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Lotus Notes 8.5 Will Support Ubuntu 7.0
E5Rebel sends in an article from Computerworld.uk article that reports: "IBM believes Linux on the enterprise desktop is finally ready for widespread adoption. To meet future demand it is preparing to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0... The Ubuntu support for Notes and Symphony were a direct response to demand from customers."
There is no Ubuntu 7.0. I'd expect them to support 8.04, Hardy.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I went to a walkthrough of the Intuit campus in San Diego yesterday. They had a raffle in the beginning and I won a copy of QuickBooks Premier 2008. Even though I am a Computer Science major about to graduate, I felt like I had won nothing; the software felt valueless to me because it would not run on my Ubuntu machine at home. Perhaps shrink-wrap software that runs on Linux may start to catch on soon?
IBM, what you've just developed is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever used. At no point in your rambling, incoherent interface were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational program. Everyone in this everywhere is now dumber for having used it. I award you no credit, and may God have mercy on your soul.
The year of Linux Desktop!
Amazing how many news outlets repeat the "7.0" typo.
Of course it should read "7.10" as in october 2007.
But et tu Slashdot!?
Who cares?
I think every large company I've dealt with use either MS Outlook or Lotus Notes. Don't ask me to reason why, I guess it's just one of those things they do. Customer demand for this on Linux may mean serious traction in the enterprise market, they tend to move slow but when they do it's with force. I think it'll only get better from here as I'm running Ubuntu here, and right now it's only slightly less frustrating than XP. While XP is at a standstill they're fixing things in Ubuntu, and I tried Vista... it was more painful than switching to Ubuntu was.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Getting that to run on Linux would be great. Being able to support the OpenDocument standard as well... priceless!
You don't use Ubuntu do you?
There is no 7.0.
7.04 , 7.10, 8.04
The format is year.month of release. Which is april and october, respectively.
Despite the facts that Lotus is or isn't a good product... let's face it, Lotus Notes is a major player in the enterprise, and this can drive some important migrations to Linux.
What will the Ubuntu version look like when the year 3000 comes? Will it go from 999.10 to 1000.04?
I'm unable to understand the logic here. Is the word Ubuntu replacing Linux for marketing use, or is there some compelling reason to support just one distribution? In "the old days" (last year was it?) everything was SUSE. In "the REAL old days" (2 years ago was it?) it was RedHat. Linux is Linux is Linux.
Karma: Neutered
There are quite a few IM clients like pidgin,psi etc on the linux desktop today.They enjoy a pretty big user base and have a stable code base.Hiring one of those developers sure makes a lot more sense than shelling out big bucks for IBM's closed source apps.It just runs on Linux.It does'nt have an open code-base.The company will still have to wait for IBM to change the app,which will onlyh happen if the company is big enough to merit the coding time for IBM's (relatively) few linux devs.
An argument often made against widespread adoption of enterprise linux(atleast in India) is the lack of good support.Microsoft actively courts large companies.By comparison,Red Hat and Novell's support group is small and relatively immobile.It takes much more time for a Red hat engineer to reach a crisis site(in case of network failuer for example) than it takes for a microsoft support guy.This is atleast partly because the demand for linux devs has consistently outstripped supply(again,atleast here in India)
It would seem to be cheaper and better in the long run for companies to develop their own customizations of exisitng apps.
However,i've never used Lotus Notes personally.They might well provide some functionality that would make the decision to buy it worthwhile.We can only hope that more companies follow suit.
Face it, if it will work on Ubuntu, it won't be too hard to coax it into working under [insert favorite distro here], and Linux is sorely missing out on commercial software.
Even though some people will surely say that we should only use the pure, open source software that no large corporation has so much glanced at, there are some jewels of the commercial software world that have no open source equivalent.
Video Editing software, for example; you'd be far better off using one of the many commercial programs than one of the few open source ones.
Having commercial software avaliable for Linux can only help the adoption of Linux on the desktop, and, really, unless you're Steve Ballmer, there is no possible downside to this.
When did IBM start hating Linux?
The battle is just to get to the point where the public authorities accept they can no longer post up websites that only work with MS's proprietary stuff - I think we'll start getting there this year. Not quite The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, but possibly the year where the rebel alliance win a few tactical victories on the long march to power.
However, are they going to open source Lotus Notes? It seems not.
This leads me to ask when are they going to fix their crappy HTML renderer in their Notes mail client? It must have the most braindead, broken, bizarre HTML renderer in the business. Why, their are whole cottage industries around on how to work on it's crudulousness.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They should be contributing to the OpenOffice code instead of creating another pointless "productivity" suit.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
so is it just ubuntu because ibm hates redhat/novell (the standard enterprise distros) or does their notes team read digg.com and think linux == ubuntu?
#include <sig.h>
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27009485
Linux versions supported:
# SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 XGL
# RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 - Note: AIGLX and SELinux must be disabled
This just means if they find a bug they will fix it if they can reproduce on those platforms.
Full support would have included the Designer. All that's being ported is the client-side application. As a Notes developer (woe is me and all that jazz), I'm stuck on the Windows platform because the just can't be bothered to work on the Designer, which has had nary an update and the same old bugs for years and years. Grumble.
"Good news, everyone!"
There are quite a few IM clients like pidgin,psi etc on the linux desktop today.
You are confused about what Notes does, and its power (often misused).
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
a version of Linux.
>IBM didn't develop lotus notes. They just bought it. I don't think they deserve all of the blame. ...
>My fear is that they will turn Linux into OS/2, and we all know what happens next....
Sure:
1- Buy lotus notes.
2- Port it to linux.
3- Turn linux into OS/2
4- ???????
5- Profit!
From what I have allways heard and read - also in this thread - Lotus Notes is about the crappiest of Groupwares right behind Outlook/Exchange. A nighmare to maintain and operate, close to SAP in it's fatness and stuck in the early ninties in terms of usability.
Give the traction Linux and OSS in general has gained in professional businesses I doupt that this is needed. It's probably more that Notes needs Linux. If it helps Lotus Notes shops migrate easyer - all the better. But I'm recommending all my business customers to stear clear of any proprietary thick-client-server groupware. Given the state of rich internet applications and web-based solutions nowadays the concept strickes me as totally backwards.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Notes" never seemed to catch on much, did it? except with the blue-underware crowd but there is no accounting for taste here and there
the Solaris system is attractive,-- has a nice office package, includes FireFox and Thunderbird. dunno how all this stacks up under heavy office use; should be great for getting started though. ( I want mine on a hot-rod SPARC though, tee hee )
I have my copy of -Geekonomics_ (David Rice) and have started reading. As I've mentioned here and there the first system to slam the door in the hackers face with effective security will be the winner
a security system like RACF is needed: one that examines not only who is trying to update what, but how are they doing it? what tools do they want to use? it should not be allowed to update software "on the fly". we need to require a download, and use the setup program and do the authenticity checking thing while we're at it
Geekonomics points out that software has become a critical part of the "cement" of our infra structure. and we can't afford to have it cracking and crashing.
It's embedded Gecko. In fact, without Mozilla/Firefox installed, it won't render HTML internally.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"He Who Dares Wins"
Doesn't IBM have their own "Red Hat" version of Linux? they can morph that into whatever but Ubantu and Fedora can continue without taking the blue poison
a Groupwise package is a high-use package on the desktop. where I work Groupwise has superseded the phone for most communication
the User Interface has to make the key tools available quick and easy. Groupwise ( Novell ) ain't bad but I think they need work on the accessibility of their message filter: if I'm reading a message I should be able to click FILTER and immediately get a list of all the traffic on that topic ( has any of the same from/to addresses ). or i should be able to open the address book, type in the first few letters of an address, pick and highlight the address and click filter -- and get all the traffic to/from that person
I am surprised at companies willingness to go with a Domino/Notes. It would be one thing if the application suite were rich and nice to use, but it isn't and webapps have in the meantime improved to have less awkwardness than Notes. I don't like acceptance of Exchange/Outlook (extreme vendor-lockin, significant cost), but at least the client isn't horrible.
I'm surprised open-standards based applications haven't gotten more traction. IMAP, CalDAV, and Jabber are decent protocols for their respective fields, but people still use Domino, Exchange, Sametime, and MS Communicator and volunteer for vendor lock-in.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The problem is a lot of what you heard and read, especially here is horribly out of date and incorrect.
Try finding out what version they are complaining about. Odds on it is R5/R6 codestreams which are 8 years old at least. It is a lot like the people go on about Java being slow then basing that argument back in the 1.2/1.3 JVMs.
R8 has Java5 client (with JNI interfaces to NSF stuff), supports widgets/RCP plugins/comp apps and the server supports all the stuff you crave fine like web interfaces, web services, etc. So you don't even need the client to connect to the server except for administration purposes if you wish.
btw. Outlook is not groupware.
A few months ago, Notes 7 on Linux took 3GB hard disk space and 1GB RAM. I wonder if this is still the case. If so, IBM won't have customers using Linux flocking to Notes, or vice versa.
Why would a company want to spend precious developer time modifying someone elses software which has little or nothing to do with their core business? It makes more sense to spend money buying a solution in and use your developers to write the things they are supposed to be writing .
Besides, if I make modifications to an application for internal use, I'm going to have to make those changes for every release. The chances are those changes would not be accepted into the core source tree in a form that made them immediately useful to me even if I submitted them, so in the next release I'd still have to spend effort altering things to do what I want.
However,i've never used Lotus Notes personally.They might well provide some functionality that would make the decision to buy it worthwhile. Problem with modified versions is long-term support. You need someone to come in for maybe four weeks a year to keep your modifications up to date with recent releases of the source project.
Notes offers an application platform as well, which you wouldn't get with what you suggest. You can go with server-side stuff (pretty much everything I've seen in Notes could have done that); if you really want client-side code, you should best go with Java or Mono.
I was forced to use Lotus Notes (6.x, followed by 7.x) for almost two years, while on a contract job with the big eye-bee-emm. I thought I disliked Microsoft Outlook, but man, Notes was God-awful!
That said, I would trade in my Windows XP + MS Office OS on my work notebook, for Linux and Lotus Notes in a heartbeat. Even better if it had the whole Lotus SmartSuite installed.
Not much chance of that though. My company uses a plethora of operating systems on its servers (micro, mid-range and mainframes), but the desktop is pretty much glued to MS.
No matter where you go... there you are.
Facts first:
.0 release.
/. community just looks like a bunch of sheep being led around without thought on. This is one of those knee-jerk reaction topics. Bitching about Notes from years past is about as easy as declaring "First Post" -- and about as useful.
1. If your experience with Notes does not include significant time spent with version 6.5 or later, your experience is as invalid as talking about Apple with your experience limited to using a Mac SE. Move on.
2. 6.5 - 7.0x are largely incremental improvements from an end-user perspective with gains mainly in performance and manageability on both client and workstation. Sure, there are some better UI things in 7.x than 6.5.x but generally they're not earth shattering.
3. 8.0 is the first release built on the Eclipse framework (which IBM calls Expediter), and while it adds a few new features it doesn't really capitalize on that framework much. Its a lot more overhead and represents huge potential but for the most part end users aren't seeing it yet. It also isn't on that many desktops yet. Its too new, and its a
4. 8.0.1 is where you start to see the benefit of running on the eclipse framework from an end user perspective and 8.5 will be a very long overdue blessing and relief for developers.
5. By moving to the Eclipse framework, IBM is now able to deliver full parity on the Macintosh operating systems this year (beta is out there now) as well as full parity on Linux desktops (they'll support Ubuntu, but it will RUN on many).
6. The BIGGEST benefit of moving to the Eclipse framework is that vendors of add-on products and high end developers can now do virtually anything in terms of both UI and FUNCTION up to and including a complete re-skinning of the client. With 8.5 the designer will also be that open. This removes a huge problem for ISV's since day 1. You can't sell a tool for the classic Notes client for real money because your stuck with the same UI available to the crappy code your I.T. department is putting out. No matter how good it is, it looks the same. That's over now. I've already seen amazingly graphical UI approaches from vendors that support graphical representations of data and gesture based controls.
---- now for an opinion or two:
There are only two real competitors in the ENTERPRISE mail and collaboration space. Microsoft (Exchange+outlook+vs.net+sharepoint+communications server+sql server+active directory+IIS) and IBM (Notes+Domino+Sametime). IBM has some variations on that theme as well (Portal - for connecting all that crap you have that doesn't natively talk to your other crap - Quicr, Connections, etc.). If you want enterprise class tools, those two choices represent more than 90% of the market. You can pick the Microsoft stack, in which case you must use all of it, all the time, and upgrade all at once when you upgrade any of it. Linux is totally unsupported, and Mac gets grade-b reluctant support. You can pick the IBM stack and run almost anyone's hardware, operating system, network, and tools or a mixture of all of them.
The IBM stack fully supports both Mac and Linux, and IBM has funded and continues to fund hundreds of full time positions doing all their work on fully open source projects (like Eclipse). What exactly, do you find wrong with that?
You don't like the way it looks? They've opened the UI now. Make it look like anything you want. You can use half a dozen languages to do it.
There are some things that the
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
You know that's what somebody at IBM is thinking.
OK, I guess. But it's hardly Office for linux.
A fifteen-year old platform carries a log of legacy baggage. I work as a sysadmin for a prestigious and well-known publishing firm. Their Lotus Notes infrastructure has been neglected for years, and we are now in the midst of significant upgrades. I spend a lot of time explaining how the IBM/Lotus Notes and Domino platform (ND8) is not simply the old Notes client with a sparkling GUI and new features. And, finally, I'm starting to see daylight with Quick8, Sametime8, the upgraded AIX, Windows, and Linux Domino servers. Supported clients are IMAP, POP3 (still have some who insist on it), Notes R5, ND6, ND7, ND8 for Macintosh and Windows 2000, XP and Vista.
I wrote up an article summarizing why I think Notes 8 is a Linux Killer-App (a few months old, and it already needs to be updated): http://www.asktheadmin.com/2007/07/ibm-lotus-notes-8-is-linux-killer.html
Ubuntu Notes is a game change. A fully extensible Linux collaboration client supported on FOSS. Thank you, IBM.
I do I only have mod points when I don't need them?
This is factual and insightful.
a version of Linux.
Yes, it will run on "a version of Linux" but it will be supported for Ubuntu. That is to say, they will probably distribute it as a *.deb package customised to fit into the way Ubuntu is set up.Actually Lotus Notes is light years ahead of Outlook/Exchange, but of course that doesn't say much because Outlook isn't very good groupware to begin with. The thing that people don't realize is that Lotus Notes is a fantastic rapid application development product. I can make a groupware application in 30 minutes that would take 6 months to a year to do in Outlook/Exchange/.NET and it still would not have the features of the notes application, for example: Integrated search in every view, Integrated replication, Easy customization, Every application is also a web application, Integrated logging, Integrated access control down to a field level, Integrated Offline capabilites and so on.
I'll admit that the email client that comes with Lotus Notes is not very good, but that is not because Notes is not very good, it's just that the IBM developers that create the email client are not very good developers, it would be possible to have the email client look exactly like Outlook.
But since Notes comes with POP and IMAP support out of the box, you can always just use the email client of your choice.
I think you've heard and read wrong. I've recently become IT Manager for my company after about five years as Sysadmin and my Notes/Domino environment (on Linux) has always been the least of my worries -- it just runs. I also have web applications and the two platforms compliment each other nicely. Web apps are great for the relational side, but Domino/Notes handles the "non-structured" stuff -- email, forms, CAD/CAM drawings, document libraries, contacts for customers and suppliers, etc. It also has excellent workflow, replication, security, and support. In my experience, people who have crappy Notes/Domino situations usually don't know how to plan and administer the product properly. With the new Eclipse-based Release 8, you can develop portalized or composite apps integrating relational and Notes information onto the same screen, and the user can't tell (or doesn't even care) which platform the information came from. You can also now run Notes on a flash drive or an iPhone. It ain't your grandaddy's Lotus Notes anymore.
I am not saying that Notes is perfect. There are numerous applications that have surpassed it in specific areas (especially UI). I agree that the overall design (especially for anything prior to v8) is so '90s. But in a large corporation landscape you will really have a hard time finding something that covers it all and is not a nightmare to support/integrate.
...what is it about Eclipse that makes it so slow? I gave the Lotus Symphony thing a try and thought - nice beginning, but if you can't make it faster, this isn't going to fly. (yes, fast dual-core processor - lots of memory - is 1GB still 'lots'?)
.NET, for that matter) might make sense as a way to deliver binary portable apps in a vertial market where apps are very complex and constantly changing. Binary portability would be a huge boon to developers in such cases, assuming the vendor cares about portability in the first place. But for traditional productivity apps, I think the QT portability model probably works better. Those kinds of apps are more self-contained, typically more mature, and (let's face it) are competing with native apps (on the major platforms, at least).
Is it Java? Is it the size of the toolkit? Or, in the case of Symphony, is it the fact that under all that bloat, you have the bloat of OpenOffice? OpenOffice (2.3, at least) is much snappier, though. I can forgive OpenOffice its long load times, since it's not noticeably sluggish once it's started. But Symphony takes forever to start and is then sluggish once its (admittedly pretty) interface is up and running. And it's compounded by their ambitious sidebar thing, which flips as you change context moving around your document, but doesn't keep up with your movements. Ends up being a distraction instead of a powerful interface paradigm (actually, I think it might even be distracting even if it did keep up).
I thought the point of Eclipse was, unlike Swing, to implement the toolkit natively on each platform. If so, it sounds like a great idea. Am I just seeing an interim step toward a toolkit that will eventually work like that?
I've even tried using the Eclipse IDE as a programmer's editor to work on unix source code from a Windows desktop via Samba. Admittedly overkill, but it was free, my company was slow in agreeing to pay for a commercial editor, and I was getting tired of vim (vim, unlike vi, is really slow for some reason on my old AIX box). Eclipse was better than I expected for this purpose (one of my programmers still uses and likes it), but no better than vim over telnet for my tastes. I'm actually hopeful at the prospect of using kate once KDE apps on Windows are stable.
Anyway, I digress. I applaud IBM for its support of Linux for its desktop applications. I'm just afraid that relying on Eclipse to do it might be a mistake. If only IBM would buy Trolltech, switch QT to the LGPL and open up another, perhaps more viable, option.
A final thought. Java, Eclipse (and
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Care to elaborate?
Lotus Notes "Integrate OSS Apps" -- well, Symphony=OpenOffice+IBM and that's fully integrated. The software supports almost every standard in existence that's even remotely related to what it does (ldap, imap, pop, smtp, xml, html, css, javascript, java, odbc --and yes, on linux too, nntp, corba, webdev, and who know what all else).
Also, its Eclipse. It supports Eclipse Plug ins. Write one. Plug in anything you want.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
>So what alternative collaboration 'set-up' would people here recommend to their would-be Linux clients who raise the subject of Lotus Notes? PROFS
1011 1010 1101 1100 0000 1111 1111 1110 1110
Could it be because it prevents you from mod'ing up things you agree with, and mod'ing down things you don't without regard to their value as part of the conversation? You're not voting for a side in an argument when you mod. You're trying to increase the visibility of interesting and valuable information while lowering the visibility of crap. So far in this thread, you've only increased the latter.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
There are two products I use to kill notes and restart it without having to manually kill the tasks. One is called ZapNotes, the other is called KillNotes. Both work great. http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/0/8aa14311cb0c51c388256aa400804e4e http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/0/7b70d2411b8dec9688256acb005c433f
From what I have allways heard and read - also in this thread - Lotus Notes is about the crappiest of Groupwares right behind Outlook/Exchange. A nighmare to maintain and operate, close to SAP in it's fatness and stuck in the early ninties in terms of usability.
You forgot to mention it's more expensive than Outlook/Exchange per-seat. Almost twice as much, as of a couple years ago. Oh, and no portable PDAs or cellphones support it natively, meaning you have to buy more expensive licenses from IBM to sync your execs. And it crashes at least twice as much as Outlook, except when Notes crashes you have to reboot your entire computer to restart it. And out-of-office messages take something around 4 hours to get turned on, and another 4 hours to get turned back off. And it's possible to create and share calendar items that end before they begin, which instantly crashes any PDA/cellphone you're trying to sync with it. It took until version 6 to get a marker to know when you've replied to an email, and it still doesn't support a mousewheel on all scrollbars. It's mail sorting is confusing and un-intuitive and leads to a lot of lost mail. (It doesn't copy a message when you move it to a folder, it makes a reference to the original. So if you delete the original message, all your filed messages disappear as well.)
And if you complain about it's terrible, terrible groupware performance, the robots at IBM just repeat like parrots: "It's not a groupware product! It's not a groupware product!" This is despite it defaulting to being a groupware product and being sold as a groupware product and 95% of users using it solely as a groupware product. Thus they have a free "out" for anybody who complains about anything.
I had to support that beast of a program once. Now I ask if they use Lotus Notes in the interview, and if they say "yes," I walk out. The program is that bad.
But your comment implies there are other groupware products out there...? Is Novell's GroupWise still around, because that's the only solution I can think of other than Outlook/Notes. So being "right behind" Outlook isn't necessarily a bad thing. (Look, I know this is Slashdot, but anybody who's used both programs has to admit that Outlook isn't just a little better than Notes, it's miles above the competition. For one thing, Outlook actually works.)
Comment of the year
Well I dunno, start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Notes perhaps. Notes is very powerful and hardly comparable to an IM client.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Unless the moronic company you work for turns off the support for RFC-based protocols (apparently on the brilliant grounds that they open and therefore insecure).
I've consistantly had the experience.
I must ask, what version and what platform are you running notes on, for comparison? I've had the experience on my laptop (Ubuntu, dual core, but not that special) and my overpowered workstation (running RHWS5.1). Are you talking about opening notes8 after already running it (i.e. memory resident, or at the very least resident in disk cache the ludicrous amount of data it wants to pull from disk?).
Load time aside, what is the latency for clicking on a calendar entry to the time it is displayed? It doesn't sound like much if you put it to numbers, but it takes the better part of a second to a couple of seconds for me in notes to have the results after clicking. Same with doing mail operations. I can do many operations in evolution, and even if the mail server is in the picture and sluggish, the UI is immediately responsive, lets you continue, and intuitively denotes a queued deletion operation, for example, with strikethrough text.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think saying 90% live in it is an overstatement.
-A good chunk (more than 10%) of notes users only ever touch email and calendaring. I would guess on personal experience, a great majority are in this camp, but won't absolutely claim it.
-Even looking beyond to companies that actual use the bits of Notes that are kind of unique (for the most part web applications without the web), I would bet a vast majority of those users do day to day work outside of notes, and use notes for the occasional internal application (maybe time card, putting documents into a database that's more awkward than a simple file share without real benefit). Bringing in OpenOffice raises it somewhat (I think I'd need to change jobs if I 'lived' in office applications), but beyond file save and load integrated into notes, it just slows down OpenOffice.
The problem is that Lotus software appears to shrug off significant memory utilization, storage utilization, and startup performance. Like you, they seem to think theirs is the only set of applications that matter, and that a computers entire point in life is to run their application suite and a user should only use it too. As such, why not suck up the memory and have ungodly load times? The truth is Notes is not my OS, it is not my 'desktop environment', it is an application. Even at its most ambitious, it is peer to a web browser. No web browser dares to have the general performance characteristics of a Lotus application, despite having a much closer to legitimate (but would still not be) claim to having typical users 'living' in their application.
Even putting aside those assumptions, running only notes and leaving it up all the time, it's still a sluggish application UI wise compared with the competition. This is even giving the benefit of client stored replica. Evolution connected to a slow IMAP server is obvious, but not grating. It immediately responds UI wise with obvious visual queues that it's interacting with the server, but allowing you to use other bits of the app while that happens. I.e., hit delete in notes, the app hangs until the server or file operation completes. Do the same in evolution, poof, the operation is denoted with strikethrough text and you go about your business while the 'heavy' lifting takes place, cleanly updating the UI on true completion by removing the entry.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You said: "Unless they completely dumped their windowing model and overhauled their form display, it's still crap."
What part of "They've moved the entire thing into Eclipse, are using Eclipse as its windowing manager, and have opened the entire UI for developers of applications" are you not understanding?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"I think saying 90% live in it is an overstatement. -A good chunk (more than 10%) of notes users only ever touch email and calendaring. I would guess on personal experience, a great majority are in this camp, but won't absolutely claim it.
I can almost agree here, except to say that anyone using the full Notes client for nothing but mail and calendaring is wasting it and wasting a lot of time resources without getting their money's worth. I could go grocery shopping in a 24' dock height box truck, but it really isn't necessary.
-Even looking beyond to companies that actual use the bits of Notes that are kind of unique (for the most part web applications without the web), I would bet a vast majority of those users do day to day work outside of notes, and use notes for the occasional internal application (maybe time card, putting documents into a database that's more awkward than a simple file share without real benefit).
Here you lose me. I'm sorry to hear its your experience, but it just isn't a good representation. Comparing what can be done in a Notes app with what can be built on the web is a very poor comparison and only valid for badly written corporate apps. Notes is powerful stuff, and easy to develop for. The downside to that is that any idiot can write a bad Notes app. You still need developer skills to write good ones, and good developers still need to understand the platform to write good apps. Just like anything else. If anything, the problem of apps in companies tends to be too many, not too few.
Bringing in OpenOffice raises it somewhat (I think I'd need to change jobs if I 'lived' in office applications), but beyond file save and load integrated into notes, it just slows down OpenOffice.
The reality is that most users do live in office applications and email. Not most I.T. workers writing code, but the vast hordes who take up all those cubicles and offices doing their marketing, sales, human resources, and whatever else end users busy themselves with that ends up generating the revenue to support our much more important I.T. industry selves do live in email and calendaring and meetings and office applications pretty much all day long. Microsoft calls them "Knowledge Workers", and understands their desktop preferences very very well.
The problem is that Lotus software appears to shrug off significant memory utilization, storage utilization, and startup performance.
Again, need to call you back on this one. Lotus has shown greater than 40% increase in the number of concurrent users that can be managed on a server at each version. They're showing a 35% decrease in storage space and a corresponding I/O performance gain in version 8.0.1 over any previous version. They're showing another 35% decrease is likely with new features in the 8.5 server due out this year. On the client side, the move to 8.0 does have a BIG performance hit. They agree that it does, and as such have release an 8.0 version that doesn't use the new UI framework for users who don't want that hit. There is a HUGE gain in capability in 8.0 that won't really be visible for 6-9 months at least because apps aren't built to use it yet. The good news in this space is that by the time the really cool driving applications for upgrade are hitting screens, average PC speeds will have made the difference up. I realize that's a tired old argument -- but its true. Making things pretty and slick, easy and rich, take massive amounts of power and space. That's why gaming machines are so much more expensive than work machines.
Like you, they seem to think theirs is the only set of applications that matter, and that a computers entire point in life is to run their application suite and a user should only use it too. As such, why not suck up the memory and have ungodly load times?
Actually, my own software, Second Signal, uses Domino
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
For whoever tagged this "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" *(I just about pissed myself laughing).
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Every enterprise uses Exchange/Outlook or Domino/Notes for a set of reasons, and those reasons show the huge gulf between your requirements and theirs.
(I don't mean to be rude when saying that, although I know it may sound rude. I'm merely trying to aid understanding.)
Enterprises require:
* Someone to yell at when it goes wrong. (Support)
* Assistance in edge cases for integration, scaling or extreme usage. (Consultancy)
* An ability to demonstrate ROI, TCO, and other items on the acronym bingo playing card. (Economics)
* Demonstrations, through real-world studies of implementations at a similar scale, that the software works. (Assurance)
* The knowledge that the software will continue to work (or with minimal effort can be made to continue to work) during most circumstances. (Reliability)
* The ability to keep up with their amazing double-digit growth as a company. (Scalability)
There's more, and it often involves politics and strategies, but those are the basics.
By contrast, you require something you can get working within an hour and have a personal liking of. Sometimes, because you're a geek (and don't try to deny that when you're posting on slashdot! - we're both geeks!), you're happy to spend longer trying to get something to work. That's because you're enjoying it. But if it was costing you time/money, would you persevere?
Whether or not Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes really do tick all of the boxes is moot. They certainly tick more of them than anything else on the marketplace. There are no serious commercial competitors when you go above 10,000 seats. Open Source software provides some components that can tick all boxes (MTAs, for example) but for most software the support, consultancy, assurance, and scalability are all lacking (or, in the case of scalability, awaiting proof at these magnitudes).
Enterprise software is an odd thing. It's not evaluated in the same way you would for 1, 10 or 100 workstations. At 1,000 workstations, you're beginning to see that the Enterprise model makes sense, despite the effort and conservatism it brings. At 10,000 workstations, you'd be insane not to look at working like an Enterprise...
I hope that helps!
Everyone seems to be focusing on Notes, but I have some big gripes with Symphony. I loaded it thinking that it would be a good way of going with an "OpenOffice.org" application that supported Lotus WordPro imports (as my company currently is standardized on WordPro). I quickly found out that Symphony takes over the file extensions for OpenDocument and OpenOffice files. There's no setting to turn this off either. Every time you start the application, it changes your file associations. This behavior was a show stopper for me. Even in an beta, file association changes should be optional, not forced onto the user at each application start.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Working for IBM we have access to an internal repository which has a nicely packaged deb of Notes client. It just works on my stock Ubuntu install laptop.
I have, in the past, worked at IBM. They've had Notes 8 running on Ubuntu internally for quite some time now. It wasn't ready for release, but it works very well.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
Why does this news feel too late for me to get excited? Just about every enterprise level-app from oracle to you know what, has been running on linux. People need to go back to the pre-fedora days when redhat 9 was practically the enterprise version. And everything was pushed onto the platform.
wow, now Lotus Notes users can be victimized on Linux
Linux has arrived, welcome to hell
all kidding aside, regardless of the quality of Notes this is really good news for Linux
To be fair, Outlook/Exchange isnt a Groupware platform anymore. SharePoint is, and you could do the same things that you mentioned, in SharePoint. Office+SharePoint+Exchange+Outlook+.Net is the MSFT story.
And I cringe whenever I hear "groupware" or "collaborative" applications. Yes sir, we dont need no steenkin design, data model, modularity, unit tests, anything!
A groupware platform is for groups; end-users, non-technical folks to collaborate on. When somebody decides to write a full-blown application on top of it, it's as useful as an Excel macro or Access application. Maybe useful at the start, but becomes a maintenance nightmare.
But will it run on my killbot?
I think instead of the HL and UT engines you mean UT-kinda and Carmack's engine; ET:QW is the game I play most these days, and it's so brilliant not to have to reboot into Windows to play a game! All the iD-related (ie. made by them or by close studios) also run on Linux, which is actually the reason why I ran/played Quake 4 (or, as I call it, the Single Player Game That Halo Should Have Been). The UT engine can entirely run on Linux, up to and including the latest version, but UT3 is being held back by licensing issues with an unnamed third-party piece of middleware so it isn't publically available; another example of where it's not even remotely technical issues holding up commercial applications from running on Linux, it's corporate and copyright issues.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I highly doubt that Sharepoint is at the same level as Notes in terms of functionality. The declarative security model and data replication are one of the most amazing things in notes. You don't have to "program" in the security you just declare it and it just works everywhere.
A groupware application is of course is no different from any other application you still need to design, test and have a data model although lotus notes data model isn't a relational one you still have to have some kind of data model even if it is only in your head.
Lotus Notes is a groupware platform, where you can build applications on top. What this means is that you can have data flow from two different applications and they can mix together in either application. The applications don't have to be specially programmed to interface with each other. Documents from one application can flow into the other one and be displayed in it's views.
Yup, sounds like Notes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yes Groupwise is alive and well. My last company switched from Groupwise 6.5 to Notes 7. Using Notes after Groupwise was a tremendous shock for the oth the users and the email admins. Awful interface, slow, and unnecessarily complicated. Groupwise is light years ahead of Notes in terms of reliability and ease of management. However, Groupwise is not a development environment like Notes.
Self awareness - try it!
This is such great news! I can't wait to hate Lotus Notes on Linux as much as I hate it on Windows!
I'm not an expert on this particular subject (e-mail/messaging/workflow systems). But a number of other high-profile OSS projects, such as Linux and Apache, scale well beyond typical enterprise-class workloads. I'm curious whether the e-mail/messaging/workflow problem poses scalability issues not encountered elsewhere, or perhaps whether it's simply an itch that OSS developers simply have not yet found a need to scratch. Or maybe neither of the above. What would be your take on that?
For what it's worth, I don't see it as a hard problem, especially compared to many others that the OSS community have solved well. But like I said, I'm not an expert. Maybe I'm missing something.
Nonaggression works!
Soon, I will be able to covertly wipe my work laptop and install Linux with nobody being any wiser. I just need to find the ever-elusive Ubuntu 7.0 ISO.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
When Adobe allowed FrameMaker to escape there were lots of library problems. I managed to get it to run under Redhat 6 and 7, and Fedora Core 3. It wouldn't run under 4. Seg fault. It runs under 6.
One of the 'virtues' of Microsloth is that degree of backward compatibility that seems to work a lot of the time.
One of the virtues of unix systems generally is that libraries can be in use by multiple programs at once with only one copy loaded.
If every application has to include a full set of libraries, then you to the winsnooze model.
How does a commercial vendor work it so that their application can run on many distributions of linux?
My ideas:
1. The application starts from a script. The script uses a library search path that checks the application library directory first.
2. The installer checks the libaries it knows that it needs. Perhaps even a 'hello world' program that uses every library call that the main program uses to see if the results are sane.
3. For those libraries it needs but aren't in the main systems libraries, it installs known working copies in the application library folder.
4. As an alternative the vendor provides an open source 'shim' library for all of it's application's calls. Because this part is open source, the translation and recompilation can be left in the hands of the groups that want it, with the vendor responding to demand by providing shims for the more common distributions.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
There may be many issues with Notes (html rendering on older versions, etc), but this isn't one of them. The way notes handles views/folders is vastly superior to Outlook and other programs that just dump documents into folders. How much intelligence does it take for users to understand that if you delete a document it is deleted?
It's the lacking of an entire, cohesive package.
(I'll not discuss Linux - it's not groupware or even a component of it! Even though I'm typing this from within Ubuntu, I'm not sure it fits in this discussion. An OS isn't groupware, and should be kept out of it in order to keep clarity and focus... I'm also going to ignore issues like being able to offer consultancy, training, international and multilingual support. I'm just focusing, as I think you wanted me too, on technology and community.)
OSS can indeed step up to the plate and deliver many parts of a groupware solution. Apache can be your web server. PHP (or Perl or Python) could be your application framework language, providing you could beef up an existing framework and CMS with better and more generic workflow APIs. (and probably cron/anacron and some kind of event system to pitch in too.) PostgreSQL can be your storage system (MySQL's replication seems to primitive to be selected currently). Exim (or sendmail or postfix) could be your MTA, and procmail your MDA. Evolution or Thunderbird/Sunbird (when Sunbird's ready) can be your email and PIM client. Firefox, especially with its XUL technology, would make an interesting application platform for those apps served by Apache.
Clustering would be harder to accomplish, as you're talking the failover kind of clustering rather than the parallel processing kind of clustering. And I'm sure a search engine for large volumes of data exists, but I'm not aware of its name. (Nor how you could easily scale it down to the client end for offline working.)
Google Gears could supply offline working for your apps, when it leaves beta.
So many (although possibly not all) aspects of groupware could be done via OSS applications. And many of those OSS applications are proven, reliable, scalable ones too.
So what's the advantage of Domino/Notes (as an example)?
I configure my servers in one interface. That's a big advantage. I don't have to be an expert in ten applications that are already broad in their own domains, and have been shoehorned into one "package". I just need to be an expert in one broad platform, through one interface.
How many people do you know that are experts - real, genuine, "could write columns on it or maybe even a book" experts - on the following:
* Apache
* {PHP|Python|Perl}
* $framework + $CMS
* cron/anacron
* PostgreSQL
* {Exim|postfix|sendmail}
* procmail
* {Evolution|(Thunderbird+Sunbird))
* Firefox
* Google Gears
* Some kind of search engine
Worldwide, that's maybe 100,000 people. If we're (remarkably) generous, perhaps 250,000. Now pick just ONE for each of the options we presented, and watch those figures drop like a stone. You might still have a thousand or two experts, but they're often employed in one specific area (web development, DB admin, sysadmin) and have no practical experience of grouping together all those products as one _simple_ package.
And being a simple package is important. As I alluded to earlier, I can configure a Domino server using one client, and almost all the configuration is stored in one database (the system directory, also used for user authentication and group memberships). That's a significant jump in ease of administration and therefore a drop in TCO. Yet, for the purposes of groupware, very little flexibility is lost. Very little indeed.
Even for the Microsoft stack, there's at least a fairly cohesive administration interface across all the applications. And the terminology is the same, the background and concepts are the same... It's a simple point, but a powerful one when you're looking for _A_ groupware solution. (Not a bundle of solutions that happen to be configured at this moment for groupware.)
Frankly, businesses aren't fools. They've been sold "multiple product" solutions in the past, and been burnt on them. Enterprises especially. If OSS wanted to enter the market - or more likely, if someone wanted to enter the market using OS
>Lotus Notes is about the crappiest of Groupwares right behind Outlook/Exchange
That isn't saying much, at least not about the Outlook part. Exchange is actually pretty cutting edge, but with a pile of dung as a client. I'd almost (note I said, almost) argue that Outlook isn't really even a groupware client.
>Give the traction Linux and OSS in general has gained in professional businesses
>I doupt that this is needed.
It is needed if you have a Domino/Notes server. People who actually *USE* groupware can't exactly switch at the drop of a hat. Groupware servers contains tons of critical information.
>If it helps Lotus Notes shops migrate easyer - all the better. But I'm recommending
>all my business customers to stear clear of any proprietary thick-client-server
> groupware. Given the state of rich internet applications and web-based solutions
>nowadays the concept strickes me as totally backwards.
Then I'm assuming your clients don't actually need [or understand they need, more often the case] groupware. The "state of rich internet applications" is pretty bad, and obviously they can never provide offline access to data [very critical in most parts of the world]. Most "rich internet applications" are PIM, not groupware.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Thank you. That makes sense, but it also suggests a possible solution, given sufficient demand (which I have to think must exist). The same problem used to exist for Linux and Linux apps maybe 10-15 years ago. People could find, download, compile and install the kernel, and gcc, and emacs, and X, and whatnot; but getting all of those things integrated and working together was a big problem, until Yggdrasil and Slackware and other Linux distributions came along to not only simplify the process, but, equally importantly, test to ensure that the various pieces of the software ecosystem worked well together. Perhaps a similar approach would work here. As a distributed systems developer I routinely write "glue" that ties together disparate components, often on different platforms, with different character sets, etc., to produce a consistent and unified result. It's a slightly different problem than this one, but not drastically so. I really do think it is solvable.
Nonaggression works!
>Why would a company want to spend precious developer time modifying someone elses
> software which has little or nothing to do with their core business?
Don't. That isn't what the comment suggest, nor is it the Open Source model.
>It makes more sense to spend money buying a solution in and use your developers
>to write the things they are supposed to be writing.
Build on existing solutions as was suggested. This is what we have done with OpenGroupware, the core (all the hard work) is done, we just built the part we needed.
>Besides, if I make modifications to an application for internal use, I'm going to
>have to make those changes for every release
Nope, that isn't the Open Source model. Changes you make to the core app get sent upstream and are packaged in the next release. This is actually how most Open Source code gets developed. Again, we've done that with OpenGroupware and everyone is happy.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
>Problem with modified versions is long-term support. You need someone to come
>in for maybe four weeks a year to keep your modifications up to date with recent
>releases of the source project.
The Open Source model is to send your patches, fixes, enhancements upstream and then they are tested and packaged in the next release. I work on Open Source projects in this manner and everyone wins.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
I'm noticing that every discussion I've ever about Lotus Notes over the past eight years or so has read more-ore-less exactly the same: Detractors complain that it is slow, bloated, hard-to-use, and has a crazy UI. Supporters say the detractors are basing their opinions on outdated versions of the software, and things are much improved in recent releases. Kinda strange how the same complaints have the same rebuttals year after year. It's almost as if nothing has changed.
(I honestly have no idea what recent Notes is like. I haven't touched Notes since 4.something. I know it sucked rocks back then, but heck, there was a time I had to boot my PC from floppy, too. But I can't help but notice that the only thing that has changed in the fan/foe discussions since then is the version number.)
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Yeah, this is solvable. As a glue writer, you know that OSS is in the final 10% stage rather - which doesn't mean it's easy, but does mean it's doable.
:-)
Once the package is there, it's a matter of having the support/consultancy/reference installations - which don't come overnight. Hence my suggestion of going for the smaller organisations.
It'd be good to have more competition in this arena, so here's hoping it happens soon.