In a product with hundreds of configuration options, there are bound to be mistakes.
With millions of installed clients around the world, some of them are going to find themselves having a problem.
As to rendering HTML... Why is rendering via IE a good default in a product that claims to be secure? If it did use IE by default, then you'd just lambast its "security" because of it.
Notes can't win as far as you're concerned, Blakey. Anyone looking at the responses you've put here can see that.
But please at least stop trying to report complicated issues as black-and-white facts.
Oh, and...
* R6 didn't search only titles. ANY version, if there's no index, will search the view contents rather than the contents of the document displayed in the view. That's default behaviour, and sometimes desirable. * The browser settings are "buried under" Location Settings because yes, sometimes you do want a different browser setting for different locations. For instance, when you do or don't have a working connection. * I'd like to see Notes use the Gecko rendering engine instead myself, and feel that would be the correct default option. But I'm still waiting... * A decent GUI for Notes wouldn't solve any problems, as you'd then have millions of users to retrain. You'd be surprised how used to Notes you've become, and would probably spend all your time posting on Slashdot that the new interface breaks all your stored knowledge and therefore sucks. * Have I mentioned that Notes can't win for you?
Resetting the password on an ID file can be quick and easy (if you have password recovery enabled, or a copy of the ID file with a known password) or slow and painful (if you don't).
If you have the old plain method, then you need to generate a new public/private keypair (a la GPG) and then update the public key in the Directory (if your servers are configured to compare public keys on connection, which they probably should be to prevent spoofing).
As someone who works at a bank and recently had a HUGE enforced password change (thanks to economic turmoils and a rogue trader in France), I can tell you that it takes our Notes team about 5 minutes to do it the hardest way.
However, we have no remote access to the user's machines (security dontcha know!), so we then have to pass the call off to another team who actually use that new ID file. It's probably the delays in getting from the helpdesk -> Notes administrators -> desktop support that really take up the time. Or at least, that's what our call log histories seem to show...
Yeah, it's a pain. But given that it's a secure public/private key based system, that's always going to be the case. If you want it to remain relatively secure, that is...
At ECLIPSECON, which was evidently held in Anaheim.
I'm not disputing the accuracy of your facts. In the post that started this, I said that some folks feel that IBM is too dominant in the Eclipse project.
Mechanik responded with that link, which wasn't what I was thinking of. I was thinking of the recent "we're upset that IBM is thinking about V4, but don't really have much in the way of a cohesive offering ourselves really" debate that was a more recent non-event: http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/03/20/eclipse_e4_timetable/
Basically, IBM is submitting code and ideas, and others were only submitting vague hand-waving gestures. Or at least, that was the impression I got...
We're heading towards agreement on the strengths and weaknesses of the product. It's all cordial, and thanks for keeping it that way - I'm always hesitant to post on slashdot due to the lack of under-bridge cleaning facilities here... *grins*
A very good point about the costs of storage varying depending on need. At my current employer (a bank), there are SANS everywhere, and from what I can gather most of them are of similar spec - but then, they're a bank and they want it that way AND can afford it. (They're a European bank. You know, the ones that still have money these days... *frowns at bankers in general*)
Also a very good point on "don't email it". I wish we could get that one across to more organisations...
As you say, it's a case-by-case basis. Sorry if I sounded like I'd assumed you were a defensive shill - not the case.
It's more that because the product is touted on "it's integrated with a near-monopoly OS", it can be difficult to get across any alternative point of view.
In a time-lagged discussion, it can be difficult to get clear communication both ways.
An Outlook PST used to have a 2Gb maximum, although I think that from Outlook 2003 that goes up to 20Gb.
Either way, a PST is not the right place for mail - it's not centralised, which wreaks havoc when doing searches for disclosure or internal investigations. Plus, of course, you can't access it concurrently whilst the user is accessing it - which makes things interesting if you need to be discreet. Then there's the fragility of PSTs - I've lost count of how many times I've seen corrupted ones.
And PSTs won't reduce the size of your storage bill - they just shuffle the costs from the "mail server" column into the "file server" column.
PST files are evil, and should be avoided at all costs. No bias, by the way - most of the same arguments I present apply to local archives in Notes, which are an analogous technology. I've told employers before now that local archives should be avoided, and I regard them as just as evil as PSTs.
The DoD is no doubt an interesting example. I'd bet that they have small quotas, and lots of sites - that helps mitigate the scaling issues that you get at the individual server level, plus it fits their need for a more decentralised infrastructure where possible.
As I've said elsewhere in this discussion re management, it's not about absolute costs - it's about the tradeoff between the restrictions you put in place to reduce those costs (and remove functionality/capacity for your users) and the costs of managing the system.
In a military setting, I doubt you can complain too much when your superior officer tells you that the maximum message size is 0.5Mb. Orders are orders.;-)
I agree that you need to manage the environment anyway. That's kind of a given.
But my point - which was not well made, I agree - is that there is always a balance between the amount of management you need to do and the restrictions you put in place to minimise that management.
With Exchange Server, it's been my experience that you get more restrictions to do the same amount of management that any of its competitors require.
That's why on competitor's products, there's been a trend towards quota scales starting in the hundreds of megabytes and ending in the gigabytes, whereas in the Exchange Server ecosystem they tend to start in the tens and end in the hundreds.
For its ROI, Exchange is a pretty expensive bit of software - and given how closely it ties into the rest of your environment (active directory, Office, etc) to up the ROI, that means the costs are basically licenses and management.
Per user, I believe that the management cost is fairly high given the ROI you're getting.
It's not about day-to-day performance, but about handling growth and managing your environment. Exchange is quite poor at that, and tends to require you to either limit your users or do a lot of management.
As an example, Exchange uses shared mail by default - but only within the storage group for that one mailbox.
Up until very recently, the maximum size per storage group in the Information Store was 16Gb. I believe it's now either 75Gb or 16Tb, depending on the license for the server. 16Tb is fine, but even 75Gb - for a shared store - is a bit constrained. It doesn't need a huge number of large mailboxes to start giving you serious problems, and in a large enterprise that will happen very quickly.
The way you work around that is simple - you either spend a lot of time monitoring your information stores and doing capacity management, or you set hard quotas at low values.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know that have very low quotas on their work mail systems are on Exchange Servers, whereas most of the people I know with gigabytes of mail aren't.
Now contrast this situation with Domino, which has a shared mail system which is switched off by default. Nobody uses it because they know it introduces these kinds of scaling issues. (By the way, even Microsoft recommends that you should ignore shared mail when capacity planning.)
Everyone gets their own database, which means that monitoring, moving, replicating and generally managing users is much easier.
That's just the start of it. Uptime? In my experience, the shared storage system that Microsoft's clustering solution requires reduces uptime, not increases it. Domino servers fail over faster because they have no shared resources.
Exchange's architecture does show strain. If you're a Microosft Gold Partner and can call on them to advise you, then fine - otherwise, good luck to you!
What they mean is that it's now using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.
Most of the core code is still C/C++, and was already somewhat cross-platform. For instance, the database code already runs on Windows, AIX, Solaris, Linux, OS/400 and the z-Series mainframe. This is because IBM tend to use the same code on the client as they do on the server - it reduces maintenance, and increases reliability.
However, over the past few versions of Notes (R5 to R7), the Notes client had become more Windows-centric as it put in place or improved various features that IBM's clients were asking for - such as Dial-Up Networking support, better OLE support, etc.
In fact, those versions didn't ship Unix clients, and the Mac client often lagged behind in terms of both shipping and functionality.
IBM's solution has been to rework the Notes client so that it uses the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. It's given them a common UI and OS abstraction layer across their three target platforms - Windows, Mac, and now Linux too.
With a common platform and common libraries, IBM should be able to support multiple operating systems without crippling development costs - and it's benefiting the Eclipse project, because a lot of the work that IBM has done to get it working properly on the Mac platform (for example) is going straight back into that project.
(In fact, IBM's commitment to Eclipse is so strong of late that some people feel they've become dominant in the project, which is a bit of a sticky political situation for them.)
Eclipse isn't perfect, and it's a bit heavy on the system resources at present. But as with most heavy applications, what's large and slow now will be small and svelte on the latest machines in a year or two's time.
Meanwhile, the ability to mix Eclipse plugins with traditonal Notes functionality - especially in workflow applications - is something that's extending Notes in some rather interesting directions...
You couldn't pay me enough to touch an Exchange server. I know exactly what you mean! I'd worked with most of the earlier versions - 4.0, 5.5, 2000 - but never, ever enjoyed it. I'd seen 2003, briefly, but I strangely seem in no sudden rush to poke at the 2003/2007 versions. It's probably an effect similar to aversion therapy...
To be fair, I'm seeing good things about the latest version when I look at reviews and various blogs. There seem to have been lots of improvements.
But it still has an awful architecture, and I'm still hearing horror stories from people that are working with it. And I'm not convinced that it's anything more than the cc:Mail/MS Mail beater that it was designed to be, or that it ever could be without some pretty serious work.
Maybe one day they'll get it working with SQL Server though - that would be a major step in the right direction, but it still wouldn't be enough to make it something I'd want to work with...
(Although you don't say which version of the client you're using, so it may not be a fair comparison. The R8 client is a major upgrade, especially in interface terms.)
However, your eagerness to move to the client tells only half the story.
The server side - well, frankly, Exchange is a pit. A big money pit. It's fine for 100 users in a small business. Past that, its storage systems show the strain.
It's not as scalable, it's not as robust, and it gives far less functionality than a Domino server. It's a mail system that was designed to beat cc:Mail in 1995, and is still straining at the architectural limitations that brief imposed upon it.
And your response will no doubt be "I don't care, I only see the client" - fair enough. But the quote was "MS Outlook with Exchange" - so you're already replying out of context.
Oh, and speaking of web access clients, the Domino Web Access client (formerly known as iNotes) is no slouch either...
High costs of support? Not really. Not more than all the other apps needed to do the same work - where the support costs have to be aggregated to compare realistically.
In over a decade of working with both Domino/Notes and with the Microsoft stack, I have to say I've not seen higher support costs for Notes than for competitors. The biggest "added" day to day cost is actually in the support of ID files - which, if you don't need that level of security, can be seen as a cost as they're not optional (yet).
However, to be honest, the rest of your reply shows you're not going to agree, and will probably pounce upon that with glee thinking you have yet another reason you're right.
For instance, you just implied that a company would use an application that's known to lose data due to fixable flaws - for over a decade. That's nuts, and you know it. Data loss would be unacceptable, and that would be fixed or the application would be replaced. Yet you're using this nonsensical scenario to beat on Notes.
Then you just compared implied that Excel and Access can be used for groupware functions - a position that not even Microsoft would agree with.
Upgrades to Word have broken templates, upgrades to Excel have broken spreadsheets, and upgrades to PowerPoint have... OK. PowerPoint breaks nothing but the spirits of those who have to sit through badly written presentations that it's used for. But still, Office upgrades can break previous documents, and have done so. (See http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/comptoolsExcel.html for a real life example of a medium complexity spreadsheet suffering from this.)
And I'm currently supporting workstations in offshore locations that are running Windows NT 4 and Office 97/2000 - they're inherited from a division of a competitor that we bought out. And we're talking profitable businesses - still running NT4 a year ago. I can assure you that organisations are sadly still using very old versions of Microsoft software in live environments - and software from many other vendors. I'm not picking on Microsoft or anyone else about old versions that their customers are using, as they have very little control over that. It's just a fact of life. It's not commonplace, but it's there and it's painfully expensive to deal with when you find it...
To be honest, all that I've written about so far is technical stuff. Easy to refute, and easy to write about. Unlike this next part.
What worries me most is that you continue this strange, paranoid, frankly almost conspiracy-theory notion that IBM only ship Notes to create consultancy opportunities, and that nobody else in the world could be so evil.
You're not stupid - I can see that. But you have become quite irrational because of your strong feelings. And I'm afraid that not everyone shares those feelings. Feelings this strong aren't the majority, or even a significant minority, at least not in my experience.
You summed it up with this sentence: "It's not normal for people to hate software with such a passion that they write long-winded posts like this one."
No, it's not.
Your reaction is WAY out of proportion to what is, effectively, a tool you had to use in your job.
It's even less normal for someone to think that a company hates them personally because of software they've selected, which you imply strongly in your last sentence.
I hope you work these problems out. Meanwhile, I'd advise not thinking about Notes too much in the future, as it evidently upsets you rather too much.
To help you, I'll just stop replying now. Sorry to have caused you such pain.
Yeah, this is solvable. As a glue writer, you know that OSS is in the final 10% stage rather - which doesn't mean it's easy, but does mean it's doable.
Once the package is there, it's a matter of having the support/consultancy/reference installations - which don't come overnight. Hence my suggestion of going for the smaller organisations.
It'd be good to have more competition in this arena, so here's hoping it happens soon.:-)
(I'll not discuss Linux - it's not groupware or even a component of it! Even though I'm typing this from within Ubuntu, I'm not sure it fits in this discussion. An OS isn't groupware, and should be kept out of it in order to keep clarity and focus... I'm also going to ignore issues like being able to offer consultancy, training, international and multilingual support. I'm just focusing, as I think you wanted me too, on technology and community.)
OSS can indeed step up to the plate and deliver many parts of a groupware solution. Apache can be your web server. PHP (or Perl or Python) could be your application framework language, providing you could beef up an existing framework and CMS with better and more generic workflow APIs. (and probably cron/anacron and some kind of event system to pitch in too.) PostgreSQL can be your storage system (MySQL's replication seems to primitive to be selected currently). Exim (or sendmail or postfix) could be your MTA, and procmail your MDA. Evolution or Thunderbird/Sunbird (when Sunbird's ready) can be your email and PIM client. Firefox, especially with its XUL technology, would make an interesting application platform for those apps served by Apache. Clustering would be harder to accomplish, as you're talking the failover kind of clustering rather than the parallel processing kind of clustering. And I'm sure a search engine for large volumes of data exists, but I'm not aware of its name. (Nor how you could easily scale it down to the client end for offline working.) Google Gears could supply offline working for your apps, when it leaves beta.
So many (although possibly not all) aspects of groupware could be done via OSS applications. And many of those OSS applications are proven, reliable, scalable ones too.
So what's the advantage of Domino/Notes (as an example)?
I configure my servers in one interface. That's a big advantage. I don't have to be an expert in ten applications that are already broad in their own domains, and have been shoehorned into one "package". I just need to be an expert in one broad platform, through one interface.
How many people do you know that are experts - real, genuine, "could write columns on it or maybe even a book" experts - on the following: * Apache * {PHP|Python|Perl} * $framework + $CMS * cron/anacron * PostgreSQL * {Exim|postfix|sendmail} * procmail * {Evolution|(Thunderbird+Sunbird)) * Firefox * Google Gears * Some kind of search engine
Worldwide, that's maybe 100,000 people. If we're (remarkably) generous, perhaps 250,000. Now pick just ONE for each of the options we presented, and watch those figures drop like a stone. You might still have a thousand or two experts, but they're often employed in one specific area (web development, DB admin, sysadmin) and have no practical experience of grouping together all those products as one _simple_ package.
And being a simple package is important. As I alluded to earlier, I can configure a Domino server using one client, and almost all the configuration is stored in one database (the system directory, also used for user authentication and group memberships). That's a significant jump in ease of administration and therefore a drop in TCO. Yet, for the purposes of groupware, very little flexibility is lost. Very little indeed.
Even for the Microsoft stack, there's at least a fairly cohesive administration interface across all the applications. And the terminology is the same, the background and concepts are the same... It's a simple point, but a powerful one when you're looking for _A_ groupware solution. (Not a bundle of solutions that happen to be configured at this moment for groupware.)
Frankly, businesses aren't fools. They've been sold "multiple product" solutions in the past, and been burnt on them. Enterprises especially. If OSS wanted to enter the market - or more likely, if someone wanted to enter the market using OS
Given that you'd have to cluster (at least) IIS, SQL Server, Sharepoint and Exchange on each of the sites - meaning at least three times as many machines - I have to say I suspect you're wrong about it being "easier". Simply put you're looking at more man hours to get it up and running, and more points of failure in the implementation plan.
And you're talking about difficulty to implement. Getting an Exchange cluster (or any MS Clustering solution) to a point where it can reliably fail over without issues can be painful, often for no good visible reason. Whereas clustering Domino servers takes about five minutes to do.
You then talk about value - in the Microsoft model, you've just paid for six more OS licences. Not to mention (for an enterprise) hardware support contracts and Lights Out/RIB licences for remote support of the machines.
An inherent value in software you can use without swearing at? Yes, I guess so. Does it equal or exceed the cost of the licenses and the manpower required to set up all those extra boxes mentioned above?
Well, I hate to say it, but it very probably doesn't. It's not going to be high up on anyone's TCO/ROI calculations in the budget.
Now, you ask what could kill Notes? Well, right now, the Microsoft stack tends to cost more to deliver the same or less capabilities. There is no open source equivalent of either that is as tightly integrated as the Exchange/Outlook/IE/SQL Server/IIS/.NET/SharePoint or the Domino/Notes solution. So you're dependent on Microsoft killing Notes, and that's not happened yet despite them trying VERY hard.
Lastly, if you believe the true purpose of Notes is to generate consultancy fees, then ask yourself how many times people must have implemented basic groupware in the MS stack. Public Folders, Exchange Forms Designer, Outlook Forms Designer, SharePoint 1.x, SharePoint 2.x and higher, and many more in between.
If you had implemented a basic business process in Notes in 1996, it would still work today. Yes, it would look very old as a design. But the backwards compatibility that Notes provides means that your app is going to work today.
If you'd implemented it with the Microsoft stack in 1996, how many times would you have had to re-write it into a new technology? How much does that cost each time? (Clues: At least three, and much more than Notes costs you.)
Can Microsoft kill Notes? Probably not. Many of Microsoft's "big wins" from Domino/Notes to Exchange/Outlook are still, after five or more YEARS, running groupware apps in Notes. And some of those companies are probably now wondering why upgrading their Domino server hardly ever breaks their apps, whereas upgrading the Exchange-related stack brings large risks and upheavals.
And yet you think IBM sells Notes to drive a consultancy and development industry around it?
I think you've missed the real money - the consultancy and development market around Microsoft's multi-product and ever-changing stack!
Again, I think you've let your feelings for Notes cloud your analysis of the issue. You'll have a very hard time trying to prove that IBM's groupware stack generates more consultancy and development than Microsoft's does, or anyone else's for that matter. Especially over longer periods of time, such as three, five or ten years. You can make Microsoft's stack look incredibly cheap by costing for one year only, delaying upgrades, and ignoring the possibility your organisation will grow. But the moment you enter the real world and the long term, it starts to get much more expensive.
That's why larger corporates use Notes. It's cheaper, yet more functional.
"What is mystifying is that rather than hiring a team of HCI experts to smooth smooth over the more difficult concepts and eliminate places where the product was gratuitously arcane, IBM just slapped a slick looking cosmetic face lift on the product."
I hope I can help here: Installed user base.
If they change Notes too much, existing users will dislike it. You won't find many here that would believe that, but it's true.
I've seen this happen in real life, and can give an example - Domino Web Access (formerly known as iNotes).
Domino Web Access (DWA from hereon) is the webmail implementation of Notes - mail only, and runs in IE/Firefox. Because of limitations in the browser (it's base target is IE6 as it's a corporate product after all!), it can't assume a tabbed working space or the same kinds of controls.
Two specific examples were reading/composing emails, and selecting documents.
In Notes, new documents - for either reading or composing - open as a new tab. In DWA, they open as a new window. A very minor change, and technically quite understandable. But it had curious results. Longtime Outlook users and light mail users liked it. Longtime Notes users and heavy mail/app users hated it.
Why did the Notes users hate the new window per email? Because they were used to seeing all open windows as tabs in their Notes client. It made everything easy to navigate, as what was Notes stayed in Notes. But DWA starts throwing more and more windows open, making navigation painful when using other apps as well. And if Windows XP collapses the windows on the taskbar into one, now your DWA windows are confused with other apps you may be using in IE. That's why I include heavy mail/app users as hating it. Whether they hated Notes or not, whether they preferred the look of DWA, they ALL wanted Notes back after less than two weeks of usage because of this.
By contrast, long-time Outlook users and light users were more likely to go for the rightmost, uppermost X on their screen and accidentally close the whole Notes client, losing everything open with obvious frustrations. (This was in the R6.5 days, before Notes 7 put a prompt up.)
Small change, big results.
Document selection is the other one that frustrated. Notes has an unusual selection system within views and folders - it makes it easier to select individual documents manually (you don't hold down CTRL, you click in the selection gutter or use the scroll keys and spacebar). But it makes it harder to select large swathes of documents as it doesn't support the CLICK --> SHIFT+CLICK method. (Until Notes R8, anyway.)
Of course, being implemented in a browser, DWA is the other way around. So those used to selecting apparently disparate (in terms of subject, sender or date) but actually related mails for foldering in Notes found DWA very frustrating. Whereas those coming from Outlook who were used to traditional selection found DWA far more to their liking.
(Funnily enough, the light/heavy divide went was the same here, too! Heavy users hated DWA, light users loved it. I'd like to think I had enough sample data to draw a conclusion, but I'm afraid that with only one implementation and less than two hundred users on this project, I'd rather say it's anecdotal than a hard fact...)
Notes has a rich interface which millions of people worldwide are used to. They're trained in it, or have picked up little tricks in it. If you ripped and replaced it wholesale with a "modern interface", then IBM would have serious problems selling the version after that due to the complaints.
They're aware of this high-wire that they have to balance on, and do employ HCI experts. Check out Mary Beth Raven's blog at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/marybeth - she's the lead product designer for the UI of Notes right now, and agonises - in public, on that blog - about balancing new users versus old users.
"But the simple fact of the matter is that IBM sells it as a groupware product, and it's terrible at groupware."
Really?
Or is it in fact excellent at groupware, delivering far more functionality and scalability for far less cost than any other option - but you didn't enjoy using it?
I suspect that this is the case. In fact, your comments show me it is the case. I just read them and saw years-old error messages mentioned, and general railing about performance. At no point did you mention any alternative distributed, scalable, reliable document-oriented database system with mail routing, web serving, offline working and almost seamless backwards compatibility through seven versions. You just railed against it.
You even went so far as to accuse anyone of liking it as being on crack. Nice fairness and balance there...
You're claiming it's terrible, but can't prove it beyond "I didn't like using it" as far as I can see.
Time to either grow up and leave the temper behind in the pram, or name what does the job better for the same or less money. I'll make it easy for you - your target reference platform for this exercise is an organisation with 50,000 users in seven sites around the world. High availability and a decentralised infrastructure are a must. You have to provide workflow for basic office operations (purchase approvals, sickness/leave approval, etc.), discussions, document libraries and knowledgebases, and of course email. All of these must be available for offline synchronisation for travelling executives. Support must be 24/7, from one entity worldwide, but in native languages for each regional administration group.
That's a pretty normal requirement for a medium enterprise.
Your suggestion? (Don't forget to price it up, as I'll then go and price up the same thing for Domino/Notes. The winner is the one that provides groupware for the lowest cost.)
Every enterprise uses Exchange/Outlook or Domino/Notes for a set of reasons, and those reasons show the huge gulf between your requirements and theirs.
(I don't mean to be rude when saying that, although I know it may sound rude. I'm merely trying to aid understanding.)
Enterprises require: * Someone to yell at when it goes wrong. (Support) * Assistance in edge cases for integration, scaling or extreme usage. (Consultancy) * An ability to demonstrate ROI, TCO, and other items on the acronym bingo playing card. (Economics) * Demonstrations, through real-world studies of implementations at a similar scale, that the software works. (Assurance) * The knowledge that the software will continue to work (or with minimal effort can be made to continue to work) during most circumstances. (Reliability) * The ability to keep up with their amazing double-digit growth as a company. (Scalability)
There's more, and it often involves politics and strategies, but those are the basics.
By contrast, you require something you can get working within an hour and have a personal liking of. Sometimes, because you're a geek (and don't try to deny that when you're posting on slashdot! - we're both geeks!), you're happy to spend longer trying to get something to work. That's because you're enjoying it. But if it was costing you time/money, would you persevere?
Whether or not Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes really do tick all of the boxes is moot. They certainly tick more of them than anything else on the marketplace. There are no serious commercial competitors when you go above 10,000 seats. Open Source software provides some components that can tick all boxes (MTAs, for example) but for most software the support, consultancy, assurance, and scalability are all lacking (or, in the case of scalability, awaiting proof at these magnitudes).
Enterprise software is an odd thing. It's not evaluated in the same way you would for 1, 10 or 100 workstations. At 1,000 workstations, you're beginning to see that the Enterprise model makes sense, despite the effort and conservatism it brings. At 10,000 workstations, you'd be insane not to look at working like an Enterprise...
The problem with a wireless network is a scalability one.
You only get so many frequency bands. On each frequency band for the wireless network, every machine using it has to share that frequency. Therefore there is a limit - a fairly low limit - to how many machines you can sensibly use.
Wireless networks are fine for low numbers of machines, provided that there are also no other wireless networks on that same band nearby.
My current employer got smacked, hard, by this contention issue. They had a sudden expansion in an office, and coped with it by putting the 50 machines onto a wireless network at first. They saved on cabling costs, which was significant, even if the wireless APs were more expensive than switches and the wireless cards were also an expense, as this was the newer 802.11g.
But then we had an interesting problem. At about nine in the morning, everyone comes in and logs on. And Windows pulls their profiles from the network... And due to contention, nobody got to finish logging on until at least quarter to ten. And that was AFTER we'd sped it up by manually forcing access points and groups of PCs onto different bands, to limit contention issues.
Let's be honest - a switched 10Mbps network would have been faster under that load. That's no exaggeration either - we timed it.
In the end, the only way we could make it usable was to have everyone never log off - just lock their machines at night. Not ideal, really. Also, if anyone was going to do certain operations that are network intensive, we had to get them to schedule them so that they didn't clash - and alert users that their networking would be slower. That was inconvenient, and sometimes caused acrimony on the floor - "my network's slow because Bob's doing stats again..."
The lack of an ability to switch means that wireless networks don't scale at all, especially for businesses. They're fine for home use, for public access points, for small ad-hoc offices and so forth. But if you're looking at a floor in an office block, or even half a floor, then they're useless except for visitors...
Everyone else has given you excellent advise on your rights, so I'd like to explore another option.
Accept it and make their lives hell.
Get it in writing that if your OS is changed, you void your warranty.
Then contact Trading Standards, with this evidence, and tell them that they give no such warning with their Windows Vista Upgrade display stand. Point out that it should be a large, clearly visible sign that makes it clear that purchasing a Vista Upgrade may invalidate your warranty on hardware bought at PC World.
Make sure you cc the letter to PC World's head office, and trade press. Make no issue of the fact that it's your right to the repair - simply highlight the policy that you encountered when trying to get a repair, and your concern for the preservation of the rights of others.
Microsoft's lawyers, consumer organisations and the trade press will do the rest for you.:-)
However, I must admit I'd like a tape of that first conversation between PC World's management and Microsoft...;-)
Well, I trusted it for some seven years plus before DEP came along, so I guess the answer is yes.
It'd be nice if Opera supported DEP. I suspect it doesn't because they're very proud of its small size, even if it is enhanced by a packer. No other internet suite fits a browser, RSS reader, POP3/IMAP4 mail client, IRC client and NNTP client in such a small package. The packer makes it look even more impressive, of course, but even when unpacked it's still danged small for all that it does.
Opera has had surprisingly few really bad security issues over its lifetime - far fewer than most alternatives. The track history of the software and the attitude of its vendor do far more to assure me of its security than whether or not it uses hardware DEP support.
Because there's a difference between just being protected by hardware and being protected by good design. Other browsers may well support DEP, but we can probably all think of a certain browser that has an awful design which is almost impossible to truly secure because it places - deep in its design - functionality and integration with the OS above security.
DEP is nice, but not all attacks are buffer overruns. Some of them are just getting a browser to do something the designers thought was cool at the time, but didn't realise the security implications of.
Having read you article, I have a question - have you actually contacted Opera themselves about this and expressed your concerns to them? You don't say that you have, so I'm currently forced to conclude you're just griping for the sake of griping or worse, have no intention of doing more than self-publicising about this.
Speak to Opera. If you haven't before now, then start by apologising for posting this without first asking them what's up with this. Be polite, and tell them you'd like an official reply to follow up this entry with.
And in future, would you consider following responsible disclosure guidelines... If this is as serious as you seem to think it is, then it's bloody reckless of you not to, no?
And Opera has had keywords (it calls them nicknames) since version 3, released in 1998.
I don't recall if they worked for bookmark folders at that stage, though, But I was using nicknames for folders to open all my news sites back in 2001/2002, I think - before RSS was really common it was necessary to open a whole folder of bookmarks to do my daily reading. Just typing "news" and getting El Reg, Ars Technica, Slashdot and others was very handy...
Finding a feature in a browser that Opera didn't have first or didn't have an antecedent of is very, very difficult.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
In a product with hundreds of configuration options, there are bound to be mistakes.
With millions of installed clients around the world, some of them are going to find themselves having a problem.
As to rendering HTML... Why is rendering via IE a good default in a product that claims to be secure? If it did use IE by default, then you'd just lambast its "security" because of it.
Notes can't win as far as you're concerned, Blakey. Anyone looking at the responses you've put here can see that.
But please at least stop trying to report complicated issues as black-and-white facts.
Oh, and...
* R6 didn't search only titles. ANY version, if there's no index, will search the view contents rather than the contents of the document displayed in the view. That's default behaviour, and sometimes desirable.
* The browser settings are "buried under" Location Settings because yes, sometimes you do want a different browser setting for different locations. For instance, when you do or don't have a working connection.
* I'd like to see Notes use the Gecko rendering engine instead myself, and feel that would be the correct default option. But I'm still waiting...
* A decent GUI for Notes wouldn't solve any problems, as you'd then have millions of users to retrain. You'd be surprised how used to Notes you've become, and would probably spend all your time posting on Slashdot that the new interface breaks all your stored knowledge and therefore sucks.
* Have I mentioned that Notes can't win for you?
"I have never seen France, therefore France must not exist".
Nice style of debate. Care to continue being ridiculed, or do you want to admit that France might actually exist?
Resetting the password on an ID file can be quick and easy (if you have password recovery enabled, or a copy of the ID file with a known password) or slow and painful (if you don't).
If you have the old plain method, then you need to generate a new public/private keypair (a la GPG) and then update the public key in the Directory (if your servers are configured to compare public keys on connection, which they probably should be to prevent spoofing).
As someone who works at a bank and recently had a HUGE enforced password change (thanks to economic turmoils and a rogue trader in France), I can tell you that it takes our Notes team about 5 minutes to do it the hardest way.
However, we have no remote access to the user's machines (security dontcha know!), so we then have to pass the call off to another team who actually use that new ID file. It's probably the delays in getting from the helpdesk -> Notes administrators -> desktop support that really take up the time. Or at least, that's what our call log histories seem to show...
Yeah, it's a pain. But given that it's a secure public/private key based system, that's always going to be the case. If you want it to remain relatively secure, that is...
Bugger me.
;-)
Someone on Slashdot that knows what the hell they're talking about!
BURN HIM! BURN THE WITCH!
*fetches his burning pitchfork*
What gave me that impression?
"ECLIPSECON, ANAHEIM, CAâ"February 2, 2004â"The Eclipse Board of Stewards today announced"
It was a press release.
Released on 2nd February, 2004.
At ECLIPSECON, which was evidently held in Anaheim.
I'm not disputing the accuracy of your facts. In the post that started this, I said that some folks feel that IBM is too dominant in the Eclipse project.
Mechanik responded with that link, which wasn't what I was thinking of. I was thinking of the recent "we're upset that IBM is thinking about V4, but don't really have much in the way of a cohesive offering ourselves really" debate that was a more recent non-event:
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/03/20/eclipse_e4_timetable/
Basically, IBM is submitting code and ideas, and others were only submitting vague hand-waving gestures. Or at least, that was the impression I got...
*shrugs*
*vaguely waves hands in that direction*
Good response. Not sucky at all. ;-)
We're heading towards agreement on the strengths and weaknesses of the product. It's all cordial, and thanks for keeping it that way - I'm always hesitant to post on slashdot due to the lack of under-bridge cleaning facilities here... *grins*
A very good point about the costs of storage varying depending on need. At my current employer (a bank), there are SANS everywhere, and from what I can gather most of them are of similar spec - but then, they're a bank and they want it that way AND can afford it.
(They're a European bank. You know, the ones that still have money these days... *frowns at bankers in general*)
Also a very good point on "don't email it". I wish we could get that one across to more organisations...
As you say, it's a case-by-case basis. Sorry if I sounded like I'd assumed you were a defensive shill - not the case.
It's more that because the product is touted on "it's integrated with a near-monopoly OS", it can be difficult to get across any alternative point of view.
In a time-lagged discussion, it can be difficult to get clear communication both ways.
An Outlook PST used to have a 2Gb maximum, although I think that from Outlook 2003 that goes up to 20Gb.
;-)
Either way, a PST is not the right place for mail - it's not centralised, which wreaks havoc when doing searches for disclosure or internal investigations. Plus, of course, you can't access it concurrently whilst the user is accessing it - which makes things interesting if you need to be discreet.
Then there's the fragility of PSTs - I've lost count of how many times I've seen corrupted ones.
And PSTs won't reduce the size of your storage bill - they just shuffle the costs from the "mail server" column into the "file server" column.
PST files are evil, and should be avoided at all costs. No bias, by the way - most of the same arguments I present apply to local archives in Notes, which are an analogous technology. I've told employers before now that local archives should be avoided, and I regard them as just as evil as PSTs.
The DoD is no doubt an interesting example. I'd bet that they have small quotas, and lots of sites - that helps mitigate the scaling issues that you get at the individual server level, plus it fits their need for a more decentralised infrastructure where possible.
As I've said elsewhere in this discussion re management, it's not about absolute costs - it's about the tradeoff between the restrictions you put in place to reduce those costs (and remove functionality/capacity for your users) and the costs of managing the system.
In a military setting, I doubt you can complain too much when your superior officer tells you that the maximum message size is 0.5Mb. Orders are orders.
I agree that you need to manage the environment anyway. That's kind of a given.
But my point - which was not well made, I agree - is that there is always a balance between the amount of management you need to do and the restrictions you put in place to minimise that management.
With Exchange Server, it's been my experience that you get more restrictions to do the same amount of management that any of its competitors require.
That's why on competitor's products, there's been a trend towards quota scales starting in the hundreds of megabytes and ending in the gigabytes, whereas in the Exchange Server ecosystem they tend to start in the tens and end in the hundreds.
For its ROI, Exchange is a pretty expensive bit of software - and given how closely it ties into the rest of your environment (active directory, Office, etc) to up the ROI, that means the costs are basically licenses and management.
Per user, I believe that the management cost is fairly high given the ROI you're getting.
(Let's not even start on the licensing.)
Yes, they did.
;-)
In 2004, according to that link.
Slashdot: "News for nerds, stuff that's ancient."
See my response to the AC.
It's not about day-to-day performance, but about handling growth and managing your environment. Exchange is quite poor at that, and tends to require you to either limit your users or do a lot of management.
Something none of its competitors do.
It's possible, yes. If you limit your service.
As an example, Exchange uses shared mail by default - but only within the storage group for that one mailbox.
Up until very recently, the maximum size per storage group in the Information Store was 16Gb. I believe it's now either 75Gb or 16Tb, depending on the license for the server. 16Tb is fine, but even 75Gb - for a shared store - is a bit constrained. It doesn't need a huge number of large mailboxes to start giving you serious problems, and in a large enterprise that will happen very quickly.
The way you work around that is simple - you either spend a lot of time monitoring your information stores and doing capacity management, or you set hard quotas at low values.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know that have very low quotas on their work mail systems are on Exchange Servers, whereas most of the people I know with gigabytes of mail aren't.
Now contrast this situation with Domino, which has a shared mail system which is switched off by default. Nobody uses it because they know it introduces these kinds of scaling issues. (By the way, even Microsoft recommends that you should ignore shared mail when capacity planning.)
Everyone gets their own database, which means that monitoring, moving, replicating and generally managing users is much easier.
That's just the start of it. Uptime? In my experience, the shared storage system that Microsoft's clustering solution requires reduces uptime, not increases it. Domino servers fail over faster because they have no shared resources.
Exchange's architecture does show strain. If you're a Microosft Gold Partner and can call on them to advise you, then fine - otherwise, good luck to you!
It's a really bad bit of phrasing.
What they mean is that it's now using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.
Most of the core code is still C/C++, and was already somewhat cross-platform. For instance, the database code already runs on Windows, AIX, Solaris, Linux, OS/400 and the z-Series mainframe. This is because IBM tend to use the same code on the client as they do on the server - it reduces maintenance, and increases reliability.
However, over the past few versions of Notes (R5 to R7), the Notes client had become more Windows-centric as it put in place or improved various features that IBM's clients were asking for - such as Dial-Up Networking support, better OLE support, etc.
In fact, those versions didn't ship Unix clients, and the Mac client often lagged behind in terms of both shipping and functionality.
IBM's solution has been to rework the Notes client so that it uses the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. It's given them a common UI and OS abstraction layer across their three target platforms - Windows, Mac, and now Linux too.
With a common platform and common libraries, IBM should be able to support multiple operating systems without crippling development costs - and it's benefiting the Eclipse project, because a lot of the work that IBM has done to get it working properly on the Mac platform (for example) is going straight back into that project.
(In fact, IBM's commitment to Eclipse is so strong of late that some people feel they've become dominant in the project, which is a bit of a sticky political situation for them.)
Eclipse isn't perfect, and it's a bit heavy on the system resources at present. But as with most heavy applications, what's large and slow now will be small and svelte on the latest machines in a year or two's time.
Meanwhile, the ability to mix Eclipse plugins with traditonal Notes functionality - especially in workflow applications - is something that's extending Notes in some rather interesting directions...
I'd seen 2003, briefly, but I strangely seem in no sudden rush to poke at the 2003/2007 versions. It's probably an effect similar to aversion therapy...
To be fair, I'm seeing good things about the latest version when I look at reviews and various blogs. There seem to have been lots of improvements.
But it still has an awful architecture, and I'm still hearing horror stories from people that are working with it. And I'm not convinced that it's anything more than the cc:Mail/MS Mail beater that it was designed to be, or that it ever could be without some pretty serious work.
Maybe one day they'll get it working with SQL Server though - that would be a major step in the right direction, but it still wouldn't be enough to make it something I'd want to work with...
So you're eager to move away from Notes.
(Although you don't say which version of the client you're using, so it may not be a fair comparison. The R8 client is a major upgrade, especially in interface terms.)
However, your eagerness to move to the client tells only half the story.
The server side - well, frankly, Exchange is a pit. A big money pit. It's fine for 100 users in a small business. Past that, its storage systems show the strain.
It's not as scalable, it's not as robust, and it gives far less functionality than a Domino server. It's a mail system that was designed to beat cc:Mail in 1995, and is still straining at the architectural limitations that brief imposed upon it.
And your response will no doubt be "I don't care, I only see the client" - fair enough. But the quote was "MS Outlook with Exchange" - so you're already replying out of context.
Oh, and speaking of web access clients, the Domino Web Access client (formerly known as iNotes) is no slouch either...
High costs of support? Not really. Not more than all the other apps needed to do the same work - where the support costs have to be aggregated to compare realistically.
In over a decade of working with both Domino/Notes and with the Microsoft stack, I have to say I've not seen higher support costs for Notes than for competitors. The biggest "added" day to day cost is actually in the support of ID files - which, if you don't need that level of security, can be seen as a cost as they're not optional (yet).
However, to be honest, the rest of your reply shows you're not going to agree, and will probably pounce upon that with glee thinking you have yet another reason you're right.
For instance, you just implied that a company would use an application that's known to lose data due to fixable flaws - for over a decade. That's nuts, and you know it. Data loss would be unacceptable, and that would be fixed or the application would be replaced. Yet you're using this nonsensical scenario to beat on Notes.
Then you just compared implied that Excel and Access can be used for groupware functions - a position that not even Microsoft would agree with.
Upgrades to Word have broken templates, upgrades to Excel have broken spreadsheets, and upgrades to PowerPoint have... OK. PowerPoint breaks nothing but the spirits of those who have to sit through badly written presentations that it's used for. But still, Office upgrades can break previous documents, and have done so. (See http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/comptoolsExcel.html for a real life example of a medium complexity spreadsheet suffering from this.)
And I'm currently supporting workstations in offshore locations that are running Windows NT 4 and Office 97/2000 - they're inherited from a division of a competitor that we bought out. And we're talking profitable businesses - still running NT4 a year ago. I can assure you that organisations are sadly still using very old versions of Microsoft software in live environments - and software from many other vendors. I'm not picking on Microsoft or anyone else about old versions that their customers are using, as they have very little control over that. It's just a fact of life. It's not commonplace, but it's there and it's painfully expensive to deal with when you find it...
To be honest, all that I've written about so far is technical stuff. Easy to refute, and easy to write about. Unlike this next part.
What worries me most is that you continue this strange, paranoid, frankly almost conspiracy-theory notion that IBM only ship Notes to create consultancy opportunities, and that nobody else in the world could be so evil.
You're not stupid - I can see that. But you have become quite irrational because of your strong feelings. And I'm afraid that not everyone shares those feelings. Feelings this strong aren't the majority, or even a significant minority, at least not in my experience.
You summed it up with this sentence:
"It's not normal for people to hate software with such a passion that they write long-winded posts like this one."
No, it's not.
Your reaction is WAY out of proportion to what is, effectively, a tool you had to use in your job.
It's even less normal for someone to think that a company hates them personally because of software they've selected, which you imply strongly in your last sentence.
I hope you work these problems out. Meanwhile, I'd advise not thinking about Notes too much in the future, as it evidently upsets you rather too much.
To help you, I'll just stop replying now. Sorry to have caused you such pain.
Yeah, this is solvable. As a glue writer, you know that OSS is in the final 10% stage rather - which doesn't mean it's easy, but does mean it's doable.
:-)
Once the package is there, it's a matter of having the support/consultancy/reference installations - which don't come overnight. Hence my suggestion of going for the smaller organisations.
It'd be good to have more competition in this arena, so here's hoping it happens soon.
It's the lacking of an entire, cohesive package.
(I'll not discuss Linux - it's not groupware or even a component of it! Even though I'm typing this from within Ubuntu, I'm not sure it fits in this discussion. An OS isn't groupware, and should be kept out of it in order to keep clarity and focus... I'm also going to ignore issues like being able to offer consultancy, training, international and multilingual support. I'm just focusing, as I think you wanted me too, on technology and community.)
OSS can indeed step up to the plate and deliver many parts of a groupware solution. Apache can be your web server. PHP (or Perl or Python) could be your application framework language, providing you could beef up an existing framework and CMS with better and more generic workflow APIs. (and probably cron/anacron and some kind of event system to pitch in too.) PostgreSQL can be your storage system (MySQL's replication seems to primitive to be selected currently). Exim (or sendmail or postfix) could be your MTA, and procmail your MDA. Evolution or Thunderbird/Sunbird (when Sunbird's ready) can be your email and PIM client. Firefox, especially with its XUL technology, would make an interesting application platform for those apps served by Apache.
Clustering would be harder to accomplish, as you're talking the failover kind of clustering rather than the parallel processing kind of clustering. And I'm sure a search engine for large volumes of data exists, but I'm not aware of its name. (Nor how you could easily scale it down to the client end for offline working.)
Google Gears could supply offline working for your apps, when it leaves beta.
So many (although possibly not all) aspects of groupware could be done via OSS applications. And many of those OSS applications are proven, reliable, scalable ones too.
So what's the advantage of Domino/Notes (as an example)?
I configure my servers in one interface. That's a big advantage. I don't have to be an expert in ten applications that are already broad in their own domains, and have been shoehorned into one "package". I just need to be an expert in one broad platform, through one interface.
How many people do you know that are experts - real, genuine, "could write columns on it or maybe even a book" experts - on the following:
* Apache
* {PHP|Python|Perl}
* $framework + $CMS
* cron/anacron
* PostgreSQL
* {Exim|postfix|sendmail}
* procmail
* {Evolution|(Thunderbird+Sunbird))
* Firefox
* Google Gears
* Some kind of search engine
Worldwide, that's maybe 100,000 people. If we're (remarkably) generous, perhaps 250,000. Now pick just ONE for each of the options we presented, and watch those figures drop like a stone. You might still have a thousand or two experts, but they're often employed in one specific area (web development, DB admin, sysadmin) and have no practical experience of grouping together all those products as one _simple_ package.
And being a simple package is important. As I alluded to earlier, I can configure a Domino server using one client, and almost all the configuration is stored in one database (the system directory, also used for user authentication and group memberships). That's a significant jump in ease of administration and therefore a drop in TCO. Yet, for the purposes of groupware, very little flexibility is lost. Very little indeed.
Even for the Microsoft stack, there's at least a fairly cohesive administration interface across all the applications. And the terminology is the same, the background and concepts are the same... It's a simple point, but a powerful one when you're looking for _A_ groupware solution. (Not a bundle of solutions that happen to be configured at this moment for groupware.)
Frankly, businesses aren't fools. They've been sold "multiple product" solutions in the past, and been burnt on them. Enterprises especially. If OSS wanted to enter the market - or more likely, if someone wanted to enter the market using OS
Given that you'd have to cluster (at least) IIS, SQL Server, Sharepoint and Exchange on each of the sites - meaning at least three times as many machines - I have to say I suspect you're wrong about it being "easier". Simply put you're looking at more man hours to get it up and running, and more points of failure in the implementation plan.
And you're talking about difficulty to implement. Getting an Exchange cluster (or any MS Clustering solution) to a point where it can reliably fail over without issues can be painful, often for no good visible reason. Whereas clustering Domino servers takes about five minutes to do.
You then talk about value - in the Microsoft model, you've just paid for six more OS licences. Not to mention (for an enterprise) hardware support contracts and Lights Out/RIB licences for remote support of the machines.
An inherent value in software you can use without swearing at? Yes, I guess so. Does it equal or exceed the cost of the licenses and the manpower required to set up all those extra boxes mentioned above?
Well, I hate to say it, but it very probably doesn't. It's not going to be high up on anyone's TCO/ROI calculations in the budget.
Now, you ask what could kill Notes?
Well, right now, the Microsoft stack tends to cost more to deliver the same or less capabilities. There is no open source equivalent of either that is as tightly integrated as the Exchange/Outlook/IE/SQL Server/IIS/.NET/SharePoint or the Domino/Notes solution. So you're dependent on Microsoft killing Notes, and that's not happened yet despite them trying VERY hard.
Lastly, if you believe the true purpose of Notes is to generate consultancy fees, then ask yourself how many times people must have implemented basic groupware in the MS stack.
Public Folders, Exchange Forms Designer, Outlook Forms Designer, SharePoint 1.x, SharePoint 2.x and higher, and many more in between.
If you had implemented a basic business process in Notes in 1996, it would still work today. Yes, it would look very old as a design. But the backwards compatibility that Notes provides means that your app is going to work today.
If you'd implemented it with the Microsoft stack in 1996, how many times would you have had to re-write it into a new technology? How much does that cost each time? (Clues: At least three, and much more than Notes costs you.)
Can Microsoft kill Notes? Probably not. Many of Microsoft's "big wins" from Domino/Notes to Exchange/Outlook are still, after five or more YEARS, running groupware apps in Notes. And some of those companies are probably now wondering why upgrading their Domino server hardly ever breaks their apps, whereas upgrading the Exchange-related stack brings large risks and upheavals.
And yet you think IBM sells Notes to drive a consultancy and development industry around it?
I think you've missed the real money - the consultancy and development market around Microsoft's multi-product and ever-changing stack!
Again, I think you've let your feelings for Notes cloud your analysis of the issue. You'll have a very hard time trying to prove that IBM's groupware stack generates more consultancy and development than Microsoft's does, or anyone else's for that matter. Especially over longer periods of time, such as three, five or ten years. You can make Microsoft's stack look incredibly cheap by costing for one year only, delaying upgrades, and ignoring the possibility your organisation will grow. But the moment you enter the real world and the long term, it starts to get much more expensive.
That's why larger corporates use Notes. It's cheaper, yet more functional.
"What is mystifying is that rather than hiring a team of HCI experts to smooth smooth over the more difficult concepts and eliminate places where the product was gratuitously arcane, IBM just slapped a slick looking cosmetic face lift on the product."
I hope I can help here: Installed user base.
If they change Notes too much, existing users will dislike it. You won't find many here that would believe that, but it's true.
I've seen this happen in real life, and can give an example - Domino Web Access (formerly known as iNotes).
Domino Web Access (DWA from hereon) is the webmail implementation of Notes - mail only, and runs in IE/Firefox. Because of limitations in the browser (it's base target is IE6 as it's a corporate product after all!), it can't assume a tabbed working space or the same kinds of controls.
Two specific examples were reading/composing emails, and selecting documents.
In Notes, new documents - for either reading or composing - open as a new tab. In DWA, they open as a new window. A very minor change, and technically quite understandable. But it had curious results.
Longtime Outlook users and light mail users liked it.
Longtime Notes users and heavy mail/app users hated it.
Why did the Notes users hate the new window per email? Because they were used to seeing all open windows as tabs in their Notes client. It made everything easy to navigate, as what was Notes stayed in Notes. But DWA starts throwing more and more windows open, making navigation painful when using other apps as well. And if Windows XP collapses the windows on the taskbar into one, now your DWA windows are confused with other apps you may be using in IE.
That's why I include heavy mail/app users as hating it. Whether they hated Notes or not, whether they preferred the look of DWA, they ALL wanted Notes back after less than two weeks of usage because of this.
By contrast, long-time Outlook users and light users were more likely to go for the rightmost, uppermost X on their screen and accidentally close the whole Notes client, losing everything open with obvious frustrations. (This was in the R6.5 days, before Notes 7 put a prompt up.)
Small change, big results.
Document selection is the other one that frustrated. Notes has an unusual selection system within views and folders - it makes it easier to select individual documents manually (you don't hold down CTRL, you click in the selection gutter or use the scroll keys and spacebar). But it makes it harder to select large swathes of documents as it doesn't support the CLICK --> SHIFT+CLICK method. (Until Notes R8, anyway.)
Of course, being implemented in a browser, DWA is the other way around. So those used to selecting apparently disparate (in terms of subject, sender or date) but actually related mails for foldering in Notes found DWA very frustrating. Whereas those coming from Outlook who were used to traditional selection found DWA far more to their liking.
(Funnily enough, the light/heavy divide went was the same here, too! Heavy users hated DWA, light users loved it. I'd like to think I had enough sample data to draw a conclusion, but I'm afraid that with only one implementation and less than two hundred users on this project, I'd rather say it's anecdotal than a hard fact...)
Notes has a rich interface which millions of people worldwide are used to. They're trained in it, or have picked up little tricks in it. If you ripped and replaced it wholesale with a "modern interface", then IBM would have serious problems selling the version after that due to the complaints.
They're aware of this high-wire that they have to balance on, and do employ HCI experts. Check out Mary Beth Raven's blog at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/marybeth - she's the lead product designer for the UI of Notes right now, and agonises - in public, on that blog - about balancing new users versus old users.
"But the simple fact of the matter is that IBM sells it as a groupware product, and it's terrible at groupware."
Really?
Or is it in fact excellent at groupware, delivering far more functionality and scalability for far less cost than any other option - but you didn't enjoy using it?
I suspect that this is the case. In fact, your comments show me it is the case. I just read them and saw years-old error messages mentioned, and general railing about performance. At no point did you mention any alternative distributed, scalable, reliable document-oriented database system with mail routing, web serving, offline working and almost seamless backwards compatibility through seven versions. You just railed against it.
You even went so far as to accuse anyone of liking it as being on crack. Nice fairness and balance there...
You're claiming it's terrible, but can't prove it beyond "I didn't like using it" as far as I can see.
Time to either grow up and leave the temper behind in the pram, or name what does the job better for the same or less money. I'll make it easy for you - your target reference platform for this exercise is an organisation with 50,000 users in seven sites around the world. High availability and a decentralised infrastructure are a must. You have to provide workflow for basic office operations (purchase approvals, sickness/leave approval, etc.), discussions, document libraries and knowledgebases, and of course email. All of these must be available for offline synchronisation for travelling executives. Support must be 24/7, from one entity worldwide, but in native languages for each regional administration group.
That's a pretty normal requirement for a medium enterprise.
Your suggestion?
(Don't forget to price it up, as I'll then go and price up the same thing for Domino/Notes. The winner is the one that provides groupware for the lowest cost.)
Every enterprise uses Exchange/Outlook or Domino/Notes for a set of reasons, and those reasons show the huge gulf between your requirements and theirs.
(I don't mean to be rude when saying that, although I know it may sound rude. I'm merely trying to aid understanding.)
Enterprises require:
* Someone to yell at when it goes wrong. (Support)
* Assistance in edge cases for integration, scaling or extreme usage. (Consultancy)
* An ability to demonstrate ROI, TCO, and other items on the acronym bingo playing card. (Economics)
* Demonstrations, through real-world studies of implementations at a similar scale, that the software works. (Assurance)
* The knowledge that the software will continue to work (or with minimal effort can be made to continue to work) during most circumstances. (Reliability)
* The ability to keep up with their amazing double-digit growth as a company. (Scalability)
There's more, and it often involves politics and strategies, but those are the basics.
By contrast, you require something you can get working within an hour and have a personal liking of. Sometimes, because you're a geek (and don't try to deny that when you're posting on slashdot! - we're both geeks!), you're happy to spend longer trying to get something to work. That's because you're enjoying it. But if it was costing you time/money, would you persevere?
Whether or not Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes really do tick all of the boxes is moot. They certainly tick more of them than anything else on the marketplace. There are no serious commercial competitors when you go above 10,000 seats. Open Source software provides some components that can tick all boxes (MTAs, for example) but for most software the support, consultancy, assurance, and scalability are all lacking (or, in the case of scalability, awaiting proof at these magnitudes).
Enterprise software is an odd thing. It's not evaluated in the same way you would for 1, 10 or 100 workstations. At 1,000 workstations, you're beginning to see that the Enterprise model makes sense, despite the effort and conservatism it brings. At 10,000 workstations, you'd be insane not to look at working like an Enterprise...
I hope that helps!
The problem with a wireless network is a scalability one.
You only get so many frequency bands. On each frequency band for the wireless network, every machine using it has to share that frequency. Therefore there is a limit - a fairly low limit - to how many machines you can sensibly use.
Wireless networks are fine for low numbers of machines, provided that there are also no other wireless networks on that same band nearby.
My current employer got smacked, hard, by this contention issue. They had a sudden expansion in an office, and coped with it by putting the 50 machines onto a wireless network at first. They saved on cabling costs, which was significant, even if the wireless APs were more expensive than switches and the wireless cards were also an expense, as this was the newer 802.11g.
But then we had an interesting problem. At about nine in the morning, everyone comes in and logs on. And Windows pulls their profiles from the network...
And due to contention, nobody got to finish logging on until at least quarter to ten.
And that was AFTER we'd sped it up by manually forcing access points and groups of PCs onto different bands, to limit contention issues.
Let's be honest - a switched 10Mbps network would have been faster under that load. That's no exaggeration either - we timed it.
In the end, the only way we could make it usable was to have everyone never log off - just lock their machines at night. Not ideal, really. Also, if anyone was going to do certain operations that are network intensive, we had to get them to schedule them so that they didn't clash - and alert users that their networking would be slower. That was inconvenient, and sometimes caused acrimony on the floor - "my network's slow because Bob's doing stats again..."
The lack of an ability to switch means that wireless networks don't scale at all, especially for businesses. They're fine for home use, for public access points, for small ad-hoc offices and so forth. But if you're looking at a floor in an office block, or even half a floor, then they're useless except for visitors...
Everyone else has given you excellent advise on your rights, so I'd like to explore another option.
:-)
;-)
Accept it and make their lives hell.
Get it in writing that if your OS is changed, you void your warranty.
Then contact Trading Standards, with this evidence, and tell them that they give no such warning with their Windows Vista Upgrade display stand. Point out that it should be a large, clearly visible sign that makes it clear that purchasing a Vista Upgrade may invalidate your warranty on hardware bought at PC World.
Make sure you cc the letter to PC World's head office, and trade press. Make no issue of the fact that it's your right to the repair - simply highlight the policy that you encountered when trying to get a repair, and your concern for the preservation of the rights of others.
Microsoft's lawyers, consumer organisations and the trade press will do the rest for you.
However, I must admit I'd like a tape of that first conversation between PC World's management and Microsoft...
Well, I trusted it for some seven years plus before DEP came along, so I guess the answer is yes.
It'd be nice if Opera supported DEP. I suspect it doesn't because they're very proud of its small size, even if it is enhanced by a packer. No other internet suite fits a browser, RSS reader, POP3/IMAP4 mail client, IRC client and NNTP client in such a small package. The packer makes it look even more impressive, of course, but even when unpacked it's still danged small for all that it does.
Opera has had surprisingly few really bad security issues over its lifetime - far fewer than most alternatives. The track history of the software and the attitude of its vendor do far more to assure me of its security than whether or not it uses hardware DEP support.
Because there's a difference between just being protected by hardware and being protected by good design. Other browsers may well support DEP, but we can probably all think of a certain browser that has an awful design which is almost impossible to truly secure because it places - deep in its design - functionality and integration with the OS above security.
DEP is nice, but not all attacks are buffer overruns. Some of them are just getting a browser to do something the designers thought was cool at the time, but didn't realise the security implications of.
Having read you article, I have a question - have you actually contacted Opera themselves about this and expressed your concerns to them? You don't say that you have, so I'm currently forced to conclude you're just griping for the sake of griping or worse, have no intention of doing more than self-publicising about this.
Speak to Opera. If you haven't before now, then start by apologising for posting this without first asking them what's up with this. Be polite, and tell them you'd like an official reply to follow up this entry with.
And in future, would you consider following responsible disclosure guidelines... If this is as serious as you seem to think it is, then it's bloody reckless of you not to, no?
And Opera has had keywords (it calls them nicknames) since version 3, released in 1998.
:-)
I don't recall if they worked for bookmark folders at that stage, though, But I was using nicknames for folders to open all my news sites back in 2001/2002, I think - before RSS was really common it was necessary to open a whole folder of bookmarks to do my daily reading. Just typing "news" and getting El Reg, Ars Technica, Slashdot and others was very handy...
Finding a feature in a browser that Opera didn't have first or didn't have an antecedent of is very, very difficult.