Dave Delay loves Lotus Notes

January 7 2006

Dave Delay, an IBM developer who used to work on Notes, noticed that Notes bashing is in fashion again this month, and so he writes:

In my opinion, people dislike Notes because their expectations don't jive with the original intent of the product. At its core, Notes is a runtime environment for collaborative applications, but when people complain about Notes, they are usually not talking about core Notes at all. They are talking about the Notes Mail and Calendar applications.
which, in some opinions, is the set of applications which need freshening up -- and as such, are getting major attention in Notes "Hannover".  But Dave, like many of us, is tired of the bashing, and says:
Here's what I am really saying to people who dislike Notes: Grow up please. You may have preferred the mail application you used in your last job. You may have a dozen small complaints about how Notes works. But don't say Notes sucks and recommend throwing it out. That's like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Chances are your IT department has many good reasons for sticking with Notes. Have you asked what those reasons are?
Some good comments in discussion already, with ex-Notes-developer/now-MS Bob Congdon chiming in as well.  I like this comment from "Brian":
I've never seen a company be so steadfast in maintaining compatibility between releases. This includes the user interface. I think the Notes designers have done a great job walking that fine line. I can't say the same for MSFT.
This is exactly the answer I gave to a colleague the other day about the sent "folder" actually being a view in the Notes mailbox.  It could (and may yet) be changed, but it would take a lot of evaluation about backward compatibility, interoperability, and application integration.

Link: Dave Delay's Runtime Log: I love Lotus Notes >

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [29]

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  1. 1  Axel  | 1/7/2006 2:57:05 PM

    I see this clearly as over-generalized statements from 2 sides. Notes sucks is an over-generalized statement. I know end-users who really do enjoy working with the Notes Client. Hey. This is the free west. People are different. Own different experiences and skills.

    On the other hand, no application is 100% backward compatible. Here in Germany especially in 98/99 Notes boom years some smart people used certain hacks, which have to be re-coded in R5. I had such a case last year. There are not many, but they do exist. Also the coding style from the 90ties (very lengthy formula language snippets) is often not easy to fix or change (and I am quite good at formula lang).

    One big problem is that a lot of organizations upgrade very, very slowly. I know organizations which still have Notes 4 (OS/2) or 5 clients. You can do much more fancier user design on a pure Notes-6 or Notes-7 clients base.

    There is certain kind of Notes-aficionado who claims that: Well Notes doesn't look nice, but it is the "best" in security, reliability, managability, scalability and flexibility.

    Well this is bold, as there is Websphere also, Spring, JBoss, Oracle, .Net, ruby-on-rails etc which strive exactly for those non-functional requirements , too.

    When I for example hear people saying that Eclipse is very slow on their 2GB Ram box I don't care, because it runs quite fast on my 512 MB Ram :-)

  1. 2  Egor Margineanu http://www.egmar.ro/ | 1/7/2006 4:08:05 PM

    Not only Dave loves Lotus Notes. I know a lot of people who work day by day with different collaboration tools (in ex. MSFT products), but only Notes flexibility give them needed satisfaction.

  1. 3  Eric Parsons startingblockcomputing.com | 1/7/2006 10:25:41 PM

    I am NOT saying revive CC:Mail, but I agree with the sentiment of Notes maybe needing some work on the email and calendaring.

    My biggest observation though is that most Notes shops had some cowboy start the system, and while cowboys are very passionate, they tend to maybe bypass some rules. So they have customized the product so that even Ray Ozzy doesn't recognise it, and now everyone in the organization thinks that Notes Sucks. Sort of like taking a new Cadillac, and tricking it out with the wonderful products at the Walmart auto center. (No offense to Walmart intended)

  1. 4  Tim Tripcony http://www.timtripcony.com | 1/8/2006 12:10:27 AM

    The behavior of products in widespread use isn't always as intuitive as proponents claim; the "ease of use" is often impacted by sheer habit. I've seen plenty of users who've used nothing but Outlook for years confused when first trying to use Notes... and plenty of long-time Notes users baffled by their first experience with Outlook. And the Sent view is a perfect example: when Outlook users switch to Notes, they may initially be confused when sent messages that they drag to a folder appear to stay where they are, but I'd submit that the opposite behavior is counter-intuitive if you don't have a pre-existing basis for comparison.

    Consider that, when treating sent as a folder, dragging a message to another folder results in a message that you sent no longer displaying in Sent. If you sent it (and saved it), it should display in Sent. If sent messages don't stay in Sent, call it something else...... when explaining it in these terms to a new user, it's always entertaining to see the "...Oh." look on their face.

  1. 5  Axel  | 1/8/2006 6:23:49 AM

    @3: Interesting point. Having done quite a bit maintainance programming of popular notes projects, I changed my mind about the cowboy issue. Its an over-generalization. I know some of them. And they certainly do have a passion for robust & maintainable code.

    They had to use certain complicate workarounds to get certain popular features in their projects. They would had implemented it in a different way, if they were using a later notes versions.

    Now as a maintainance programmer you need to understand their workarounds even if you replace it with newer and more maintainable code.

    The broad downward compability of Notes does not come without costs for maintainance. You need to understand the old and the new ways.

    Customers often don't comprehend, that they need some refactoring process for their inhouse-applications. That means: Change code to use more maintainable features of new version without necesarily adding new functionality. Else your project easily bloats to an unmaintainable nightmare with time.

    Downward compability & Refactoring is probably often cheaper than rip, replace & start from scratch. Nevertheless refactoring is often a necessity to keep future maintainance & change costs controlable. This is often ignored. Its so much easier to blaim past programmers for being cowboys.

  1. 6  Steve Castledine http://www.dominoblog.com | 1/8/2006 11:08:43 AM

    My experience of "Notes Sucks" attitudes from people/companies I have dealt with, is that the biggest origination of this comes from poorly developed applications written without thought or good practice and therefore letting the end users down. This leads to the entire platform being tarred with the same brush.

    This is clearly Iris/Lotus fault for creating an application that is way too easy to build collaborative applications with and therefore too easy to "get things working" without having to give it much thought ;)

    So one of the biggest benefits of the platform in the end becomes its achilles heel! You can't win! VB/Access applications can nearly match this ease (but not quite) and you can also get really poor applications using this combo - but because they are seperate applications to Exchange it does not get mentioned in the same sentance (exchange sucks).

    I wonder if in the beginning notes mail and notes application development etc were different products with different names how different perceptions today would be?

  1. 7  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 1/8/2006 1:34:31 PM

    @6 - a good point there Steve... I can think of 5 internal applications, and if they were the only ones I used (and if I didn't know any better) I'd get the impression that Notes sucks. But of course, Notes doesn't suck. It's not perfect, but it has the tools to get my job done and more.

  1. 8  Thilo Hamberger  | 1/9/2006 5:18:17 AM

    It is simply untrue that Notes has a bad UI design because it is backward compatible. I can implement an undo function or a right-click folder deletion without breaking old applications. Same goes for realtime spellchecking like in WORD and lots of other things Notes misses so badly.

  1. 9  Sean Burgess http://www.phigsaidwhat.com | 1/9/2006 10:11:36 AM

    @4 I have been forced into using Outlook for the first time in many years and I am completely baffled as to how people actually get any work done with it. Luckily, I do not receive much email or I would never be able to find anything. And the thing that really blows the minds of Outlook users is that a message can be in more than one folder/view. They just can't grasp that sort of veratility.

    @8 In the future, when you want to compare Notes with some other application platform, make sure it is a platform and not a local application. Word processors can do many things that platforms like Notes never do because the only thing they have to worry about is writing documents. There is no communicating back to the server, worrying about replication, encryption of data, or pulling data real time from external sources when I am updating my resume. If Word had to worry about all that, would they really waste resources on realtime spellchecking?

    In my mind, saying Notes Sucks is akin to saying Web Sites Suck. If the person developing the UI sucks at their job, then there is nothing that the platform can do to stop them from doing a sucky application. While not something that is recommended, there is nothing to stop a truly resourceful person from reworking the mail template into something they think is semi-decent. Name me another mail client that gives you that flexibility.

    Sean---

  1. 10  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 1/9/2006 11:57:36 AM

    @9 - agree with the response to 'Notes Sucks is akin to saying Web Sites Suck'. I've created demo applications with (what I regard to be) attractive fonts, chrome-like faded tool bars, high-colour icons and clip-art. The reaction is often "ooh, what version is that?". Well, it was 6, now it's 7. But if I'd used Comic Sans (which should be outlawed) and crappy low-res graphics the reaction would be somewhat different.

    If I'm honest, I have changed the font in my inbox and calendar because the default is just a little too large and not as attractive as it could be. But I wouldn't be any less productive if I hadn't.

  1. 11  David Bell  | 1/9/2006 12:46:09 PM

    @10 - I have changed my default sans serif font to Segoe UI (the one used by default in Windows Vista). It is compact, somewhat similar to Arial, but very readable at small sizes with the Cleartype enhancement.

  1. 12  Bob http://www.bobcongdon.com/blog | 1/9/2006 4:43:48 PM

    @10 "I have been forced into using Outlook for the first time in many years and I am completely baffled as to how people actually get any work done with it"

    I've used both Notes and Outlook, Notes since 2.x. I've heard this sort of "bafflement" comment from proponents of both applications. There's not much chance that opinions like this are going to convince the other side that they're "wrong".

    @10 "And the thing that really blows the minds of Outlook users is that a message can be in more than one folder/view. They just can't grasp that sort of ver[s]atility."

    The ability for a document to exist in multiple folders is cool but can be a source of support calls as well. You have to carefully explain to end users how there aren't multiple copies, they are only referencing the same document in multiple folders. You delete the original and all of the "copies" disappear as well.

  1. 13  Bob http://www.bobcongdon.com/blog | 1/9/2006 4:46:35 PM

    @12 -- Those reference numbers should be to @9 D'oh!

  1. 14  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 1/9/2006 6:21:21 PM

    @11 - tried Segoe UI in Notes... not to my taste, a bit skinny for my liking.

  1. 15  Brian Vincent  | 1/9/2006 7:24:37 PM

    I'm a bit annoyed by Notes bashers too. Frankly Outlook is no masterpiece of UI programming either. However what it does have going for it is that it does loosely emulate the MS Office UI's making it feel more natural feeling for most people.

    To exceed Notes must become the most enjoyable productivity software experience for everyday users, not just developers. Marketing and Finance guys who are the true decision makers now days (since CIOs entered the outsourcing black hole) need to get warm fuzzies from "Hanover." Marketing wants easy to use with a sexy feel, finance is worried about cost of ownership. If we were talking about a car it would be a mid range model with German looks/design and Japanese fuel efficiency.

    UI design and usability should be the prioritized goals for Hanover. This release of Notes needs to be iPod easy to use and iPod pretty if it wants to put Exchange/Outlook in the rearview mirror. There is a reason iPods sell with impunity over their competitors whom simply stuff features in a plastic box. Three letter acronyms are great, but you can put a V12 in a Yugo and at the end of the day its just a fast Yugo.

    Neither Notes nor MS have reached UI nirvana so "Hanover" has a real opportunity here.

  1. 16  Nathan T. Freeman  | 1/10/2006 2:00:51 AM

    @8 - You're completely correct about a lot of that stuff. Notes handling of the context menu is abyssmal, and it actually got WORSE in 7 with the addition of the programmable view context menu (What good is a right-click menu with 40 options in it? But that's the mail template for you.) Undo is a little trickier to me, but I can see where you're coming from. A lot of actions in Notes are client/server interactions, and therefore the "undo" rules would get a little crazy. Notice that MS doesn't let you undo a file deletion on a network file server for a comparison.

    The big problem with UI in Notes remains its complexity, and the lack of facilities to TURN THINGS OFF. For instance, why can't I remove, at least in the context of an application, the "Cut" command for a document? That should be possible, and even easy, given how dangerous a command that is. I should be able to remove menu options and general client options through administrative policies, but that's only about 30% where it needs to be so far.

    Will Hanover address some of this? I hope so. Is there any other tool that even BEGINS to address this level of flexibility? Maybe XUL in Mozilla, but how many people are building sophisticated apps in that? Nothing from MS comes close -- they just limit UI complexities by forcing you to use entirely separate programs, or not allowing customization of the program.

  1. 17  Thilo Hamberger  | 1/10/2006 5:41:16 AM

    @9 - I was comparing features I need for collaboration regardless of implementation because that is what a user cares about. And I don't consider realtime spellchecking as a wasted resource but rather a productivity gain because the user no longer has to activate it manually. Anyway no GUI improvement of Notes is wasted but rather needed urgently. A company like IBM should have no problems with resources. Just think of the marketshare Notes would have with a better GUI.

    @16 - I would be quite happy as a first step with a multiple Undo before the user hits save.

    By the way, Lotus Organizer got so many praise for its user friendliness so there is proof that Lotus can do it. Maybe IBM is the problem??!!

  1. 18  Bernard Devlin  | 1/10/2006 8:04:17 AM

    @17, AFAIR Organizer was bought from a British company called Threadz (or maybe Lotus swallowed up the whole company).

  1. 19  Nathan T. Freeman  | 1/11/2006 1:49:05 AM

    @17 - "And I don't consider realtime spellchecking as a wasted resource but rather a productivity gain because the user no longer has to activate it manually."

    You can turn on automatic spell checking at send time in your email. You've been able to do this since 6.0 at least. For any custom-built application, you could program this behavior quite easily.

  1. 20  andrew  | 2/26/2008 7:21:05 PM

    Notes is a great program for Mail and Calendering.

    I've used it very sucessfully for 9 years, it never gives me a problem.

    My experience of Outlook on my home pc or trying to help people out with it was just horrible, I hate outlook and everything to do with it.

    >>>>>>Maybe its just 'what you are used to'?

  1. 21  andrew  | 2/26/2008 7:23:24 PM

    "This is exactly the answer I gave to a colleague the other day about the sent "folder" actually being a view in the Notes mailbox. It could (and may yet) be changed, but it would take a lot of evaluation about backward compatibility, interoperability, and application integration. "

    - I hope they never do this, what a wonderfully useful view Sent Items is, I can see everything I sent, brillant, why would I want to have to drag things in there?

  1. 22  Ryan  | 3/25/2008 8:03:10 AM

    I hate Lotus Notes (mail) for a seemingly different reason than most. I think the platform is fine, and the flexibility is nice, but the refinement is... non-existant. "Nitpicky" things like when I paste something into notes it literally takes 3 or 4 minutes to paste it, then I have to delete it and manually tell it to "Paste special" as text only. Text-only pasting should be the default, or at least I should be able to set it as the default.

    EVERYTHING about Lotus is excrutiatingly slow, from startup, to pasting, to send/receive, to app switching, ... the list goes on. When I right-click on a file (maybe to open an attatchment), the show-menu delay is at least 1000ms... typical for the slowest program on my computer. Who was it that decided that a 1000ms delay was acceptable? 400ms is the default for Windows show-menu delay, and I think even that is too slow and I set mine at 200ms because I know how. If I knew how to change the defaults in Lotus I would, but the help forums seem to spend more time bashing the program or defending it than actually trying to help anyone use it.

    As for your precious "views"... I'm mixed on that. I like the general idea of views, but it is very complicated when you DELETE something so that you can stay under your mailbox quota but it doesn't really delete the file it just moves it to the "trash view" and it stays on the server... Everything I've ever deleted still shows up in the "view all documents" view, and I have to delete it again.

    There is no "undo" in lotus for moving or deleting mail.

    So WTF? Is this just a case of an end-user not understanding how well the platform is built? That's like saying I should buy a car that is extremely annoying and difficult to use just because the engine is laid out in a convenient way for my mechanic to do maintenance. I understand that Lotus Notes is a platform that is intended for developers to be the "end users" and they can customize the program for their uses... but maybe there should be a standard program that is actually a decent, finished product that is not so annoying and will stand as an example of how a typical design scheme "should be." Maybe the interface I'm using IS that example... in which case it's a poor example and my hatred is justified.

  1. 23  Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net | 3/25/2008 10:22:47 AM

    Ryan,

    Seriously dude...

    1) You need a new PC...there are no delays in the areas you talk about on a sufficiently specified machine. Some more RAM would probably saves you minutes every day.

    2) You need some training about views, deleting and mailbox quotas. It sounds to me like you may even be using an old unsupported version of Lotus Notes....deleted documents wouldn't be in your All Documents view if you had an even vaguely recent release on your machine.

    By all means contact me off-line if you'd like to compare you setup with how it should be.

  1. 24  Alwyn  | 7/21/2008 5:53:00 PM

    I agree with Ryan - there are issues with Notes - v6.5.1 is incredibly slow at pasting html/rich text into an email.

    I'll try update to 6.5.6 and let you know.

    certainly no issues with PC performance. Seriously dude.

  1. 25  Stephen Kuhl  | 8/7/2008 10:03:23 AM

    And I also notice that you did not provide any help to Ryan with his issue of 'paste special'. Is there a way to change the default so that it is text?

    my pc is a brand new dell with 4G of RAM and when I paste rich text or HTML of any size I am looking at half a minute of downtime.

    Stephen(seriously dude)

  1. 26  Hannes  | 11/16/2009 8:35:42 PM

    Using Lotus Notes 7 with a very, very fast pc now for the last 2 years. And stilll it takes FOREVER to paste some text in a mail. And how do you set the standard text pasting as default?

    Ryan is quite right in his view that Notes suck, because IBM couldn't provide a semi decent example of how something simple like an email client could work. I'll go back to using exchange, outlook and .net anyday.

  1. 27  Oram Plus http://oramplus.net | 3/31/2010 1:24:59 AM

    I'd like to chime in here. I have used Lotus Notes (varying versions) for the last 15 years. My company uses notes for email. I realize it is more than just email, but the point is I *have* to use it at my company. I have to say this is the most application to use. Nothing is standard, nothing is on the menu you think it will be, unpredictable and unreadable errors are shown all the time... Well, after 15 years of moaning about notes, along with my 40,000 other colleagues in our large organization, our company has finally seen the light and will be upgrading us to exchange by the end of April. It's like heaven!

  1. 28  Mike Geary http://mikegeary.org | 4/11/2010 9:01:49 PM

    I am not a notes admin or developer, but I have experience using both notes and outlook from the perspective of a user.

    The problem here is that lotus notes is VERY powerful. It can do so much, so well... Of course, IBM markets it as such. The problems occur because of shoddy, half-finished implementations.

    Often the notes detractors take the position that IBM have made a mistake by marketing notes so well, that they are "forced" to use it for email. What would these people suggest?... that IBM markets notes as a system that will only work well if the admins don't stuff it up?

    Going forward, the only way to placate these users will be if notes can come up with an solid, out-of-the-box front-end for email that the admins don't need to play with, and therefore can't break.

  1. 29  Oram Plus http://oram-plus.net | 8/13/2010 4:42:46 PM

    @Mike Geary.... I don't think anyone is suggesting that Notes is not powerful... I think people have an issue with the fact that Notes does not come with an intuitive interface out-of-the-box.