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Lotus Notes server to come to linux
Lotus CEO Jeff Papows announced
to an exuberant crowd at Lotusphere99 that
the Lotus Notes server will be ported to Linux, albeit not as open
source. It should be available later this year. This is a
U-turn
for Papows.
made clear it was the server.
I almost started jumping up and down, but I realized that the article said that the SERVER would be delivered on Linux. I really, really, really want a full-featured native client for Linux. Then I won't have to use WinBlows when we sunset our OS/2 systems.
I know some people have to use it (I am one of 'em), but man, Notes sucks in so many ways its not even funny. I especially love the non-standard UI they throw on top of the Windows UI. And why is Dial Server under File on the Menu bar? Bah....
Now I can nuke off nt and pop on linux when it comes out! Linux will always be superior to NT!
> In the long run, he said the string of delays in > the shipping release of R5 has hurt Lotus > a little because arch rival Microsoft has been > able to provide a high-performance product and > get it to market.
Are they talking about Exchange? Everything Microsoft does is pushed back (NT 5.0/Windows 2000 is a good example) way past expected release date.
Besides, since when has anyone ever called Exchange "high-performance", please, remember what happened to the House of Representatives a few weeks ago?
Do those Gartner group guys do ANYTHING but spread Microsoft FUD? I wonder why news people bother quoting them anymore...
P.S. Cool, the more Linux apps, the better!
If they port the server they have to port the client, you know how much I use the
client to do things on the server? ALOT.
well then tehre wouldn't be a need for a client port would there ... :]
Yeah, having a Linux client would be nice, but what would be nicer would be convincing the company to go to OPEN standards -- smtp and ldap. Then I could use MY choice of a mail server and avoid all that bloat that I don't need. Notes isn't even a good mail client, bloated and sluggish and alltogether ugly (Kind of like OS/2.)
Our company runs fewer than 600 users on Exchange, and has to reboot the server regularly to fix problems. So congrats, you're lucky.
I know i will love that
I've been running the client (4.6.1) with wine990103 (see www.winehq.com). Work just fine for daily use.
It may not be fully capable to do everything, including form&agent editing, etc, but it's a good start, and the first step to getting it to work perfectly under wine is posting bug reports (read the wine FAQ to find out how) on to comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine
I will definitely be one of the customers for the Linux version of the server as soon as it comes out. Can't wait. Anybody know of a mailing list from notes about the port? any beta programs? I'd really like to join. I've got gigabytes to spare on my Linux server, so heck, sure I'll do beta testing on a copy of our databases.
No kidding! The GUI is just totally funky. Even many home-brew Linux apps carry over some UI consistency. In Notes, nothing is consistent. And those huge icons on the Notes desktop reminds me of AOL's interface - bulky and ugly. I am glad I don't have to use AOL, but I am stuck with Notes for, seemingly, as long as I work at IBM. BLAH!
Since folks seem interested, here's a URL about running the Win32 Notes client on Wine:l
http://www.brooklinesw.com/linux/linuxnotes.htm
This is great. Now I can get Linux on the new DELL server that was supposed to run NT/Notes.
Yet another step for "Tux" towards World Domination.
I wouldn't bet on it. Lotus isn't supporting the client on much other than win32. It's an extremely complex piece of code to port.
This is great news for my company. So much of our legacy applications are being moved off the mainframe and onto Domino. This is going to be great for stability. We finally get to ditch those crash prone NT boxes. We have like 30 or 40 Notes servers.
ditto for Netware. the NLM for netware requires a client running at another workstation
The company I work for are pushing a Notes based Intranet solution. I am supposed to support it, yet can find no redeeming feature. This uses notes as a web serverp; to see how bad Notes is as a web server, go to www.lotus.com. Also our product only currently supports IE3 and IE4; I hate working for these bozos.
Notes appears to implement at layer 7 in the OSI stack features that should be in layer 3 (such as server to server comms). Also every notes mail message appears to use data encryption to pass between client and server, even if on a secure LAN. A complete waste of CPU cycles and resources. Notes is classed as a database product, yet there is NO record locking - every transaction generates save/replication conflict errors. And I won't go into the sluggishness of this product.
Anyone who wants to implement Notes should be treated with more comptent that any site that wants to install NT - the product is so bad. I speak from experience - I have looked after Notes since release 2.
is running fine on this spare OpenBSD box, with Solaris x86 libs. Just pick any two....
No Notes R5 client for 'nix, so you're still
stuck with Windoze to use it.
And Domino on Unix looks & performs just like
what it is: typical Windoze the-hood-is-welded-
shut bloatware (with all that implies), half-
heartedly ported to Unix.
Blegh.
Lotus remains clueless.
There's probably more demand for an OS/2 client than a Linux one. (Once you remove the Linux users that don't actually use Notes anyways.)
notes sucks rocks
What is Notes actually good for? Its a mediocre e-mail client, a mediocre webbrowser, a useless database(basically just a flat file system), and some sort of colabrative thingy that no one has ever really explained to me. It fills up about 100 meg of my hard drive and takes about a minute to load and I can't for the life of me tell you what its purpose is. I work for a company that happens to own Lotus so we are forced to use it but I really don't see the point. Netscape is a better mail client(even though it crashes twice a day) and much better web-browser. And a directory full of text files is about as effective a Notes is as a database. Maybe i'm missing something really obvious but why does note even exist?
clearly you do not work in the IT department.
Gartner use Netware, wonder what their position is on it. I worked there for a while. Their network dude left my machine logged on as administrator for about two hours after my machine screwed up. And I was only a temp :-)
I've been working with notes awhile.. It is pretty powerfull groupware.
I've created easy to use databases for my lightly computer skilled group. They use it fine, and the gui seems more intuitive to them than to me...
It seems the direction they're going is to use an internet browser as the client. They don't like to talk about it because they fear the loss of notes client revinue... But the switch is inevetable as they push e business..
The notes developer page uses the navigator on the web. It works pretty good.
-notesdude
Notes does indeed have its merits. However, I just want to point out that you may have answered your own question:
It boils down to philosophy (IMHO). The Unix approach has historically been one of developing a lot of small applications that can be used together to implement any functionality. And, if and when a better implementation of one of the pieces comes along, one can simply choose to either adopt it or ignore it.
The kind of big-hype 'wait until the next release of the *whole* solution', and then it will be OK, is anathema to the DIY kind of attitude that Linux has inherited.
[Illustrative example: seven or eight years ago '*.Z' files were everywhere, and '*.gz' files were rare (IIRC)].
p.s. I can almost imagine the rebuttal that someone may subsequently make: "Well, what about the kernel, what about GNOME, ...". Well, if you think this, then you have missed my point.
There is a God, andhis name is Jeff Papows. Now I can dump NT. I hope this server will be multithreading...
In R5 there is a specific Admin client, that fortunately is nothing like the stripped down admin client that was used for NT server (Notes 3.x) or non Win32 servers (4.6x). It is actually quite nice, although there are still problems with the Beta2 version. Unfortunately the admin client is either native Win32, or you need to use the Browser based web admin.
The R5 server needs no client at all.
True, a lot is fud, third or forth hand. Exchange can be made relatively stable, but a LOT of care is needed in the design and setup. It is also an absolute bastard if you wish to change its design.
However my first hand experiences have been different to yours - 80% of (MS 'certified' installations) Exchange systems had a major system 'event' in which the client lost some data. Not one of my Notes installations (which were generally much more complex, as it is rather more than just an email client) had such a problem. We shall not even begin to talk about trying to connect one exchange company (I don't want to use the term site) to another....
NT Notes servers in my experience have never been as reliable as OS/2 servers (maybe 'cos less 'admins' knew OS/2 so they left well alone!!!)
I also found that troubleshooting Notes problems to be much easier than MSX. The UI, though was not what might be termed 'pretty'. I also found that any remote help over the phone was much easier under Notes.
from someone who knows what they're doing.
"and prevents you from checking your mail remotely" - statements like this prove that you know absolutely nothing about the product at all. try learning something about it before spouting crap like this.
"Fred's Notes is down... any email you may have sent him over the last day may not get read" - this would be his client ? - that mail is still getting delivered. If his client is down all day then clearly your tech support people haven't a clue either.
If all you do is fetch your mail, you can do this just as easily with Eudora, Netscape or any other WWW browser/POP client/IMAP Client/MAPI client.
I seriously suggest you get rid of your tech support/Notes consultancy because they obviously know jack shit.
I think most of you are forgetting that Notes is more than just email. Sure it is a memory hog and R.5 will probably be worse. Sure it has bugs but please name one application that does not.
You can do things with Notes that you would need at least 4 or 5 other programs to match. At my work we use notes for email, calendar, scheduling, news from Reuter, help desk and documentation. And it can also syncronize with my PalmPilot!
I agree that the UI is a little strange but our users have not had that many problems with it. Besides I guess that is a problem with many multi platform applications. We recently switched from OS/2 to NT and our users could continue to use Notes because the UI is the same. If only switching word processor was that easy.
I also don't see all the crashes you are talking about. I almost never have to reboot my NT workstation and when I do it is usually not because of Notes. The worst problem I see is low memory which Notes doesn't handle well. Lotus support is also a pleasent surprise (at least here in Denmark) and a visit to http://notes.net shows their dedication to the product.
And if you don't like the Notes client then use a browser to reach the server.
While I agree that open standards is a good thing you have to remember that many of todays standards didn't exist when Notes was released. Lotus has acknowledged this and are trying hard to incorporate many of them in future releases.
Porting Domino Server to Linux is not bad. You of all people should welcome it. I can only see it help consolidate Linux as a valid server choice.
As I said before, all admin is done from the admin client, which starts an admin process. You do not need local access. Netware Notes servers have worked in this way for some time, but the R5 admin client is a different beast.
Gartner as the source of Microsoft FUD? These are the guys who warned the corporate world not to touch Win2000 until 2001, or maybe Service Pack 2. Gartner's anti-2000 warning was one of the most serious mainstream condmenations that we've heard of MSFT's flagship in a long time. And please, isn't the word FUD a bit played out on Slashdot? Let Linux stand on its on merits. A world where every journalist slammed Microsoft without thinking wouldn't be any better than the state we're in now. What people need is open dialog, honest commentary, and a free choice among several competing operating systems.
No they don't. Domino for AS/400 doesn't have a corresponding Notes for AS/400. And I believe with R5, Notes is a Win32-only application (no *nix clients at all).
Actually, Domino R5 has native support for LDAP and SMTP, in addition to HTTP, NNTP, Java, and JavaScript.
then the client can't be too far behind. I know of a few people at work who'd love to have a Notes client available in Linux.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Posted by Skip Franklin:
Lotus is good at putting servers on platforms without bothering with clients. Cases in point: Novell, HPUX, Solaris (R5 version), AS/400. The clients for Windows are used to connect to the server, or a web-based admin tool is used. I know that isn't quite like having a client on the server itself, but it can get things done.
Posted by DocNo:
l
Lotus/Iris/IBM has made it quite clear that the Mac and Windows are going to be the only two native client platforms and that their stated direction is going to be 100% Java/HTML/Web Browser for the future.
I don't necessarily agree with there dropping of the clients in the R5 timeframe (frankly, the web stuff is still pretty immature - if it wasn't there wouldn't be this big desire for the proprietary client now, would there?)
That being said, the WINE option is the best chance to get the Notes client under Linux.
We need more stuff like:
http://www.brooklinesw.com/linux/linuxnotes.htm
Hey, we got the server - take comfort that even the OS/2 guys (IBM's own OS!) are not getting the R5 client . . . .
If Linux continues to get support and documented desktop usage, then we will be able to stand up and demand the client like the Mac folk did at the last Lotusphere - until then, the server is all we will probably get. In that scenario, our energy would be better spent working with Iris and the WINE team to make the client work as flawlessly as possible...
Posted by DocNo:
>Not to be too cynical, but there's is a big
>difference between the words that flow forth
>from the marketers, and the actual deeds that
>come out of the software.
Not to be a smart a$$ but have you actually installed the R5 Beta?
The mail is fully native SMTP/MIME, the R5 client speaks MIME with no conversion. Conversion only happens if you have 4.x clients that don't understand MIME/HTML.
So, that would make "truly" native IMAP and POP a no-brainer. And LDAP is a directory interface, so there is no "native" or "pure" LDAP regardless.
And as soon as some standards for calandering ever emerges on the Internet front (and has some decent functionality) I am sure Notes/Domino will support it too.
Please, I realize the Internet stuff for mailcan be quite good, but there isn't a cohesive set of standards that would allow Domino to be easily replaced by pure Internet standards or everyone would be doing it now! (After all, there is a heck of a lot more to Notes/Domino that just mail!)
>(And, yes, I am *quite*
>familiar with the 'capabilities' of
>Notes/Domino).
You sure aren't demonstrating any vast familiarity in this forum.
Either appreciate the software for it's merits and use it or don't. But blithely stating it's crap and stupid serves no purpose other than to make yourself appear stupid and close minded.
--THAT particular learning curve was the nastiest part. Notes 3.2 was pretty awesome, intuitive menus, etc. V4.0 and 4.5 came out, and the menus were hopelessly different from what made SENSE in the last version!!
--Now I hear that 5.0 will be COMPLETELY different from 4.x... Sucks to be me...
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Yep. Gartner has been mostly wrong about Linux and everyone pretty much knows it. Why do you think Linux has really taken off desipte Gartner's advice concering it? Because nobody's really listening to them and the rest of these so-called computer experts. The whole Year 2000 thing is just another example of this. The world isn't *going* to come to a screeching halt because of it and these people have made themselves look rather silly over the whole issue over the last few years.
A point that has been raised before is that NT sales are being inflated by people taking exactly the advice you just offered - sysadmins are specializing their NT servers, using one for Exchange, another for fileserving, and so on, when the load is such that one server ought to do for multiple services.
I'd like to see an estimate on how many extra copies of NT were sold because of the decision to split the serving tasks up.
I like their rack mounted systems.
I had to use Lotus Notes in my last job. Boy, it sucked. What's that you say? Slow, unstable, arbitrarily different, AND hard to use? Where do I sign up for that?
Fortunately, my new office uses Unix e-mail only. Whee! (Well, some folks use Win95, but they use the standard POP3 interface, or telnet in to a Unix server.)
For that reason, I think its kinda unfair for people to go on about the inflated NT sales. I doubt that Linux is much different, and if linux had licensing similar to NT, I'd be guilty of buying many copies of Linux where one could have sufficed.
For all the guys who have not noticed so far.
Notes is very powerful Enterprise Groupware. Some of you now should look up the definition of *Groupware*, especially the difference to a simle Email client.
The Notes-Server Concept enables you to build up very powerful, reliable and secure configurations. The databases enable you to implement nearly every funcionality you want. Admitted, Notes has performance problems, but there are ways to deal with this. Notes has a huge set of functionalities which are not always instantly intuitive. But the more you deal with the product, the more you get used it.
If you take a look at the market you will find only 2 major groupware product. Notes and Exchange/Outlook. Anybody here who would prefer Exchange/Outlook??
Regards Tobias
I got the impression that many people farting on Notes do not really know what they are talking about. Many people just seem to see it as a bloated emailclient.
As my predecessor replied, there are quite some things I dont understand.
:-))) ).
"Well, when your company requires you to fetch your mail using Notes and nothing but,you begin to regard it as just another bloated (and buggy, and crash-prone, and monkey-designed) email client."
Sorry to say so. But using a multiple thousand dollar product as an email client is hard on the edge to idiocy and lets me draw quite some conclusions about education level of your IT-dep.
"Fred's Notes is down... any email you may have sent him over the last day may not get read."
Whats up with your IT-Support? Installing a configuring a client takes just up to 10 min.
"For most of our employees, Notes has been far
more hassle than it's worth, both in actual downtime and in employee resentment. You'll excuse me if I don't seem overjoyed about the product."
This is necessarily a fault of the product. Notes implements modern clustering technics which offers you the possibilty of achieving nearly every degree of reliabilty and availability you want. It seems you have a setup and maintainance problem so my honest advise to get a consultant. (Wanna hire me? IBM Global Service will be right on the way
The whole IBM is driven by Notes and I hope you dont dare to say that a quarter million employees worldwide runs on unuseable product.
"What is Notes actually good for? Its a mediocre e-mail client, a mediocre webbrowser, a useless database(basically just a flat file system), and some sort of colabrative thingy that no one has ever really explained to me. It fills up about 100 meg of my hard drive and takes about a minute to load and I can't for the life of me tell you what its purpose is."
Notes certainly has its problems. Some of the descriptions on the User Interface Hall of Shame web site make me fall down laughing.
However, Notes can also do things no other system can do, primarily based on the 'collaberative thingy'. In our case, we have ~1000 people who travel full-time to remote areas of the globe - places where you are lucky to get a 1200 baud phone connection. Yet they need access to product information, customer information, databases, as well as e-mail and discussions.
Notes, with its distributed replication system specifically designed to work on slow and unreliable links, fills this need perfectly. Yes, it is the world's most expensive e-mail product. And yes, its 'everything is a document/database' view takes a while to understand. But it is an excellent tool for its intended purpose.
I am also a little amused when people complain about Notes UI (which I personally don't think is so great). Either everyone is forced to use one UI standard (guess who's that would be?), or everyone is free to do what they think best. Arguing in favor of freedom of design choice, then bashing Lotus because you don't like the choices they made, seems a little silly.
Oh well, have fun. I would encourage you to do some research on distributed, replicated databases though: they are a different animal from either POP-type systems or relational databases.
sPh
Why is it hat whenever Linux and Notes are mentioned together that we have a whole bunch of people jump on how bad Notes sucks (I disagree but I'm willing to let other people think what they want)? I use Notes every day, I admin it, I develop "applications" in it and in general I find it to be a well behaved application. I would LOVE it if I could ditch my NT servers and run Notes on Linux. I just don't understand why when people see that something is being ported to Linux we have to have a 100 people saying how that software is crap and it's a waste of time to port it. Well people I've got news for you; Notes is a jack-of-all-trades. It doesn't do very many things great, but it does do a LOT of different things, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a SINGLE application that allows you the potential to do so much.
sounds cool :) then again if it doesn't (i.e if it doesn't actually run under FreeBSD's Linux emulation), don't forget that you can run it under Linux itself! Even the biggest FreeBSD big^H^H^Hadvocate would agree that it's a big step up from NT.
Notes was always a sure-fire way to make a PC crash (at least eventually) since it was such a memory pig. As I result, most of the people I worked with that were unfortunate enough to have to use it were rebooting a ton more times than I was.
I got used to not using it so I can't say I'm looking forward to its arrival on Linux. Though, I guess it might actually be more stable when running on Linux and be able to rely on decent memory management...
I have to agree with the post that said the Notes interface was ``ugly''. I'd go one step further and say it has the ``nicest'' user interface since All-In-One (heh heh heh).
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
have multiple machines.
Besides, you said you buy small, cheap Linux boxes for a specific purpose. NT sites are frequently shocked to find that, although they already have a big, expensive server, they need to buy another in order to do X. I think they would be happy to have a number of small, cheap boxes.
linux has problems multitasking, or at least keeping different servers on their respective sides of the couch
/net/usr and /net/home to the second machine. (kernel nfsd)
uhmmm let's see. i have two machines at home. of which one, and AMD k6, 64MB runs:
a small news server (INN)
an email server, sendmail.
an SQL database, postgres.
nfs serves
NIS server
web server (apache)
dial-up server. (diald)
dns server for two small zones. (named)
ftp server..
more i can't think of out my head.
3 X servers always running.
and it runs rc5des at nice 20 all the time, as does the second machine.
none of the servers are heavily loaded, but there are a lot of them, and from experience linux scales pretty well, as long as you have enough memory to avoid active apps being swapped out.
performance is excellent even with 64MB, netscape and staroffice are my biggest performance problems (memory hogs)
I find this report odd. In my experience a well designed Domino server can stay up for months without problems.
(I'll admin that the client was a unstable piece of crap between 4.0 and about 4.5.2. But it's rock solid now (4.63) Try the latest patches - you'll be happier.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
A lot of people responding to this news are hopeful, yet pessimistic of a client port. I wonder what would be a good way of letting IBM know there is a demand for a Notes client on Linux.
It's a shame petitioning doesn't work when talking to Software Companies.
When does the Lotus Notes client come to Linux, then I can start telling my boss to get ride of this crapy Win 95 machine that I am rebooting 3 or more times a day???????????????
Only 'flamers' flame!
Notes will still crash my nt machine without even having it up. And i love those lovely Dr.Watson errors all the time about notes causing this program and that program to crash.......
I'd like to see exchange do half the stuff that notes does. Thats why Notes is one of the last products to have a larger marketshare than MS. We should all support Lotus, whether you like it or not.
I'm getting ready to take flame bullets but....
Exchange is not groupware. It can emulate it a bit, but is extreamly limited in its function.
As for the UI. I can see how some of these linux people (geeks in the good sense) could misinterperate it's function. Notes is written for the Average user, and the last time I looked, the Average User has never even heard of Linux (until recently). Once a button has been clicked on on the desktop, the UI responsibility is up to the developer, not lotus.
Notes is NOT an E-mail client! That false impression is why so many people fall for MS's sales pitch for LookOut. Yes, Notes is ideosyncratic, but it's an extremeply powerful GroupWare product. If someone from IBM is bad-mouthing it, it's just that (s)he is still feeling the loss of that paragon of technical excellence, PROFS. Ask the people who use it every day - they just couldn't operate without Notes now.
It's unfortunate that Notes uses the term Database for the document repository, since it's not at all what Codd & Date would have liked, but it's an extremely effective way to exchange information, hold discussions, etc. I run a project that spans three continents (and 24 hours) and I know for certain that it just couldn't be done without the collaborative features in Notes.
For those of you who don't like the UI, you can, of course, use Netscape or (if you must) MSIE.
For those of you who complain that it crashes all the time, I work in a company that has close to 10000 Notes seats, and the reliability is astounding (release 4.63).
B=