Notes on Productivity Home Page

I wonder how long a Microsoftie or Applite would keep his job after publicly calling one of their products "truly horrible?" 15 minutes? 20?

I get the impression from his blog that he's good at icon design. Color me overwhelmed.

I think the issue is not really about Lotus Notes but more about people being forced to use a particular product against their will. There is a natural resistance when people are forced to use anything.

The situation is not helped when people are not trained or poorly trained about how to use Lotus Notes, or by people who think that it is only used for email.

Jon Molholland appears to come from a graphic design background with a heavy emphasis on Apple products, iphones and Web 2.0 social media. From his perspective he views Notes as old school and behind the times. He doesn't appreciate its power or flexibility because he is blinded by his current perception.

It's an interesting debate:

Are you better off with a highly flexible, untra reliable, secure environment that allows code that was written 20 years ago to continue running today with no modification while also allows you to develop new cutting edge solutions which will most likely still be running in another 20 years time?

Or are you better off with technology that is untra easy to use, has a visually pleasing and simple interface that will most likely be obsolete or superceded by something else in two or three years time.

However, I suspect that the gap between commercial & consumer technology will become even wider in the future.

That being said, IBM still needs to continue improving the Lotus Notes user interface and embrace more Web 2.0 and mobile media technology into the future.

Perhaps also if Jon travelled more widely for IBM he would grow to appreciate a technology that still works on the plane when his iPhone is switched off and he cannot access twitter or Facebook or when he is travelling to parts of the world where broadband is replaced by a dial-up 64k phone line that his hotel is changing over $7 per minute to use.

Jon's perception might also change if a simplified and glossier version of Lotus Notes ran on the iPad.

Ian . What you talking about ? against their will. they have option to work else where correct ? Am with Nathan on this one. You apply for job , you get job description and tools that WE like to use do you except ? its easy.

I'd have to agree with Nathan and Palmi.

As an IBMer working with Lotus 110% of my time that tweet was a smack in the face from an alleged "web and social media" strategist that should be promoting the product (or be silent if they hate it)

I feed most of my web and social networks through my side bar. LinkedIn, Facebook, Lotus Connections, Twitter, Gist, Tungle.Me etc. Those social network feeds are in my Lotus Notes client.

I'm guessing empowerment is what is needed. I hope you get a response to your tweet to Jon so you can empower him with the tools he has.

It seems that Jon has taken down his tweet. It doesn't even appear in the search stream, which i have no idea how you pull that back.

I have yet to decide what to "do". IBM is a big company and we value disparate viewpoints. Jon wasn't the only IBMer behaving badly who hit my radar yesterday. I got a ping out of the blue from a non-apologetic IBMer who Sametime'd me with a problem with internal support for Notes, as if somehow the product executive was going to fix it. I told him to calm down and send me the details...which haven't arrived yet.

Maybe it was international-vent-about-Notes day at IBM. Doing so in public clearly isn't helpful, but it's not the first time, either. I'm sure it chafes the Microsoft technologies team in IBM Global Technology Services to have to use Notes, but at least they are professional enough to understand why. I think.

Jon's site has links to twitter, facebook, flickr, and vimeo - not linkedin! (linkedin is not pretty enough?)

His latest posts are all focused on a competitor's product.

Seems he's more interested in the "toy" side of social networking.

Perhaps he will appreciate Notes when he matures.

Ye gods! An IBMer?

I wonder how long a Coca Cola company employee would last if he'd twittered "Diet Coke tastes like piss"?

As Eric writes, software is there to make users productive and efficient, and to solve business problems. Sure, a good UI is important.

But if all Jon want are pretty shiny things with no real functionality, he can as well go to the local strip club. Nice to look at, but not something you really have use for. :-)

Poor guy. One dumb tweet and he gets smoked. I guess he thinks this statment on his blog is a safety net: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent my employer (IBM's) positions, strategies or opinions."

I agree with the others, it is bad form to make fun of the boss.

Playing devil's advocate here...

I get it. Or, at least, I think I get it. IBM is a huge organization, and I'm *certain* that there are business units using applications that were written in 4.6 that are still not only in-production but being used *daily* with nothing but new feature add-ons and duct tape tweaks.

That's the major issue sometimes with IBM Lotus Notes Domino apps, since they don't require rip-and-replace every 2 years the design and overall UX tends to get dated rather quickly.

The problem with users, even "Technology Strategy Consultants", is that they see the "database" and think the platform is crap.

It's like limiting your web browsing to websites from the early 90s. Sure, you might have Chrome or Firefox, but the UX is crap! If that's all you understand, you assume Chrome and Firefox are crap.

As for someone from a company whose loyalties to a platform are called into question *every day* publically bashing said platform... well, that just looks *really* bad, and only helps fuel FUD.

Just woke up to find several interesting emails an active comment thread on my blog (which is proudly hosted in Notes and DominoBlog. I know some people are as passionate in their dislike of Lotus Notes as I am in my passion for it. I am sincere in my desire to understand the issues as it gives me the opportunity to help others and learn what I can do to improve our products and services. For what it's worth, I contacted Jon directly to offer to talk and help him in any way that I could.

Meanwhile, we have an interesting (and passionate, I'll bet) group of people with experience. I'd be happy to listen to (or host) a podcast if we can get a few folks that want to discuss this topic constructively. Jon, if you are reading this thread, you're invited to talk with me publicly or privately. I think it can be a learning experience and I want to hear your side and learn what about Notes is so bad.

One or two mistakes in a posting is not enough to hang someone. Even if public at some point.

Yes it feeds the fire but some people inside the company really never know or get to know the other side, which may be the case.

@Chris, while I agree with your point about out-of-date apps, I see no difference between Notes and a browser in that regard. On the corporate intranets I've seen in recent years, the a significant portion of the apps are IE-only and have UI's that are very basic, from non-descript to downright ugly. And then there are the flash apps that range from pretty to spectacular, but are often downright unusable. I fail to see why anyone who lives in that reality would put special blame on Lotus Notes for the fact that corporate IT rarely cares about good, robust, and highly functional UI.

@Keith, I agree, and it was not my purpose in blogging to fan the flames of unhappiness for those users that dislike Notes. That wouldn't serve me as part of my livelihood as a Lotus ISV is dependent on Notes thriving. At the same time, I'm well aware of sites dedicated to people posting their Notes gripes (as there are with almost any product I have ever enjoyed or found productive). I'm sure that from Jon's perspective there must me some things he does consider horrible. Unfortunately, he did not offer any details in his tweet so I can't respond.
At the same time, I'm sure it would be helpful to the IBM Notes design team to hear from passionately unhappy people who use their products as much as it is helpful for them to hear from passionately productive people who use their product. The Notes design team has alredy shown that it listens and responds. We can look to Notes 8.5x (and every subsequenet release) as an example of that. As a software developer I have a new appreciation for what it takes to make and keep customers happy and that has given me a new respect for what the IBM team is doing with Lotus Software.

Over the past six months, I've been using Notes 8.5.1 and Outlook 2007 on a daily basis. I don't see any clear advantage of using one product or the other. Both do mail and calendaring the same. Having contacts in the mail file would be nice, but I find it hard to believe that that is a game-changer if Notes did that in 8.5.3 or whatever.

The one feature I do wish Notes had that Outlook has is the ability to send a request access to someone's calendar. In Outlook, the person receives the request and just has to click Accept or Deny. If they click Accept, the security for the mail file is automatically updated. That is would be so much easier than having to teach users how to update their preferences, given that the preferences dialog has a zillion tabs and its far to easy for users to give the world universal access to their mail file without knowing what they are doing.

Even after reading the post and the responses, the only thing I can say with 100% certainty is that Jon showed bad form in complaining about his own company's product.

With apologies to everyone else, the rest is just "noise." I have learned, in a public way, that making assumptions without actually engaging the individual, is equally in bad form. It's not like there aren't a multitude of methods for contact these days.

For you Twitter peeps who want to delete a tweet, go to your list of your tweets, hover over one, and watch as the "Delete" icon appears next to the selected tweet.

Gregg, The counter-argument is that the fact that he deleted it points to a high probability that someone, perhaps several someones, did already contact him directly. Furthermore, the tweet was read, the damage is done, and to some extent can't be un-done because nothing is ever necessarily really deleted from the Internet. Just last week a blogger who works at my company posted something that he shouldn't have: a complaint about a new and unpopular company policy. He removed the post, but I can still read it and it will certainly still be found in various places for quite some time.

I can only hope that one day people can accept that not everyone loves Lotus Notes. It is a great product with great success. It should be strong enough to not take damage from one Twitter comment of a single IBM employee that seemed to had a bad day with Lotus Notes.

He will probably learn his lesson and next time probably post it as an anonymous coward.

It really urks me when I hear people compare Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook. I know that many organisations and people only really use it for email and fail to appreciate all the other great things that it can do.

There are things that Outlook does that Notes doesn't do or do as well and there are things that Notes does that Outlook doesn't do or do well either.

Both products benefit from friendly competition, borrowing features from each other and both products are beginning to look and feel very, very similar, but what really urks me is that what I really love about Notes has nothing to do with email.

This comparison limited to email was started by Microsoft when they first launched Outlook, when all thay had to counter Lotus Notes was email.

Even today, users need to install many different products just to approach what Lotus Notes does in the one product.

Is it just me, but I would really like to see a healthy discussion about all the great things that Notes can do (other than email), and all the things that make it unique.

@Ian, well said. When David and I talk about why we love Notes, email rarely comes up -- it is but one reason. As far as the unfair comparison between Notes and Outlook, your descrtiption matches what I recall and that is Microsoft had (at the time) little to offer beyond email and thus drew the comparison between Micrsoft Mail and Notes. At the time Microsoft had the pretty UI and mail features and a lot going for it and Notes wasn't so pretty even though it could do more. Perhaps IBM could have done more to differentiate way back but the product was often positioned by the IT folk making the purchasing decisions as Email vs Email with extras. That, in my opinion has made it hard for IBM to break out of that characterization. It's not realy fair to second guess, that's just my $.02 I welcome a discussion on the things that make Notes unique. Happy to participate.

@Eric, thanks. Let me start with one of the things that I feel makes Lotus Notes/Domino really unique....

UNIQUE FEATURE # 1: Backward Compatibility.

The fact that applications developed 20 years ago still run in Lotus Notes without change today. And the confidence inspired by an unbroken track record and commitment by IBM to support backward compatibility.

I know that there is also a negative aspect of this unique feature, but let's focus for a moment on the positive aspects of this for once.

How many executive sponsors of a commercial development project would be truly delighted with the notion that an application they are funding today will be able to continue to operate FOREVER without forcing them to fund ongoing enhancements or improvements over many many years.

In other words if the code ain't broken they don't need to pay to fix it.

What's your favourite unique feature of Lotus Notes/Domino?

@Ian, great question: Here goes. My favoriate feature of Notes (if I have to choose one) is REPLICATION. I love the fact that I can be anywhere and access my information locally yet trust that my information will be current and accessible in all replicas. It brings me peace of mind to know that from a backup perspective if my server crashed today I could restore the entire sertup in an hour by copying the databases from my laptop to a new server. A few years ago, we had to evacuate our home for the Day fire in California (we were next to it). When we heard that evacuation was pending I purchased a GoDaddy hosted server and set up Domino on it and then started replication. Overnight my gigabytes of local server data were transferred to the hosted server. Shortly I was fully operational and none of the users knew the difference. That's cool. I wonder if others will respond with their favoriate feature of Notes... Let's start a meme!

The good way to handle it may be :

- Invite Jon to some sessions with Mary Beth Raven and her crew to tackle what he dislikes

- Jon publishes story about this collaboration with MBR on his blog (no doubt he'll be convinced that, at least, Notes is becoming far better than what he is used to)

The real travesty here is the guy's actual title. If this bozo is a "technology strategy consultant" for IBM then we all just as well pick up our ball and go home. Game over. It is apparent what his "strategy" will be if you ever put him in front of a customer.

It is this type of "off-the-cuff" remark/tweet/retort/etc that really irks the crap out of me. And it happens all the time from non-Lotus IBMers. As mentioned several times above (and best by Mike Brown with his Coke quip) this guy needs to be given the boot.

These people need to start understanding there are consequences for their actions and until the stick starts whacking them NOTHING will change.

Fire the idiot. Plain and simple, and no golden handshake crap, out on his ear, immediately. In ANY company on the planet this is grounds for instant dismissal so get rid of someone who roundly deserves it. IBM how much revenue do you think this "consultant" just cost you? Go on guess....Oh, and me too.

Wow. With employees like Jon and "partners" like Salesforce.com IBM really doesn't even need to worry about the competition, do they?

I think Notes Administration plays a part in a user's perception of Lotus Notes.

Internally, we just converted a group from Outlook to Lotus Notes and our admin group put no effort into converting their mail,contacts, or calendar. Imagine the users' first impressions of Lotus Notes when they heard that. They either think that Lotus Notes isn't capable of importing Outlook information or the people who work with/for Lotus are incapable of helping.

There's also a corporate policy here that forces our "Home Page" to be a complete waste of space. It's basically a link to the intranet. It's the biggest waste of a productivity tool I've ever seen.

I'm not sure if it's R8 or just luck, but the administration's ticket load has greatly increased with problems, especially out-of-office issues. An R8 version of a product shouldn't have so many out-of-office issues. That "bread and butter" feature should work from R2 and never have issues.

On the bright side... I just had the opportunity yesterday to explain to a group that I can do so much than a "shared mailbox." I really enjoyed the conversation... it's like breaking a user's hard belief that Lotus Notes is just mail. When they heard terms like "status," "workflow," and reporting... they were ecstatic.

How many executive sponsors of a commercial development project would be truly delighted with the notion that an application they are funding today will be able to continue to operate FOREVER without forcing them to fund ongoing enhancements or improvements over many many years.

Hey, if Lotus Notes is so great... maybe someone can tell me why I have a guy who has a problem where Lotus is switching from a local replica to his server copy on its own? So in order to use the local replica he has to go back and reselect it.

I've used Lotus Notes in several organizations. And for databases (while there are better options out there) it works fine, but the email side of the system is so outdated and frustrating for normal users its unbelieveable.

But please, if you know why in the world it would be doing that, let me know..

The other strange phenomena is that the local replica icon won't create "on top" of the server copy on the workspace..

Boy, I hate Lotus Notes :)

Hi Danny,

Notes is designed to provide seamless access to databases and one of the ways it can do this is to automatically switch to a replica if the selected replica is not available. This is transparent to the end-user.

If this happens to be an email database you are referring to, then the setting for which database will be opened is defined in the localtion settings.

As one of those 'forced user' of Notes who spent dozens of hours trying (in vain) to bypassing Notes with other email client, I am truly amazed (amused) by the passion towards Notes displayed on this thread. I have a couple of questions:

<quote>I'm more interested in what the application will DO for me on an ongoing basis. I love shiny things and cool user interfaces and shiny baubles but not as much as I like tools that work really well. </quote>

I would prefer functionality to UI too. However, why a user HAVE TO choose one over the other? If your point is Notes UI truly sucks, but there's NO alternative yet for its strong functionality, then comes my next question:

Why, as some of you mentioned, most Notes complainers (which is majority of my colleagues) do NOT see the hidden value of Notes? May I venture to argue that a more intuitive UI may help to reveal those hidden values to the end users? Is the argument that "take some training courses and then you will eventually understand" really valid in 2010?

I have used software since software has been available in a multitude of formats, from DOS assembler sessions to creating a movie with the latest MacOS, and as a user, software programmer, and above all, a cognitive human being, I have rarely seen a substandard / buggy / user-unfriendly / obsolete / uninviting product being released to the public.

I am, as some on this thread, a incredibly frustrated user of this disaster of a product, and there is not 1 day I do not think why IBM still insists developing this cluster of unpresentable code they have named Lotus. If I really were one of the Lotus (car maker) guys, I would sue IBM for trashing my name like this.

I will use any other available technology if it wasn't for the abstract / self-servicing / inward feeding IT guys we have here that feel that we should adapt to this in the name of their incapability to serve a simple and secure email system and make the users existence bearable. I often just type the stuff in my blackberry...

This is not rocket science....