I came across a website called Lotus Notes Sucks - which is dedicated to lambasting IBM’s Lotus Notes corporate messaging client.

The author chooses to remain anonymous since he is forced to work for a company that uses Notes and he (for some reason) is concerned about letting his employer know just how much he hates Notes.

The site has a long list of perceived bugs, outlining in quite a bit of detail the user interface design flaws, and other functionality flaws of Lotus Notes. Most of the flaws are based on the now obsolete v5.0.x client, but some of them have been updated (and indeed some flaws marked as “fixed”), since they are now apparently running Notes v6.5.2

The author (let’s call him Lotus Notes Hater), writes:

Why does this site exist?

It’s not to put Lotus people out of work. It’s to embarrass them into fixing the egregious problems of their product. Also, to influence people into not buying Lotus Notes until it works for users.

Lotus Notes Hater updated his page earlier this year with details of an email he received from someone in the development labs at Lotus:

Dear Lotus Notes Hater,

IBM is working on a redesign of Lotus Notes, as described in the following link.

I, and others on the Notes design team, have been paying attention to your “Lotus Notes Sucks” website. On your home page you mention that one of your goals is to “embarrass [us] into fixing the egregious problems with the product.”

I am writing to ask you to post this email, which is an invitation to participate in usability evaluations of the re-design, on your web site so that many others like yourself can participate in improving Lotus Notes.

Point your browser to http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/usability to read descriptions about the usability studies and choose the Sign Up link to be contacted.

Thank you.

_________________________________________
Mary xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Ph.D.
Lead User Interaction Designer for Lotus Notes
Westford, MA, USA

The main criticism I have of the site is that much of it is rhetoric, unproductive nitpicking. The only conclusion Lotus Notes Hater seems to be able to come up with for any issue is “Lotus Notes Sucks”. It’s over the top, and fairly unprofessional. But still, that’s not really the point is it? The point is what Lotus Notes Hater has to say - and whether the criticisms are valid.

Some comments about myself might be worth inserting at this point. My first real software development job after finishing university was building Lotus Notes applications. That was nearly 10 years ago (long before I started working for IBM) and I’ve done extensive application development with the product, and have been using Notes for email and applications as a user ever since. I currently use Notes v7.0 for mail and applications.

I love Notes, I think Notes and Domino are a fantastic enterprise messaging platform, and an extremely powerful tool for developing highly secure, distributed applications. I personally believe that it is the best enterprise messaging and collaboration platform available today, and from an IT management point of view, is one of the best investments you could make.

So let’s be perfectly clear. I absolutely love Lotus Notes.

Now that I’ve said that, I actually agree with a large part of what Lotus Notes Hater has to say. I read through a large number of the bugs and issues that he mentions on his site - and largely I agree that they are bad UI design, or meaningless errors, or confusing behaviours, and so forth.

As an IT administrator or application developer, I think Notes and Domino is fantastic.

As an experienced power user of Lotus Notes, I know how to make it sing and dance.

However, if I put myself into the shoes of a novice user, I can understand how some might come to the conclusion that Lotus Notes Sucks.

My usual defence to criticisms of Notes is: Notes is almost 20 years old - most of the GUI standards and behaviours were undefined back then. The cross-platform capabilities of the client bring flexibility and choice. You won’t find a more flexible and capable distributed application development platform around. Anyone (yes, even a salesperson!) can learn how to be a Notes power user, with a bit of training and guidance. Most of the limitations come from the fact that Lotus and IBM have not once ever required you to rip-and-replace your existing Notes/Domino applications when migrating to a newer version. I have heard reports of people running applications developed for Notes v2.0 on a Notes v6.x platform, unchanged !!! That’s unheard of in the IT industry. The preservation of investment is phenomenal, and dramatically lowers the total cost of ownership of this platform.

Of course, the counter arguments to these defences is that nobody cares how old the product is, it should be updated to conform with standards, especially GUI standards. End users don’t care how powerful it is, how flexible it is, or how secure it is (until they lose emails, or get infected with viruses, or find their mail system down for days at a time because of a corrupted data store - but even then, they still won’t sacrifice ease of use if given a choice). End users don’t care about the preservation of investment. End users don’t want to be trained, they just want to sit down and start using the product.

So, from a purely novice end-user point of view, the Notes UI is not as good as it could be (or perhaps should be!). I know that. Most people know that. Even people in the Lotus labs know that. But taken on its own, that’s a very narrow view of the product - and shows a complete lack of understanding of the whole solution.

Concentrating on the end-user client niceties from a novice’s point of view is not the whole story, and this is why I still insist that, despite its shortcomings, Lotus Notes is still the best choice out there as an enterprise messaging platform and distributed application development platform. Don’t underestimate security, reliability, managability, scalability, flexibility, and all the other benefits that the platform provides the enterprise. Anybody who has experienced this knows that there really isn’t anything available that can truely compete with Notes and Domino in this arena. Don’t underestimate how much your users will complain and be bitter if your messaging platform becomes unreliable and stops them doing their jobs effectively - even with a pretty UI. It doesn’t matter how nice the UI is if you still can’t access your email!

Notes may well “suck” for some users, but it works and it works extremely well.

So what’s to be done about it? Complaining won’t actually fix anything (although we did need to make the product managers pay attention to the shortcomings of the client platform, which required a degree of complaining, which techos are permitted by law to do :D ).

Okay, so what if we were to totally redesign the Notes client user interface from scratch? What if we were to rebuild it on an extensible open source platform? What if we were to re-do the UI to not only conform with the UI standards, but to do so uniquely for each client platform it was deployed on? What if we were to incorporate new functionality based on open standards? What if we were to largely maintain that preservation of investment, minimising (or eliminating) any changes required when upgrading applications to work on this new platform? What if we were to more tightly integrate the client platform with a server platform, reducing deployment and management effort? What if we were to extend the back-end integration to fit in with industry leading Portal technology? What if we were to make the new client not suck?

That’s the key really. The new client simply has to not suck. Although I suspect to actually win over naysayers like Lotus Notes Hater, we would have to do a lot better than to not suck - we would actually have to completely rock, and then they might begrudge us some credit.

Of course, with such high expectations set on this new version of Lotus Notes, there will surely be disappointment. Don’t expect it to be as complete or as powerful as the current Notes client is today. That will take a couple more versions. But do expect it to be nice and end-user friendly. Don’t expect it to be simple. It’s a complex and powerful solution that should provide the basis for the future of collaborative enterprise computing - that comes with a cost. But I still expect it to be nice and end-user friendly (at least, much more so than the current versions of Notes).

In summary - while I don’t think Lotus Notes Hater really appreciates what he has available to him today - I do fully appreciate his complaints. And while I can sympathise with his pains, I do still believe that Notes and Domino is really not that bad. We went through a period internally where our sales people (many who were relatively new to IBM and IBM products like Notes) used to complain bitterly about Notes. All it took was some simple mentoring from experienced users - and they now fully appreciate the power and capabilities of the platform. 2 years ago I was hearing complaints regularly inside IBM, but now I hear none. I think Notes v7 is helping there too - quite a few improvements. Though, maybe it’s really because we all have Siebel to complain about now instead :D (oops !)

All I can say is - bring on the next release of Notes. See this article about “Hannover” for more details: With the unveiling of the next release of Lotus Notes, code-named “Hannover,” IBM articulates roadmap, demonstrates commitment

The first thing a Lotus Notes user will notice in Hannover is a fresh, new user interface but the changes go beyond cosmetics. Virtually every core Lotus Notes collaborative function offers new, more productive ways to view and work with information.

So hang in there Lotus Notes Hater - v7 is a step closer to a better client, but Hannover is on its way, and will hopefully make you a believer!

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