Ed Brill

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1. 1  Jess Stratton http://www.mattandjess.net | 1/9/2005 4:44:45 PM

   I once gave a custom app to a client. A new user in the organization complained that she had bought "Lotus Notes for Dummies" and was upset because she couldn't find the instructions for the app in there. The moral of the story is that many end users have a hard time knowing the difference between the database production *software* itself and the *platform* (Lotus Notes) it runs on.

1. 2  Dan  | 1/9/2005 5:30:07 PM

   Notes is often blamed for everything becasue people use it so much. At one previous employer, we measured '% of desktop time' and found that people spent more time in Notes than anything else. Anything was more likely to happen when Notes was running than not. Yes, there are some real problems but it reminds me of the classic support call "my mouse isn't working" when the computer is completely locked.

1. 3  Andrew Pollack http://www.thenorth.com/apblog | 1/9/2005 6:04:36 PM

   That's a saying we have here in Maine, talking about some of the tourist spots. Of course we're not blind to the irony -- but it fits.

   Notes is that way. Nobody uses notes, it sucks. Only we know that because more than half the corporate world uses it.

1. 4  Carl http://www.iminstant.com | 1/9/2005 6:23:08 PM

   The most popular one I still hear is that "Notes deletes my email after I read it", at some point the user had turned on Show only unread mail

1. 5  Chris Whisonant  | 1/9/2005 7:06:38 PM

   A senior management person in my company wanted to have a laptop that was lightweight. To meet his criteria we had to get a celeron processor with a 5400 RPM disk drive. Besides that his Norton AV was improperly configured (along with the rest of the company b/c our AV admins messed up the config twice!) and it was scanning Notes. Well we heard all the time that Notes is slow, etc... We get him a new laptop and haven't heard anything since!

   We come from a POP3 Eudora/Outlook environment so nobody was used to server-based mail. We often had requests like "Where are my attachments stored?" Others have said they liked the "bells and whistles" of Eudora. I said "like a calendar?!?"

1. 6  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 1/9/2005 7:08:10 PM

   Rather than clog up your comments with overly long replies, I've stuck my two examples here:

   { Link }

   (P.S. - What no trackbacks?)

1. 7  Oliver Regelmann http://www.n-komm.de/blog.nsf | 1/9/2005 7:31:34 PM

   We have one customer who's routing mail to the internet via a Linux box. Because this box is overloaded with spam and wrong Non Delivery Reports they went the simple way and disabled NDRs on that box.

   Now always when a mail cannot be delivered to the appropriate receipient for any reason and Domino creates a NDR or just rejects it, it disappears. And Notes is blamed for having "destroyed" that mail.

1. 8    | 1/9/2005 7:45:34 PM

   But how many of us dealt with the "QNC is crashing my system" complaints, back when Quincy was installed by default with Notes.

1. 9  Colin Williams  | 1/9/2005 8:04:50 PM

   ...I have that same problem when copy/pasting from IE to Notes.

   I can understand how you might feel if you do it often - I generally do it once in a session and then remember to paste special\text until the next time...and then its "doh!" all over again...

   This behaviour has always bothered me - but the fact is, LOTS of things about Notes bother me so I just put up with them (read:swear and curse when they get on top of me). As much as I love Notes, I also love to hate it because of these kinds of oddities which differ from what I might expect. If I had the energy I'd write them up but four years of oddities have worn me down somewhat.

   Now, does anyone know what is actually going on during a copy/paste operation from IE?

   And Ed, if you've not experienced this behaviour, you must be living in some Notes nirvana OR I run my Notes environment rather badly - take yer pick! ;)

1. 10  Doug  | 1/9/2005 9:02:34 PM

   I get this complaint sometimes. "Lotus Notes is corrupting my emails again. I only see a Winmail.dat file." Lol

   We get the "Notes is slow" comment on Mondays. If you shutdown your computer on the weekend, then Monday morning you'll probably get some new Virus definitions, and therefore, your computer will be sluggish. The lesson here? Forget energy conservation, and let that PC run all weekend.

1. 11  david  | 1/9/2005 9:17:13 PM

   it is certainly an "issue." i've found that on the FIRST copy to clipboard then paste to notes, it can take ages. thereafter it's faster. must be something to do with how notes reads the clipboard initially--i suspect too that it probably is slow because it's dealing with rich text importing.

   the "issue", for me, is so bad, if i want to cut and paste to notes, i first paste to notepad, copy from there, and paste to notes. all the formating gets stripped out and it's actually FASTER that way.

   i'm a notes dedicated believer (my company has a notes shop), but like colin, i just live with this oddity. irritates me no end when i forget to cut to notepad first

1. 12  Subhan http://slate.blogspirit.com | 1/9/2005 9:55:33 PM

   Yesterday we had breakdown and one by one all our mail servers were not responding. And as usual, the Users who uses LN from day-break till day-end would say "Notes not responding".

   Our Admins where quick to identify the cause, though not the exact reason. The problem was server access from LN client only, though the Domino was responding to web queries and the server console was alive too. The problem they found was due to a schedule web-update of 'ScanMail' Anti-Virus. Soon after the update, all our Domino Mail Server failed to respond to LN Clients, interestingly Enterprise Servers were not effected.

   And every such Notes non-availablity makes our LN2MS Guys more happy. One more reason for their virtuous cause.

1. 13  Dave Harris www.wavysworld.com | 1/9/2005 10:34:20 PM

   I used to get constant complaints of "Notes has crashed while I was at lunch" and "I can't read my email anymore".

   Hmmm, hardly surprising with 14 other heavy duty applications running, really, is it?

1. 14  Scott  | 1/9/2005 10:35:34 PM

   One of our top-level executives called me in a panic one morning to say that "I was just working on some things and Notes deleted all my e-mail, but I swear I didn't touch anything!!" After checking their mailfile from the Administrator Client, I calmly replied to this person (having seen this gem on rare occasion before), "Do me a favor and hit the HOME key in the upper right-hand corner of your keyboard". Voila! Suddenly Notes had somehow magically restored the e-mail it had previously "deleted" due to the executive hitting the END key while working in their Inbox.

1. 15  Bruce Elgort http://www.bruceelgort.com | 1/9/2005 11:01:07 PM

   Now there's a good Notes UI flaw. When hitting the end key you would expect Notes to scroll to the end of the inbox however, it scolls the screen all the way to the right. Control+End gets you to the end of your inbox.

1. 16  Bill Geimer  | 1/9/2005 11:27:32 PM

   I only run Firefox on linux and when I copy from Domino Web Access, it happens instantly. LOL.

   Seriously, I copy/paste from IE to Notes 6.5.3 on XP - SP2 all the time and it rarely takes more than a second or two. All the time means four to five times a day. Sometimes in html format, sometimes in text format. The only trouble I have had in the past several versions was with version 6.5.1, but in that version, the Admin client seemed to leak memory. At least the task manager measured a steady increase. That went away with 6.5.3.

1. 17  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 1/10/2005 1:09:34 AM

   @11 - have you tried a "paste special" using text only?

   @10 - winmail.dat -- ROTFL , that's got to be way up on the list.

   @6 Phillip -- does this mean you've entered the blog world?? :)

1. 18  Colin Williams  | 1/10/2005 2:02:13 AM

   Yeah, winmail.dat - Notes gets blamed for that one all the time - makes yer wonder why IBM didn't do something about it...Just because you're right doesn't mean you can sit on yer high horse and ignore an issue that effects so many users...

   How simple would it be to allow Notes to "understand" such a ubiquitous thing as Winmail.dat?

   Bend like a reed.

1. 19  Ben Rose http://blog.jaffacake.net | 1/10/2005 2:04:01 AM

   The copy/paste from IE thing has been around for a long long time but, as mentioned by some people, it only seems to happen the first time.

   During that first paste, your machine gets busy loading the nweb.exe process which isn't loaded in advance...I guess Notes load times aren't superfast anyway so there's little point in pre-loading.

   Once the process is loaded the paste operation is reasonably fast, but that first time can be a bit slow as the nweb executable starts up and is no doubt checked for viruses along the way. How a 57KB file (Notes 6.5.3) can take so long to start is beyond me.

   I've never liked nweb.exe much, it seems to be bloated, slow and above all unstable. The majority of crashes I saw in R5 were related to nweb.exe falling over, especially when pasting web content. Alternatively, should something else crash, it will always be nweb.exe hanging around the process list keeping the files locked and preventing Notes restarting easily without a process cleanup or reboot.

   An anti-Notes colleague here continually jokes that if Lotus Notes is so good and stable then why on earth if there a program (downloadable from IBM) to clean-up Notes crashes? { Link }

   He's got a point perhaps...

1. 20  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 1/10/2005 2:25:19 AM

   @18 - I don't think it's that ubiquitous. As I understand it, a properly-configured Exchange/Outlook environment doesn't send winmail.dats, which is well-documented in the MS technotes etc. That's what STANDARDS are for!

1. 21  Colin Williams  | 1/10/2005 3:03:39 AM

   @20 - its ubiquitous enough to be a common complaint - it must be because its at the top of your own list!

   Whats a STANDARD anyway? Average users regard standards as an expectation of how something should work rather than the technical nuts and bolts...deleting mail in Notes is a good example of this - it took 18 odd years for Lotus to make Notes work as a user would EXPECT - thanks for listening Lotus!

   Notes zealots call Winmail.dat proprietry and no-one cares. Microsoft zealots call NSF proprietry and the Notes zealots cry "no fair - 100+ million seats means its a standard!".

   It follows that if market penetration = a standard, then Winmail.dat is a standard.

   Don't get me wrong, I love Notes. I spend a huge amount of energy deeply involved in the product, both where I work and in my spare time. I can tolerate its quirks and shortcomings but it really rips my shorts when "Notes professionals" get so engrossed in the product that shortsightedness alters their sensible viewpoint.

   Anyway, the key thing is that being RIGHT isn't always right. It would be too easy to code around Winmail.dat - thats a significant issue gone from your list - and a reasonable support issue gone from my own. Thanks for listening Lotus!

1. 22  Jan Van Puyvelde  | 1/10/2005 3:39:02 AM

   In an editor, End takes you to the end of the line and Control+End to the end of the file.

   I too have hit the End key by accident, but I prefer the behaviour to stay the same.

1. 23  Ben Rose http://blog.jaffacake.net | 1/10/2005 3:39:41 AM

   I'm with Colin on this one, whilst it's easy to blame Microsoft it's a "problem" that affects nearly all Notes/Domino environments I have seen.

   As I understand it, and I know jack about Outlook, as soon as an Outlook user adds somebody to their contact list it will being to send in the proprietary winmail.dat format by default. This happens with non-exchange users, a standalone Outlook client is sufficient.

   As people generally only add important contacts to their personal address book, this means that those affected emails are generally more important too.

   There is a solution, one can be found here { Link } , thanks Julian.

   I have a hunch that this functionality may well be included in the next OpenNTF mail template too. ;O)

1. 24  Oliver Regelmann http://www.n-komm.de/blog.nsf | 1/10/2005 4:36:42 AM

   Another thing that I might to add. We got a lot of complaints of the worse client performance during the R5 -> ND6 upgrades. Especially on older machines.

   While this actually IS a Notes issue, it's also an issue of every new application. New version -> new features -> less performance.

1. 25  Henning Heinz  | 1/10/2005 5:15:49 AM

   Just want to say thank you for Colins comment(21). I stop now, I am in troll mood and everything that I add would be nasty.

1. 26  Chris Whisonant  | 1/10/2005 7:41:36 AM

   About the copy/paste from a browser, I like the "Copy to Plain Text" extension available for Firefox. I never liked how everything I pasted from a browser was inside a table anyway.

   https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=134

1. 27  Scott  | 1/10/2005 7:46:14 AM

   @ 17: Ed, Do you...

   @ 20: ...ever sleep??

1. 28  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 1/10/2005 7:50:09 AM

   @24 is that true after the initial rebuilding of database indexes, etc.? Or is it just 'a first impression'.

   Colin, I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone claim NSF is a "standard", though at least it is accessible via standard interfaces such as sql.

   Thanks for linking to Julian, Ben. It helped my understanding of the problem -- I had mistakenly thought that winmail.dat only contained formatting information. I guess that's the only time I ever see winmail.dat in my own mailbox.

1. 29  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 1/10/2005 7:51:11 AM

   LOL I must have been responding when Scott added 27.

   Uh, well, it's called "jet lag" in this case, really. I slept on my flight out here (Vegas) and then now I'm up early. Sigh.

1. 30  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 1/10/2005 8:01:48 AM

   anyone want to contribute to the original topic? :) (back to bed for another hour)

1. 31  Ben Rose http://blog.jaffacake.net | 1/10/2005 8:13:40 AM

   Ed - So now you understand the winmail.dat thing we can expect a fix in...hmmm. 7.5? ;O)

   I'm still waiting for the day that virus writers start transmitting nastiness in winmail.dat attachments...could be a disaster for Exchange sites.

   Back on the original topic I recently rolled out the Notes 6.5 template globally, an upgrade from 6.0. This gave our users the very useful Junk Mail folder which we are making extensive use of via an anti-spam appliance and message tagging.

   A couple of days later, on of our seniors had problems accessing the internet. He blamed this new Junk Mail folder...errrr....how????

1. 32  Chris  | 1/10/2005 8:14:25 AM

   So this whole "paste into Notes delay extravaganza" is a Notes issue after all. No ? We are still suffering from this and would benefit from a fix. If I do a CTRL+A on this very page and paste into new memo I get to wait circa 40 sec.

   Best oddball blame I heard of was a trader complaining that his recipients would only receive the beginning of his emails (after 255 characters I believe) - the rest of the email would mysteriously disappear. We got top dog email engineers on deck for this for a number of hours, the pope of SMTP MTA was involved and thinking caps were on.

   At the end of the day they discovered that the precious genius was typing his whole emails in the subject field...

1. 33  Bob Brodsky  | 1/10/2005 8:15:18 AM

   Well this is not exactly Notes geting blamed for everything but one "Notes" problem I get all the time is complaints for "Server not Responding" or "No path found to Server" or "Server is not a TCPIP Host" from users with laptops who missed when they plugged/slammed their laptop into their docking stations

   =:-O

   Bob

1. 34  Kevin http://www.DominoPreacher.com | 1/10/2005 8:16:06 AM

   Here's one of my favorites.

   "Notes doesn't allow me to open my mail."

   This is an oldy but a goody. We got that one when we migrated the company from cc:Mail to Notes. Part of the migration (when all was done) was to then turn off cc:Mail (obviously). Despite all the training, emails, warnings and holding of hands... we still received a number of complaints on how much Notes sucks because it deleted cc:Mail from their computer.

1. 35  Ben Rose http://blog.jaffacake.net | 1/10/2005 8:36:55 AM

   @32, Chris - I've taken this to another level. I selected some text from this page, copies and pasted...not into Notes...but into MS Word...took just as long. This would be the speed of OLE I guess. Doing a select all/copy on this page prompted word to display "There is insufficient memory or disk space. Close extra windows and save your work". The same paste worked in Notes...so I think we'll blame something else at this point.

1. 36  Dave  | 1/10/2005 9:17:47 AM

   I'll respond to the initial topic of what silly things get blamed on Notes --

   We have a web site that provides a read-only interface to customer data. The data is housed in the microsoft world (SQL Server), exported to text files, and imported to Notes using ZMerge. Most often, when the content on the site is incorrect, despite the fact that it is housed in another technology, and the problem originated elsewhere, people blame Notes.

   Likewise, when the server goes down, I get paged. Nevermind that the problem is network or the operating system 98% of the time. Notes gets blamed, and the server admins don't even look at it until I confirm that it is not a Notes problem.

1. 37  Alan Lepofsky  | 1/10/2005 9:41:49 AM

   Notes melted the ice cream in my freezer.

1. 38  Alan Bell http://www.dominux.co.uk | 1/10/2005 9:46:49 AM

   Windows applications can put stuff on the clipboard in lots of formats at once, the application being pasted into can collect the format it prefers, you can override this with paste special. Notes can render HTML so it picks up this as being the best (most high fidelity) format which IE can provide. To render HTML notes needs to start it's nweb task (hence the short delay when this first needs to happen) secondly if there are any resources to download (like the content of an <img> tag) then it connects to the internet and downloads them. HTML does not contain images. Now we get on to your proxy settings. Open your location document and fix them. They are wrong and Notes is timing out. It might be nice if an error message pops up, but basically it is trying it's best to render the HTML and stops when it has achieved it's best.

1. 39  yuval  | 1/10/2005 10:28:31 AM

   Also it doesn't make any sense, this will solve I.E cut and paste problem :

   1. Open location settings

   2. Go to internet brwoser

   3. Change to Notes with internet explorer (no need to save)

   4. Change back to Internet Explorer

   5. Save & exit.

   your problem is gone !

1. 40  Declan Lynch http://www.qtzar.com | 1/10/2005 11:00:34 AM

   Yes, Notes always gets blamed first, and probably for the reasons mentioned above, it's the most used application in the environment. Here's a few from our helpdesk system :

   PC Crashed - Notes Blamed - User had 'removed' a number of files from the windows directory becuase he never used them.

   PC Slow - Notes Blamed - User had 6 instances of Excel open with some pretty powerful macros in them. 3 MS Word docs open and SAP.

   Mail not being sent - Notes blamed - NDR showed destination recipient was 'over quota'.

   Can't Print - Notes blamed - user was trying to print to a non-existant printer.

   Emails on PDA missing - Notes Blamed - User had let battery on PDA drain complete and device had hard reset itself.

   Personally I think a lot of the problem can be down to the support helpdesk. If they don't ask the right questions then the user will have their 'problem' logged as being a notes problem and therefore become used to blaming everything on Lotus Notes.

   I refuse to deal with calls from our helpdesk unless there is proof that it's a notes problem.

1. 41  Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net/bensblog.nsf | 1/10/2005 11:07:37 AM

   Following on from Declan's comment, I think us Notes professionals really suffer when it comes to Helpdesks.

   Unlike most products, e.g. Word/Excel etc, we have job titles that include the product name e.g. Lotus Notes administrator. This makes us a product specialist and the target for all helpdesk tickets. They seem more than happy to pick up calls for anything but Notes, but I guess we don't have a MS Word admin or Hewlett Packard printer analyst.

1. 42  Brian Benz http://www.softwaresoapbox.com | 1/10/2005 11:25:27 AM

   Try cutting and pasting from IE to Word or Excel - much more of a delay. Maybe cutting and pasting sucks?

1. 43  Scott  | 1/10/2005 11:32:03 AM

   @41 - Ben: True, true. Which is one of the reasons our department is now, "Messaging & Collaboration" and our titles are now "Collaboration Engineer". Of course, it doesn't help that they now keep adding on responsibilities to our position, but that's another story.

1. 44  Eric Parsons startingblockcomputing.com | 1/10/2005 11:38:31 AM

   And the Notes problem ticket -- "I can't print my Notes from MS Word."

1. 45  Bruce Elgort http://www.bruceelgort.com | 1/10/2005 12:00:13 PM

   Obligatory "Get a Mac" post

1. 46  Chris Whisonant  | 1/10/2005 12:31:01 PM

   @43 - Scott, my title is "Senior Mid-Range Systems Administrator". Up until 2002 this was strictly an iSeries administration and support job (hence the title). After we got Notes my job description now includes:

   Support daily adminstration and operations of Lotus Notes Domino Internal E-Mail, Domino Workflow, Database Applications, and Corporate Intranet Website.

   Support Help Desk issues regarding AS/400, Lotus Notes Domino Internal E-Mail, Domino Workflow, Intranet Website, Database Applications, and Kofax Optical Archived Data

   Lotus Notes Domino Development for Workflow, Database Applications, and Intranet Website.

   That's added to doing iSeries stuff (where time seems to permit!). Also taking up my time are calls from users with "Notes" problems...

1. 47  Mavis Moon  | 1/10/2005 1:27:05 PM

   One example at my company: Autocad needs a lot of memory and works better when Notes is not open at the same time as Autocad, therefore, "Notes is a memory hog."

1. 48  Gregg Eldred  | 1/10/2005 1:46:53 PM

   I think that it was said once before, but no matter what the NDR says, it is Notes' problem. Also, when the internal DNS is down, and mail is no longer routing, it is Notes' problem. When you send a message to the wrong recipient, because you haven't looked at the Ambiguous Name dialog box, it is Notes' problem.

1. 49  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 1/10/2005 2:28:50 PM

   Ed [17],

   I'm entering the blog world, yes. So now you can spend less time reading comments. ;-)

1. 50  Henning Heinz  | 1/10/2005 4:51:45 PM

   If IBM thinks that "Server not responding [Ok]" is enough as an end user information, how can you be surprised that Notes is blamed for everything?

1. 51  Adam Osborne www.preemptive.com.au | 1/10/2005 5:08:56 PM

   Years ago when I worked at Lotus as a Support Manager, I placed a feature/enhancement request for the 'Server Not Responding' prompt that went something like this:

   1. Allow the text "Server Not Responding to be replaced with something more meaningful..

   2. Allow the Notes client to do a call out to a dll when this error occurs. A developer could then write code to say, ping the server, ping the local router etc, then tell the user what is really going on, ie. Sorry the communications line between your PC and the Domino Server has been severed, you need to restart Notes. or 'The Netware server holding critical Notes files has crashed, you need to restart Notes.... This could even send an smnp trap to the helpdesk... etc.

   Anyway I still think this is a good idea.

1. 52    | 1/10/2005 5:47:50 PM

   Newsflash... this just in.... Polar ice-caps melting, Lotus Notes blamed... we'll have more on this story as people make it up.

1. 53  Tony Austin notestracker.com | 1/10/2005 6:56:25 PM

   Ciao ragazzi e ragazze,

   from summery Melbourne, way Down Under.

   Re responses 32 and 35 (copy/paste this very page into Notes Mail rich text field and into a Word document) ...

   My results are as follows:

   (a) Ctrl+A (select all) - the paste operation takes around 7 or 8 seconds "only" -- noting like 40 seconds.

   (b) Copy only the plain text body of this very page (omitting the URLs in the left column, etc) - the paste takes one second or less.

   I always have a network monitor open so as to always be aware and alert regarding all Internet activity. (Why not install it yourself. To download it, find the link for "MyVitalAgent" on { Link } or { Link } and you'll see what I'm getting at.)

   When I pasted the whole page (including URLs) it was evident from MyVitalAgent that most of the 7 or 8 seconds was caused by network activity (such as validating the URLs perhaps). When pasting just the plain text of this page, there was no such activity so the pasted text appeared almost immediately.

   So it seems not just OLE but aother sorts of "invisible" activity that can cause slow pasting.

   So it's another case of "apples and oranges" or "horses for courses".

   Even amazingly brilliant experts like us can be caught out by things like this, so pity the poor "end user" who hasn't spent months and years mastering the quirks and interwoven intricacies of operating systems, Windows, Notes, anti-virus and anti-spyware tools, and all the rest of it!

1. 54  Dave Harris www.wavysworld.com | 1/11/2005 1:40:31 AM

   1. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C

   2. Start Notes

   3. Ignore Outgoing Mail pop-up (from a support issue yesterday)

   4. Open Journal

   5. New Journal Entry

   6. Tab to Body field

   7. Ctrl-V

   Total time (going slowly to avoid mistakes) = 45 seconds

   OK, I'm using Firefox ;o)

   Elsewhere, on a talkboard I use, there was a thread entitled "Conspiracy theories as to why the Tsunami really happened"... Only a matter of time, surely

1. 55  Ben Rose http://blog.jaffacake.net | 1/11/2005 2:21:14 AM

   @53 - A note to all users. I found a live download of "myvitalagent" for testing. It killed my test environment, if I'd used this PC I may not be able to warn you.

   It could be a fluke coincidence, but you have been warned.

   Ed - How about "Lotus Notes killed my exchange server"? There I was using the Notes client to access my exchange mailbox thru IMAP4 when all of a sudden that single shared object store corrupted and all of my users were without email for 2 weeks until we got it all repaired. Nobody told me that the exchange server depended upon the domain controller see. And they certainly didn't tell me that a domain controller needed a backup domain controller in case of a failure. So instead of deploying one mail server, my infrastructure should have consisted of 3 machines. Must be something to do with Notes I guess. { Link } ;O)

1. 56  Tony Austin notestracker.com | 1/11/2005 3:07:08 AM

   Re: responses 53 (mine) and 54 (by Dave Harris) ...

   I only measured step 7 (the Paste operation itself). Don't tell me that the prelimanry steps are to be counted -- if so, now wonder a figure of 40 seconds is being quoted.

   I use Firefox, plus Internet Explorer (and various tabbed variants like Avant Browser and Enigma Browser). Which of these I use seems to make little difference, so it seems its a Windows thing rather than a browser thing.

   AN ASIDE:

   Since Firefox has been mentioned, and lots of people are extolling its glories! ... Nice as Firefox is, I find that it has its own set of issues. One is unusual and somewjat unnerving screen painting at times, sometimes causing things to jump around on the screen before finally settling down after a second or two (whereas IE hadnles the same page smoothly). Another is that Firefox doesn't seem to handle scrolling "marquee" text properly: view the scrolling text at { Link } and { Link } firstly using Internet Explorer and then using Firefox. You should find that with Firefox the scrolling goes on ad nauseam, whereas IE handles it as intended -- scrolling once (for the first link) or a few times (for the scond link). I find that I need to switch back and forth between browsers to use their respective good features and avoid their individual quirks. Heard that story before? Oh well, I must dash off now, and "throw a shrimp on the barbie" ...

1. 57  Ben Rose http://blog.jaffacake.net | 1/11/2005 4:05:22 AM

   Another classic today:

   User: what's up with this new version of notes?

   Me: Why:

   User: It won't open excel attachments...

   Me: What's the error?

   User: "Sorry, an application to open the document cannot be found"

   Me: An excel attachment?

   User: Yeah

   Me: You haven't got excel installed...

   User: Yeah I have

   Me: No...you haven't. Save to desktop and try opening from there...what does it say

   User: Choose application to launch attachment

   Me: Is excel in the list?

   User: No

   Me: Is office installed?

   User: Maybe not...

   The wonders of putting out a new Notes version on a new build...that doesn't have Office!

1. 58  Chris Whisonant  | 1/11/2005 7:02:31 AM

   @57 - Ben, we get that sometimes too. Recently we had a string of DWA users who could not open jpg or gif attachments. They got the "Sorry, an application to open the document cannot be found" message. So I just saved to desktop, chose to open with MS Imaging, logged out and into DWA and VIOLA! the attachments opened.

   Another that we recently received a few of - "I get an error in Notes every time I reply to an email". Since I knew from my groups activity database I created that our Windows server guys moved that workgroup to a different server all I had to do was change their Notes signature to point to the new server for their html signature.

1. 59  Tony Austin notestracker.com | 1/11/2005 7:46:16 AM

   C'est la vie! What can you expect?

   There are lots of corporate users who don't get much (if any) training: even in Windows, much less Notes (Notes in general, and specific Notes apps such as Mail/Calendaring).

   And they get the same amount of training when a new version (of Windows, or Notes, or whatever) comes out.

   On the one hand, some things are relatively intuitive so maybe not much training is needed. On the other hand ...

1. 60  Don Strawsburg  | 1/11/2005 9:02:29 AM

   You heard it, right from my CEO's mouth, I was trying to figure out why he didn't like Notes and after a few minutes of making lame excuses, the truth came out. "The biggest problem with Notes, is it's not Microsoft"

   So my suggestion is, to change the box color from Yellow to Windows Blue, call it MicroSoft Notes by IBM.

   On a serious side, give away the client, and provide free mail hosting for home users, for 1 year, then charge a small fee.

   People could use Notes at home, and public apps would be built, if there was an customer base that could use them. IBM could make there money back from the hosting of Domino apps, but just like the browser, and the e-mail client, it has to be free. Just like home users went back to the office and asked for Outlook cause they had Outlook Express at home, they would go to their office and ask for Notes, development is way faster than the web, much more friendly to use. Business would eat it up, employees working from home in a secure environment.

   Nice Blog!

   Don

1. 61  Ben Rose http://blog.jaffacake.net | 1/11/2005 9:32:32 AM

   @60 - Don, you're joking...I've seen grown IT professionals cry at the thought of installing Notes...they call it a "black art" around here.

1. 62    | 1/11/2005 11:34:30 AM

   @61 - They should get out more.

1. 63  Colin Williams http://www.guttedgeek.com | 1/11/2005 2:53:09 PM

   @53 and 54

   This is a real issue for some sites - having spent some time trying to fix this issue, your experience is clearly different due to a difference in configuration.

   Alan Bell sums it up nicely in comment 38 above - Notes is starting a process (nweb) to render the HTML into Rich Text which explains why the first attempt takes sometime (anywhere from 20-40 seconds, depending on the machine and its current load).

   Now, this all gets worse should you happen to have a proxy server between yourself and the internet - if you don't have your proxy settings set in your current location document then Notes will take even longer because it not only needs to start 'nweb' but its attempt to connect to the website in question will ultimately times out - this is when it can take up to 60 seconds - and in my experience, even on a fast machine, this is a realistic figure.

   Oddly when it does time out like this, I generally get what I wanted to paste in the first place - although I only ever copy/paste text - so perhaps 'nweb' is only actually to deal with images?

   Our environment makes this whole delay issue even worse because we need to authenticate to get out through our proxy server - this is done seemlessly through Active Directory integration in respect to IE but Notes can't deal with that so the location documents 'proxy username and password' would need to be maintained by our users as they change Windows passwords.

   So it comes back to a limitation of Notes and the specific environment really doesn't it?

   @Ed - If this is not already written up somewhere, an explanation along these lines would make a good candidate for the "IBM Lotus Support Services - Lotus Notes" resource (whos RSS feed I find extremely useful!)

1. 64  Colin Williams http://www.guttedgeek.com | 1/11/2005 6:30:48 PM

   I take some of that back, its not a limitation of Notes - its completely a Notes configuration issue...

   I have just tested the same copy/paste operation into Microsoft Word (with similar misconfiguration of the proxy settings). Word does much the same thing as Notes - it connects back to the web to get the content. If it can't get to the web it just sits there - and unlike Notes, it JUST SITS THERE until I kill the task.

   Our proxy that requires authentication is a PITA!

   Forgive a fool? ;)

1. 65  Ben Rose http://blog.jaffacake.net | 1/12/2005 5:18:19 AM

   Colin,

   As an addition to this, proxy settings can be deployed to users via an R6 policy document in the Domino Directory, that's how we do it here. This is essential for many rich emails these days hence why we use it.

   On the authentication side, good luck. There's no easy way off the top of my head.

1. 66  Mick Moignard  | 1/12/2005 1:04:12 PM

   Years ago I had one of these. A customer I was visiting to do some work with a Notes-based product we'd sold him showed me Notes running on his desk, and said "this is crap", and sure enough, the performance was pretty bad.

   After a few more minutes we headed to the computer room on another floor, and in doing so, passed another desk where someone was also working with Notes, and as we approached and went past, I could see that it was moving from screenm to screen, opening and closing documents and redisplaying views with the snappiness that I'd have expected. I stopped my host and said "that looks Ok to me", and he agreed, looking rather surprised.

   A few days later he called me and said that they'd found a network problem, and now all was Ok. So, Notes was crap? Not really, just getting the blame, because it was the most commonly used network app, in those days.

   I've seen another, more recent one, where a customer had internal pressure to remove Notes and replace with, yes, you guessed, Exchange; not uncommon. I pointed out that much of the reason that they had complaints was because the Notes infrastucture wasn't that well implemented, it wasn't that well managed either, nor were end users trained or kept informed about updates, changes and so on. So if they couldn't do Notes very well, what chance had they of doing Exchange any better? So could they end up with masses of disruption while the rip/replace went on, lots of money spent, and still a groundswell of discontent with their email system? They stayed on Notes.

1. 67  Ed Fisher  | 1/12/2005 11:36:34 PM

   I love this thread. Brill didnt have any anti-exchange posts, so he jumps on a Notes complaint - mocks it - and then it turns out that a bunch of Notes users (those who read this site most likely are), come out and say - hey, it kind of is a problem... same thing happens with winmail.dat jokes... these things aren't great.

   Brings me back to the original point of this blog entry - about Famien Katz article... he had to rewrite the @Command code from scratch - by himself, without much c+ skills... and he made it 300% better. That just amazes me... what if Lotus put a team on it - would it be 1200% better...

   Where do the maintenance dollars go? K-Station?

1. 68  Roberto Boccadoro  | 1/14/2005 3:55:08 PM

   What are the most oddball things you've had users blame on Notes? I was at a customer site long time ago, and they were having horrible problems with network communication from client to server. They were using MS TCP v0.9.....yikes! Well...the customer, after the uptenth time he could not connect told me "your fault! after all, all the world knows Notes can't work with TCP/IP but only with NetBios." The fact I plugged my PC, with a more recent version of the TCP stack, in his network and I connected every single time did not change his mind.

1. 69  Mike Brown  | 3/7/2005 6:14:42 AM

   A couple of years ago, we were setting up VPN access for remote users. I wasn't involved in the project at all, but I found out (over the coffee machine!) that the entire VPN project was stalled because "Notes doesn't work with it".

   I immediately poked my nose in and asked the team responsible to show me the problem. They opened somebody's mail box for me over the new VPN. The Inbox opened in a few seconds! "Ah", they said, "but look what happens when you try and SEND an email". Sure enough, it crawled. It took several minutes after clicking the button for the email to actually go.

   "All our other applications work just fine; only Notes is a problem", I was told. When I enquired what exactly were the "other applications" that had been tested, it was basically a lot of Web browsing stuff, plus the occasional opening of a Word or Excel file from a server folder.

   Thankfully, I'd remembered to swtich by brain to the On position before leaving home that morning, and the connection hit me immediately. With all those so-called "applications" the data was moving in one direction only: from the servers down to the remote client. When you opened Inbox in Notes, and the data was moving in that same direction, that worked fine too. You only got a problem when you did something (send an email) that tried to move some data in the opposite direction.

   To verify my brilliance, I initiated an OS copy of a small file from the client to a server folder, over the new VPN. It crawled.

   "There appears to be a network and/or OS problem with the transport of data from client to server", I said, trying not to look too smug. "It's nothing to do with Notes".

   Twenty minutes after my insight, one of them had found a packet size setting that was set incorrectly, somewhere in the OS. They'd been held up for days chasing down this "problem with Notes".

   You'll note that at no point did my knowledge of Notes help me solve this problem. It was just the application of simple logic, Captain.

1. 70  Mike Brown  | 3/11/2005 2:13:31 PM

   @21

   A belated response to Colin.

   Sorry, Colin, but your winmail.dat Vs .NSF argument simply doesn't hold water. People don't generally email .nsf files over the internet, and then say "your problem if you can't read this"

   The Last Thing Microsoft Did = Today's New Standard is not an equation that computes in my world.

   Cheers,

   - Mike

1. 71  T. Woods  | 3/17/2005 4:42:02 PM

   @38 Alan Bell, you may have saved my sanity. I am just a Notes user, and I went to Google looking for some solution to this painfully slow pasting, which baffled me because I experienced only in Notes. After updating my proxy settings it compeletely fixed the issue. I don't care what software/configuration/policy/admin was to blame, Thank You for publishing a solution!!!!

1. 72  ThePef http://thepef.blogs.com | 3/22/2005 5:58:48 PM

   Try dragging and dropping emails from one folder to another.

   Try to get your Sametime client list to go behind something else.

   Try to easily archive mail.

   Try to get a quota that does not include calendar entries.

   Basically, the UI in Notes is mis-designed and bloated. It may be the most wonderful piece of software in the world, but it is obvious that the user community can't get beyond the bad UI. If the Notes team were to actually pull back and focus a release that centered on creating a usable, intuitive UI, then we might actually have a product that is worth something.

1. 73  Jonathan  | 6/2/2005 10:41:40 AM

   Comment deleted by blog policy. I'll refrain from outing the company IP address from where it was posted.

1. 74  fab  | 6/19/2006 5:10:16 AM

   @39 : you saved my day.

1. 75  Phil  | 6/19/2006 10:26:37 AM

   @72

   >Try dragging and dropping emails from one folder to another.

   yep, do it all the time, no problem. what's your point?

   >Try to get your Sametime client list to go behind something else.

   Can't comment on this one, I don't have it.

   >Try to easily archive mail.

   happens quietly every week like clockwork.

   >Try to get a quota that does not include calendar entries.

   why would you want to? the entries still take space in the file and it's the size of the file that counts.

1. 76  CGomez  | 11/28/2007 8:29:15 AM

   "if I accidentally cut and paste anything from Internet Explorer directly into a Notes 6.x email, it freezes up for (and I am not exaggerating here) nearly 60 seconds"

   I wish I could figure this out, because it's not just from Notes. It's from any application in the world except Notepad. And it's driving me crazy.

   The author appears to just want to blame IE (it works fine in Firefox). This is probably just your anecdote. For some reason, there is some common configuration out there that is causing this ridiculous slowdown. I find it more than coincidental that I am searching on Google and found this blog post because I am desperate for a solution. I don't care who's fault it is. I just want it to stop.

1. 77  Wesley  | 2/17/2011 2:28:30 PM

   Woohoo! Alan Bell, you rock. Lotus Notes Paste delay/hang is gone!

   I added a proxy address of {my default gateway, found via an IPCONFIG command}:8080 to my Prefs->Locations->Edit->Proxy Configuration. My 2-5 minute wait dropped to an appropriate 5 seconds or less, depending upon the complexity of the content.

   Thank you!

1. 78  Wesley  | 2/17/2011 2:35:51 PM

   By the way, that is using Lotus Notes Standard (not Basic) 8.5.1 on XP, copying from IE rather than Firefox. The guy next to me has no problem, and he does not have a proxy address set up. Go figure!

1. 79  Klas2k  | 5/20/2011 2:52:00 AM

   Hmm,

   a 1-5 second delay would be ok.

   A message that "resource xxx loading" would at least be better.

   But now the Notes application totaly hangs for 5-20 (SIC!) minutes if I forget to do paste special and instead just press CTRL-V - NOT ACCEPTABLE !!

   I tried to do the Exploer with notes switch tip above - did not work. Also subsequent pastes are as slow as the first.

   And I only pase a couple of rows, may include a table or a link, buit no images etc !

   Lotus notes is crap because the GUI is crap and IBM (developers) doesnt seem to want to adapt to modern UI's but stick wit htheir "principles" - the engine behind the curtains may be the best one implemented - that dosent help if the users gets frustrated !

   While I am on the subject: Why doesnt lotus mark my calendar with invitations when I get them !? If i havent responden i see nothing => Missed meetings :(

   /K

   /K