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Baltimore Police Department Is Still Using Lotus Notes (baltimoresun.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the blast-from-the-past dept.

swm writes: The Baltimore police department is still using an antiquated (1996) case-management system based on Lotus notes. A recent technology assessment found "millions of records and roughly 150 databases built into the system, each designed to address different unit and personnel needs," reports Baltimore Sun. The report found that the "siloed nature of the Lotus Notes databases made it difficult for officers to match, verify or search for information. [...] Various systems may also contain 'conflicting information' about the same case, or may not reflect the most complete information."

"At the same time, detectives continue compiling and using paper case folders," the report stated. "Depending on the unit and the detective, the appropriate Lotus Notes database and/or hard copy case folder system may or may not be up-to-date, and the systems may or may not match." The consultant who is paid to maintain the system says that it is "working wonderfully for the police." Despite these concerns that the assessment addressed, Baltimore's spending panel agreed to pay $176,800 to the consultant to help maintain the outdated system. The police department's chief spokesperson said in a statement Thursday that the agency will be moving away from Lotus Notes in the future. "However, until such time, we must manage and maintain the product that we currently use which is Lotus Notes," he said.

8 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Anyone report a robbery by jsepeta · · Score: 4, Funny

    suspect calls himself a "consultant"

    --
    Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
  2. Lotus Notes is amazing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After working 20 years in IT, I can honestly say there is nothing to compare to Lotus Notes and its simplistic and powerful way it works. This is why its still there. The only reason it is not currently top dog, is because exchange came along in the late 90s and outlook was better than the Lotus Mail client. Anyone trying to tell me sharepoint is good has rocks in their head, its bloated and requires way to much training and development to make it anywhere near an out of the box Lotus Notes install.

    1. Re:Lotus Notes is amazing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      "outlook was better than the Lotus Mail client"
      ANYTHING would be better than the Lotus mail client. Kids shooting wadded-up paper notes as spitwads through straws would be better. I was forced to use Lotus Notes for about a year and still shudder. The UI was obtuse. It was feature-poor and slow, painfully slow, to deliver messages. It was unstable. It was bad in every way that software can be bad. We ended up using the telephone a lot more than a modern software operation should, because e-mail was so bad. Whoever programmed it should be shot.

      I never used Notes for anything other than e-mail, but that experience would make me run screaming from the rest of it. It's very hard to square your "nothing to compare" observation with my experience.

    2. Re:Lotus Notes is amazing. by Nethead · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm running 30,000 users all over the globe on IBM Domino (it hasn't been Lotus for two decades.) It is interesting but I must say there are some really cool things about it. Think of it this way, Exchange is a mail program that tries to be a database. Domino is a database program that tries to be a mail server. With Domino, email is just one way to use it. It's data replication between hosts over the WAN is like nothing Exchange could do. Domino was designed in the 90s when intermittent dial-up between hosts was the common solution. I have about 100 servers sitting in Tunisia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, all the EU, US and even Canada. They all talk together and share the same address book and master config.

      So yes, now that we have been bought by another larger French aerospace company, we will be moving to some form of Exchange. It will still take years to get out from under all the applications so I'm sure I'm good until retirement in about 10 years.

      But don't knock Domino until you have really looked at it. Did you know it runs on Unix and Linux? IBM supports it on the AS4000 so do you want to talk about uptime?

      --
      -- I have a private email server in my basement.
  3. sounds like a bargain by albeit+unknown · · Score: 4, Insightful

    $176k to keep it working? It will cost them $176 Million to replace it, resulting a similar level of hassles, errors, and inconsistencies as before. Just different ones.

    Most or all of the problems in the article have no relationship to the fact that the software helping to support the bureaucracy is Notes. The detectives use of paper case files won't magically go away just because the software is replaced. Also, just perhaps, they Know What They're Doing, and paper has valuable or required chain-of-evidence advantages?

    Isn't almost everything else of its ilk "decades old" (never mind still in active development like Notes)

  4. Re:Ewwww... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You couldn't pay me enough to manage Lotus Notes. It appears there are ways to migrate Notes apps to MS SharePoint, but you can bet it would be a painful, expensive nightmare.

    Are you referring to the migration itself, or the fact that afterward you’re stuck using Sharepoint?

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  5. Is this a Microsoft Ad ? by martiniturbide · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lotus Domino / Notes works fine and is supported by IBM.
    1) Latest version is Domino 9.0.1 (server) and Notes 9.01 (Client) released on 2016 . Now you can use Domino apps on cloud and IBM Collaboration cloud for mail. There is no end of support for Lotus Notes 9.0 listed yet (https://www-01.ibm.com/software/support/lifecycleapp)
    2) Notes 9.0.1 Fixpack 10IF3 was released on 2018/05/21
    3) The article does not says which version of Lotus Notes are they using.
    4) If you don't like using Lotus Notes, the same mail and nsf applications can be turned into web applications.
    5) Domino applications are very easy to create and maintain.
    6) Lotus Notes was designed by Ray Ozzie. Even Bill Gates said he was one the greatest software architects.
    7) Microsoft has done a great job thrashing everybody that uses Lotus Notes, just like they did with OS/2 users.

  6. Lotus Notes gets a bad rep. by kbg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I worked with Lotus Notes for many years and although its far from perfect it was actually maybe 30 years ahead of it's time. Most of the negative comes from people who don't understand what Lotus Notes is and/or think that the included email client is Lotus Notes. Which I agree was not very good and could have been improved drastically.

    Lotus Notes is basically just a non relational database with a lot of build in core support for access control and replication. People are using NoSQL, Mongo and other non relational databasee and think that this is something new. This has been in Lotus Notes from the start. The Lotus Notes client software is basically just like the web browser is today with the app running completely in the browser.

    What is great about Lotus Notes are the included features out of the box. It's basiaclly just a rapid application development software for data. The offline synchronizing and replication of data is amazing really. Because although you can implement replication in any system the replication system is built in and can handle replication for everything. So any system you build, automatically has data replication. The security is also built in with fine grained control to individual fields built in.

    I could build for example a complete working CRM system in just one hour that had offline editing, replication and synchronization of data, fine grained access control, both fat client and web client enabled with zero code changes, Workflow integration, email integration, and much more. And this could be done without writing little or no code.