some valid points some invalid points, and a complete lack of an appreciation that Notes is not just an email system. Developers and users of custom applications love it. People who used 4.6 for just email were less enthusiastic. Moving back into this century Developers still love it and the UI has moved on a bit. Can people please critisise the current versions? this is like flaming Linux 2.0 for inadequate SMP support.
the F5 vs F9 thing predates Windows so it wasn't really a case of deciding not to follow M$, M$ failed to follow Notes when they chose their key mappings. It is a shame they are not in agreement though, but you should understand that M$ hasn't been around forever. RBOD is pretty much history now, I haven't seen it at all on 6 and I try pretty hard to break it. The Red box of Death used to be as frequent as a blue screen of death. It is now as rare as a Linux kernel panic.
There is an Open Source mail template that you can use instead of the mail template you get out of the box. (incidentally have you tried iNotes web access, that is a very good interface even if it is IE only) go look at OpenNTF for the OpenNTF mail template and also whilst you are there check out BlogSphere which is used by a whole community of Domino Bloggers.
Alan.
that does not happen now, you see new mail straight away. The refresh arrow is there largely due to historical reasons. Rebuilding a view index is a costly operation, on a large database if a lot of documents had been updated it could take several minutes to update the index (on a 386 running OS/2) The blue arrow indicates that there are documents that need to be inserted into the index and gives you the option of not doing it every time a document is updated. Remember that fundamentally notes is a collaborative application, it is just the mail file that usually has a single user, so this was to allow applications to scale on the hardware of the time.
That said, they could have changed this behaviour a little sooner than they did.
any system can be made to look bad by the administrators really. I don't know about syncing to pocket PC but there is something hidden away on the IBM alphaworks site that allows you to sync to Palm OS. it is a Java application called Manplato
it is free as in beer, and the source is available but not Free as in speech. There is an open API so you can write your own custom conduits, which is pretty cool. Sad thing is it looks like IBM has abandoned it for now.
Alan.
there is formula language, which is what various spreadsheets use (coz Lotus invented it with 123) and there is LotusScript which is Basic, very very similar to Visual Basic. And there is Java and JavaScript. Which one is the obscure one?
. . . and what are you smoking when you talk about the trash folder???
the UI has changed significantly in 6.0.* and 6.5 6.5 is really sweet with instant messaging integration built in to the mail client and all custom applications. If I open a mail my buddy list grows a to: and cc: group with all the recipients and all my databases which have a name anywhere grow little green icons if the user is online. This is a bit hard to explain without seeing it in action, here is a link to a webcast that may be of interest.
(the webcast probably needs windows, but then so does Notes. I want a Linux version of the Notes client.)
Notes does support a lot of open protocols
CORBA
POP3
SMTP
HTTP
SSL
IIOP
LDAP
IMAP
but NRPC which is the native protocol on port 1352 should be opened up too.
Alan.
on the security front Notes is the oldest and most widely implemented public key infrastructure. Public keys are held in the name and address book, private keys in the ID file. The security infrastructure is pretty sound and is available to all applications to use.
As for bloat and email, exchange and others started life as email servers and grew and evolved extra bells and whistles. Notes started out (that is Plato Notes in the 70's) as a general purpose system for shuffling documents about between databases. Give every user a database and shuffle documents that look like memos between them and you have built an email system. Email is a trivial application of what Notes really is.
Alan.
what version are you using? versions that are 5 years old are probably 5 years behind the times. Big corporates which use Notes often have a really long upgrade cycle, so if your work email on Notes 4.5 looks a bit dated when compared to your Outlook Express 2003 or whatever then I am not surprised. Try Notes client 6.5 and remember that Notes is more than email just as windows is more than a word processor and Linux is more than just a development environment.
Alan.
Domino is a database system with very cool features for shuffling documents about between databases. With such a system it is fairly simple to give each user a database containing email documents and let them send and receive these documents to and from other people's databases. If your organisation is using Domino just for email then you are not getting the benefits from it that you deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
some valid points some invalid points, and a complete lack of an appreciation that Notes is not just an email system. Developers and users of custom applications love it. People who used 4.6 for just email were less enthusiastic. Moving back into this century Developers still love it and the UI has moved on a bit. Can people please critisise the current versions? this is like flaming Linux 2.0 for inadequate SMP support.
they sound like a great customer to me, I would love to talk to them.
the F5 vs F9 thing predates Windows so it wasn't really a case of deciding not to follow M$, M$ failed to follow Notes when they chose their key mappings. It is a shame they are not in agreement though, but you should understand that M$ hasn't been around forever. RBOD is pretty much history now, I haven't seen it at all on 6 and I try pretty hard to break it. The Red box of Death used to be as frequent as a blue screen of death. It is now as rare as a Linux kernel panic.
There is an Open Source mail template that you can use instead of the mail template you get out of the box. (incidentally have you tried iNotes web access, that is a very good interface even if it is IE only) go look at OpenNTF for the OpenNTF mail template and also whilst you are there check out BlogSphere which is used by a whole community of Domino Bloggers.
Alan.
that does not happen now, you see new mail straight away. The refresh arrow is there largely due to historical reasons. Rebuilding a view index is a costly operation, on a large database if a lot of documents had been updated it could take several minutes to update the index (on a 386 running OS/2) The blue arrow indicates that there are documents that need to be inserted into the index and gives you the option of not doing it every time a document is updated. Remember that fundamentally notes is a collaborative application, it is just the mail file that usually has a single user, so this was to allow applications to scale on the hardware of the time.
That said, they could have changed this behaviour a little sooner than they did.
any system can be made to look bad by the administrators really. I don't know about syncing to pocket PC but there is something hidden away on the IBM alphaworks site that allows you to sync to Palm OS. it is a Java application called Manplato it is free as in beer, and the source is available but not Free as in speech. There is an open API so you can write your own custom conduits, which is pretty cool. Sad thing is it looks like IBM has abandoned it for now. Alan.
there is formula language, which is what various spreadsheets use (coz Lotus invented it with 123) and there is LotusScript which is Basic, very very similar to Visual Basic. And there is Java and JavaScript. Which one is the obscure one? . . . and what are you smoking when you talk about the trash folder???
the UI has changed significantly in 6.0.* and 6.5 6.5 is really sweet with instant messaging integration built in to the mail client and all custom applications. If I open a mail my buddy list grows a to: and cc: group with all the recipients and all my databases which have a name anywhere grow little green icons if the user is online. This is a bit hard to explain without seeing it in action, here is a link to a webcast that may be of interest. (the webcast probably needs windows, but then so does Notes. I want a Linux version of the Notes client.)
Notes does support a lot of open protocols CORBA POP3 SMTP HTTP SSL IIOP LDAP IMAP but NRPC which is the native protocol on port 1352 should be opened up too. Alan.
on the security front Notes is the oldest and most widely implemented public key infrastructure. Public keys are held in the name and address book, private keys in the ID file. The security infrastructure is pretty sound and is available to all applications to use. As for bloat and email, exchange and others started life as email servers and grew and evolved extra bells and whistles. Notes started out (that is Plato Notes in the 70's) as a general purpose system for shuffling documents about between databases. Give every user a database and shuffle documents that look like memos between them and you have built an email system. Email is a trivial application of what Notes really is. Alan.
what version are you using? versions that are 5 years old are probably 5 years behind the times. Big corporates which use Notes often have a really long upgrade cycle, so if your work email on Notes 4.5 looks a bit dated when compared to your Outlook Express 2003 or whatever then I am not surprised. Try Notes client 6.5 and remember that Notes is more than email just as windows is more than a word processor and Linux is more than just a development environment. Alan.
quoting my website:
Domino is a database system with very cool features for shuffling documents about between databases. With such a system it is fairly simple to give each user a database containing email documents and let them send and receive these documents to and from other people's databases. If your organisation is using Domino just for email then you are not getting the benefits from it that you deserve.
http://www.dominux.co.uk