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IBM to Adopt ODF for Lotus Notes
Mike Barton writes to tell us InfoWorld is reporting IBM has announced that the upcoming version of Lotus Notes, due out this fall, will feature an "ODF-compatible version of OpenOffice embedded in the Notes e-mail application." IBM hopes that this large scale distribution of the ODF standard will help bolster their foothold in the marketplace since "standards live or die on how many people use them"
Come on folks. It's either:
IBM to Adopt ODF for Lotus Notes OR
IBM Adopts ODF for Lotus Notes
But not both. Please choose one.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Like Notes wasn't bloated enough, now they are embedding OOo?
It looks like the OpenDocument Fellowship will have another application to add to its list.
If you're a developer, like myself, you may be wondering how you can take advantage of OpenDocument. Afterall, the point of it is not to have to have developing licenses or the inability to generate your own documents for applications that your user uses. Check out their site for developers. From there, you can find the resources to begin writing your own code that generates ODF compliant files. If Microsoft ever switches to ODF compliance, you might be ahead of the game!
My work here is dung.
Why not just bundle OpenOffice.org and a couple other free applications with the CD? Saying that the email client is not a full office productivity pack seems a bit bloated, doesn't it?
Saying you bundled a few other applications on the CD, on the other hand, makes it sound like you are giving extra value (The value of not having to search for and download it).
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I manage 2 Domino servers that back-end our school district HR system. There's a well-entrenched user base for this app in the school district market. Anything that helps us get stuff in and out cleanly is a huge leap forward. PDF generation and compatibility has been a bear for our technically challenged, but good at their HR specialties, HR dept staff.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
The most respectable collection I can find is the OpenCD which has both OOo & Thunderbird on it, I believe.
This is becoming a popular idea.
My work here is dung.
Having said that, I still think this is great news for ODF.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Being a end user of Lotus Notes, I am forever wishing it would die it's overdue death. It's horrendous. Running Notes Client 6.5, and I hate it with a vengance. Unfortunatly my IT department forced it onto me :-(
Notes won't suck monkey balls now?
End users HATE Lotus Notes. So by bundling openoffice with it, you get a "crummy by association" reputation. Terrible.
I know the IT geeks love them some Lotus Notes (I guess the IBM salesmen know where all the good strip clubs are?), but honestly, it is simply the worst application ever conceived. Pine (hell, even emacs) is a better email application, and there is nothing the crappy database stuff that could not be better implemented using web based technologies.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Now people can use some format they never heard of in a app that nobody likes. It's like Realplayer suddenly supporting OGG or something.
Check out this blog entry for Ed Brill (Business Unit Executive at IBM), scroll past the first section: Ed Brill's blog.
Also, check out the Screen shot
I administered email for a large corporation. I installed, setup, configured, made-route-to-one-another email across Lotes (lotus notes, or should I say "domino" -- wtf with the naming?), exchange & sendmail. Of all the email server/client platforms, lotes was the worst.
.id file, copy it to your local machine, and change the password on it. Viola! You can now read their mail database. Out-of-the-box, this was dumb. Exchange & sendmail were inherently much more secure (and lotes was written for the CIA?).
The client, alone, was the most horrible thing witnessed upon a tech. Let's see if I remember: turning on auto spell check and having a certain amount of hyphens in your sig would unquestionably crash the client each and every time. There was absolutely no knowledge on this error and I had to figure it out myself as several users had such a sig with spell check set to auto (maybe there's a knowledge-base doc on it now).
It was impossible to totally close the open relay in version 5.08 I think it was. I had an on-going argument with the orbs blacklist on this, begging them to cut me some slack as users on my network could not route email to certain servers running the blacklist. The issue was finally resolved by taking away lotes as the public mail gateway.
Back to the client: in certain versions of the client, if you edited the text-based config file, and didn't put in a hard return at the end of the final line, the thing would refuse to attach to the server. This was another one I had to figure out on my own.
Security: lotes was incredibly easy to crack as far as getting into a user's email. Simply grab their
Interface: both the client and the server had the most incredibly stupid interfaces ever designed. What sort of crack were the developers on? I could have forgiven the server if the console came with all the commands, and more, than the GUI could offer, but it didn't. Most of the time, you had to use the GUI and it blew chunks hard. I remember taking an advanced lotes class and even the instructor got lost in the GUI and continued the lesson (in theory).
Yes, this is/was a rant, but some where there is a review of the client rating it the worst application ever designed. Mind you, I was all for lotes at one point, mostly because it's all I ever knew. Exchange and Sendmail are far more elegant to use -- Exchange mostly cuz it's ripped everything from Sendmail.
Of all the mail servers I've ever setup and ran, I prefer Squirrelmail. No, I am no email expert or know-it-all, and I've not done it in several years now. My entire time was about 2 to 3 years, and I had to figure out some pretty big routing between Lotes, Exchange & Sendmail (I used Sendmail to handle all routing between Lotes and Exchange as we migrated). I had Squirrel mail pulling users from Active Directory, but as an admin it was very sweet and to the point with the best documentation IMO. Unfortunately, I let management see the little squirrel graphic, and it never had a chance after that....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
....I didn't realise Notes was still alive!!!
;-]
I thought it hand been taken out into the street and (in)humanily shot!
Jaj
You beat me to it! :O
This was actually shown at Linux Forum 2006 in Copenhagen. Slashdot reported about it then. I saw it live, but too little to be able to say anything about it.
It's going to be a little different than the usual Notes Client.
Blar.
I couldn't agree more!
This is actually a good thing. One of the arguments Microsoft made against ODF as a standard was that it was only supported by one application. The more other office suites that actually support this format, the more specious that argument becomes. Someone needs to get to Corel and convince them to add support to their office suite. They are one of the few remaining competitors (small at this point) to Microsoft.
How about writing a Lotus Notes adaptor for Evolution and porting it to Windows? Then everyone benefits - IBM from dumping the shitfest which is their Lotus Notes Client, and every user who would like a decent replacement for Outlook.
It is stupid to use it for email period. Unless you don't care about external email. Anyway I use gmail for all external email, so I don't care.
They rate it 8.7 out of 10 --- very high. Of course, they actually go to the trouble of comparing recent versions of the product with other things on the net, not just some badly done apps in an oversized I.T. department from a guy paid to deal with problems.
0 TCnotes_1.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/05/11/78099_2
FSM save us from yet another rich client war.
You have 27,000 employees who live and breath Notes. Do you have any idea what it would take to put that many employees on Exchange, and if you did, what what happens when a single file became corrupted? What if you had to upgrade versions?
The biggest problem with Notes is that it's easy to design a bad app. Designer is so easy on the surface, that any moron can make something that looks like its a Notes app. Of course, it won't scale because they didn't know what they were doing when they wrote it. The UI will suck, again, because they didn't know what they were doing when they wrote it. Nonetheless, these quick temporary solutions quickly become permenant and critical, and then someone who knows something has to be paid a lot of money to do it right.
Notes will continue to "suck" for people like you for years, but then again, you don't have an alternative because there is nothing to migrate to. Other products do some of the things Notes does. Many do Mail and Calendaring -- some better, surely. None do the kinds of rapid, inexpensive, but secure and portable applications and integration.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
There is several myths and misunderstandings why Lotus Notes are hated or loved by IT and/or fellow users. First of all, let's claim what Lotus Notes is and what it's not.
First of all, LN is _platform_. Heavy, huge, interesting, effective (yes, it is that word) platform. What is NOT - it is NOT e-mail client. And there comes paradox - Usually, IT dept. will follow hype of CEOs and other managers and will buy IBM promises. However, when implemented, it's usually where it stucks. Why? Because there is NO ONE to port all old apps/functionality needed to abolish all old apps and go fully LN. Using LN alone is nonsense - email client is total nightmare and that poisons all efect of it's usage.
LN is powerful and quite capable of doing great things. Except that there is need for good admins and coders to get to those great things. Usually, it is stuck in the middle of nowhere.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
This will be based on Ooo.org?
I wonder what happened to Lotus SmartSuite... would leaning towards OpenOffice mean they will kill it off?
Poor old Lotus 1-2-3 *nostalgic sigh*
I don't know if anybody uses Lotus Smart Suite any more, but... shouldn't THAT be the place where they add ODF?
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Yeah, I agree with you. Notes is a machine gun and this place has a bunch of monkeys who have access to the designer. It's far too easy for someone to develop something without putting any thought into the business process, impact, design or maintainability. I've been replacing notes apps with web based apps that are maintainable and scaleable.
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
Very nice, I support that. Can we have proper multi-user support, faster performance and more robust databases as well please? No? OK well then I'll continue to ignore this product :) Lotus 7 is just a great big missed opportunity. Maybe Lotus 8 will be better, but I am not holding out much hope.
If I'm laptop bound and can log in via POP, I'm a thunderbird type of guy. Otherwise it's normally their choice.
And Lotus Notes just sucks.
Sure, some of it is being set in my ways as a Groupwise/Outlook/Outlook Express/ Thunderbird guy. I'm used to a multi-windowed interface. But a lot of it is simply usability.
Here's a really simple thing Lotus Notes could do to make their product a lot better: Prompt users when closing if they have more than one tab open! Particularly since their system is so freakin' counterintuitive from every other email browser!
I loathe this product. Maybe it was just the implementation that sucked, but it was a bitch to schedule meetings (No, don't use that calendar link, it won't work. Click over on the other calendar link. Yeah. Then go to tools. Then find Calendars. Then type in each person.)
Seriously, I think I'd rather use Outlook Express, vulnerabilities and all. (also, Lotus Notes was the slowest program I think I've ever run. I know that probably was the implementation or somesuch, but I'd click on an email, then surf the net for a couple minutes before coming back to it)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Is that a fancy term for meeting scheduler/appointment calendar or is it more and I've just missed the groupware train?
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Oh Notes, how I hate thee, let me count the ways...
1. 90% of people use it for an email client, which is kind of like using Oracle's RDBMS to manage your grocery list. Or maybe a better analogy is, it's like using a Swiss Army knife to carve a marble sculpture. There are many things that swiss army knife is good for, but when all you want to do is carve marble, it's not the best tool for the job. Eventually it just leaves you wanting to find the person who gave you said pocketknife, and stab them with the little corkscrew, in the hopes that next time they'll give you a proper chisel.
2. Searching sucks. I mean, just sucks. I don't even bother using it, it's that bad. If you can search for stuff in the contents/body of emails, I've never figured out how, and even searching by subject/sender etc. is a PITA. You have to be in the main list view of emails for the folder you want to search, and then you have to click on the column of the term you want to search (e.g., subject). Then you do Find or start typing a few letters, which opens a dialog box into which you type your term. Then you press return. If you're lucky, an email will be highlighted in the view. If you're not lucky, nothing will appear to happen, but if you look down at the veeeeeery bottom of the window, they'll be a line that says "'foo' was not found." As far as I know, you can't use any sort of wildcards, expansions, or regexps in search, and it's totally literal: if you type 'Bob Jones', and the guy's name on the email is 'Bob T. Jones,' you won't find it. This is absolutely braindead for an email application, especially one that's as database-centric as Notes purports to be. I don't know about Exchange, but Apple Mail is better than this (stores everything as flat text files, too), as is GMail and every other webmail system I've ever used.
3. Everything runs in one gigantic window. If you can tear off message windows so that they're not all running as tabs, I've never figured out how. If you don't like it taking up your entire screen, your only option is to restore down, then resize the window and scroll. People really aren't that far off when they're joking that it seems like Lotus is about two lines of code away from becoming a full-fledged OS: it seems designed under the assumption that it's the only application you'll use. Ever. For everything. It's email, it's groupware, it's calendaring, it's a CMS/version-control system, hell, it's even a web browser. Why? No idea! And now it's going to be a word processor and office suite too.
4. It's not particularly stable. It's not that it's that unstable; it doesn't crash every hour on me or anything, but what annoys me is that when it crashes -- which it does -- it never goes down cleanly. Invariably, some little part of it is still running, and the only way you can get things working again is by restarting. And restarting is irritating. There's no reason a userland program should make you restart. Ever. Maybe this is a Windows thing, I don't know. It just sucks.
I could go on, but those are my major complaints. It's just a program that tries to do too much. There are obviously some very smart people working on it -- the whole database backend is pretty slick, and the way you can create local databases and keep them syncronized (replicated, in Notes-ese) to other computers and servers is neat. But everyone I know who uses it, spends 90% of their time with it just doing email, and it's a really crappy email client. Ten years ago, or even five years ago, it might have been competitive. But when you put it up next to Apple Mail or even GMail, using it is just painful.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What is NOT - it is NOT e-mail client.
And that is Notes' biggest problem.
Email is the killer app of the business world. I don't know any organization these days that doesn't live and breathe email.
Notes purports to do, among other things, email. And it does this poorly. So basically, in implementing Notes, you take away users' other email programs, and replace it with something that does a lot of stuff, but doesn't do the ONE THING that they want it to do, very well. Can you blame them for hating it? I sure can't.
The fact that you can develop great database-driven, collaborative applications on it doesn't matter one whit to 99% of its userbase, if the email features suck.
Any program which replaces users' existing email programs, must do email at least as well as what they replace, or it will be hated, regardless of what other features it offers. I don't care if the program makes coffee and massages my feet, I'd still hate it because it's my only option for email, and as an email client it's lame.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I tend to wonder if the startup time of Office and its RAM requirements aren't being hidden because it's tied into the OS so deeply that it's really sharing resources with it.
Kind of like how IE seems to start up faster than Firefox, but only because a lot of the stuff that IE uses has already been preloaded by Windows, and therefore it has an unfair advantage (because nobody else but Microsoft can take advantage of this sort of thing).
The way Microsoft intertwines its products basically makes comparisons to anyone else's stuff very difficult, because it's hard to say whether you have half of the MS program already loaded just by turning the computer on.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Wow, email must be harder than I could ever imagine.
People have been bitching about Notes email client FOREVER. it's the NUMBER ONE reported problem with that platform.
yet after a decade, people still say it sucks.
come on IBM, get off yer ass
..whether end users or IT staff, has been when they are happy that their organization has decided to transition off of it.
Of course, someone, somewhere must be sticking with it and buying into it, since its still selling. But I've never personally met anyone who praised it as software that "just works", in fact, I've heard that more often as praise (by comparison to notes) for whatever was transitioned to from Notes, usually Outlook/Exchange (which I'm not a big fan of either, myself.)
Why must we add _more_ to Lotus Notes? This application is so big and bloated already, is this necessary? No one uses 1-2-3 anymore anyways. Just do away with it and replace it with OpenOffice. As for Lotus Notes, I've been a strong advocate of the 'throw the code away and start from scratch.' Though, I will give somewhat of a nod to Lotus Notes 7. It's a hell of a lot more stable than 6 ever was on it's best day. Although, I still curse when the damn thing locks up when sending a big file. Would it kill them to add a progress bar to show how soon my uploading is going to be done. :/
*open source notes*
I do not understand how the most robust, secure and reliable email client ever designed can be "hated"
From Notes wiki:
"Many people, including competitors, some industry analysts and mainstream business press, have claimed that "Lotus Notes is dead" in 2006. There have been repeated insinuations of this since the mid 1990s, yet none have proven true. For example, an article published in Forbes magazine in April 1998 proclaimed "The decline and fall of Lotus". Since that time, the installed base of Lotus Notes has nearly tripled from an estimated 42 million seats in September 1998 to more than 120 million in 2006.
Current claims of the death of Notes are fueled by lingering market confusion emanating from IBM placing marketing emphasis on Websphere and IBM Workplace in 2003 and 2004. IBM's most recent figures, however, indicate that the product is enjoying a sustained period of double-digit growth.
While the future of any product in the technology sector can not be predicted, IBM has made announcements that indicate that it continues to invest heavily in research and development on the Lotus Notes product line. The next major Notes release, currently code-named "Hannover" (after the location of the 22nd Deutsche Notes User Group meeting, where it was first shown to the public) will incorporate Notes into a larger Eclipse framework and include support for a Linux version. In addition, IBM executive Ken Bisconti has made public comments on several occasions asserting that there will be releases 8, 9 and 10 of Notes and Domino."
Every place I've seen that's used Notes is stuck in the past and violently allergic to "new*" ideas. I'll have to ask that question at the next interview...
* (where new idea = any idea less than 40 years old)
Lotus Notes sucks, don't blame tha apps.
The client is poorly coded, so poorly that almost all end-users have killnotes in their desktops.
Most people say the Notes email client sucks because they're used to Outlook Express (go ask your users why they think it sucks and you'll get "because Outlook does it this other way" comments).
The Notes email client lets you do interesting things like file a document in multiple folders, integrated IM, etc.
Besides, if they don't like the Notes email client, they can always use Outlook Web Access (Outlook thinks the Notes server is an Exchange server), iNotes (web browser access), POP3, etc.
Notes/Domino indeed is a platform more comparable to JBoss + a real PKI infrastructure for security + applications for admin, etc...
Hanover (a.k.a., Notes 8) is a rewrite of the Notes client to use Eclipse as a base platform, so for folks that understand the Notes client, it'll be quite interesting...
Telephone.
Mike Barton writes to tell us InfoWorld is reporting IBM has announced that Billy says Jeff shouted something about Tom uttering that John C. Dvorak wrote a crazy article about Bill Gates whispering that The Register claimed Intel held a press conference stating that Adobe leaked news IBM was planning to include ODF support in Lotus Notes.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Is it me or does anyone else think the idea of embedding an entire office suite into an Email client seem a bit like putting a fullsize kitchen into a lunchbox? I guess with Notes users nobody will notice an extra few minutes of load time to compose a message, but...
Perfectly Normal Industries
If you picked sendmail for your SMTP e-mailer, that pretty much destroys your credibility right there.
It's like saying "I have extensive experience with RealPlayer, and can say with authority that MP3 is no good..." or "I drive a Chevy Cavalier, and the Ford Focus just isn't a quality automobile..."
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Notes 7 lets you use DB2 for the data store, WTF do you want that's more robust than that?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
the notes people keep looking for more and more garbage to bloat up their client... they should get rid of all that crap... if it takes my email client 45 seconds to resolve which email address I'm trying to send to... thats a problem. oh and once it crashes, you have to log out of windows and re-login to get the app to run again...
some of my coworkers have gotten upgraded to just using pine on their unix boxes.... did I mention I work at IBM?
But I'd hit post already. It's not counterintuitive so much as divergent from every other standard out there.
It might even be the better standard, but it's not what I'm used to.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
"Oh really? When you hit Delete - does it actually move the damn message out of the fucking inbox or does it just stick a trashcan icon next to it?"
If you where using a version 6.0 (shipped sept 2002) or never it would move to the inbox.
What about Corel Word Perfect and Applixware Office? Will these company's support OpenDocuemnt in the future?
OK, I'll indulge you. Why sendmail sucks, in a nutshell:
It was designed before Internet e-mail standards were established. As a result, it contains a general purpose rewriting engine that's Turing complete--the idea was it would be able to be configured to translate addresses between BITNET, UUCP, JANET, ARPAnet, CompuServe, FidoNet, and so on, without recompiling the sendmail binary. This was important because back in the 80s, those networks all had different address formats.
Nowadays the ability to arbitrarily rewrite addresses is completely unnecessary, but Sendmail keeps the old design. This leads to a number of major misfeatures.
Sendmail is a pig to configure. The "new improved" sendmail.mc is slightly better than the old sendmail.cf, but still awful compared to the alternatives because it's layered on top of M4, an ancient macro processor. Compare an example postfix config and an example sendmail config. And remember, that's the new .mc file that's compiled into the actual sendmail.cf; if you ever need to do something complex that requires editing the sendmail.cf itself, you'll be faced with something much nastier.
Sendmail has a continuing history of poor security. 16 vulnerabilities between 2000 and mid-2006, according to nvd.nist.gov. By comparison, Exim has had 9, Postfix has had 4, Qmail 3.
Sendmail has lousy performance. Postfix is 2-4x faster. Take a look at some benchmarks.
Sendmail was designed to parse and reconstruct the header of every e-mail going through it. This makes it brittle--give it something it isn't expecting, and the results are unpredictable. This has resulted in Bcc:ed recipients being revealed to each other, unknown header fields being destroyed, and so on. It also makes e-mail forensics difficult--just because the message looked like it had the right addresses when it arrived, didn't mean it had the right addresses when it was sent, if it has passed through sendmail. MTAs should not rewrite e-mail going through them; only e-mail being passed to them directly by a client.
It has broken behavior when sending to multiple recipients. For example, if the To: field is missing a comma between two addresses, sendmail will send copies of the e-mail to all the addresses that it can parse, then barf on the broken ones. This is unhelpful, because if the user then re-sends the mail, most people end up getting 2 copies.
So in short: it's broken, it's slow, it's insecure, and it's awkward to configure. There are other open source mailers that have a few of those defects, but sendmail is the only one that has them all. Do a search for "sendmail sucks" and you'll find plenty of people with the same opinion as me.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I couldn't help but chime in when I saw this thread. We use Notes at work, and I have a tough time finding messages if I'm unsure what folder it might be saved under due to Lotus Notes' search shortcomings. It could be a problem with our mail template, but try this:
1. In your All Documents view, open the search bar and type a query.
2. In the search results, the desired message is probably in there somewhere. Usually, you have an idea who the sender was, but you can't sort the results by sender! Want to see the subject threads grouped together? Sorry, that doesn't work either.
Even Yahoo! mail is easier to navigate and search.