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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"
If you're in a company with 27,000 employees, and you don't know anyone who doesn't despise Notes, then your company desperately needs som new Notes developers.
I started developing for Notes only about 2 years ago, so I came in with the same predisposed notions as is the norm around here. But when I truly came to understand what Notes is, my opinion changed quickly.
Notes isn't a mail client. It's a platform for database applications, which can be developed by anyone. If you don't like something in the default mail template, you are free to change it, as everything is open!
Sure, you can quibble about features in the client itself, but competent developers can get around that. Notes applications can be excellent if the developers of them are competent, and collaboration between applications in Notes is ridiculously easy.
Furthermore, IBM is now starting to push Notes hard, and focussing on bringing more open source ideas into it, as this announcement indicates. The most recent server release is a huge improvement over the last, both in performance and stability. Notes now has a future, where a few years back it wasn't clear whether future releases would have fewer and fewer new features.
Add that to the fact that the main alternative for most companies is Microsoft, and Notes is a winner...