I’ve written before about Lotus Notes… to my surprise, there’s a whole web site dedicated to documenting how much it sucks.
Wow. I thought dealing with correspondents using Notes email was bad. Looks like it’s absolutely hideous if you’re trying to actually use the interface.
(via Coding Horror)
I’ve worked with Lotus Notes for 11 years and there are certainly a lot of annoying things about it, but websites like “Lotus Notes Sucks” is mostly an exercise in arrogance – if it’s not done my way, it’s the wrong way. To take but one example, there’s a rant about the behaviour of the Sent ‘folder’ in Notes. It’s actually the Sent ‘view’ and displays all your Sent messsages regardless of which folders you may also store them in. When my company migrated to Exchange/Outlook I found it really annoying that when I file sent messages to other folders I no loger have a view where I can see all my sent messages. Can I conclude then that Outlook sucks? No, the bottom line is that Notes and Outlook do things differently. Not that one or the other sucks.
There are plenty of other examples on this web site that just betray the authors ignorance, arrogance and prejudice.
Fair point Lachlan. I found it an interesting site, but “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “sucks”.
Ironically the site itself sucks a bit. Lots of ads, including a popup if you click on the content, and no updates in over two years.
I’ve had experience with Notes since the early days when the server product worked best on OS/2. I think the biggest issue with the interface on Notes is that e-mail is not THE primary purpose of the product, it’s simply something that runs within in. Notes has FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR more potential than e-mail.
It’s like saying Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh OS X is good/bad for wordprocessing… uh yeah okay.
The last company I worked for I wrote a complete purchasing system in Notes that took requisitions, routed around to appropriate staff for approval, went through Finance for processing, automatically submitted orders through the AS/400 mainframe, monitored arrivals and payments, and provided live status/notifications of complete progress. Again, a bees dick of what Notes is all about…
So sure it’s a little clumsy and awkward for e-mail, but it’s usually because one doesn’t have a grip of how Notes itself actually works… understand that and the e-mail side of it is trivial.