2. As others have said, searching is one of the strongest features of the product. If your admin staff has locked you out of it, go beat them up. It's not the product's fault. If it is available to you but you can't figure out how to use it, call your help desk. And be aware that there are two kinds of search: quick-search, which kicks in when you type characters while you are in a view index, and which only finds exact "starts-with" matches in the _currently sorted_ column of the index, and full-text, which requires that you type your search string into the search box at the top of the view index. You will find that the syntax is different from most popular search tools, and that is because it pre-dates today's common search-engine syntaxes by quite a few years and hasn't been changed. For example, "A B" searches for the string "A B", not for "A" or "B"; and you have to type "A and B" if you want to search for both A and B. IBM really should provide search "personalities" to accomodate the fact that the de facto standard syntax for search engines is radically different from the one in their product.
3. Right click on a message and select "Open in New Window". Or if you've already got it opened in a tab, right click on the tab and select "Open in New Window". If you do not see that choice on your right-click menu, then you are running an old version of Notes. Complain to the people at your company who are responsible for buying and installing upgrades. Don't complain to IBM.
4. Regarding stability, the latest version 7 client very, very rarely crashes and it almost always recovers gracefully from a crash. It even usually recovers gracefully when Notes app developers are running the Notes client and the Domino Designer simultaneously and one of them crashes. Not always, but most of the time. Compared to my experience with previous releases, I almost never have to do anything special now to restart Notes.
Well, there's your problem. Instead of bringing in IBM, you need to bring in a qualified consultant, preferably an IBM Lotus Business Partner, with actual real-world experience in the trenches making Notes and Domino really work for organizations similar to yours, and who makes it their business to understand your problems, fix them, and transfer knowledge to you. You'll never get that from IBM. You're a small customer for them. You barely register on their radar screen. And contrary to what most people assume, the people IBM Global Services have out in the field supporting Notes and Domino simply don't have vast amounts of special inside knowledge and direct connections to development.
I wouldn't normally do it your way, though. I would click the "Forward" button, then double-click the attachment, select the "Edit" option, edit and save, and then send. But I could do it your way. The only requirement is that you have to put the received message into edit mode before you try to edit the attachment. There is no "Edit" command on the menu or action bar for received messages (because face it... the received message is supposed to stay the way the sender intended it), but you can do it either by ctrl-e or by double-clicking anywhere in the message body.
The OS X Notes client is not "effectively BSD", because it is descended from the earlier Mac OS version of the Notes client and still makes heavy use of many Mac-specific features that are supported by Apple on OS X and are not available on any other *ix OS. There was a SCO Unix Notes client up until about six years ago, but IBM dropped it, and at this point that code base is so far behind the current Notes version's codebase that it would be next to useless as a starting point for a Linux port. So, I'm afraid that if there were to be a Notes client on Linux it would be a brand new port from scratch, and IBM has repeatedly said that's not going to happen. There are two things, however, to look at for Notes functionality on Linux: Notes running under WINE unsupported by working well enough to be usable (according to multiple reports), and IBM's upcoming "Rich Client" technology for Workplace.
-rhs
You are certainly correct that the tools you would use as users and as administrators of a Wiki environment would be lighter weight, but it sounds to me like your real complaints are about implementation and management decisions about your Notes infrastructure that have fallen far behind your needs for flexible collaboration. Notes and Domino can be as flexible as a Wiki. Notes and Domino, can do everything that a Wiki does and they can do it the "Wiki way". Domino can be a Wiki using one of several Wiki application templates for Dommino. It can do it with or without the security that is getting in the way of your organization's productivity.
My real point is that all the problems that you cite for Notes are due to two things: the fact that your organization has a lot of information in different Notes databases but apparently hasn't invested in any type of search or index facility to make it easy to locate information with Notes, and your organization has chosen to use security features provided by Notes and Domino that restrict read and edit access to information. Changing over to Wikis would not address those problems. Those problems aren't a matter of how heavy or light the tools are. They're much more about your organization's approach to information management than they are about the tools.
-rhs
re "Anything with a closed proprietary protocol, by definition doesn't have an easily accessible API. (Yes, communications protocols should be considered part of the API.)"
You can certainly argue that the lack of documentation of the NRPC protocol means that Notes doesn't expose its *complete* API, but it is disingenuous to claim that the lack of an open network protocol necessarily means that there is no easily accessible API.
Notes provides APIs for two builtin programming languages, a procedural API for C, and object-oriented APIs for C++, Java, any COM-capable programming environment, and any CORBA-capable programming environment. There's also an XML schema and an API for importing and exporting XML-based data from Notes. All of these are more accessible to more developers than any documented network protocol is for any product or standard.
-rhs
re "My mail client should read mail, not impose its idea of workflow on me."
Notes does not impose its idea of workflow on you. It gives your organization's developers the ability to very easily program their own idea of workflow right into your mailbox, and impose *that* on you;-)
-rhs
Nope, sorry. When the system generates URLs all by itself, it uses the long internal identifiers because they are the only thing available that is guaranteed to be unique, but... Any coympetent Notes developer can design applications to automatically create friendly aliases and use them instead of the system's URLs. All that is required is a short unique key for the document, either entered by the user or created by the system. That capability has been available since the very first web-aware versions of Lotus Domino in 1996. It's not often used simply because most developers don't think it's all that important.
-rhs
IBM already has this -- though not fully automated -- in a free add-in for Lotus Notes called SwiftFile. It does not automatically file your mail, but instead it creates three hotspots at the top of the message with "suggested" folders based on an analysis (similar to Bayesian spam filtering) of the patterns in your previous messages. Clicking any of the three hotspots files the message.
-rhs
Slashdot Mirror
Not true that only Bill Gates wanted it. Ray Ozzie did, too, and he's taking over as Chief Software Architect.
/ stories/2003/11/14/640kbOughtToBeEnoughForAnyone.h tml
See Ray's blog from November 2003 -- before Microsoft bought Groove: http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/old/blog
Actually, I suspect he's talking about Domino.Doc, not QuickPlace. In any case, it's not Domino. It's an app built on top of Domino.
2. As others have said, searching is one of the strongest features of the product. If your admin staff has locked you out of it, go beat them up. It's not the product's fault. If it is available to you but you can't figure out how to use it, call your help desk. And be aware that there are two kinds of search: quick-search, which kicks in when you type characters while you are in a view index, and which only finds exact "starts-with" matches in the _currently sorted_ column of the index, and full-text, which requires that you type your search string into the search box at the top of the view index. You will find that the syntax is different from most popular search tools, and that is because it pre-dates today's common search-engine syntaxes by quite a few years and hasn't been changed. For example, "A B" searches for the string "A B", not for "A" or "B"; and you have to type "A and B" if you want to search for both A and B. IBM really should provide search "personalities" to accomodate the fact that the de facto standard syntax for search engines is radically different from the one in their product. 3. Right click on a message and select "Open in New Window". Or if you've already got it opened in a tab, right click on the tab and select "Open in New Window". If you do not see that choice on your right-click menu, then you are running an old version of Notes. Complain to the people at your company who are responsible for buying and installing upgrades. Don't complain to IBM. 4. Regarding stability, the latest version 7 client very, very rarely crashes and it almost always recovers gracefully from a crash. It even usually recovers gracefully when Notes app developers are running the Notes client and the Domino Designer simultaneously and one of them crashes. Not always, but most of the time. Compared to my experience with previous releases, I almost never have to do anything special now to restart Notes.
Well, I know that I'm safe in my office. I work at ohm.
Well, there's your problem. Instead of bringing in IBM, you need to bring in a qualified consultant, preferably an IBM Lotus Business Partner, with actual real-world experience in the trenches making Notes and Domino really work for organizations similar to yours, and who makes it their business to understand your problems, fix them, and transfer knowledge to you. You'll never get that from IBM. You're a small customer for them. You barely register on their radar screen. And contrary to what most people assume, the people IBM Global Services have out in the field supporting Notes and Domino simply don't have vast amounts of special inside knowledge and direct connections to development.
I wouldn't normally do it your way, though. I would click the "Forward" button, then double-click the attachment, select the "Edit" option, edit and save, and then send. But I could do it your way. The only requirement is that you have to put the received message into edit mode before you try to edit the attachment. There is no "Edit" command on the menu or action bar for received messages (because face it... the received message is supposed to stay the way the sender intended it), but you can do it either by ctrl-e or by double-clicking anywhere in the message body.
-rhs
The OS X Notes client is not "effectively BSD", because it is descended from the earlier Mac OS version of the Notes client and still makes heavy use of many Mac-specific features that are supported by Apple on OS X and are not available on any other *ix OS. There was a SCO Unix Notes client up until about six years ago, but IBM dropped it, and at this point that code base is so far behind the current Notes version's codebase that it would be next to useless as a starting point for a Linux port. So, I'm afraid that if there were to be a Notes client on Linux it would be a brand new port from scratch, and IBM has repeatedly said that's not going to happen. There are two things, however, to look at for Notes functionality on Linux: Notes running under WINE unsupported by working well enough to be usable (according to multiple reports), and IBM's upcoming "Rich Client" technology for Workplace. -rhs
You are certainly correct that the tools you would use as users and as administrators of a Wiki environment would be lighter weight, but it sounds to me like your real complaints are about implementation and management decisions about your Notes infrastructure that have fallen far behind your needs for flexible collaboration. Notes and Domino can be as flexible as a Wiki. Notes and Domino, can do everything that a Wiki does and they can do it the "Wiki way". Domino can be a Wiki using one of several Wiki application templates for Dommino. It can do it with or without the security that is getting in the way of your organization's productivity. My real point is that all the problems that you cite for Notes are due to two things: the fact that your organization has a lot of information in different Notes databases but apparently hasn't invested in any type of search or index facility to make it easy to locate information with Notes, and your organization has chosen to use security features provided by Notes and Domino that restrict read and edit access to information. Changing over to Wikis would not address those problems. Those problems aren't a matter of how heavy or light the tools are. They're much more about your organization's approach to information management than they are about the tools. -rhs
re "Anything with a closed proprietary protocol, by definition doesn't have an easily accessible API. (Yes, communications protocols should be considered part of the API.)" You can certainly argue that the lack of documentation of the NRPC protocol means that Notes doesn't expose its *complete* API, but it is disingenuous to claim that the lack of an open network protocol necessarily means that there is no easily accessible API. Notes provides APIs for two builtin programming languages, a procedural API for C, and object-oriented APIs for C++, Java, any COM-capable programming environment, and any CORBA-capable programming environment. There's also an XML schema and an API for importing and exporting XML-based data from Notes. All of these are more accessible to more developers than any documented network protocol is for any product or standard. -rhs
re "My mail client should read mail, not impose its idea of workflow on me." Notes does not impose its idea of workflow on you. It gives your organization's developers the ability to very easily program their own idea of workflow right into your mailbox, and impose *that* on you ;-)
-rhs
Nope, sorry. When the system generates URLs all by itself, it uses the long internal identifiers because they are the only thing available that is guaranteed to be unique, but... Any coympetent Notes developer can design applications to automatically create friendly aliases and use them instead of the system's URLs. All that is required is a short unique key for the document, either entered by the user or created by the system. That capability has been available since the very first web-aware versions of Lotus Domino in 1996. It's not often used simply because most developers don't think it's all that important. -rhs
IBM already has this -- though not fully automated -- in a free add-in for Lotus Notes called SwiftFile. It does not automatically file your mail, but instead it creates three hotspots at the top of the message with "suggested" folders based on an analysis (similar to Bayesian spam filtering) of the patterns in your previous messages. Clicking any of the three hotspots files the message. -rhs