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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
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.
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
That's exactly what I was about to post...what a bloated app!
...and now they're going to embed an entire office suite?
Here's the rub: No large organization is going to want that installed. They will turn off that part of the install.
I work for a large financial corporation and they like things to be standardized (Yes, we use MS Office). I would love it if we moved to open office but it ain't gonna happen soon. The last thing they want are problems with multiple incompatible standards used for business documents.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
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 :-(
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
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.
What are you talking about Bloated? Look at what else is out there. Office? Is that not bloated as all get out? And Open Office is not so light either. If you look at what IBM has done with Workplace and some of the open standards in there with editing docs and power points you will see that they might actually be on the right track. Plus they have completely retooled the client....in reality Notes is no more....long live Notes for now call Hanover. I think we get stuck in a rut thinking that Office and Open Office is the only way to do things. What if you had one client that was your office and did it all pretty well without all the crap? Most users of Office only use about 5% of the features anyway so why not deliver a good tool set to edit things in the email collaboration software and keep the users with one app vs. oh 8 from Microsoft? I think IBM and Lotus are on the right track with Hanover and Workplace. I'll take a wait and see approach to this but a good many large companies run Domino and Notes and they are really looking forward to it. -David
David Vasta iSeries(AS/400) Admin & Junkie
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!
Sounds like you have lots of experience using Lotus Notes for your email... and no other experience with Notes. If that's the case, you don't even know what Lotus Notes is. You only know what the eMail database is.
Yack, yack, yack.
Don't trust anything that bleeds for a week and lives.
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.
I was criticizing the decision to embed a large office app in an already way-too-large email app.
I don't like Lotus Notes (I work for IBM and I don't use it for my e-mail), but you're making a basic mistake here: Lotus Notes is *not* an e-mail app. Lotus Notes is a programmable document database management and replication system. e-mail is just one application that can be built on top of Notes' database tools. Notes comes with pre-built templates for e-mail, calendaring, address book and simple document store functionality, but that's far from all you can do with it.
If that's all you want to do with it, well, I think purpose-built tools and protocols do a better job. That's why I use a little program that pulls my e-mail from Notes and puts it in an IMAP4 mail server, then read it with a traditional mail client. But I do have to give Notes its due: It's extremely flexible and powerful, if you need what it does. And if you need what it does, it makes sense to use it for e-mail as well.
Further, since Notes, used properly, is a full business document management system, it makes sense to integrate document viewing and creation functionality as well. For many users, that combination can provide all of the application functionality they need to do their jobs. IT can deploy machines with nothing more than the OS and Notes.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention that IBM is coming at this from another direction as well: IBM is also going to be releasing a product called "IBM Workplace" which is a cross-platform integrated office suite, based on OpenOffice, and includes Notes client support.
I can see that being a killer combination for lots of environments. If Workplace provides all the functionality your users need, then you can dump Office *and* Windows. Since Notes can be configured so that all of the user's data is replicated to a centralized server, deploying a new machine could be as simple as a five-minute install of a custom corporate Linux image with IBM Workplace included. The first time the user connects it to the network, they automatically get all of their stuff replicated to the local drive, and all of the new work they do automatically gets replicated to a server so if their laptop gets run over by a bus, issuing them a new one is trivial and takes no time at all.
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