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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.
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!?
It's been said every year for almost ten years, so can we call it the decade of Linux on the desktop instead?
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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.
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
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.
Actually, they just announced at Lotussphere that for Notes 8.5, they are working on an Eclipse-based Designer, which then would be quite simple to also make available on other platforms than Windows... So it's very likely going to happen.
In the mean time, as far as I know, it's possible to run Designer under Wine.
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
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.
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.
...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...
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.
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