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Networking (Apple) Businesses Apple Hardware

Mac OS X Version of Lotus Notes 6 66

Posted by pudge from the i-am-nowhere-near-that-flexible-anymore dept.
NadizPicR writes "Lotus released the first Mac OS X beta for its Notes Domino messaging and collaboration system client. Version 6.0b1 also features improved toolbar handling. I just downloaded and installed it, and it seems to be an excellent implementation." Do people still use Lotus Notes? Honestly?
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Mac OS X Version of Lotus Notes 6 More

Mac OS X Version of Lotus Notes 6

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  • IBM? (Score:2, Informative)

    by rogerl ( 143996 )
    Lotus released the first Mac OS X beta for its Notes Domino messaging and collaboration system client.

    Should read: IBM released the first Mac OS X beta for its Notes Domino messaging and collaboration system client.
  • Do people still use Lotus Notes?

    The client I am currently at does use Lotus Notes. The email client has to be the worst that I have ever used. It is so bad that I am wishing for Microsoft Outlook.
    • Still better than Novell GroupWise.
      • True dat - someday I'm going to figure out why Novell is determined not to have anything useful on any other platform but Windows. Yes, it's great that you can incorporate Linux/Solaris/NT boxes into the NDS - we do that at The Day Job (well, the NT part anyway - we haven't had the guys to try the Linux side).

        But why can't we have some more *client* options from Novell? Where's the OS X Groupwise client? Or the Linux X-Windows Groupwise client? There's basic ConsoleOne support for Linux, but hardly the level for Win32 based systems.

        Novell - please, I love NDS, but buy a fucking clue and get some clients on those "other" operating systems - you know, the ones *not* made by your #1 competitor. (Yes, Novell. Microsoft.)

    • Re:People Still Use Lotus Notes (Score:4, Interesting)

      by amorico ( 40859 ) on Thursday March 14, 2002 @09:37AM (#3162019)
      >The email client has to be the worst that I have ever used.

      That is the admin's fault. Notes allows you to do a lot of customization so that it serves your needs, but once you do, it's pretty much essential. Of all the groupware I've seen it integrates best with heterogeneous data stores, custom applications, and workflows.

      I agree that the e-mail is sucky compared to Outlook 2002 or mozilla or kmail or any number of other clients. This can be remedied though by effective use of custom domino applications and templates.

      -a
    • The Federal Government uses it. Cross reference the CIA article from today and you see that the CIA uses it as well. OK, they are part of the Federal Government.
    • The corp. i work for uses lotus notes. about 12000 users. It's a nightmare, I don't know if it's the domino server, or the nt boxes that have the problem, but either way it's the most unstable service in our company.

  • Screenshots? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by amorico ( 40859 ) on Thursday March 14, 2002 @09:32AM (#3162011)
    Does anyone have any screenshots?

    This is pretty exciting since, with MS Office, it makes the mac a pretty viable alternative in the non-creative workplace. I worked as a designer and it was always immensely frustrating to either have to also use a PC, or simply be excluded from some enterprise apps and productivity tools.

    I noticed though that there is no Domino Server for OS X. pity. A Dual G4 domino server (with Gigabit ethernet of course) would kick serious butt and would make an all mac office a distinct possibility.

    I dream of a day when Oracle server runs on OS X and Apple has an easy to use data access framework a la ADO.net (with Postgres support): Rack mounted OS X application & database servers.
    Oh my god, somebody get me a towel.

    -a

    • Re:Screenshots? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by tarkin ( 34045 )
      Why do you dream about such silly things ? If you were to pay for all that stuff you would be gratefull that Oracle is making Linux their main platform. You still can't beat the price of that OS!

      I like OS X alot as my primary Desktop platform, but give me my Linux on the server side for maximum performance,cheap intell hardware and thus the lowest Cost of Owndership for all my server needs.
      Apple shouldn't take on Linux for the UNIX server market, Linux already won that in my opinion. Just you watch and see !

      And for rack mounted Apple hardware (if you still insist ) look here : Dual 1Ghz Rackmounted [terrasoftsolutions.com], running YellowDog Linux offcourse ;-)
      • >> You still can't beat the price of that OS!

        I take it your time is worthless then?

        • >> I take it your time is worthless then?

          No, my time is not worthless. I value my time greatly. which is why the uptime of a linux server is at the top of my list. even if it does take longer to set up(i have never done a side by side comparison) it would still be less in the long run.
    • You really need to check out the Enterprise Objects Framework layer of WebObjects [apple.com]. You can use this in a web app or in a Cocoa app. It's an object persistence framework that talks to a variety of databases -- support for Oracle, MS SQL Server 7, and and MySQL is built in, FrontBase [frontbase.com] and OpenBase [openbase.com] are excellent Mac OS X native relational databases, and it basically should work with any database that has as JDBC 2 type 4 driver available. EOF has been around since the NeXT days and is a rock-solid, mature database access technology. ADO by comparison is a complete wannabe.

      Also, check out the recently released dual 1 GHZ G4 2U rackmount server from yellow dog linux's developer, Terra Soft Solutions [terrasoftsolutions.com].


      --Paul

      Quote:
      Apple has an easy to use data access framework a la ADO.net (with Postgres support): Rack mounted OS X application & database servers
  • IBM uses Notes for it's inter-office email, calendar, databases, etc. In a word, it sucks.
    • Yes, we unfortunately have to use Notes here at IBM. However, having a mac client is awesome for me because it means I can telecommute without needing to have a PC running to do it!
    • IBM has a long tradition of sucky groupware suites (PROFS, OfficeVision). So much suckage, so little productivity...
    • IBM seems to have a passion for products with there own proprietary widget toolsets...

      *cough* eclipse *cough*

      Justin Dubs

  • Lotus Notes Sucks! (Score:2, Informative)

    by gers0667 ( 459800 )
    The company that work for used to run Exchange 5.5 with Outlook 98/2000. It was an adminstrators dream. Everything just worked. Then, we got bought out, and our parent company told us to switch to Lotus Notes, which is what they use. WE HATE IT! Roaming users don't really exist in Notes. A name change involves us to go to the machine itself and change many settings. It also kills any computer that doesnt have more than 64MB of RAM. Lotus Notes blows. It's sad to see such a crapy program corrupt such a beautiful OS.
    • The company that work for used to run Exchange 5.5 with Outlook 98/2000. It was an adminstrators dream. Everything just worked.

      Sure it did. That's what the employees were used to. The main reason Lotus Notes was not appreciated was it was different. It has different behavior and a different interface.

      This is why I silently curse when I ever have to use MS Outlook...it just has all sorts of quirks that Emacs does not--and vice versa. Emacs just works, too, but I'm sure the typical Outlook lacky would hate it.

      Let's see...in Outlook, how do I file my e-mail into archive folders automatically using regular expressions against the "From" and "Sender" fields...oh, I can't?...oh, darn. Let's see...in Emacs, how do I open this attachment sent for my advice...oh, I have to save it and manually open it in another viewer...hmm, that sure is inconvenient.

    • Roaming Users..... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      First, use Web Mail in Notes. The 5.0.8 server came with iNotes, which is a pretty decent web client. Includes calendar. Light-years ahead of Microsoft's crap.

      As for roaming users, there's a reason they don't roam under Notes. The Lotus Notes ID file, which is analogous to your PGP private key, is needed to log in. Exchange relies upon NT authentication, which is exactly why groups like the CIA won't touch it.

      In Notes, the server can be given permission to put things into your mail file, and nothing beyond that. The user -- the one with the correct ID file (and the password to it), is the only one that can open that mail file.

      Try that with exchange, or any other mail program.

  • Dammit (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was hoping to migrate to OSX *because* it didn't have Lotus Notes. So much for that idea.

  • 2 weeks running (Score:3, Informative)

    by self assembled struc ( 62483 ) on Thursday March 14, 2002 @09:46AM (#3162048) Homepage
    I've been using this client for about 2 weeks since it was released, and aside from a few small crashes, it's been running solid. The main problem is that when it freezes and you kill it, you have to reboot your Mac in order for it's database to be unlocked, (or i haven't figured out what else to do), which is kinda dumb, this being BSD.

    The aqua interface isn't too aqua - it's mainly a wrapper around the R5 design with the exception of the dialogues, but all in all is just as easy to use.

  • Flamebait (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sydb ( 176695 ) <[michael] [at] [wd21.co.uk]> on Thursday March 14, 2002 @10:28AM (#3162205)
    Do people still use Lotus Notes? Honestly?

    This is just /. flamebait. Notes has a huge installed base in big financial institutions and other sectors where security and IBM are important. My employer, with over 10,000 staff, is currently migrating everyone to Notes from a mix of mainframe mail and POP3. 2000 users are to be migrated this weekend.

    Now, I'm a Free Software bigot, so I hate Notes for being proprietary. And I hate the odd GUI for being... well, odd and buggy. But Notes has no real competition in terms of features and security. It's also impressively cross platform (on the server side, anyway).

    It's really in a class of it's own. Of course it's still used.
    • I know Exxon uses it. Came as part of the merger with Mobil. Mobil has always used it, the Exxon side was a combo of mainframe mail and Exchange. Lots of people weren't very happy with the change. But it was working rather well when I left the project.
  • Ever hear of a company called IBM, you know, the one that owns Lotus? Do you think that they would allow people to use MS products like Outlook or Exchange?

    Think about it.
  • People seem to think that no one uses Lotus Notes/Domino these days. I think I remember seeing some numbers presented on Lotus Sphere '02 where thay claimed to have ~51% of the market for groupware products in Europe. I can't find that data right now. But I searched for Lotus Domino at InfoTech Trends [infotechtrends.com]. The script returned the following forecast number of seats for Q4 2000 (you have to pay for information newer than that):

    00Q4 - Forecast number of seats for groupware/messaging, by program.
    Seats (mil)
    Software 1998 1999 2000
     Lotus Domino 34 55 65
    Microsoft Exchange 24 44 58

    Total 58 99 123

         Unix based solutions obviously isn't included in this survey. But I think it clearly shows that Notes/Domino has a quite large market share.

  • Who Uses Lotus Notes (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    3M
    Accenture
    Arthur Andersen
    BASF
    Bayer
    CIA
    Chevron Texaco
    Countrywide
    DiamlerChrysler
    Eastman Kodak
    Eli Lilly
    ExxonMobil
    General Motors
    GlaxoSmithKline
    Hewitt Associates
    IBM
    JP Morgan
    Mars
    MasterCard International
    Nationwide
    Philips International
    PricewaterhouseCoopers
    Procter & Gamble
    Prudential
    Rockwell
    Coke
    World Bank

    I could go on, but I'm tired of typing.

  • IBM customers mostly (Score:3, Informative)

    by iankerickson ( 116267 ) on Thursday March 14, 2002 @02:39PM (#3163495) Homepage
    IBM shops often use notes, since they already depend on IBM as a vendor. I know Kaiser-Permanente, the HMO, just recently swtiched from MS Exchange (A.K.A. Mmm... sex change...) and Outlook over to Lotus Notes after weathering one too many email viruses. KP uses DB2 on RS6000s running AIX.

    Washington Mutual probably uses Notes too. I know they're an IBM customer. At the branch in Cheney you could see the S/390 behind the counter. If you get a look at the screen of a loan officer's PC, it's not running Windows but OS/2. From what I understand, the banks buy the AS400s and get OS/2 thrown in for free.

    Casinos are another safe bet, if you want a job working with IBM iron and Notes. The new ones being run by native americans seem to prefer NT/2000, but the "old" corporate-run casinos of Las Vegas mostly use AS/400s for their accounting.

    The Associated Press (AP) used to be all-IBM too. All the turnkey systems they used to sell newspapers ran nothing but OS/2, but last year they made a big promotion about they're new commitment to Windows 2000, and shortly after that all our AP systems were replaced by IBM PCs with W2K. They may still may be a place to look if you're looking for a Notes sysadmin position.

    • I know Kaiser-Permanente [...] just recently swtiched from MS Exchange...

      Is that the guy from "The Usual Suspects"? If so, I'm switching over too. That guy is scary.

  • Interface. (Score:3, Funny)

    by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Thursday March 14, 2002 @03:05PM (#3163669)
    I certainly hope it has the same well-crafted and intuitive interface I came to know and love last time I worked for a company that used Notes.

    *cough*

    --saint
  • It's nice to have an OS X native Notes, but what I really need is Domino Designer.
  • I have a question for those of you familiar with Notes.

    Our company is talking about migrating to Lotus Notes, and I'm running Mac OS X. Will I still be able to use Entourage as my email client? I expect I won't be able to access the applications without the Notes client, but is regular POP3 mail typically available?

    What exactly is Notes anyway? Is it a proprietary email and calendar system, like the old cc:Mail + some sort of calendar function?

    Thanks!

    • Re:Tips for Notes Newbie? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The Notes server (now called "Domino") supports IMAP, POP, SMTP, HTTP, and whatever the Notes native protocol is (port 1352).

      If your Domino server supports POP or IMAP, then you can use any client you want. There's also iNotes for Exchange, which allows you to substitute a Lotus Domino server for a Microsoft Exchange server.

      For those not familiar with Domino, it's something like an SQL server. Each Notes database is a database (so each mail file is a separate database) with design elements and command/scripts embedded into the design elements. For example, when you open a calendaring invitation, there are scripts that execute before the display renders to handle things like reschedule notices, return reciepts, etc. In a sense, using IMAP or POP is like doing an ODBC query, in that you get the raw data, but not necessarily in the full-featured native format. The single database model makes restores faster than Exchange's nightmare of a single database for all messages. You can create views, which are preset SQL queries (select all messages in my mail file that are in the folder "inbox" and list them), or base them upon formulas. There are also agents, which are either complex Visual Basic or JAVA actions you want to perform, or scheduled complex actions (like cron). Notes understands Java, JavaScript, and LotusScript, which is about 95% similar to Visual Basic.

      Since IBM owns Lotus, version 7 of Domino/Notes is rumored to have lots of DB2 technology included in it.

      Rapid application development is easy, and requires minimal user training to get started.

      Since Domino is database + intelligent scripts + UI, that means you can make it do whatever you want. Throw in DECS (Domino Enterprise Connect Services), which means you can hook it into Oracle or any other SQL server, and you can make it the GUI front-end for your database, or make it pump data in and out to other sources.

      Some examples of things I've done since I started working with Notes: software rollout (complete with scheduled "it's time to..." emails), time tracking, greeting cards, web sites, and secured document storage.

      Understand I'm really just scratching the surface. Find someone who runs a Notes shop, or hit one of the big vendor fairs. I've run Sendmail, Exchange, and Notes servers, and frankly prefer the Notes servers -- except I use PostFix for spam filtering.

      There are full-featured demos available on Lotus' web site, and incredibly good documentation on IBM's Red Books web site. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Go to IBM's Red Books web site anyway. Documentation on everything.

      Exchange takes less Administrator training than Notes does -- but Exchange doesn't run on mega-hardware like multi-processor Unix boxes. One Gartner study I read indicated that larger companies that can afford single-purpose administrators, use Lotus Notes, and smaller companies with administrators that must split duties, use Exchange. Oh, WebSphere gets along wonderfully with Lotus Notes, too, and they're talking about using the WebSphere IDE for Notes at some point in the future. (Yes, Notes is a self-contained application development environment, and it includes an IDE.)

      There's other products like Sametime (http://www.lotus.com/sametime) that's a real-time collaboration/chat program that's encrypted end-to-end that frankly kicks Jabber's, AIM's, and NetMeeting's asses. (But since Sametime was written by Ubique and DataBeam, the companies that created NetMeeting and AIM, I'm not surprised.) The U.S. Pacific Fleet is currently using Sametime to better manage ship-to-ship communications, and to let Allies talk to one another while coordinating the whole Afghanistan mess.

      (Posted anonymously because I can't remember if that Gartner study was classified or not. :-P )
      • > (Posted anonymously because I can't remember if that Gartner study was classified or not. :-P )

        the whole time I was reading your reply, I couldn't figure out why it was anonymous. Thanks for all the details.

        Any moderators out there, please mod the parent answer up.
  • Everone at IBM uses Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is the primary email program used internally at IBM. Also, some of the old mainframe-based applications are being migrated to Notes. Having Notes run natively on Mac OS X is therefore a great thing for IBMers who use Macs.
  • My girlfriend uses Notes for her job. Her Win2000 laptop is kak, so when I got my iMac a week ago, I tried to set it up so that she could read her email using the OS X Mail client. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out where the Notes client stored its mail settings (POP3 and SMTP), so I couldn't copy the server values.

    Anybody know where to find these values in the Notes client?

    Cheers,
    dubs.
  • I have always considered the best feature of Mac OS X to be the lack of support for Notes/Domino, coming in well higher on the list than the robust Unix underpinnings, elegant interface, etc. I simply cannot exaggerate my dislike for Notes/Domino. I had a CS degree and had done some C development professionally, but no web app development when I accepted the Notes/Domino development position. I swear, if I had not discovered Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP with some codeplay on my own time, it would have taken YEARS for me to have grasped the coherent flow of a web application. Domino with its "agents" (which won't handle dynamically generated fields), @formula, and document-based DB model is the most obfuscated example of the web app development model that I could posibly imagine in my widlest and most esoteric musings. It is with great trepidation that I witness the ushering in of this foul beast, borne of the minds of a band of seething madmen from Lotus. And Notes as a e-mail/PIM client sucks as well. It made it into a special in-depth section of the Interface Hall of Shame: http://www.iarchitect.com/lotus.htm [iarchitect.com] It is a dark day for OS X indeed. blakespot -- iPodHacks.com [ipodhacks.com]
  • I hope Notes for OS X is better than R5 for the Classic Mac OS. I have to use that dreck at one of my client sites, and until I did, I never thought I'd find Outlook/Exchange superior to *anything*.

    Talk about the most half-assed port of an app that I've ever seen... what's with the hundreds of 8.3-named files scattered in the Lotus Notes directory? And the user interface sucks terribly, they have done incredibly brain-dead things with the web-browser metaphor.

    ~Philly
  • I'm a DBA for Andersen (save the jokes) and we are the largest install base of Lotus Notes in the world ~80,000 users. If things don't go right for us, IBM will loose it's biggest customer.

  • Do people still use Lotus Notes? Honestly?

    I frigging hope so I'm a Domino Admin looking for work.

    anylou...

    While Exchange folks get two days off everytime some douche' cracker dope gets a day off from school Domino Admins go to work not really giving a flying fuck about the latest Outlook Virus b/c we have this little thing call the ECL which translates to security.

    I'll admit it though... Developing for Notes is the least intuitive, most ass backwards way to accomplish anything I have ever experienced.
  • ...a beowulf cluster of machines...dropped from the top of a building...onto the heads of the team that created Lotus Notes?

    blakespot
  • I figured since many people here are anti-Microsoft, most would be praising any company using Notes/Domino over Outlook/Exchange. You just cannot win with this crowd.

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