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Lotus Domino for Linux -- but not NetWare
technophile writes "This article indicates that Lotus is dropping support for NetWare in favor of Linux support. They expect to have a Linux Domino server out by end-of-year. " This came from comments from the CEO of
Lotus this morning in an interview. They are "bullish" about having a version for Linux out by end of year. Excellent.
Well, there's another NT app that I can run on linux instead. I've never actually run Domino, and that's simply because I'd need an NT server to run it. I've always wanted to start it up and see what it can do, looks like we'll all get a chance pretty soon.
-earl
Training for Notes? So not only are there people who can't figure out how to open a database, scroll around a view, and edit a document, and apparently can't even read the builtin help or any of several books, but you're actually *paying* them with real money?
Rumor from the IBM bigwigs is that IBM is, after evaluating Linux for the remainder of 1999, will kill AIX (the product), and offer the AIX maint. code. In addition, all webservers (now Domino) will move to Apache (under AIX or Linux). In addition, check out http://www.ibm.com/linux for other stuff. IBM isn't playing around. IBM (and that includes Lotus), internally at least, is out-and-out pedal to the metal with Linux. Now, if only they could make a Mandrake desktop load I'd be happy.
Just close your eyes and imagine as many really suckful software aspects you can like an inconsitent interface, poor help system, non-intuitive commands and menus. Now wrap them around a Lotus-(i.e. poor)-quality system and you've just demo'ed Domino (and Notes at the same time)...
I second that one. We had to install Notes for our Ernst & Young consulting team. We've all messed with it. It's being yanked and shitcanned as soon as E&Y leaves the building.
NOBODY will miss it. I'm kind of hoping to setup an Apache/PHP3 system for tracking open help desk issues instead
My new employer lives on Notes, and it is truly very overrated. The replication trick is very nice, but as a whole the thing is slow, and the UI is very poor and counterintuitive - in mail, "Reply with History" and "Reply to All" only moved to the same *screen* with the latest R5 release.
:( Also, it is Notes that would add to Linux credibility on the desktop - it is already established in the back shop.
The R5 client is a memory hog, it space leaks and more than occasionally takes down my 96Mb Nt machine with death by swap.
The Domino web UI is also nothing to write home about - the latest mail incarnation is pitiful compared to something like Yahoo. For all practical purposes, it is unusable. Submitting expense reports in Notes is hard enough, I wouldn't dream of trying to do it via Domino web.
Now they even provide a (buggy) applet so you can compose on the web in all those cutesy fonts. Wake up Lotus - applets are on the way out, and non ASCII mail is a flawed concept in a world with Internet access.
In spite of this, I wish it was Notes and not Domino they were porting, as it is one of the few things that means my Thinkpad has to run NT most of the day.
Another thing to remember is that Lotus is no longer the darling of the PHB's - they are all drinking at the fountain of truth in Redmond nowadays, and buying Exchange. Sure, it doesn't do half of what Notes can do, but it's from Redmond and that's all that matters nowadays.
I am not certain why this has generated so much. Both items, support for Linux and loss of support for Netware, have been reported previously. The Notes server for Linux was announced, albeit tentatively, at LotusSphere in January. Dropping the Netware Notes NLM was reported in late '98.
They won't blame linux, they will tell the user to use the version that they developed it for.
They will blame the user.
If I try to use Office 2000 on Win3.1, MS would tell me the same thing.
I think the various distributions of linux is going to hurt linux's potential as more main stream applications are developed. Linux must become more standardized before it will ever be able to compete in the app server/workstation market.
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
Domino can reflect SQL data as virtual Notes databases. A good thing too, because Notes' actual database format is highly unstructured (you can hang arbitrary data off any document) and none too efficient.
Yes, it should be pointed out that Domino for NetWare was not very well supported or very popular (or very stable). Most NetWare shops run Domino on something else (NT, OS/2, Unix).
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Echelon? Who cares you idiot. Especially if its
on a corporate network. You must be one of those paranoid kiddies who fret over cookies and think that the NSA can somehow grep on all mail stores, no matter where they are.
If the servers run out of disk space, it's the admins fault. It's not like sendmail or imap are
any more intelligent. They will also happily
fill up the spool, or your mail store.
Finally, the database is not meant to be a real database. Why would I try to treat a mailbox like an RDBMS and replicate it? RDBMS are not a universal solution. The only better way to store something like a mailbox would be using an OODBMS that stored preparsed messages.
The fact of the matter is, Notes offers a built in public key infrastructure, directory service, and authentication system for sharing data, combined with a way to ship applications in email (or on the web) and a built in IDE.
Nothing else comes even close. If I wanted to do workgroup/groupware within a company on Linux boxes, I would essentially have to duplicate notes: create a datastore to store arbitrary structured documents, add replication, scripting language, event handling, encryption, authentication, and lots of applications to sit on top, like Calendaring.
Right now, the only Linux solution is to hack up some shite open-source web mail projects, combine them with web calendaring, and then try to implement a datasharing system, and the end result will be inferior to Notes.
Somewhat off topic, but Linus is set to give the keynote address at Lotus DevCon in June.
The Lotus page for the conferecne
Interesting that you mention this, because it just so happens that a similar thing happened to CP/M back in its heyday--developers actually started porting their CP/M applications to MS-DOS / PC-DOS because it was actually easier to port to DOS than it was to CP/M-86... So they started porting to DOS in spite of the installed CP/M user base... And look what happened!! This almost suggests that Linux will be the MS-DOS of the 90's... Isn't it wonderful how history repeats itself sometimes!?!?
I've been using Notes at my place of employment for about 6 months now, and I must say it's one of the worst programs I have ever had the misfortune to use.
That is, when I am able to use it, due to poor setup, I am able to read my proprietarily stored email, on which access depends on the uptime of the server (about 1.5 days), and the phase of the moon. I can't go in using a decent emailer to read some of this email which periodically disappears or goes unread for months. And doing any external interfacing to the Domino server is next to impossible unless all the Domino techies know what they're doing (which is rare).
I'd much rather use a bunch of smaller apps that do the individual parts better (mailer and database client) than one large program that feigns functionality by attempting to look nice. But I guess that's just the unix coming out in me.
And it isn't really that nice to use anyway. The menus and toolbar buttons are non-intuitive (yes i realise i'm now talking about the client, but that's what you need to interface to the proprietary server, linux or not)
jamesw
yes, all this Notes and Domino and ViaVoice stuff for Linux is cool and all, but let's
get to the GOOD stuff--Port smartsuite over to LInux you nutheads! Beat redmond
to the punch and have YOUR office suite there first.....
The Linux camp largely thinks other versions of Unix are irrelevant. Of course, the "Linux camp" is only a subset of the *nix community that many people identify with foremost. Heck, hasn't it been said by more than a few that as soon as the Hurd is stable it will be time to use it for the kernel? Userland is mostly equivalent in all the free unices.
Not this crap.
Of course, you'd have to be SuperHuman(tm) to be able to deal with all the inane BS that comes along with it.
I don't understand why someone would choose to inflict this kind of pain on themselves.
Somewhere down the line years ago, Lotus took a different devolpment track than everyone else. This is fine and dandy if you've been using Lotus since oh, say, 1987, but otherwise it will be totally different than anything you know now. All your old rules about development will have to be thrown out the window, and you will start anew. On top of that, you'd better hope you have a very competent Lotus guru to guide you along in your learning process, because if you don't, as is said above the documentation is sparce. There are few books, and the online documentation reads like old IBM manuals: Very dense, jargon filled pieces that hold very little real information (the javascript section took all of one paragraph!).
I'm sorry, but Lotus is way behind the times when it comes to web development and web servers. There are a few good uses for their Domino server, but it mostly focuses on those that are already using Notes for their development and don't want to (or can't) change all their Notes documents into HTML.
It may be stable, but it's slow as hell, and it may be great from a corporate management / tracking stand point, but from a developer's point of view: stay away.
...Development is a little rigid. HA. That's about like saying molten lava is a bit... warm.
I work in an office completely regimented by Domino and Notes... a more clunky excuse for a groupware framework I have never encountered. Notes spends more time giving people problems than it does solving them.
The idea was that great lumps of information would be shared by groups through Notes databases and Domino pages. The reality is that it's one more thing for notech lusers and PHB's to ignore and fail to learn. It's just a glorified email system at this point, and far less elegant than simple POP and SMTP. ah well.
"It's OK, my sheet's got a hole in it!"
he said penetration
Not that everything HAS to be free. But I think (and hopefully I'm wrong) that NDS will be a hard sell because the benefits aren't really tangible.
I think funky LDAP integration will give Linux everything NDS has some day, but it's not there yet and won't be for a while.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Sure, 386BSD *existed* first, but was it *available* (not strangled in copyright issues) before Linux?
Like someone else said. They are covering all their bases. The thing that saved IBM from taking a nose dive was to switch their outlook to a "solution" company. IBM sells different solutions rather than push ONLY their stuff like other companies. If their stuff doesn't work, then they will try other stuff to sell i.e NT boxes and now Linux. You might as well be the one selling other products your client wants if they don't want your stuff. Right?
Lotus is second only to Microsoft as an expression of pure Lovecraftian evil in the software industry. Consider their track record:
- They effectively handed the PC software market to Microsoft by hamstringing their competitors with bogus "look and feel" lawsuits. Lotus was so hung up on this that they gave each of their own products a gratuitously incompatible interface.
- They promptly murdered OS/2 immediately following their acquisition of IBM's PC software business (cleverly disguised as an IBM acquisition of Lotus), again handing the industry to Microsoft.
If Lotus gets a foothold in the Linux market, we will live to regret it.
---------------------
John 3:16 - God's Public License
ISTR (from the Business Partner Forum) that the Mac client effectively *had* been cancelled, but the evangelists screamed so loud over it that they resurrected it. I hope they map documents and designs to XML and then finish dumping all their half-baked clients.
Exactly. If someone out there has some product which is equally capable, then lets see it.
Was it with irony aforethought that you posted this on Slashdot?
Compare Slashdot to (for example) this page from Iris Cafe.
Are you really trying to argue that the above site is better than either Slashdot's discussion model, or what your typical NNTP newsgroup provides? (You probably are, and therein lies the gap between your high praise, and other's flames). Remember though, that Notes.net is a Domino showcase site. Is this the best they could do with all the resources they could bring to bear? Where's the context in that page? (I won't even bother to detail the painful performance issues).
The fact of the matter is that, yes, Notes has some good features in an environment where you control the client, the server and the pipe.
However, as far as usability on the web goes, Domino is not competitive at all (and that was already true more than two years ago despite rumours to the contrary). Simply grafting the Notes model onto the web was a fatal design choice.
So what? It's a desktop App and would be a perfect remedy for the "no business ...).
applications" cry that all the press give Linux (I know there is Wordperfect and
Star Office out there, but IMHO they don't compare to Wordpro
Notes/Domino is apparently solid enough that it's considered to have an audit trail good enough for the FDA to approve it's use in Medical Device companies. I know that in the last place Medical Place I worked at it was championed by the Regulatory people for that reason.
I think they'd be pretty hesitant to allow something as stable(sic) as what Slashdot runs on in such an environment.
Now that's a comment I thought I'd never see... Lotus has killed Approach on Windows so I don't think I'd hold your breath waiting for a Linux port ;)
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
IBM happens to make all of their money on mid-to-high range stuff. Think of their PC division as a loss-leader to keep the user base from forgetting about them.
If IBM is going to push Linux as a midrange solution, I think that's phenominal news, but it's going to have a very small impact on the end user/small business. Having IBM push Linux as a desktop OS is hardly going to make much difference.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Why does Linux being the first 'freeware' on x86 mean BSD has to be compatible with it, while Solaris, which is NOT freeware, hold dominant on Sparc? What does freeware have to do with it? If your arguement holds (it doesn't) then Linux should have to be compatible with Microsoft Xenix (pre-SCO) since Microsoft Xenix was the first *nix that ran on x86 (on the 8086 in the early 80's).
BSD is MORE accepted than Linux by experienced Unix heads. It just isn't being run by the college kids, and it isn't the media darling of the moment. That's reality, face it.
You can load the POP3 and/or IMAP task on the Domino server, which will allow you to read your mail with your favourite mailer. Load the HTTP taks and you can read it through a browser.
I'm glad that more stuff is coming out for Linux, but I used to administer a Netware network and it's sad it struggling. For what it does Netware is fantastic and NDS _IS_ the greatest thing since sliced bread. Linux (and even NT) will have something like NDS some day, but I think it'll be quite a few years.
Nobody has mentioned that committing to a Linux port is really a no-brainer for Lotus. They've got Unix versions already and Linux will be EASY. What they're really saying is: "Novell has lots of users but the huge development effort required for the port doesn't justify the risk. A Linux port, however, will cost next to nothing and people seem to want it, so we'll go ahead with it."
This shouldn't be seen as a Novell vs. Linux thing, because Linux doesn't really require any effort. The news here is that Novell is losing vendor support.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
>The only MS product running is the OS...I am using 3rd party apps for everything else.
:)
smart person.
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Yes, it was.
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
correct me if I am wrong
>So Lotus has finally decided to "jump on the Linux bandwagon" has it?
/. It is truely sad how easilly this community has taken misinformation and twisted it around against LN/D. I wouldnt blame them if they didn't release it after all.
For the last time! This is OLD news. Here is the JANUARY Computerworld snippet that says they would be developing the 5.0 server for linux.
Linus Redux
>Lotus strikes me as a company very fond of heading in whatever direction the latest band-wagon might happen to be headed.
Read above statement. They were talking about it when everyone else did. Does this change your opinion?
>Recently, they dropped Unix support for all but the Domino server.
That would be because they are going to browser access. Only a couple of clients are being developed for DB Application Design!!! Seems to me that Lotus *IS* the forward thinking company that you say they are not.
>you can not win the game by allowing Microsoft to set the rules!
MS has never set the rules in this area. They have never gained ground on the installed base of notes. MS for once is clawing and scratching and still losing.
In fact, this information about a linux port was ON
You're little linux bandwagon is just a little chevette in an SUV world. Stop compaining.
Give me a break. Everytime I've seen someone unhappy with Domino/Notes it was because of 1 or 2 reasons.
1: The admin was thrown in to running the system with little time to prepare. (No fault to him/her)
2: The applications are written by a beginner.
Although easy, LN/D need experienced people to develop and maintain the system..just like everything else.
Check your references......
;)
AIX is going to be killed... by Project Monterey.
Check out the web sites. Project Monterey (the joint effort between IBM, SCO and Intel + Others) is the sole inheritor(sp) of AIX. All AIXs functionalities are being ported to this new OS.
With this said, IBM will also allow Linux applications to run on top of Project Monterey. kinda funny if you ask me.. but oh well....
I agree to a couple of posts above. IBM can/should only concentrate on providing solutions and providing middleware applications to the mainstream market. Don't deny they also have some pretty cool HW.
If there is an excellent OS out there, why the heck re invent the wheel. Use the darn thing as your 'reference base' . Of course contribute to this base, but build ontop of it.
If I'm not mistaken, the eventual goal of Linux is to the be what Java is not... Write Once, run anywhere
Hopefully, someone is listening,
Cowardly Anonymous Coward
Why in the world would you sink all that time and effort into simply finding out whether an app is even worth considering? Just how frequently can you really afford to do that (do you have boxes oversized enough to boot NT that are just laying around doing nothing?), and how often is it actually worthwhile?
A couple of points really:
Netware deserves better. For the record so does Notes.
You can't run it without a good admin, preferably one that's actually USED notes. And with a good developer, you can make it fly.
(without either, put it back in the box)
We haven't had a server (running NT) go down (without permission) in over 2 months. That wasn't always the case. We inherited quite a bit of trouble from the previous administration. I feel pretty sure that it was never as bad as 1.5 clicks a week uptime.
As far as a web server goes, so much is made of the traditional approach. I can't ftp my files, I can't..... The replication architecture, tracking, and workflow (all well implemented) can have a tremendous impact on corporate geography.
It does have some issues, to be sure. Documentation. Development is a little rigid. (slightly better with R5)
What kind of software WOULD you make for SUPER.HUMAN's?
Sorry - Notes DOES just suck big time. We run AS/400, NT, Linux quite happily in the same environment and they all work beautifully except for the Notes bit crashing our whole company at least once a week. The email side of it is so poor I removed Notes from my laptop altogether and have a separate email address on a 486 running Linux (along with most of the other pissed off techies) which I can access through POP/IMAP.
The rest of it follows the Microsoft ethic - build it like a whale and people won't be able to tell what's wrong - slow, cumbersome and impossible to work with at a sensible level.
Some of our staff have gone BACK to green screen 5250 terminals because they can at least work more effectively this way.
Exactly.
If someone out there has some product which is equally capable, then lets see it.
I have to say that Notes is one of the only pieces of software I have ever used that I have an open hostility towards.
Notes use at a company is a sure sign of a lame, lost in the 80's "we need an enterprise platform!" IS management style. Notes is favored by people to whom "4GL" is still a hip catchphrase.
20 days uptime.. i dream of that on the boxes we've got, my pointy headed bosses got seduced by the evil ibm salesmen and bought 2 netfinity boxes, 4 gig of ecc ram in each and 60 gig raid, all for about 1000 users not doing much more than email and a few mail in databases
We had Domino installed as the basis of our Intranet when I worked for regional Australian bank. I quit because of the fact that it was installed...6 months down the track the executives aren't happy with it (it's slow, etc.) and it's being pulled out, quite a costly stuff up, indeed.
>Linux *IS* compatible with Solaris
Then why doesnt Domino run on linux? It runs on Solaris.
Just like you object when someone says they can't figure out the command line and says linux is shit, don't blame domino because your admins etc don't know what they're doing. If it is poorly setup, that's down to uselss admins - it is one of the easier to maintain systems around. Likewise uptime. In most cases you are at the mercy of NT, but even so the server should stay up much longer than 1.5 days. OS/2 Notes servers stay up for months, OS/400 one too. Even NT ones can be made to stay up for a month at a time.
Domino isn't open standard or open source, and I'd guess that it will initially be released for one version of one linux distribution. Businesses will try to use it with other distributions and versions, it'll crash a lot. They'll complain to Lotus. Lotus will blame linux.
Also, much as I like Linux (I do Linux support where I work), Netware is a good, stable product for its environment. The sort of company who's willing to buy a proprietary groupware bundle is the sort of company who'd probably have better luck with Netware.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
What about LDAP?
You've been talking to the wrong people. AIX will _not_ be killed, especially by Linux, for several reasons. The most important reason is the fact that AIX users aren't going to give up AIX (and all their AIX apps) that easily, especially some OS that's been newly-ported to the POWER2 platform and that has not had the proven track record of AIX. (Now, you AIX-haters out there, remember, people that bought AIX bought a *nix system from IBM, creator of EBCDIC. 'nuf said.)
Your information on Apache on IBM platforms is only partially correct. Apache is slated to become the core server in IBM's WebSphere Application Server and probably Domino Go Webserver. Domino Go (which is NOT Domino) is scheduled to replace the lame (and apparently NCSA-derived) web server on the AS/400 and other IBM platforms. There apparently isn't much code that is actually shared between Go and Domino now, and Lotus isn't about to recode Domino around an Apache core anytime soon, especially after all the delays in shipping R5 in the first place. (Keep in mind the AS/400 version of Domino just shipped a month or so ago, and the Mac version of Notes _still_ hasn't shipped.)
That's B.S.
Linux *IS* compatible with Solaris
Linux *IS* compatible with SCO
Get a clue.
Linux was the first freeware Unix available under the x86 architecture. This is why it is BSD's responsibility to be compatible with Linux and not the other way around. Just like Solaris was the first on Sparc, that's why Linux is compatible with Solaris on Sparc, and not the other way around. SCO was the first on x86, this is why it is the responsibility of Linux to be compatible with it, rather than the other way around.
Face it, BSD may be a hell of a lot more secure and nominally faster in networking, but it is also far less compatible with hardware and not nearly as accepted. That's reality, face it.
1: Paranoid
2: No one argues that the DB capabilities are not very strong (flat file). Rather that THEY HAVE ANY AT ALL! Show me a system where you can reprogram you're whole email system from scratch and maintain external DB connectivity.
3: My servers dont go down...and if they did go down that often, it wouldnt sell.
4: Running out of disk space has nothing to do with notes. That can happen on any platform. OR get more disk space. Are you an end user?
5: and you have full progmatic access to all the data. It can be easilly moved to whereever you want it. If it is done right, you never need to move it. Plus if you knew anything about the field level replication and the data store, you'd realize that there is not a standardized format that works with such an advanced feature.
Read a book already
It's worth noting that a LOT of the support for Linux at this time is coming from commercial entities primarily interested it only on the server side. I.e. I suspect Compaq will be supporting Linux on Proliant servers, and not on Compaq laptops. It's not the truth that Linux evangalists want to see, but it's the cold business reality right now.
Notes is *NOT* just a POP/IMAP server. If it was,
it would be a waste of time. Real companies that take real advantage of Notes use it for document management, tracking systems, approval processes, workflow, etc.
Notes also has the best security architecture of mail/web system, built in support for public key, and a very nice distributed key infrastructure and address book.
To do this with POP/IMAP would require a super-hacky combination of a Mail Reader that launches a Web browser to view an HTML email which is linked to a CGI, which can then manipulate you mailbox to route documents and evaluate server side agents.
Besides, the default IMAP implementation on Linux is a *PATHETIC* joke. On a machine with 64mb of RAM and a P300, it chokes when any of my mail folders get more than 500 messages in it. The Unix mbox format is not-scalable and not-safe (can be corrupted, and without being detected)
Oh, and about Netfinity boxes, because some luser mentioned them. What's wrong with them? If your company is supporting 1000 users, having redundancy is good. You don't want the machine to go down. So having redundant CPUs, hot-swap RAID, load balanced power supplies, and ECC ram is a good thing. Even for a mail server.
Why even take the chance? Yeah, you could say "well, this cheapo Linux box has a MTBF of 1 year, and if it crashes, I can have a new one up and running in 1 hour."
1 hour of downtime is not good for a company of 1000 users.
Spouting off with crap like this helps no-one. You found it difficult to use since you didn't know what you were doing. It is NOT like IIS or Apache, which seems to be the way you were using it. Just like you'd probably have trouble with developing and using a system whose only language was Basque.
With M$, not only do the smaller apps work even more badly, but you can't really replace many of them, which is the whole *point* of having small separate apps.
>If their stuff doesn't work, then they will try
>other stuff to sell i.e NT boxes and now Linux.
>You might as well be the one selling other
>products your client wants if they don't want
>your stuff. Right?
Wrong. As far as OS/2 is concerned, it outperforms and is more reliable then NT but customers don't seem to want that. They want NT because everybody else is supposed to have it. According to the press just after Windows 95 shipped. When customers insist on an inferior product it is a smart company that ramps up its services for that product. They, IBM are making $$ hand over fist fixing Windows NT problems over and over again. Just look around, Windows is always breaking and at ~$200/hour those who are willing to take pay for a living hell are making some big $$. That is my take on what is going on with IBM pushing NT. To bad businesses are so dumb about selecting it but a working OS/2 or Linux machine gets no attention while Windows has MS fed press and every 10th word out of most employees mouth is Micros~1 when computers are discussed. Go figure.
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
But the moment is against you, as Lotus is not doing Unix-based Notes clients for R5.
Yes this is a shame. For what it's worth, they are not doing any UNIX ports of the 5.0 client, so it's not just Linux that's getting the shaft here. There is a very nice web-based server setup procedure, and 5.0 does provide good web access to most Notes applications.
See http://www.brooklinesw.com/linux/linuxnotes.html for a how-to guide on using Notes 4.6 with WINE.
> You don't like WordPro (AmiPro?)
I share the same bewilderment. I __love__ both of those word processors
and Wordpro even more than AmiPro. From the get-go they had years of a
jump on Turd (Word) and still do.
Lostus, uh, I mean Lotus needs to get their act in gear and port some of their
"desktop" applications to go along with Notes, etc.
What about Adobe?
I'd love to see a Linux version of Photoshop and Illustrator.
In fact, the abscense of those products and Macromedia's excellent Fireworks, is what keeps Windows on my PC at home. Sadly, I don't see Adobe porting anytime soon as most of their (paying) user base is corporate.
...and don't tell me to just use the GIMP, because sorry, it just ain't the same.
NDS is marketed as an add-on for NT, so in a sense NT already has NDS.
Once Netware legacy installs move on, Novell will port NDS to linux...if they aren't planning to already.
Just close your eyes and imagine as many really suckful software aspects you can like an inconsitent interface, poor help system, non-intuitive commands and menus. Now wrap them around a Lotus-(i.e. poor)-quality system and you've just demo'ed Domino (and Notes at the same time)...
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
I wonder where this puts Project Monterey, IBM's joint development effort with SCO for a unified un*x to run on IA64 platforms?
See this Slashdot link for more info.
Linux is great but it still lacks the unified management environmnet that SMIT offers to AIX. If IBM will release a SMIT for Linux (shouldn't be TOO hard, it's mostly scripts anyway) then we'll know that IBM is serious and not just looking to latch on to penguin popularity.
trichard
Which is a shame, for those of us forced to read our mail in a Win32 app part-supported by Wine.
--
They have it inflicted upon them, like some punishment for unspeakable sins. They use Notes in Hell, I am sure. Probably on all those Microchannel 386 machines that IBM had to get rid of in order to actually deploy the Server of the Beast. And to think, they're one of the more clueful companies (I won't even mention what MCI was doing for an E-Mail solution while IBM was deploying Notes. And an INTERNET company, for shame...)
/. out of Domino.
I'd just as soon Lotus DIDN't port their bloated ugly software to Linux. A much better solution could be found with the Apache and MySQL solution that drives this web site so well. You'd never be able to get anything as good looking as
And while I'm at it, Papows is a mouse, not a man. I got news for you you insufferable frog: your company will never be truly successful when you are following the hype instead of leading it. Your customer base has been begging for a linux port for YEARS, now you're jumping on the band wagon in the most conservative fashion imaginable. I've no respect for the guy at all.
It's one thing to sell products based on linux, it's another all together to run your business on it. Generally it makes more sense to go to NT from OS/2 _right now_ since there's an easier transition between the two. Also you can probably run all the same server/client apps from os/2 on NT, and for user desktops, you'ld require less training. In the long term however, I'm confident that Linux will fill these app holes as both a client and a server. Also starting a new computing environment, you could easily go with linux today. It's just when you're dealing with legacy PC apps that you'll probably have NT be the stronger canidate.
Of course you're gonna lose out on stability and scalability with NT, but frankly, you still can't run alot of wintel type apps on linux _today_. Next year... well that's another story.
-earl
LOTUS NOTES IS NOT APACHE. Duh.
If you try to use it as such, you will inflict great pain on yourself.
Notes is a distributed database platform that happens to be web-able. Unless that's exactly what you need, don't use it, despite what Lotus' marketing says.
- A notes developer who makes just a hair less than the figure you listed
I am as enthusiastic about notes as most /.'ers are about linux. If there is one thing I (and a few others have stated during this discussion) have found, it is that you need to know notes really well to run a good system. This isn't a toy that you can play with for a week.
/. 100 times waiting to complain about something else. Notice that I started at 12am CST. Thats when I got off work, and I got up at 6am to do it all over again.
As for a lot of postings. It was well deserved. I haven't seen such blatent spreading of misinformation in a long time.
As a systems integrator, many problems are not caused by software but are easy to blame the software. I do it with MS all the time.
There aren't many problems if you can successfully scale a mountain of servers to support 100,000+ users.
As for being late to the discussion...i work! I can't spend all day hitting
And be prepared. I will be back when the next Notes discussion comes around. Just try to get
I totally agree that some applications MUST be run on some operating systems. The ones only on Windows are there not because of the OS's capabilities but because of market perception. I work for one company that is moving to NT not because of its technical abilities but because of perception. This company sells PC preconfigured with the OS and the apps the customers are to run. Simulators and associated tools. I have a friend that started his own business doing portable spectrum analysers and he is using Windows 9x. In 1991 I told them to dump Dos/Windows for OS/2 because of the flat memory and the multitasking. They didn't and haven't because Windows has marketshare. Both of these companies products are essentially embedded systems but Windows is the target for non technical reasons and in both cases Windows has to be worked around to get the job done. Go figure.
I guess all we can do is take advantage of situations where Windows can be removed from the equasion. As I see it, we have to make some moves even if there is alittle pain involved or else little by little, no choice will exist. Micros~1 does a wonderful job paying companies to product Windows versions of things, holding one or two companies up to the public and saying, "Look what the world is doing", then walking away with the prize. Examples are some European Banks, Dell had MS replace WebObjects with NT/IIS, SoftImage, some company MS and SoftBank started to support game developers to port to Windows 95-only games.
Many of us can say that no OS fits all tasks but that isn't what Micros~1 is selling and the choices are getting fewer and fewer. Another friend who does hardware engineering consulting had set up a small NT system and was talking to me about replacing it with Linux. This was 6 months ago but now they have thrown Exchange and IIS onto it and are using all Microsoft protocols. Linux or any other software/OS is unlikely now. Go figure....
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
That's what I'm getting at. The only problem is, the place that hired me hired me as a web developer/administrator knowing that my previous experience was with apache and IIS. They were wanting the kind of work that I was doing on apache and IIS but done in Domino instead.
I agree with your assessment for what Domino is good for. It does have some uses, but for a corporate website with all the bells and whistles, well, Apache does it soooo much better.
...and FYI, yes, I did inflict great pain on myself. $100k/year still isn't enough to go back to that (seeing as how I'm making almost that doing something I love).
So Lotus has finally decided to "jump on the Linux bandwagon" has it? My
take? Shrug. Who cares?
What vendors like to have is customer/brand loyalty. Repeat business is
*good* business. (And relatively easy business, too. Providing you
*take* *care* of your customers!)
Shouldn't you look for the compliment in a vendor? If you believe so, I
would argue that Lotus is *not* a company on which you want to hang your
future. Lotus strikes me as a company very fond of heading in whatever
direction the latest band-wagon might happen to be headed. And they'll
apparently cavalierly ignore the needs of existing customer base in the
process.
Why do I say this? A few years ago they dropped Unix support for all but
Notes. Recently, they dropped Unix support for all but the Domino server.
*Now* they're supporting Linux? And dropping NetWare?
Is this *really* a company you want to bet *your* company on?
Go for it. But when (notice I said *when*, not *if*, for IMO it's only
a matter of time) Lotus burns you, remember: I told you so!
(The really remarkable thing in all this is the complete cluelessness
displayed by Lotus. One would think that the recently clueful IBM
would've dropped the hammer on Lotus' management by now. As is obvious to
most: you can not win the game by allowing Microsoft to set the rules!
Nobody ever wins those games but Microsoft. Has Lotus figured this out
yet? All indications are, as a Dilbert character once noted, that the
"clue meter is reading zero.")
Jeff Papows made the announcement at Lotusphere in January... I started following slashdot closely after this, and had assumed it was widely known.
I happen to work in an organization that is extraordinarily involved with Domino, and I've been using it since '94. I'm also a UNIX junkie and linux enthusiast. Which gives me a rare perspective. Used properly, Notes / Domino an amazing and wonderful thing. The replication technology is deep magic... it just works. Used improperly (ie, only for e-mail) it's a big, sucking monolithic beast that is much more trouble than it's worth.
Many may not realize this, but there are many close parallels between the way Notes adoption grew and the way Linux is invading the enterprise today. It started out in most companies as a "grass roots" effort... a small department would start using it and hack together some quick applications, which soon other people would want access to, which increased the number of users, which increased the number of applications being created, and so on. Sooner or later, people realized that their business depended on the damn thing, and it became a "standard".
Notes is best viewed as an environment for developing and operating small applications for managing and sharing unstructured information, and the most successful users (companies) are those who figure out how to effectively manage the chaos associated with the fact that every user has a full Notes development environment on their desktop. (The latter part is finally changing substantively with the release of R5, which is sad). You end up with an "application ecosystem" of constantly-evolving applications in which only the most useful are successful and end up sticking around. This is a nightmare scenario for your typical top-down control-freak IT department, but it can lead to tremendous innovation.
Unfortunately, Lotus (IMO) has constantly screwed up the marketing of what really is some great (if closed) technology. I don't expect that to change with this release. I was there when Papows announced the Linux port, and there was *no* vision to accompany it. In fact, about all he said was that his CFO thought they were crazy to do it. I got the impression that this was a reactionary "me too" announcement with little real management understanding of it's implications.
Reminds me a lot of NextStep... killer tech, bad business. Sigh.
As some people pointed out, this was not, "to add Linux, we need to drop something, let's drop NetWare." When the R5 project started, Lotus decided to drop the following Notes/Domino platforms:
Domino -- NetWare, OS/2
Notes -- all *nix-based versions
Linux was *not* considered at this point. It was decided that OS/2 and NetWare's future were questionable (this was before NetWare 5 became such a huge success, and before NDS 8 was announced), and so few people were using the *nix clients it didn't seem important to continue them. Even a Mac version of Notes was apparently not considered until late in development.
The Domino port to Linux most certainly comes from Lotus's experience porting Domino 4.6 to OS/400. In order to accomplish this, Lotus attempted to compile the Domino for Solaris source code on an AS/400. The error percentage was small and apparently fixed easily. Lotus's previous experience with porting Domino, combined with others' successful ports of software to Linux from other *nixes, and IBM's newfound support of a Microsoft fighter..err, Linux, made Domino for Linux a logical progression, Jeff Papows and his fake Marine career notwithstanding.
IBM is just acting like a company, they are covering all their bases. Given the penetration of Windows NT, it would be very foolish of them to ignore the platform. I.E. IBM is trying to make money, and they are hedging their bets.
> Of course you're gonna lose out on stability and
> scalability with NT, but frankly, you still
> can't run alot of wintel type apps on linux
> _today_.
Not true - just use VMware (www.vmware.com) and you can run Windows NT or Windows 98 (or even Win3.1) inside a virtual machine running on Linux. I do this all the time for a Windows-only email package, and it works fine - not suitable for games players, but great for running Wintel business/office apps on Linux.
The supported version is about $300 but I have the unsupported version at $99. Not cheap unfortunately but it does work very well, and it may be cheaper than junking Windows apps before they are obsolete.
If we can get all the major environment players to ship their software for Linux and an appropriate OSS web server, ecommerce issues will suddenly snap to hardware performance and OS reliability - and we all know where Linux stands on those issues.
Ok, M$ Orifice is hardly a notably stable/perfect office suite... but SmartSuite? SmartSuite is the most bitey, klunky, non-intuitive heap'o'crap I have ever had the displeasure to encounter.
> I am as enthusiastic about notes as most /.'ers are about linux. If there is one
> thing I (and a few others have stated during this discussion) have found, it is
> that you need to know notes really well to run a good system.
First: I think you are ignoring the fact that many of the posts indicated
substantial experience with Notes (and unfortunately displeasure with the
product). Those postings may not agree with your experience, but they are not
uninformed.
Second, there is a curious dissonance among the pro-Notes statements (not
attributing them all to you):
(1) No knowledge of HTML, HTTP, etc. required.
(2) Domino is a web application server.
(3) In-depth knowledge of Notes *is* required.
(4) It's a simple all-in-one package. It does everything well.
(5) You have to hire knowlegable consultants/administrators to spend many
person-months to get it to work properly.
> This isn't a toy that you can play with for a week.
Shallow reasoning. Many posts indicated extended experience.
> As for a lot of postings. It was well deserved. I haven't seen such blatent
> spreading of misinformation in a long time.
Many of the posting were frank observations by both Notes users and
developers. You may not _agree_, but that does not make them 'misinformation'.
> As a systems integrator, many problems are not caused by software but are easy
> to blame the software. I do it with MS all the time.
Certainly. Many problems are not caused by software per se, but instead by the
misuse/mis-configuration of software.
One problem is, though, that Lotus positions its product as being "zero-effort, go
home at 6pm, turnkey, all problems solved if only you sign the purchase order";
the reality is much different as you yourself attest, isn't it.
> your other stuff here
Yes, yes, yes. You CLP. We hacker. You important. We stupid.
I just looked at that IBM Website. All I saw was 'middleware' and server apps. That's great, but it further confirms the sentiment out there in the commercial sphere that Linux is a server OS.
IBM isn't selling Thinkpads with Linux installed on them.
Make cents. The market seem hungry for Linux so they aren't fighting the press, it's free, it is small and fast and OSS gives it tons of capability out of the box. It even runs on many types of hardware. Couple that with Java and IBM has a software base that can possible run through a very large range of tasks as opposed to having Winodws, OS/2, AIX, and AS/400(OS?) and diffent software for each. IBM has pretty good software engineers and service is now its middle name. Funny how Micros~1 doesn't really fit in this picture. Coincidence?
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Yes, indeed, a busy poster indeed, trying to counter all the frank postings about Notes/Domino problems.
In a little over two hours (12am to 2am), after most of the discussion had ended, our friend 'vawlk' made _15_ replies to previous comments.
I'm sure we all sleep better tonight knowing that any perceived deficiencies in the software are simply our imagination.
'vawlk': the cheque is in the mail.
There's a script (can't remember the name) that enables your mail database for POP and IMAP access. You need never use the Notes client again.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
All the more reason for a company to either pick a distro of GNU/Linux or to pick something like
FreeBSD
or make sure if you ship a Linux product it runs with the *BSD Linux emulation.
*sigh*
Why doesn't the Linux camp make an effort to be sure products work with *BSD, SCO and Solaris?
Yeah you've got encryption, along with whatever mandatory NSA backdoors have been put in so that Echelon can continue to monitor your E-mail.
You've got build in database capabilities that are about on par with Dbase III.
You've got servers that like to go down. Often when they run out of disk space. Which happens on a fairly regular basis when your 1000+ users all decide they want to keep their 30MB+ mail spools on the server.
You've got your data locked in proprietary formats, so you're stuck with the solution once you've locked yourself into it initially.
Just before Christmas I made a bet with a colleague that SAP would port their R3 system to Linux within a year. The bet was made in the heat of the moment and I worried a tiny bit about appearing foolish if I turned out to be wrong, but as we all know SAP made the announcement only three months later.
Shortly after that I was discussing the same thing with someone on the net. I was explaining how this type of bet - if it comes off - is the easiest and most effective way to silence people sceptical about open source when you are trying to get Linux deployed in your organization.
When pressed for another example prediction - to see if I could do it again - I chose Lotus Notes, again to happen by the end of this year, principally because Lotus had unequivocally said they had no interest in doing so. I must admit I did worry a bit more about that one. But here we are less than three months on from that point and Lotus have made the announcement.
Are there any bastions left yet to fall? I'm really stumped. I can't think of any other major ISV's or software products that ought to and haven't, short of Micros~1 themselves - and there are already rumours about that...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
"Ok, M$ Orifice is hardly a notably stable/perfect office suite... but SmartSuite? SmartSuite is the most bitey, klunky, non-intuitive heap'o'crap I have ever had the
displeasure to encounter. "
You don't like WordPro (AmiPro?)
You don't like LOTUS 1-2-3???
Approach not good for you?
Admittedly the 2-D CAD interface from the original Freelance was wonderful and the new versions of Freelance are not that...
I'd LOVE to have Organizer and 1-2-3 on my desktop.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You're running what OS and can't get more
then 20 days of uptime? Since you're talking
Notes/Domino here...NT or OS/2?
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You can bet that Lotus is not ignoring Linux either, as shown from this tidbit on Lotus' Developers site
- Lotus DevCon99 June 21-23, San Francisco...Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, will deliver a keynote address. And when you get there, be sure to visit the Application Development/Enterprise Integration Lab....
BTW, the reason that SmartSuite users want it for Linux is that it contains a full set of tools (database, spreadsheet, word processor, presentation graphics, Personal info MGR, etc.) which is strong enough to allow us to dump M$ from our systems permanently....Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Wrong. As far as OS/2 is concerned, it outperforms and is more reliable then NT but customers don't seem to want that. They want NT because everybody else is supposed to have it.
No, they have to have it because the prebuilt applications and interoperability with other businesses require Windows.
As an example, I'm the decision maker in my organization. I use Linux at home, I've contributed to a HOWTO, I install it everywhere I can because it's superior. Unfortunately for some of my home needs I still must have Windows 98 at home. And unfortunately for my business needs, I must have NT in the office ( and Sun, and NetWare, and Linux ). I'm an advocate, but I'm not a zealot.
Windows IS a POS. But it runs Word, and SAP/R3, Goldmine, Excel an Powerpoint, and the other apps my customers demand. I can't get away with substituting beta-quality OSS versions that suffer from compatibility issues that I have to retrain the users on. If our mechanical engineers need SolidWorks, I can't tell them to use Gimp and Spice and POVRay. It has more to do with inertia and critical mass than with anything else.
The rest of your paragraph I thought was on the money.
Dave
>That is, when I am able to use it, due to poor setup
Well to start, this statement alone should discount all further statements against LN/D. Notes setup is very important.
>I am able to read my proprietarily stored email
Everything in notes is stored the same way. Even the server configuration files. I personally dont see a need to have to be able to read already downloaded email in multiple programs. Maybe if the server is down, but you dont need a server to read your mail if you keep a local copy of the database. Replication is LN/D most powerful feature.
>on which access depends on the uptime of the server (about 1.5 days)
I'll chalk this one up to the poor setup you talked about. My beta 1 test server never crashed that quickly.
>I can't go in using a decent emailer to read some of this email
Depending on the version, you can use any email program you like. Notes as far back as 4.5 i believe is MAPI compliant.
>I'd much rather use a bunch of smaller apps that do the individual parts better
So you like Micros~1. Bucket of bolts flying in close formation.
It's a shame, though, that they had to drop support for one OS to add Linux. But it is good for Linux; and I've thought less of Novell since they dropped their Mac client.
I love my computer -- You make me feel alright (Bad Religion)
those 2 people who run Domino on Netware will be pretty unhappy.
While I'm really happy to see more support for Linux from the general software community, it distresses me to see Domino being ported over to Linux. I recently had the misfortune of having to develop a website using Domino. Let me tell you, it was the most inane, bloated piece of micromanaging crap I've yet seen. Maybe the 5.0 version (which I'm assuming is the one being ported) is better, but the 4.5 version ate into my productivity like nothing I've ever seen. Poor CGI support, poor java support, poor interfacing, I couldn't FTP my webpages into and out of the server, it all had to be done one by one (images too!) in the Lotus Notes enviroment. No extended find and replace. I could go on and on about missing features and poorly implimented ones.
If you actually want to create pages outside of the Lotus Notes enviroment (as I did because the development tools sucked), then you are just setting yourself up for pain, suffering, and heartbreak. Granted, most of my experience was with client application and not the server, but I never saw any reason to use Domino unless you just happen to have a few thousand Lotus Notes documents laying around that need to be posted to the web, or if you have someone that wants to get into web development but only knows how to use Lotus Notes.
In short, I tried for three months to learn to use and love the Domino server, and finally hightailed it out of there for a better job. They kept telling me that top Domino administrator / developers make $100k+/year, but there's a reason for it. First, it fights you if you try to do anything that's not the "Lotus Way", and second, there's not that many people who want to fool with it. You'd have to pay me 100k just to think about going back to work on a Domino system.
LDAP is crunchy, gooey goodness. It's coming. It'll be here soon. Watch out...
Blar.
You didn't catch my irony. IBM isn't putting on a big push for Linux anywhere but on the server side. Neither is Compaq. Neither are many of the big commercial interests at all. They're porting their server apps over, because that's the only place Linux shines. It's only the little companies that are pure Linux who are evangalizing for a Linux desktop. It isn't gonna happen too soon.
He said it comes down for maintenence.
I am currently on my first boot after installing R5 on NT, which was over a month ago. Previously, I was running 4.6x and it never crashed. Only took it down ever month or so for updates.
Come to think of it. My server has only crashed 1 time and that was my fault.
The only MS product running is the OS...I am using 3rd party apps for everything else.
I have to agree with those concerned that Notes on Linux is a mixed blessing. We have Notes on Solaris at work, and it blows pretty badly. The Solaris part is rock solid, but Notes blows up almost weekly. I'd hate to see people evaluate Notes on a Linux server, be disappointed, and then conclude Linux is a crummy app server.
Please moderate down the ill-informed crap.
>>You've got build in database capabilities that are about on par with Dbase III.
Notes IS NOT A REALTIONAL DB. For fuck's sake, do some research before spouting off
>you've got servers that like to go down. Often when they run out of disk space. Which happens on a fairly regular basis when your 1000+ users all decide they want to keep their 30MB+ mail spools on the server.
Domino will just go into read only mode in this case. If it happens in the first place, it's because you haven't set your system up properly in the first place. This is what quotas are for.
It was only a matter of time before they would decide to do this. For me this is great, notes/domino is a great environment. We currently run it on NT, and it has been extremely stable, 20+ days uptime, only coming down for maintenence. Hopefully the Linux version will retain this stability, and provide better performance. Can't wait to find out.
When I have to deal with a certain system X, why should I not use the best platform available? Our sole reason to use NT is using it as a Domino platform. As soon as Domino for Linux is available and usable, we will switch.
:-)
Seeing IBMs support for Linux, this may even go further: Currently, when buying a Netfinity Server, you get a Domino license for free. So the hardware is from IBM, and the application/server is from IBM. The OS (Loose NT) isn't.
I'd be more than glad to see a bundling with everything from one source: Hardware, OS [A Linux version tested and certified for this very hardware you just bought], and Application/Server [What do you want to install: Notes Server (Domino), Web Server (Apache), Windows File and Print Server (SAMBA), Mail Service (Sendmail/POP3)].
And *if* there is a problem, its just one source to blame. "IBM, fix this" instead of "It's propably an OS problem" vs. "Either your hardware is bad, or you installed an application not approved by M$"
This is next to admin heaven i can get at the moment
Why would Lotus port SmartSuite over to Linux? SmartSuite isn't a server app.
Domino servers do not go down when the disk gets full. At least not when your swap is on another partition.
(Linux apparently does lock when the disk fills. At least it did for me with RedHat 5.1.)
Note that in some senses the database capacities are worse than DBase III. Notes is *not* a relational database at all. It's a "unstructured document store", which means it's nothting more than a collection of arbitrarily structured data which you can access through pre-defined queries (views). If your query isn't pre-defined, the full text search is damn excellent.
The document-oriented data store aspects are really the only reason to use Domino instead of a bunch of perl scripts or CGI or ASP. Any of those technologies can probably handle the display aspect much better than the proprietry scripting languages that Notes has. The big "But" is that you necessarily have to build a relational database and jump through a bunch of hoops to get your data out on the page. On Domino, your structured data is the page so this is somewhat easier. On the other hand, if you are querying structured data, Domino is a bit kludgy
The mail features (when you aren't building mail-based workflow apps) are really not top-of-the-line and should be considered as more of a free add-on. Many shops use Domino/Notes with another mail system. (Although, Notes is the most widely deployed corporate mail system, excluding ccMail which is no longer in development.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Just because you support something, doesn't mean that you have to use it. What surprises me more is that IBM is releasing a new version of Warp Server and they are switching to NT.
Rumors of the demise of the NLM based Notes server were rampant in '97. It was the hope (and may still be) that Dr. Schmidt's relationship with Notes Co. would foster a new realtionship based on a Java Deployment.
So much for hope...
Thought for the day, don't you really dislike the space and bandwidth wasted by most signatures?
>...many of the posts indicated substantial experience with Notes...
:)
I think a couple of my posts have run together and after a record setting 15 (now 17) I may not have been to clear on the subject.
The question about experience with notes comes from a few responses that said they used it for 3 weeks or a couple of months. This is by no means enough time to learn the ins and outs of notes administration especially on a large scale. 3 months is definatly not enough time to conquer the programming aspect.
Notes is different, and it is not easy to understand some of the features in the product because there has never been a product like it before. Educating our customers has been the hardest part. All the documentation and explanations cause their eyes to glaze over. They actually need to see the product in use to understand it.
*My* experience in implementing notes has been nothing but positive. I have not run across 1 unhappy notes installation that my company has set up. The few we ran across that were unhappy we plain and simply set up incorrectly, or they were just using it for email (bloated). When you can walk in, start the web service and create a discussion area on the web in less than 5 minutes, eyes open widely.
The spreading of misinformation was because this was old news and people were spouting out at notes *because* they are jumping on the bandwagon...thats it.
>One problem is, though, that Lotus positions its
>product as being "zero-effort, go home at 6pm,
>turnkey, all problems solved if only you sign the
>purchase order"; reality is much different as you >yourself attest, isn't it.
I think that is a little exagerrated, but that is correct. If you have an experienced admin and programmers, then it is not true. It took me 1 hour to set up R5 and convert my apps from 4.6. It has been running since with no problems.
>Yes, yes, yes. You CLP. We hacker. You important. We stupid.
I am not a CLP, just an enthusiast much like yourself. But one thing I have noticed (not you) is that there is a lot of bias in favor of linux and oss.
Anyway...nice talking to ya...
I work primarily off of information stored in Lotus Notes, and really, I'd have to say that if it sucks for you, its due to the people running it. Our notes servers run fine, without a problem, and I have no problems getting all the information I need. When implemented correctly, and used effectively, it can greatly improve productivity. Obviously if you can't get server admins that can keep more than a day of uptime, anything you're running that they are in charge of is going to suck. Even NT can have decent uptimes sometimes (I can't believe I just said that!!), and as sick as it sounds, weekly reboots can solve a lot of your problems.
Personally I'd rather just run the notes server on Linux and never reboot it... but is there a Notes server port to Linux??
Anyways... I don't like NT, in fact I only use it at work, but it isn't as bad as people say if you get somebody who has half a clue, and don't mind spending some time servicing it. Of course, if you go with a more stable OS (Linux, *BSD, etc), you have a lot less maintenence, but it is hard to find people who are proficient in them compared to finding a person to do NT administration, and its much harder to convince management to switch from NT to Linux than it is to convince them to hire somebody who can administer NT effectively.
Okay, now I need to go irradiate myself and burn my clothes... I feel dirty, having defended M$.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
This is slightly off topic, but why is it that IBM says they are really behind linux, but I keep hearing about IBM switching to windows NT boxes internally? (no hope for OS/2 internally?)
A little more on topic, I'm glad that Lotus is finally getting things ported? Believe it or not, I want to see a port of Lotus Approach.
Or perhaps someone can suggest a free equivalent?