Comments on: IBM Releases Lotus Notes, Domino Version 8

By: Mikko

Mikko — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:46:54 +0000

Looks a lot better than earlier version.

I can only agree that the application is still cumbersome. It takes quite long to startup and keeping it running in the background takes resources I need for other applications.

By: Wildcard

Wildcard — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:56:14 +0000

I use Lotus Notes 8 at work. We just upgraded from 6.5. I had expected big things with the upgrade because I had always been disappointed with 6.5 after using Outlook. Lotus Notes 8 was a big disappointment. They added a few things, new icons, in-line spelling correction (hello 1990’s!), etc, but the application is still very cumbersome. Adding contacts is a huge pain. Syncing on my PDA phone is another major pain! Come on IBM, where is the Windows Mobile client for Notes?! Jeez. I can’t wait till we move back to Outlook. Simple, easy, much better. “Collaboration” might seem nice and it’s a cool buzz word, but in reality it doesn’t work if you’re not a fortune 100 company (or fortune 50).

By: Craig

Craig — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 02:23:57 +0000

As an IBM employee I’ve been using Notes 8 internally for some time now, and I can say that it’s MUCH better than Notes 7. They’ve done a lot of work on cleaning up the user interface, and it’s cross-platform as well… I’ve been running the various betas and pre-release milestones on both Fedora Core 6 and Windows XP.

There are still some big flaws though – only certain parts of the application are built on the Eclipse platform; a platform-specific runtime is still required. The good outweighs the bad for the most part though, and the integrated Sametime is great!

By: yoshi

yoshi — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 23:54:11 +0000

Out of everything Microsoft develops – Calendaring/E-Mail is the only thing I can say they get right Microsoft realized that that people just want to e-mail and schedule events. No more no less. Sure it took them 10 years to get synchronization and free/busy info working but they finally did it.

Notes always tried to do too much, Lotus failed to capitalize on their best features (security, replication), the user interface always sucked, and their early attempts at calendaring was a hod podge at best. Just 5 minutes ago I sent an e-mail using v7 of Notes for a client and I still find it a painful experience.

(for the record – I beta tested notes in the late eighties and my first “real” job was LAN and Lotus Notes administrator for 120 users – god I feel old)