. One thing interesting though about Notes, when we sent an e-mail to Australia from the U.S. asking for a read receipt, the receipt gladly told us that our message "was read tomorrow".
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
Give up Sex for Video Games
Give up Kobe Beef for Bean Sprouts
Give up SUVs for Hybrids
Give up TV for a walk in the park.
Give up music for the sound of waves on the beach
Give up Logic for Scientology
You too can have an episode of South Park devoted to your madness!
Having worked for IBM in the past and having been forced to use Notes as my desktop email client, it's difficult for me to comprehend why they'd make it the centerpiece of their assault on Microsoft. Powerful, yes, but also terrible to use as an end-user.
As an email/calendar/contacts application, it's pretty weak.
If you are doing workflow-enabled applications, and you have good Notes developers, it's a damn good product and you'll find that you can roll out apps very quickly (detractors, please note that I said you need good developers).
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
> The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had.
It isn't so much that the Penguin has powerful friends, but that Microsoft has powerful enemies. How about a Warcraft scenario: Bill in Borg weeping as he runs through the swamp, pursued by big war trolls and a very angry penguin!
All I can say is.. STAY AWAY!!
Outlook may be pretty evil, what with sending RTF e-mails.. But then.. so does Lotus Notes! It manages to 'retain' formatting from other applications when copy-pasting when it's entirely inappropriate, even (like, pasting some text from a webpage, bam! different font). It doesn't download attachments when you get your mail, but when you do download it, it doesn't add it to its 'local mail database', but let's you save it somewhere. Get the attachment from e-mail again because you deleted it from your filesystem, you have to download again. Calendering, sure, nice. But buggy as hell. Rescheduling usually doesn't work, you can read invites from Outlook users, but (sometimes) not accept them, or when you accept them, they don't get notified. "Replicating" databases takes ages, and doesn't in fact allow you to work offline. The client isn't noticibly multithreaded, you have to wait for a download to finish before being able to do something else. The client is a huge bloated binary, and it writes huge ass 'database' files to your disk. When you kill the client (which you often have to do as some actions lock the client up completely, though you'd like to cancel them), you have to log off and login again to restart it. It comes with transparant encrypted connections to its server - but it's not on by default. There is no clear way to mark a message unread!! I had to endure a few weeks of "tip of the day" messages to find out the INSERT button marks messages read/unread. No context menu option for that. Making a todo note? Not by using a menu option in the To-Do part of your screen, but you have to focuse the ToDo canvas, and then go to the client's main menu and select "create Todo". It uses proprietary mail protocols that don't add the usual RFC 2822 headers, and RFC 2822 headers from internet mail are really hard to get at. It makes you confirm unicode (utf-8) encoding for a message TWICE, even though it selects it by default when you type an accented character. It's slow and unresponsive. Did I mention the address books don't work properly? And no auto-complete?
This might all be fixed in later and greater versions (i have no idea what version I'm on now, I think 6.5 or something).. But compared to Lotus Notes, Outlook is a godsend!
Yeah. Compared to Lotus Notes, Outlook is a godsend.. Just imagine how crappy Lotus Notes must be, for that comparison to hold!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
That's called "making users switching from Microsoft feel right at home".
You Windoze fanboys who go into twitching fits at the sight of a command prompt should love it.
How many people could $300 million employ?
Hmm...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
This has to be an April Fool's day joke...
Lotus Notes is an incredible platform. It does just about everything.
... look). Then spend $50 million on getting the word out.
Unfortunately, most companies just want something that will handle the email and calendaring with Outlook.
Instead of putting $300 million into this stupid ad campaign, spend $250 million on a basic corporate email server that handles email and calendaring that works with Outlook (or clone the Outlook
Start small and build up. Lotus Notes is anything but small.
Wow! IBM is open sourcing Lotus Notes and Domino? They really believe in the Open Source development model! That's an absolutely amazing mov...
Oh, what's that? The actual mail product they're selling is every bit as proprietary as exchange?
Gotta love the marketing department that can actually say the above quote with a straight face while being so hypocritical at the same time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
IBM sold off the ThinkPad and ThinkCentre division to concentrate on other things. Chip manufacturing? A major issue to Apple was the availability of the IBM PowerPC G5 chip, with the expanded feature set that Apple so desperately wanted. It just didn't happen fast enough, early enough, because IBM couldn't keep up with the production. IBM also failed to produce a G5 chip that would function adequately in a PowerBook environment.
Enter Intel.
So now they have to try to make it up.
Informatus Technologicus
I work for IBM and use Notes every single friggin day, all friggin day. Overly complex and bloated is an understatement. It's absolute crap. $300 million seems like enough to start from scratch and create something decent. If I didn't have to use it, I never would..
Anyway, it should also be noted that there is no Lotus Notes client for Linux (although the Windows version supposedly runs in Wine), so I'm assuming the campaign will be all about switching the servers.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Lotus is the WORST FUCKING PIECE of software I have EVER used.
Period.
Bar NONE.
End of comment
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
thats right IBM!! Never Surrender Take down the Giant!!!!
With Ford in GM where they are, it doesn't seem unrealistic to think that IBM, Microsoft, and perhaps Intel being next.
Maybe the writer speaks Spanish, Portuguese, or some other Latin-based language. In such languages, the word that naturally would be translated into English as "concurrence" really means "competition".
Take a look at concorrencia, choose the link "concorrencia" from there, and you'll see this definition: espécie de luta pela vida que é baseada nos fenómenos de selecção natural e que defende a ideia de que esta é efectuada através da escolha do mais apto e não do mais forte. This means: a fight for life based on the phenomenon of natural selection implied by survival of the fittest.
Maybe that explains the choice of words. (The other definition means, I think, "claims of rights to an object by multiple people" -- same idea.)
Actually, it's not Notes that IBM was on about. It's called Workplace which is Notes' replacement. It's very nice:
m l
http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1004514.ht
It's in Java and therefore it works on the Linux platform.
I just finished a security review at a financial firm. They have 12,000 users using Notes & Domino for Mail, Calendaring, and collaborative applications.
It only requires 15 people to support the entire environment.
They have had no downtime in 5 years.
They have never had a worm.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I imagine many Slashdotters will have little idea what Lotus Domino does that anyone would care about. The simple version is this -- it behaves something like an organic content management system (i.e. like Wikipedia, say) which anyone with sufficient privileges can tack stuff onto (i.e. add or modify new nodes anywhere) AND you can store any chunk(s) of the tree on your hard disk and work with them offline and then merge back as appropriate. So, for example, you can synch some subtree dealing with a topic you're interested in to your laptop, work with and edit it offline while (say) flying from Sydney to New York, and then resynch when you're next online. This is definitely useful, non-trivial functionality.
Domino does a bunch of other stuff but the offline/remerge functionality is the fundamentally cool thing it does that other products don't do. As, say, an email client and calendar, Domino is a pretty horrible.
I used Lotus Notes for several years while working for a big consulting firm. It was one of the worst designed, ugliest programs ever. It had groundbreaking functionality (see above) but even then it was easy to imagine something better, easier to use, and easier to administer.
Domino can still do some very useful things (again, see above) Exchange can't do, or does very poorly (indeed Exchange is worse than either IMAP or POP at dealing with offline clients -- and Notes is substantially better). It seems to me that there ought to be web-based tools that do everything EXCEPT the offline component far better than Domino or Exchange do, and more cheaply and simply, but I don't think Domino has a significant competitor in terms of its offline functionality (more's the pity).
The estimated TCO for a laptop PC back in 1997 was somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000. The estimated TCO for a single Lotus Notes client was $9,000 -- Domino's functionality is great, but it ain't cheap. This would be of academic interest if Lotus Domino had improved substantially in usability or reliability in the nine years since, but by all accounts it is basically the same.
"The Penguin gets more and more support from the two biggest rivals that Microsoft have ever had."
... use Exchange instead. Hell, use ANYTHING else.
Please. IBM is OK for Linux in general, but Lotus Notes is the biggest piece of shit ever. All the people INSIDE of IBM hate it, let alone anyone else.
I hate Microsoft, but please, please
When they really get their mail / calendar project going, Microsoft can kiss their Outlook customers goodbye.
I'm posting anonymously because I'm a contractor to IBM and don't want to jeapordize an excellent job. When the company I worked for was acquired by IBM, the employees were switched to Notes. Now, I don't use it myself. Fortunately I work off-site and don't have to deal with it directly, but all of the on-site employees had to switch to it and I hear nothing but complaints.
E-mails I send to them sometimes arrive late or not at all. E-mails they send to me sometimes arrive late, or not at all. And when I say late, I don't mean a few minutes or even a few hours late, I mean days and weeks after they were sent. It's like they just disappear into the system somewhere and then suddenly get delivered days or weeks later. I've haven't heard of an e-mail client or server that does such a poor job of delivering e-mail in over a decade.
As for scheduling stuff, sometimes I get scheduling notifications, sometimes I don't. Unlike the e-mail, if I don't get it right away, I'm pretty sure I'll never get it. At least it's a bit more reliable there. I don't have to worry about a notification coming days late. It just won't come.
I use Outlook, which isn't the greatest, but it works. There seem to be a lot of incompatibilities, particularly in the scheduling stuff between Notes and Outlook. We were doing a lot better when we were using Outlook and Exchange. Some of the stuff we do is pretty time critical, so if someone misses an important e-mail, it can screw up the entire team and cause us a delay in our delivery schedule.
Clearly from the other comments posted here, this isn't an isolated situation. It seems to me that IBM would be much better off taking Notes out and shooting it and starting over from scratch.
Lotus Notes is cool, but it can be a pain.
It would kind of interesting to see Notes take off again... Basically you can use it like outlook and then combine MS access in it for custom databases. However, somethings are still a big pain that make Outlook look good. (no pun intended)
If you need just email, setup an imap and use Thunderbird for your client.
If you just need email and calendering then Outlook might be what you want (or maybe Groupwise if you are old school).
If you need email, calenders, custom database development tied into your email, plus tons of other stuff... Then Notes is your program. Hey they even have a OS X client that is way better than MS's Entourage.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I think what everyone is missing is this: IBM doesn't have a native Linux-based Notes client (that I know of). The solutions being pushed/advertised could very well be web-based, using Domino on Linux (w/ integrated Websphere/DB2) on the backend.
-b
If only HP had not caved to the MS pressure and ditched OpenMail. OpenMail was sweet. It could scale way beyond Exchange while providing all of the same features.
:P
IBM is a services company that wishes it was a software company b/c software is more profitable. Trying to re-focus on software by getting customres to switch fom Exchange to Notes is...what's the word?...a joke. Exchange takes seats from Notes every day of the week. Thousands of them. IBM is also a dinosaur. It's ironic that this campaign is beign announced a week or so after MSFT announced their "People Ready" campaign. IBM's message: leave it to us, we'll take care of you with our services arm and the software we cobble together from closed/open source. Microsoft's message: we believe peole are at the center of things. Enabling people to do more is what we (MSFT) are about. Talk about a contrast in visions... More at http://notaprguy.wordpress.com/.
"The new 'Migrate to the Penguin' initiative is an expansion of IBM's Move2Lotus program, which now includes more than 100 IBM Business Partners helping customers migrate to Lotus Notes and Domino and developing migration tools to help customers make the transition."
Wow! When exactly was it that Linux became IBM's bitch? Lotus Notes is a prime example why IBM shouldn't be allowed to do software. They should stick to what they know branding open source, and services.
Lets get a few things straight given that I actually KNOW THE F'ing products involved:
/. it by linking it here).
/.'ers scream for, WHAT IS THE F'ING PROBLEM?
1. Notes has an odd UI with some challenges, we agree on that. Of course, that's because it was DESIGNED TO BE CROSS PLATFORM. In fact, the next rev includes a LINUX CLIENT.
2. Notes is VERY STABLE. I am personally aware of a major financial firm where 12,000 users are doing mail, calendaring, I.M., discussions, and workflow applications with the support of less than 15 people. They have had no outages. They have had no works.
3. Notes is inherently secure. It was doing public/private key encryption from day 1, back in the late 80's and is still doing so. It even supports PKI plug ins. Apparently, it was the only one because nobody else ever made any.
4. The notes CLIENT is inherently secure. It use execution control lists and design elements are signed. There are not worms or trojans that use Notes to replicate because THEY CAN'T.
5. Notes is OPEN. Yes, it uses a proprietary storage and transport format, but it also FULLY SUPPORTS XML for every design and and data element. It also includes Java (w/ IIOP and CORBA as well) object models, COM object models, and a published XML schema. It FULLY SUPPORTS MIME, SNMP, SMTP, LDAP (as client or server), NTP, HTTP, SSL, DIIOP, WEBDAV, WEB SERVICES (as client or server), ODBC.
6. Notes is PROGRAMABLE. Its objects are openly accessable and it includes full support for JAVA, Javascript, and its own Lotusscript and formula language.
7. Domino (the server) is MULTI-OS cross platform. It runs EQUALLY WELL on Linux, AIX, Solaris (in the past, and soon again) iSeries (OS400). I even know of one web accessible server running on Linux on XBOX! (no, I'm not going to
8. Notes owns roughly 50% of the corporate mail and calendaring marketing. No, not in small business or home use, but in major corporations.
9. Notes & Domino are backward compatible. No rip and replace upgrades. EVER. I can take a version 8 beta client and open a version 2 application (that I have) and it will WORK. Now. It is cheaper to upgrade to Domino 7 from Exchange 5.5 than to upgrade to Exchange 2000 or 2003 from the Exchange 5.5.
---
So, given all these things -- every one of which is something in general
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I found you can force a refresh by clicking on another mail folder then clicking back on the Inbox.
The numbers quoted in dollars attached to the item seem ludicrous. I call April fools.
,"motivational dificiency disorder", which apparently affects 1/5 Australians.
Anyway, anyone recognised the british medical journal gag this year. It's a "news" story about MoDwD or
Total bullsh*t. April 1st as it should be.
I never thought I would become a Microsoft Outlook advocate, but after using Lotus Notes at work for the past two years, I bought a copy of Outlook and installed the Outlook Notes Connector just to avoid Lotus Notes.
The Lotus Notes client provides such a poor user experience. Just to name the most obvious problems: the menus are substantially different from other applications, preferences are hidden several levels deep in weird places, the toolbar buttons and the bookmarks sidebar are pointless, copy and paste doesn't work properly for things like addresses and names, the main window steals focus if you have X-Mouse/focus follows mouse enabled, HTML formatted messages aren't layed out correctly, and contact synchronization with my cell phone overwrites all numbers with the contact's work number. To make it worse IBM support doesn't want to know about any problems in the product and the online help isn't very helpful.
IBM needs to get its shit together before trying to push Notes. It would take a lot to make me consider it again.
I hated the earlier versions because they crashed so much. v6.5 was nice though. Crashes rarely. Unfortunately, my employer switched to Outlook and Exchange.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You can sort by subject in the current version of Notes, 7. Mail Rules had a few quirks at first, but have worked solidly since version 6.5.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
And how much productivity have you lost due to people having to call IS every time they want to change their password because it's hard-as-hell to figure out how to do it? What about the angry calls you get when Notes gets confused and deletes emails you didn't intend to? (Sometimes Notes makes 'shortcuts' to emails when you move them into folders instead of copying the mail; then you delete it from your inbox and the email in the folder disappears also.)
How much time is spent managing email folders and rules that other email clients do automatically? How much money wasted on training users to know what "replication" is and when to use it? Heck, how much time is wasted in a year from the 45-50 seconds it takes Notes to even *display* an email if it had the misfortune of being swapped out of RAM?
How many meetings are missed when Notes' calendars get corrupt and stop sending out reminders? Or if you get one of those fun meetings that actually ends *before* it begins, because Notes doesn't even do the most basic sanity-checking on incoming data? How about the extra cost to make your Palms, Blackberries, and PocketPCs work with Notes, and the lost time having to use "Force Full Synchroniztion" in EasySyncPro every week?
Sorry, Domino might be solid, but that doesn't excuse all the other flaws in the product. And if you add it all up, it's just not worth it. It's not worth the cost, it's not worth the stress.
Ask your users if they like using Notes. Seriously. You'll be surprised at all the colorful replies you receive.
Comment of the year
Nice one IBM, but I have yet to find the Linux port of Notes - I need it to get a client off M$ shit.
You can make Outlook talk to Domino via a replacement mapi32.dll ... for email only. If Lotus would only steal^H^H^H^H^H^H borrow from Outlook, Evolution, or even Thunderbird ... things would be so much better.
I don't even dissagree. Its cumbersome, feels slow, and the editors and things feel outdated. Even most of IBM agrees that needs work. They're actually spending a fortune on it for the next rev (Hannover) which is built on the Eclipse framework and is much more extensible.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I've seen the commercial. It starts with just a few people lip-syncing to "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" By the end they show hundreds, maybe thousands of people.
All singing "I'm Not Like Everybody Else"
I think if you look in the dictionary under irony, you see video of this commercial.
(And yes, I know that this comment reflects the common usage definition of irony rather than the dictionary definition. Give me a word that means the common usage definition of irony.)
WTF are they thinking?
having switched from outlook to notes at work recently, it's horrible. lotus notes blows so hard, it's amazing how bad it is. no one in their right mind would switch. even if IBM does give them 20K, they'll loose that in productivity in a day.
15 people? Jeebus! They have enough users to need a farm of three whole Exchange servers with associated Outlook infrastructure -- typically considered about a half-FTE position in most Exchange shops. Hell, Microsoft's entire 24 by 7 support for 65000 users with about 120K mailboxes takes less that fifteen people!
I've been running lotus notes for 5 years now, and the reason why we didn't switch to exchange?
Because to scale exchange to support the number of users we have, we'd need to deploy *FARMS* of intel boxes.
Oddly, it's been about two years since we had to reboot our iSeries (AS/400). Yeah, it's not as sexy as running 100s of windows or linux servers. As it's just a pair of clustered boxes in the corner, each running multiple LPARs that serve to provide redundancy for the other. But it just works, plain and simple.
It only requires 15 people to support the entire environment.
We use Exchange to support email and calendaring for at least twice that number, and it takes 1-2 of us to support it part time. It pretty much takes care of itself. The only downtime we've had since upgrading to 2003 was when a third-party backup app started locking up one of the servers every weekend.
I'm not a huge MS fan, and I do tend to like IBM, but Notes is a pile of shit. The only thing I ever liked about it was the hieroglyphics when I entered my password, and I still thought that didn't belong in an enterprise desktop app. It's not a matter of redesigning it or adding new features - the whole concept is flawed. Email and calendar apps go together - that's why Outlook is so popular. Email, calendar apps, the worst database product evar, and whatever else IBM decided to shovel into Notes for the releases after 5 do not belong in the same executable.
Notes is such a terrible product that I thought this article was one of the April Fools' jokes.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Sometimes I'm not sure what IBM is thinking. I don't "get" this campaign. IBM is spending $300M on a campaign to convince customers to switch from MS' propietary to their propietary message product?
Umm. What do you expect? They have a product. They're advertising it. This is shocking?
Yes. IBM has been extremely reluctant to market Domino. The last effort was in 1999 when Lotus Notes 6 was released. Lotus Notes 6.5 and 7 have since been released with almost no marketing.
Look at "IBM software by products by category":
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/sw-bycategory/
Lotus Notes is an Application Server, but it has no entries in the "Application Server" category, even though "Distributed Application & Web Server" is the definition of Domino. Notes is still the best software for distributing and maintaining code and content amongst thousands of servers and often disconnected clients.
Lotus Notes is great for "Business Integration", either with the standard DECS (Domino Enterprise Connectivity Service) or the optional LEI (Lotus Enterprise Integrator). None of this software is listed under "Business Integration". The Notes client integrates with MSOffice and DDE and most any software used in business.
Lotus Notes practically invented "Content Management" (information maintained by people outside the computer priesthood). The category mentions a Lotus product, but not Notes.
Databases are the basic units in Notes, but Lotus Notes is not mentioned under "Databases". IBM is scared because Notes databases can be created by normal people, and easy computing reduces the need for their consulting services.
Domino has central identity management, was the first public software product using public/private keys, and includes an LDAP server. There is no mention of Domino under "Identity Management".
IBM does not understand Lotus Notes. When it does remember Notes, it tries to chop it up to add to Websphere. Now they are marketing it for email. At least they are marketing it.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
IBM will be moving their internal users to Workplace for email. Workplace is IBMs collaboration suite built on their j2ee/portal stack.
Actually, this forum is pretty nasty to use. I'd much rather read it in my Notes client. Browsers suck wet ones worse than Notes.
Working in a two-way business radio company, we were talking to someone about Nextel's "Push to Talk." He said it worked fantastic, but in the area we were in, they didn't have good coverage (we did happen to have good coverage in that area, too, so we still had this customer). He then went on to point out that Nextel had spent X amount of money to have a big Super Bowl ad...and that if they had instead put that money into building towers to get good coverage, their service would really be useful to them.
Well, as someone who puts food on my familie's table due to stupid mistakes of huge bloated corps., let's hear it for the huge, money wasting marketing campaigns!
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
Gotta chime in on this one. Lotus is by far the strongest collaborative platform available with products range from the Notes/Domino to Quickplace (hidden gem)and Sametime.
a 386256f9a0056e956/42cf7602df53917586257108000261d8 !OpenDocument o vfor.nsf/wdocs/generalsessionwebcast/. The Sametime 7.5 and Hannover (Notes 8) parts are good.0 317040CF37680FD8525711F0061CB5F/$FILE/Lotusphere%2 0INV101%20January%202006.pdf?OpenElement
Even if you hate Lotus, check some of the above out. ;-)
I work in a Domino shop (with good programmers) and its frankly amazing how far the platform can be pushed.
Think of it this way. Each Notes user is sitting there with a secure client for accessing any apps they need, whether they are native Domino, or plugged in to another system (SAP, Peoplesoft etc). The path forward will make this even easier.
The way ahead looks good with IBMs approach to making Notes a plug-in the their next-gen Eclipse-based platform. Existing Domino apps will run and the "client" will be fully extensible.
Sametime 7.5 looks killer.
I think one of IBMs major issues is marketing and personally am glad they are taking it seriously under Sarjit and Mike Rhodin's leadership. The "Gloves are off" campaign is a good start.
Product naming is another issue. Lotus's offering that competes with Sharepoint is called "Workplace Services Express". WTF does that mean? Who's ever heard of that product? (It's pretty neat by the way).
There's a good Ed Brill presentation that I'd suggest you see called "The Boss Loves Microsoft". Failing that you can at least download the slides (pdf 7.5mb). http://www.edbrill.com/storage.nsf/00d4669dcd9456
You can watch the 2006 Lotusphere opening session webcast here in rm or wmv format http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/events/g
My advice is to skip through the Jason Alexander into..it's pretty lame. Slides about Hannover and beyond are available here http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/ByDateNJ/
It pays to know your enemy
You know, if the Tuttles City Manager used Lotus Notes to send his authoritative PRO-FBI emails I doubt we would have ever heard about it. An email sent entirely in Wingdings isn't nearly as amusing as the one we've all enjoyed reading.
And as far as Lenovo: Again I agree- fine - sell the PCs but what in the world were they thinking selling the laptops! Those were the crown-jewels! I recall reading articles just on their little mouse-pointer itself. Maybe a loss, but what a way to showcase IBM technology (not everybody can have a Deep Blue, etc).
Considering how Lotus is nearly as awful as Exchange, I'm not sure why anyone would bother switching.
Exchange: Vacation autoresponder replies to list mail
Lotus: Vacation autoresponder replies to list mail
Yeah.
imagine if they had just donated that much to a variety of open source projects instead. *that* would be some serious advertising and give them a lot of real cred. And a cubic metric boatload ton of more free code to use.
Did I miss something here.....is IBM going to finally have a Linux Notes Client.....or does it just come with a copy of the eight page article from their Notes tech sight telling why it is impossible to port the client code to Linux and suggest you run it under Wine....
"We are all Aliens until we get to know one another."
We use this at work (we're IBM's bitch; if IBM says jump, we ask "how high?"; if IBM says "pay up!", we ask "how much?"). /.'s database doesn't have enough space for the complaints I have and my co-workers about Lotus Notes.
Some highlights from version 6.5:
* Copy/pasting text into a memo? Be prepared to wait 3 minutes or more (on a P4 2.53GHz) if it isn't unformatted plaintext, e.g. something as oh-so-fancy as HTML...
* Illogical menu design. Seriously, why are there different "preferences" choices beneath 2 different menu headings?
* Slow, slow, slow due to its sheer obesity. You've had Notes open all day and haven't used it in a while, and you're switching from the calendar to a plaintext memo? Wait a minute while Windows has to load Notes' fat ass out of the swapfile into RAM...
* Want to select multiple emails (say, to drag them into a folder or the trash)? No, you can't do it the usual, worldwide-accepted method of click item 1, hold down SHIFT, click last item in range. You must hold down SHIFT and click each fucking email.
* Want to setup a meeting in the calendar? Go ahead and choose "appointment" in the first combobox, then "meeting" once the creation form is open...
* People are encouraged to build apps using Lotus scripts. And invariably, the apps blow. Coincidence? Crappy developers? OK, both are probably true...
* And then there are the "You've got new mail" pop-up notices which occur sometimes when no email actually shows up in your inbox. Thank you Notes, for breaking my concentration on a project for the the notification of an email which doesn't exist!
Not a day at work goes by that I don't curse the giant steaming heap that is IBM's Lotus Notes. Seriously, the only nice thing I can say about Notes is that its scheduler does a good job of finding free time in peoples' schedules to setup meetings. That happens to work very well, and is quite a time-saver. But otherwise, Notes is fucking garbage, and while I haven't tried Exchange + Outbreak, I can't imagine it would be any worse. (Personally, I wish we'd switch over to a web-based groupware app and ditch these proprietary POS's that MSFT and IBM have for us, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.)
IBM's hardware rocks, but their software almost invariably is so godawful that it makes one wonder if they've implemented the "1,000 monkeys at keyboards will eventually write perfect software" theory. If so, the theory is failing badly... As much as MSFT's software tends to be putrid shit too, it's leaps-and-bounds better and more-consistent in behavior than anything I've seen IBM turn out. IBM realizes this, and that's why they're trying to ride the Linux wave -- IBM can't churn out worthwhile code, so they figure they'll let hobbyists do it for them...
Frankly, if IBM ports Notes to Linux and tries to get people to actually use it, I believe the brand image of Linux vendors (RedHat, etc.) will be cheapened. It will wind up being a negative impact on the viability of Linux as a desktop OS. Seriously, for those who've never used it, that is how bad Notes is; that's how incompetent IBM apparently is at writing solid, well-designed software...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
"$300 Million dollars"
As in, 300 Million dollars dollars??
That's a lot of square dollars!!!!
And what's best, TFA is dated March 31st!
I can say, I work on a helpdesk supporting around 1000 users or so. And the majority of our Knowledge Base articles we have are on how to handle various bizarre and weird things that go on in Notes. And a big chunk of calls, disproportionately large, are about Notes.
I support Notes, and I hate Notes. My co-workers hate Notes, and my users hate Notes. I don't know anything about the Server side, but I would not inflict Notes on anyone willingly ever. It's shit.
As to why - yes, everyone else has explained that it's due to Notes being a full-fledged database replication system. Which is nice. But sometimes people just want an email client.
You press CTRL-F to Forward? Shouldn't CTRL-F do a Find? How confusing that inconsistency must become.
Different apps work better for different people. I have recently started at a company that uses Notes system wide and I am quite impressed. I would have to guess that most people that are complaining don't use any of the forms function (yes, I have used MS Outlook's excuse) and don't have to document change controls and government compliance issues.
A simple database with an advanced calendar (I have worked with Outlook for years and could never trust a shared calendar) and an email client that won't blow up with a couple hundred emails a day.
Some things are different and I hate the keyboard shortcuts, but I have been on an XP machine that makes it thorugh a ten hour day without my email client throwing a wrench in the works.
Outlook may be prettier, Notes is nice for getting work done.
As a former OS/2 user/developer I have a tip for you all. NEVER TRUST IBM! They do have excellent scientists, researchers, developers and technicians, sometimes even the marketing dept is pretty good, however the top level management cannot be trusted. I hope they don't manage to muckup the future of Linux. Apples 1984 commerical poking fun at them got it right.
Matthew