Notes on Productivity Home Page

I don't know about the world, but I know I hate Lotus Notes! My biggest disappointment when switching companies for a new job last year was that I wasn't getting away from Lotus Notes! I won't argue with any of your points about poor deployment, utilization, marketing, etc. I don't know enough about it to even try. What I hate is the interface. We use MS Office for everything in my company, and Lotus Notes is just based on a totally different interface and way of working, so for that reason alone, I hate it. I'm a Microsoft girl! What can I say? I understand that Notes can be a powerful collaboration tool, but it's too complex. Most of my needs can be met by a shared network drive or a simple Web2.0 solution. The "databases" that some people in my company have created confound me...and I'm a technically inclined person, so I can't imagine what the "average Joe" does when they access one. Some of my issues could be fixed if we would upgrade from R6 (vCal or iCal integration), but I'd rather just migrate over to good ol' MS Outlook!

Yes it's quite true, the world does hate Lotus Notes.

From it's 30 second load times to kludgy non-intuiatve interfaces, it just isn't conducive to what I would call an efficient productivity application.

Couple this with the quirkyness it exhibits and you get a real piece of work.

Here's a brilliant site that outlines many of the reasons why people hate Lotus Notes: { Link }

@2: 30 seconds? I even use R8 on the Eclipse platform, and I can get to my inbox in well under 10 seconds. The old-style R8 client is almost instantaneous after I've put in my password.

That site is old news...based on antique versions. It's about as relevant as me writing a page on why Vista sucks and pointing to screenshots of Microsoft Bob from the early 90's as my evidence.

Hello Tara, thanks for sharing your experience. I too, am a Windows Guy (XP for me) yet I "live" in Notes. It's the first app I load in the morning and the last one I shut down. In a sense. Notes has become my operating system. I understand your point about the Notes interface being different from the Microsoft way of doing things. At the same time, I encourage you to look past the differences and look to the results - what can you accomplish. I still struggle any time any vendor changes the interface on me (e.g. Microsoft with the Ribbon UI or Notes 8 with calling a "database" an "Application") still, I look at what I can DO with the app. Lotus Notes has evolved considerably over the years since I first started using it with version 2.x. That said, I agree that the Notes interface has been far too clunky, visually, for too long. Fortunately, in Notes 8, that's all changed. Mary Beth Raven and the Notes 8 design team have done an amazing job of taking an already poerful program and making it nice to look at, too. if you get a change and have the interest, you may want to see what I;ve done with Notes and eProductivity - and it works across Notes 6-8x. Thanks for your comment.

Having started this discussion with my post I just want to bring back the discussion to the point:

IBM needs to communicate with end users not just the technical community if they want longevity. This is also true about Foundations, Symphony, etc. The pay-off para was about using Lotussphere registration as a springboard for a 'tweet 4 notes' campaign, simple low-cost stuff but potentially effective.

Ian

Ian,

I had already been thinking about these topics when I read your timely blog post this morning. So, I unloaded my thoughts in this post. (sorry)

I fully agree with you that IBM needs to communicate with end users not just the technical community if they want longevity. In this era of social networking, I think that IBM marketing needs to extend the "conversation" to the knowledge workers actually using their products not just the people buying them. This extends to all products, including Foundations, Symphony, etc..

Your idea of a 'tweet 4 notes' campaign might be an excellent way to accomplish this. I look forward to seeing how or if IBM responds to this discussion between Notes users.

Warm regards,

Eric

That's my problem, over the years I have had lots of great ideas that rarely get taken seriously - its a lonely path (sigh) :-)

Ian has an interesting idea. Lotus could also have someone dedicated to these disscussions in Twitter. I know various people to at times engage, even I do.

And some of the blog posts, Fudbuster Fridays is about some of this too. By the way Alan was doing many posts of whats cool in notes, but I think they also went to the choir more than end users.

Good idea, Keith. I enjoy your Fudbuster Friday posts, too. - Eric

Hi,

I'm a technical guy, that has been working with the Lotus platform for years. As Eric says, "It's the first app I load in the morning and the last one I shut down."

I understand that people can like or dislike the interface, it's quite different than Microsoft's. But, I also do think that the Lotus is making a great effort in closing the gap between "nice" MS interfaces and the Lotus one.

Regarding communication between Lotus and the end user, there is a blog, "Notes Design blog" { Link } /NDBlog.nsf/ driven by Mary Beth Raven, the person responsible for the Lotus Interface Design Team, that explains and collects ideas from user experience in order to design new UI for new Lotus Notes releases. It's a place to visit to let them know what you need in the Lotus client and to explain how you use Lotus Notes. It's quite interesting!

Miguel Angel

Thanks Miguel, you bring up a good point.

While, from a productivity and knowledge sharing perspective, I'm quite happy with the current versions of Lotus Notes, I think that Mary Beth and her team are doing a fantastic job of making the new version (R8) even easier to use and prettier to look at.,

Thanks for your comment.

Eric

Lotus Notes is my enemy. I would never again join a company that uses it. It makes me so much less effective at my job.

I want email, calendar and contacts - the basic things that Notes simply can't do. I don't care that Notes does other things well.

Just a couple of things on Eric's cockeyed piece of puff, which praises Notes at length without actually explaining anything.

He says: "Seattle continues to spread misinformation about what Notes can or cannot do". I've never heard Microsoft say anything about Notes. All I know is my own experience, starting with an email exchange about 18 months ago. Me: "Good grief, I can't even read your emails without pasting them into another program and reformatting them." Her: "Yeah, we use something called Notes. I hate it."

Then I moved company, and saw the full horror for myself.

Notes lovers resemble a cult, huddling ever closer to reinforce their mad beliefs and shut out the clamour of reality. When asked to justify this, they mumble something vague about "co-ordination" and "collaboration", as if this somehow makes up for its failures to do the basics. It's slightly better at allowing you to edit attachments, but that's it.

Still, I could use better collaboration. So can I collaborate with Word docs? Er, no. Excel? No. At least, not according to Notes' own Help pages. In other words, I've got to renounce the outside world and join the Church of Notes in its remote mountain community.

No thanks.

I hate LOTUS notes with every fiber of my body, and I pray to god that Lotus and everyone affliated with them is cast down to hell for all eternity

Eric says: "organization needs to make sure that their users understand what Notes can do for them as individual knowledge workers", but I can't find anything on this site that shows me what Notes CAN do. Eric says Ed Brill's site is great but users don't read it. I've read it, and I still don't get it because it's pitched at technically minded users who already understand (and like) Notes, or at those who are part of an anti-Microsoft crusade.

The fact remains: after six months of using it every day, I literally DO NOT KNOW what Notes 7 is, other than a mediocre email program with a very poor Contacts section. While Notes 8 looks better, can IBM really have learned any lessons in the move from 7 to 8 that they hadn't learned between 1 and 7?

Still, this mysterious collaboration thingy has given me the idea of using GoogleDocs to share files across my organisation. So Notes has helped me, albeit not in a way it intended.

Patrick,

"I want email, calendar and contacts - the basic things that Notes simply can't do. "

Notes can and does do these things. It does them in a slightly different way than MS Outlook but that doesn't make Notes the outlaw. I tried using MS Outlook and I hate the interface, but that doesn't make it a bad program. It just means that I am unfamiliar with it like you are unfamiliar with Notes.

"Me: "Good grief, I can't even read your emails without pasting them into another program and reformatting them." Her: "Yeah, we use something called Notes. I hate it."

Sounds like your email is configured badly. That's a problem for your sysadmin - that's not a problem with the functionality of Notes.

"So can I collaborate with Word docs? Er, no. Excel? No. At least, not according to Notes' own Help pages. In other words, I've got to renounce the outside world and join the Church of Notes in its remote mountain community."

While you continue to see MS Office as the center of the universe and insist that all software should work the same way as MS Outlook, then there is no way you will ever be happy with Notes. Sounds like you're the one living in the 'remote mountain community'.

"The fact remains: after six months of using it every day, I literally DO NOT KNOW what Notes 7 is..." - So you admit you don't know how to drive the software and yet you condemn it?

"'... those who are part of an anti-Microsoft crusade. "

The crusade is not against Microsoft per se - it's against their hollow claims that their software stack provides a cheaper and more capable desktop application environment.