I Hate Lotus Notes

michael singer said on July 1st, 2009 at 12:28 am

what the f… A page dedicated to Outlook is worth 4 nothing. Sorry guys but if you do not understand how easy to support and configure LN is, stay on M$ Crap. Try to manage DBs easy in Outlook you will turn immediately to Notes.
complete Mail client with full Calendar, including DBs handling and now since LN 8 also includes a full Office Package (Word, Powerpoint and Excel) No more Memory issues. No more stopping WinXP.

Keep on cheering for Outlook, hooray

Peanut said on June 30th, 2009 at 7:38 am

We’ve heard that there’s a Domino Access for Microsoft client (DAMO) that we can use to access our Lotus stuff via other programs…like Outlook…..can it be true??!! Google doesn’t seem to provide any downloadable answers…..

Kee said on June 30th, 2009 at 2:43 am

Ummm… apparently my work email has a facility where I can log on externally using “lotus notes” – I couldn’t find the website, but stumbled across your support group instead….. think I will save it in my favourites, as it may come in handy! (when I figure out how to get into my Lotus Notes, that is….)

Comp Expert said on June 29th, 2009 at 5:33 am

I have love and hate relationship with Lotus Notes; I am divorced at sleep with Lotus Notes/Domino. I hate it as development platform, there is not much to do, and you can only build not transactional database hence very low visibility in organization.

Lotus Domino is excellent email platform depending on how well you have designed the network. It provides excellent calendaring and emailing, I have reasons to belive this,

I have been using outlook for roughly 10 years now and never able to view free time of participant in advance. Similarly in email I never able see the email conversation in tree. Two basic differences make the Lotus Notes email system different from Outlook.

I do agree that Lotus Notes UI is poor least till version 5.0/6.0 definitely better in version in 8.0

Lotus Notes is a pain and painkiller both, it depends how you look at it.

Jimbo said on June 25th, 2009 at 11:18 pm

I guess some one already posted somwere arround,but if you had some issue closing a notes or trying to re-open it, just download, the exe file KILLNOTES.EXE as an icon it has a black skull…
It is very functional

Jimbo said on June 25th, 2009 at 11:01 pm

Since, I work for the big blue,I rater not give my name.
But I had the chance to work with severeal environments and mail clients, I don´t know and I don´t care witch one is easier to administer, as end user, the best is Outlook Exchange, it is a damm mail cliant and not a giant bug as the notes it self. Come on!! whos idea was to lock the application wile pressing F5??? I belive it is a drunks joke, it also is not fault of the IT team who support the tool, I´v been there my self, (supporting) for both, exchange and notes client, and there my hate had the chance to grow even worst! Now my only hope, is to get an emulator to ron Outlook exchange over notes, I´v been trying this a log time now, but still could not get the propper connector.
Wish you all luck!!! and when ever you get the power do not buy NOTES!!!!!

Someone Else said on June 24th, 2009 at 3:40 pm

OH MY GOD!
Why the hell did I just sign a contract to continue working on implementing Lotus Notes for another year….?
AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
I thought they would have fixed this stupid problem by now, where you delete an unread email, but Notes doesn’t flag it read, and for some dumb reason the original folder still says it has the unread email in it, even though it’s quite clearly in Trash.

Kev said on June 23rd, 2009 at 9:48 am

Why is F9 refresh instead of F5 like every other app in the world?

Kev said on June 23rd, 2009 at 9:34 am

Why do some of my user’s have random email that sometimes disappear from their database?

Notes Victim said on June 18th, 2009 at 7:46 pm

And what’s with Notes admin people – why are they all so strange?

P said on June 16th, 2009 at 12:28 pm

Lotus Notes is so evil, that at work, to help with the frequent crashes, and then locked processes, that they actually rolled out a “Fix” that installs an EXE on your desktop just to kill all the Lotus Processes for when it crashes/locksup/freezes so you can run it again….

Anonymous @ IBM said on June 13th, 2009 at 8:02 am

@John on July 3rd
Go grab Steve Miller’s PureText for pasting into Notes.
It has made my life much simpler.
http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

tim said on June 11th, 2009 at 3:50 pm

I install Lotus Notes daily on computers here at work, love me. I’m spreading hate!!

Annnoyed said on June 11th, 2009 at 11:18 am

Can someone help me? I am trying to send a link to a file on our companies networks, I don’t want to attach the file itself, just a link to the filepath. I work with people that aren’t the most computer literate and have trouble following the filepath. Our IT team here is no use and I can’t figure it out. Thanks.

Greg Edwards said on June 10th, 2009 at 12:29 pm

Notice how most of the people who love Notes are admins, probably people whose jobs depend on managing the back-end, so they’re kinda vested in it. Meanwhile, the vast majority of end-users I’ve asked are either indifferent or hate Notes with a passion. Not Domino, mind you, but the whole Notes paradigm. If you can make the front end work as well as Outlook, then you’re more than welcome to do whatever you want on the back end.

Yes, Notes has amazing groupware features. Yes, it’s a paragon of security. Yes, it’s a database that just happens to have an email application. But it also has some of the worst UI conventions in the known universe. And most people just want a simple e-mail, calendar, address book, and task management program that actually makes sense.

Dianne said on June 9th, 2009 at 1:12 pm

old company bought out, I exported 800+ Outlook contacts to excel spreadsheeet and now cannot import them to lotus notes….any suggestions?

Joris said on June 5th, 2009 at 5:31 am

I don’t know what’s up with most of you guys, but it looks like it’s not lotus / domino that’s not working for you, but it’s your IT team that’s just not doing their work properly.

@ death to notes, sorry, but if you’re support and you can’t figure it out, you haven’t got enough training + most of these settings can be put in a policy, so an admin sets them, and you just install the client and be done with it.

No system works without decent admin.

I administer domino lotus and exchange boxes, and I must say the domino ones are a lot better admin wise.

And we happeliy migrated users from exchange/outlook to Lotus Inotes 8.02, and they actually like it better (beats me, I like full clients better always;-))

JOHN B said on June 3rd, 2009 at 4:47 pm

Had my first exposure ever to it today. First thing I do Is open a “new email”…how hard could that possibly be? Now I’ve noticed there are a few fans out there of this software that is only worthy to be decompiled forever, If you click on “new” it should open up even almost right away….but this thing sported that little hourglass for a good minute before yieilding a blank email for me. TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. I read here somewhere that there is a community out there to help us folks thet “can’t understand” lotus notes and can provide work around solutions to problems with the application. Here is what I really can’t understand…Why do I need a workaround for simply acessing an application and getting a simple email to send out?

JOhn said on June 3rd, 2009 at 1:52 pm

I just did it again. I copied a line of text from a website and stupidly pasted it into a Lotus Notes email. I am trying to see if I can register this complaint before it responds… Yes I can…

feelsorry for u said on June 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 pm

I have to agree with TerryB – this is actually humorous
there are a lot more idots out there than originally thought – it’s EMAIL people, not rocket science, I am actually ashamed to be wasting my time on a site like this.
(and by the way, it is much more stable than the last product I used… from a company called Microsoft!)
TerryB said on May 5th, 2009 at 11:18 am

This site is a classic example of someone with too much time on their hands. I was searching for tech info on whether custom Letterhead could be created and found this nonsense. You people either have world’s worst admin or you have no clue. If you can’t figure out ANY email client in 2 minutes, a computer is wasted on you. Unreal. So many talented people being laid off and you can’t work with an email client without posting on site like this? And point to Microsoft as a beacon of quality? Please.

hater said on June 2nd, 2009 at 2:45 am

I want to stab Notes in the face

daGUY said on May 29th, 2009 at 2:54 pm

If you get a meeting invitation and happen to accidentally click the “Request Information” button, it is *impossible* to cancel it without sending an email to the chair of the meeting. This happened to me today. If you try to close the tab, you get a message that says:

“Do you want to send the notice with these comments? Choose Yes to send as is. Choose No to send without comments. Choose Cancel to continue editing.”

In other words, you can send an email with or without your own comments, but you can’t NOT send the email. Even if you try to close Notes itself, you get the same dialog!

WTF said on May 29th, 2009 at 12:14 pm

JOHN D – I know Notes is a development tool. Knowing that doesn’t relieve my stress in having to endure the crappy “mailfile” shite that is forced upon many Fortune 500 companies. As I said, it isn’t just the mail side. I’ve yet to come across a single decent Notes app and we have many. Clearly, Notes does NOT make it easier for IT groups to develop apps. Well, perhaps it makes it easier to deploy ill-conceived pieces of gobshite. The people complaining about Notes are complaining about its email functionality. The rest of it is irrelevant. Justifying its dreadful performance because it was a last minute add-on is silly. Re the interface, there a plenty of other email clients that Windows users find effortless and productive. Notes is the only one that succeeds where all others have, thankfully, failed.

Tom said on May 27th, 2009 at 7:43 pm

We are using Lotus 5.0 at work and I previously used 6.5 at my old company. This is so frustrating going back to this old version. But there are three things that currently annoy me the most:

1) When you want to delete an attachment from an email and go into Edit mode, delete the attachment (get the message that it can’t be undone, OK), then click save, all of a sudden the sender’s email address is changed to one of the recipient’s email address instead. So, it now looks as if the email was sent from someone you may not even know.What the hell??? Isn’t there a fix for this problem?

2) There is no “time” column in your inbox! What??? Can’t believe that the whole cooperation doesn’t see what time the email came in unless you open it and look at it. I work mainly with the preview screen on and just want to get an overview at what time my emails came in. Apparently you need access to Notes Designer to fix this which I don’t and my local IT guy doesn’t either…

3) Takes me to my third point which is that the mail preferences and the view preferences aren’t remembered. I have my latest emails at the top and preview pane on. And I have ticked “Database” – “Properties” – “Restore as last viewed by user”. But it’s not consistently doing that. I think that if I shut my PC down and open Notes again the next day it “forgot” to remember my settings and when I look at the Properties the “Restore as last viewed by user” option is no longer active.

I have a few more “minor” complaints such as can’t delete into Trash folder (either ctr+del will delete instantly or you have to manually move it into the trash as just deleting requires you to confirm and F9 to make sure it is deleted, what a joke), if you’re in 31 day view in calendar you cant’ scroll with your mouse to next week/month, in this view you also can’t see the description of your “all day events”, you have to be in 14-day view mode or less…ah, there is so many things that seemed to normal in 6.5 and I’m sure the newer versions are even better…so, in summary I don’t hate notes but this old version is just soooooooo frustrating to work with!

Kill Notes Program said on May 26th, 2009 at 10:29 pm

All I want to do is send out all my e-mails, outside of my company, in times new roman 12 point font. If you really search around you can make everything APPEAR as if it is times new roman 12 point font, but there is no option that really sends it out in this font by default. So instead I have to set my permanent pen to the setting I want and always click it before I write an e-mail. Sure, a few people who have a bad e-mail client may have trouble reading my e-mail. But it should be my choice to format my e-mail the way I want them, not theirs.

WTF said on May 23rd, 2009 at 6:50 am

MIKE – you clearly don’t get it. There’s a world of difference between being a developer and an end user. Do you actually use the crap that gets foisted on people? Should the end user really need a degree in computer science to send, receive, organize and delete emails? Should a company have to spend $1Ms on training to make up for the shortfalls of software purchased that had a cheaper sticker price?

I’ve been developing Windows software for 15 years. I also lead non-computer related projects involving dozens of people around the world, shitloads of scientific data, regulatory documents etc. I can navigate around any app you throw at me – shareware, freeware, payware, enterprise, database, bespoke etc. My colleagues frequently cry “OMG, how did you do that?” – easy, the software is intuitive and follows well-defined guidelines. Except for Lotus Notes, Statistica and nearly all Adobe applications. With that trio, I could create a video on the probability of an email ending up its own ass.

RyanJames said on May 21st, 2009 at 8:33 am

I work for IBM so I have no choice but to use this piece of shit software. After working for them for a year and a half a now, I am ready to throw my laptop through the window. I just sent an email, checked my sent items, and it’s not there. This after recovering from my daily Lotus Notes crash. I really wish Notes was a person so I could kick it in the fucking nuts and stomp on its throat.

Someone Else said on May 20th, 2009 at 4:56 pm

FUCK!!!!!!!!
Why is it that ANY problem in Lotus Notes can ONLY BE SOLVED BY A FUCKING SCRIPT!

No IBM, Don’t bother putting OPTIONS THAT ARE USEFUL in the preferences. Put a whole bunch of USELESS options there, and then, don’t arrange them in an easy to understand way, get a hat, write down each option on it’s own piece of paper, then put all the pieces of paper in a hat, throw it up in the air and when it lands, we’ll arrange the preferences in that order – SCATTERED ALL OVER THE WHOLE FUCKING PROGRAM.

WHY THE HELL IS OUT OF OFFICE NOT ACCESSIBLE THROUGH PREFERENCES!!!!!

Why the hell is every problem with lotus solved by writing a fucking Script.
AAAGGGHHHHH!!! FUCK!!!!!

john doe said on May 20th, 2009 at 8:03 am

I HATE LOTUS NOTES!!!!!!!!!!! PIECE OF COW DUNG

Pete said on May 20th, 2009 at 1:49 am

All I bloody wanted to do was paste a URL into a mail – white screen and a 5 minute wait – this crap drives me nuts !

WTF said on May 16th, 2009 at 8:03 pm

I can’t decide which is worse:

Lotus Notes or Statistica

By the end of the year, there will be 100,000+ happy employees. As happy as GWB finally f**ked off into the sunset. Oh, George, take note: “Take Notes with you.”

As I type, f**king Notes is restoring a bunch of files from the Trash. 3 hours and counting. Seriously. Why? Because it doesn’t just change a reference to the original folder (like a FAT) but has to copy every message from the server to my laptop, delete the original from Trash and then send the message back to the server.

Why the h*ll can’t I move sent messages from the Sent folder? Because it isn’t a real folder but just a filtered view. But it gives the illusion of moving even down to the click/drag icon. Hmm. How about Ctrl-C then Ctrl-V. Seems to work. New copies of the messages appear (marked as Unread). But takes forever for the same reasons as restoring. So delete the originals in Sent? No. Because that will delete the copies. Remove instead of Delete? No. WTF? Why do I need to do this? Oh, I don’t know. Organizing my messages, perhaps? And some f**king insane creation called the Janitor that sweeps by every month and deletes anything in the Inbox or Sent “folders”. I have defeated it for Inbox by using Designer to change the default location for delivery. Can I defeat cleansing of the Sent “folder”? No. And because can’t save the ones I need to keep, I’m screwed. Perhaps there is a way that the Notes arse-lickers who thrive on developer-induced orgasms will educate me about since I am obviously thick as pig s**t. But I shouldn’t have to spend hours trying to find a way – it should be obvious. And I sure as h**l shouldn’t have to wait >3hrs to restore files from the Trash which, incidently, Notes put there because of one of its insanely stupid behaviors. Outlook? Click, drag, drop. Done.

So what about databases? We have 1,000s of them worldwide. We are required to use them for meetings (agendas, minutes etc). The replication is a pile of cr@p. Let’s say I have a meeting in 30 minutes and the chair is on a different continent. I put a Word document in the database. The chair doesn’t get it until after the meeting has finished because of the excruitingly slow replication cycle. We don’t have access to each other’s replicate. Yes, I could force a replication but I shouldn’t have to. It isn’t intuitive and doesn’t always work. The recommended workaround? Make sure all meeting material is sent to the server 24 hours before the meeting.

Funny how the decision to go back to Outlook came a few months after our CEO retired.

Canon said on May 15th, 2009 at 6:30 am

I use M$ft Outlook, and have used Thunderbird, Outlook Express, and am forced to use Lotus Notes. The largest annoyance to me is that I cannot export Lotus Notes to another compatible format! Once you could “archive” Lotus Notes 6 to Outlook 2003 with the Outlook Connector, but that functionality is no longer supported with Lotus Notes 8 or with Outlook 2007!

JBupp said on May 12th, 2009 at 10:59 am

Why does it take 30 seconds to paste a two-word phrase from IE to an email, yet is immediate if I >paste special>text?

How can I get a RTF error when pasting text? But I can paste the text into the subject line sucessfully, copy it and paste it into the body of my email.

Ben said on May 10th, 2009 at 11:25 pm

OK, this is the SECOND TIME TODAY that Lotus Notes has crashed on me. Not just a run of the mill processing error, but a full blown crash that then REQUIRES A RESTART OF YOUR WHOLE PC to fix!

Notes is crap. Crap, crappity crap crap crap.

TINCHAN said on May 7th, 2009 at 2:29 am

I truly never imagined that I will meet a database like Lotus Notes.
Its database concept is really deviate …
Ignorance of Lotus Notes has even created my company to pay a penalty because an error from a program developed by me. I am sure such error would never happened if I used another database. But currently my company still use it. Oh no….

TerryB said on May 5th, 2009 at 11:18 am

This site is a classic example of someone with too much time on their hands. I was searching for tech info on whether custom Letterhead could be created and found this nonsense. You people either have world’s worst admin or you have no clue. If you can’t figure out ANY email client in 2 minutes, a computer is wasted on you. Unreal. So many talented people being laid off and you can’t work with an email client without posting on site like this? And point to Microsoft as a beacon of quality? Please.

den said on May 5th, 2009 at 3:22 am

I’m just going to reiterate what Tallguy said about killnotes. All it does is shutdown the leftover processes that notes is too stupid to end. The usual tasks are nfileret.exe, ntaskldr.exe and/or anything to do with cadenza or commontime. If any of these are left on, you’ll get an error saying “error opening a window” or something to that effect, every time you try to launch ln.

Kill Notes Program said on May 2nd, 2009 at 6:33 am

Lotus Notes crashes and freezes up so often that IT put a “KillNotes” program on our desktop. The function of this program is to shut down Lotus immediately in case it freezes up the computer. If you have to add a program just to shut down Lotus Notes because of how often it crashes it might be time to switch programs.

The sad part is, I am most likely stuck with Lotus for life.

DaveCo said on April 30th, 2009 at 8:11 am

OK, So this company I work for switched to Lotus notes about a year ago stating that it was helping corporate “collaboration” and all it has done is create a living email HELL that we all have to live through each and every day of our lives!! I am a Project Manager here and so I rely HEAVILY on my email and meeting software. Ever since we switched to Lotus Notes nothing has gone right. People call me on a daily basis and tell me that they are all of a sudden off of my meeting invitation!! Just fell off??? Outlook never did that to me!!!

Then, I sent a meeting cancellation, about 2-hours before the meeting start time, because the person in charge was not able to attend. About 10-minutes after the meeting was supposed to start I began getting phone calls from people that were invited asking me what happened to the meeting. Turns out, no one received the cancellation. Oh wait… Yes they did, but 12-HOUR LATER!!! Turns out that our “intelligent” IT department decided to use the server in GERMANY to hold our information and it has to scan everything before sending it on…..

I see from “TALLGUY” on this page that there is something called killnotes.exe I’m gonna have to check that out. Maybe I can use it on the corporate server……

I could go on and on but I’m worried that Notes will lockup my computer before I can fin………………..

den said on April 30th, 2009 at 12:31 am

Actually Mike, ln was originally supposed to be a collaboration suite. Email was added later on. It’s still garbage however. I’ve never seen an email client this complex and useless.

To all the developers that like ln that posted here, nobody cares for you. Really. No one cares what you develop or how well you can develop on the notes platform. The point is, notes is being sold and deployed as an email client when that is simply not its primary function. The vast majority of users only use it for its email functionality, which the notes devs could not seem to get right for several years.

Perhaps my workplace is doing something very wrong with ln, but from what I’ve seen, the concept of a database is very very wrong. What I’ve seen called a database in notes, can easily be accomplished by creating a shared area or shared folder. I’ve created databases in RPG, COBOL, Access and the like, these look nothing like what passes for a database in notes.

Shella said on April 29th, 2009 at 7:43 am

I hate notes and IBM is slowly draining my life away.

While a friend was on holidays I was administrator and oh god I wanted to kill someone.

Why is is soooooo bad. Java is so much easier.

Jock said on April 27th, 2009 at 5:21 am

Thanks Ivan for trying to help. Unfortunately I could only get as far as step 2. Left clicking on Applications generates a grey box that says “loading folder contents” for a millisecond then goes grey again. Unfortunately no sign of “Workspace”. I gave it 6 minutes but perhaps notes expects me to wait another few hours to load the folder contents.

I don’t have to “enjoy” symphony yet as fortunately I still have an office license.

ivan said on April 24th, 2009 at 3:34 pm

I did not want to send it yet, sorry…
so..
5. click okay for the popup.

There you go.

I hate notes too…
have you tried Symphony? This is the office application package for Lotus Notes. you will “enjoy” it…

Rish said on April 23rd, 2009 at 10:31 pm

@John, As you said you are getting old mails in your inbox. Buddy it doesn’t happen.I am using LN from past 6 years and never had such funny experience. I must say kick your administrator ASS.

john said on April 22nd, 2009 at 9:49 am

Oh god just tried to schedule a meeting! oh no I made a room change… oh god don’t crash on me now…. nooooo!

Jock said on April 22nd, 2009 at 3:28 am

IBM/Lotus have done the impossible and actually made notes 8 even worse than notes 7. That really must have taken some serious effort. Unfotunately I’m forced to use 8 rather than 7 since a laptop upgrade. Here are a few sore points…
– SCROLLING DOES NOT WORK! I CANNOT SCROLL DOWN MY INBOX, I HAVE TO USE THE ARROW KEYS
– Hotkeys have been REMOVED! I can no longer ctl-tab between open pages!!!
– The small icon on the bottom right of the screen (which took me 5 years to discover!) which was useful and allowed me to send and receive mail with 1 click has been REMOVED! WHY?!?!?!?! I now have to use the mouse to go to the replication page and click start then click back to the inbox – 3 clicks insead of 1!
– Cannot see replication progress from inbox
– IT NEEDS 2GB TO RUN! WTF?!?!?! IT IS AN EMAIL CLIENT!!!!! (with some sh!t ‘collaboration’)
– ‘Databases’ have now been renamed ‘Applications’ – why? They haven’t changed so why change the name
– The workspace tab has been removed, so it is now impossible to launch a database, sorry ‘application’ from one place, I am forced to search for it which requires me to know the server name where the database resides, and the directory within that server. HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT!!?!?!?!?! I had to get the db name and directory from a collegue who was fortunate enough to still have notes v7.

That’s pretty much everything for now. Ahhh that feels better.
Suggestion to Lotus – GET SOMEONE WHO HAS A CLUE ABOUT USEABILITY TO REDESIGN NOTES FROM SCRATCH AND GET SOME DECENT PROGRAMMERS WHO CAN CODE RELATIVELY EFFICIENTLY!!!

Chris said on April 17th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

“Carl said on March 26th, 2009 at 7:12 am
I have been developing with Lotus Notes for many years as well. I have alos lead project teams with other web based platforms. I have found that developing in Lotus Notes is ten time quicker than in any other enviroment. I made the transition from Notes Db to the web with little difficulty and amazing design to production speed. I take most comments that criticize the product as pure ignorance. Name another platform that you can develop a workflow application with business logic, field level security and built in Db connectivety. I am sure you can not.
The email client upgrade was long over-due. I will give you that, but so what. It is an email client. Stop your complaining and learn how to program. If you know what you are doing Lotus Notes is awsome.”

I think you nailed it. You have to learn how to program in order to appreciate this system. Guess what Carl, if my life was programming I’d probably be in awe too- but like the majority of users I have degrees and interests elsewhere. The failure of notes’ programmers is thinking we should be impressed by what your system CAN do verses what most users WANT TO DO. It is your pure ignorance to expect us to worship a product you can finesse but the uninitiated must manhandle.

Dave said on April 17th, 2009 at 11:44 am

I hate the little progress bar that’s forever telling me about the status it’s auto-saving. I hate the 30 second delay I experience trying to read about every 10th email. I hate the preview pane, but I hate waiting to bring up emails even more, so I use it. I hate that something as simple as sending an email has to be such a nightmare.

Jake said on April 16th, 2009 at 2:05 pm

Lotus Notes is garbage.

I’ve been programming for twelve years. The first job I had was with a company that used Lotus Notes. I ended up learning to develop in it and doing some stuff I thought was pretty good. My next two jobs were with companies that use Outlook (thank the Universe) but have one lingering “legacy” app still hanging out in Lotus Notes. So I am in the middle of my second migration from Notes to some viable, useful platform.

Migrating data from Notes is just about the most painful (or expensive, if you want to go that route) experience I have had in IT.

Over the last decade+, I have developed and maintained software on a number of platforms. OS-390 COBOL/DB2, TELON, Focus, Mark 4, Java/Struts on Websphere, C# and ASP.net, MS Access/SQL Server quick apps, tons of scripting languages, and have fiddled with Ruby, Python, php… really everything I have come in contact with, I have gotten to at least make changes in it, if not write new stuff. There are some IBM products I really appreciate. I happen to Love DB2. Websphere worked out pretty good for us. Lotus Notes is a nightmare and a soul-draining suck-fest. I pity you if you need to extract data from it to put on some kind of useful platform, like a relational database, or use a reporting tool for making decent reports, or want to create a data warehouse for reporting from it.

Lotus Notes is one of the most awful experiences I have had in IT, and I’ve maintained old software in Mark4!

Thank you… I feel a little better now.

Shades said on April 16th, 2009 at 4:27 am

The brainiac(s) behind this software were only thinking about themselves during the design process because it sure as hell aint User Friendly … Outlook over LN anyday!!!

Pradip Shrestha said on April 16th, 2009 at 12:51 am

Very poor API condition and undocumented everything….I hate Lotus notes…

Andy said on April 14th, 2009 at 10:13 am

I hate Outlook….. there I said it….. am I better now doctor?

Lawrence Attrill said on April 14th, 2009 at 8:18 am

Having been at Notes Only shops for the past 12 years, I have now joined a Co with Outlook as it’s mail client. My first time of using Outlook for it’s basic mail and calendaring stuff.

I also have to navigate around a couple of MS Sharepoint servers for files, another software package to keep track of the Change Requests, and we “only” use Notes for the main project work.

Of course searching for things in Notes is pretty awful, but at least it was all on the single server…

I just don’t get the logic of spreading your data all around the house… (unless you’re the vendor who has a server for everyroom, rather than a server that can do everything).

Linux Luser said on April 13th, 2009 at 3:55 pm

Dear developers of Lotus Notes. This is the largest piece of shit that was ever shat. Please quit shitting on me. Cause that’s what it feels like when I use notes. I’d rather use cups with strings for instant messaging, pieces of paper thrown into coworkers offices for email, and marker on the back of my hand for a calendar.

Carl said on April 13th, 2009 at 5:54 am

I am really trying to understand the level of frustration with the mail client or even with the search function. Notes has two search functions. The type ahead search lets you search the first sorted column. I have not found any search to work faster than that. I have a s/n I am looking for and I go to a view sorted by s/n. I have found the full text search to miss documents and give some bad results, but I have seen google or any other search engine do the same. I have tried to use the Outlook search and it is just as awful. The type ahead for the To address works about half the time and every time I open Outlook it has to check for about 5 minutes if every thing is ok. I use the Notes mail client and other than a few stupid unread mail messages it works fine. It is just mail. I get a message and then I respond to it. What is the big deal.

Heman said on April 11th, 2009 at 7:30 am

I work for IBM. I get paid by IBM. I hate notes. There is nothing I hate more in my office but the wait to check on mails (I get paid for that too) & watching my machine grind into pieces as Notes keeps digging & consuming endlessly. I dont want any crap..just my emails but it gives you shit loads of shit. Useless. Absolutely. I am a programmer myself, I do stuff with notes. But it (refers to Notes) doesnt do anything to make things better. More hatred to NOtes.

fred said on April 9th, 2009 at 1:12 pm

My biggest gripe about Lotus Notes is the crappy SEARCH function: it is SO godam slow, and cumbrsome to use. I have no option t stop it from looking in attachments (which makes it slow, and brings up misleading search resultes). And why the hell is NOTES unable to do anything else while a SEARCH is running?!?

Another big gripe: hiperlinks don’t work when you’re editing an emai (including when you’re initially typing the email). This means you can’t test your links before you send it, so I sometimes send it to myself first and then copy/paste into a new email.

Regarding the wonderful power of all that flexibilty that the Notes-lovers tout: there is nothing more powerful than programming directly in assembler language. You can do anything. The downside, like with Notes, is that it takes a long time and requires a lot of detailed knowledge to make it do your will.

Carl said on April 9th, 2009 at 5:13 am

Hello,

I have read and heard many complaints about all kinds of software. In general the gripes that I hear can be resolved if users were trained for an hour on how to use the software. I have also experienced genuine complaints. The question is how responsive and what can you as an administrator or developer do about it to resolve the issue. With Lotus Notes as a developer I can easily customize and fix most any short coming in the mail DB or any other customized DB that I have created. Even the mail Db itself can be modified. Every software has bugs and Lotus Notes is no exception, but I have found it to be a very solid platform and very responsive to user feedback. Version 8 is on an entirely new platform that most users and even administrators do not fully understand. The Open platform of Eclipse allows developers to create applications that were created on a variety of platforms and present these platforms to users as a single application. If you do not like the Notes interface then you can create your own web interfaces. If you do not want to program with Lotus Notes @ functions then you do not have to. I have users usually like what they are used to and I am no exception. I like the Notes design interface because when I want to design a form or a view it gives me a head start over and other platform. The built in structure and relationship within a db of a form to the views in the db are just enough to help a developer focus on the users needs. I have allot of respect for developers in other platforms that have to write long SQL strings to pull in just the right table of information as is the case in relational DB’s. These relational Db’s focus on the data record where Notes is designed around the document. Developers can design intelligent (I hope I spelled intelligent correctly) documents that can have images, rich text, file attachments, embedded views and built in security. For creating and managing documents their is nothing better. Having documents stored on a server where they can be properly backed up and have the proper security applied is far superior to the Microsoft Word , save it on my local pc structure. If you like the Word or PDF editors you can use them and then store the document properly in a Notes DB.

matt said on April 7th, 2009 at 4:50 am

I just became aware of the horrible mess that Lotus Notes and .nsf based applications are.
I have developed in procedural languages, OO languages, multi-tier web apps, heavy DB-based apps and i am a big fan of neatness and good design principles – desgin patterns. All i can say is that Lotus Notes feels like a loosing fight to still keep relevant a 1980 idea-technology into 2010…

Jesper K said on April 3rd, 2009 at 5:52 am

In my work Notes is primarily used as email, calender and then Sametime and todo. Used to run 6.5, now running 8.0

I’ve yet to experience something as horrible as this from a GUI client. Just to make sure I didn’t write something wrong I just went to my Notes client and did a search. It returned a bunch of emails, and lo and behold …. every single mail found has the checkmark enabled, so I can’t just mark the one and two mails I NEED to forward. No, one either has to forward ALL af the result set or none. And of couse … sign … any attempt toi un-check one of the mails found will remove it entirely from the view. Way to go morons.

And – I’m not shitting you – clicking a bit around trying to make the un-check thing work -> IMB Lotus Notes/Domino has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience..

AppName: nlnotes.exe AppVer: 8.0.0.7214 ModName: nnotesws.dll
ModVer: 8.0.0.7214 Offset: 0010305a

Story of my life…And don’t get me started on the Calendar…

den said on April 1st, 2009 at 1:17 am

“So to me its simple, most of “The pain” experienced on this site is where users are running out of date clients, the resource hungry comments are simply poorly implemented clients and nobody has mentioned Domino going down because, if its configured properly, doesn’t.”

Once again, illiteracy rears its ugly head. Out of date clients are used because that is what is forced on the user. One simply is not permitted to install anything else.

Poor implementation? Once again, user has nothing to do with that. Look to the IT departments and management.

No one has mentioned Domino servers going down because… users don’t touch the servers. Most users will simply like to see their email. That’s all. Users don’t care what server it’s on, as long as it’s available. If a Domino server goes down, common sense will simply say to have a spare. even then, lotus notes doesn’t switch automatically. Apparently, automatic failover is a feature. However, it never seems to work.

From an IT standpoint, ln makes sense. on paper at least. However, users are not engineers. Compare lotus notes email prior to version 8 to something like gmail, hotmail or yahoo. Which is easier to use? Certainly not lotus notes.

Grey Area said on March 23rd, 2009 at 5:18 pm

Four more working days, including the rest of today, before my company switches from Notes to Outlook. One month later all archives and old emails will be fully accessible in Outlook and we will be able to discard Notes. Hoo-fucking-ray!

Wesley said on March 19th, 2009 at 6:31 am

i goddamn hate lotus, my wife is leaving me because my agents dissapear. My dog died because nkill doesnt work with notes 8.5. My unborn child has a local encryption error, so it wont come out. the lotus notes logo is burnt in my eyes, all i can see is lotus notes. lotus notes when i crap, lotus notes when i sleep, lotus notes when i have sexual intercourse oh wait my wife left me so thats one problem less i have with lotus notes. Imagine me looking at the sun, its not a happy sun with a smiley, all i see is a glowing lotus notes logo, that makes my skin turn red. thank you for listening i hope the healing will begin soon

ultra pissed said on March 9th, 2009 at 12:27 pm

I hate lotus notes as well. I use mac and am still forced to use Lotus Notes if I want to clock in or out and get paid. It’s the most difficult software to use, not to mention I use it with a HUGE network of people worldwide, and out IT is ALWAYS having to troubleshoot junk. Lotus Notes is slow, and WAY out of date. I HATE HATE HATE IT!

Matthew Kershaw said on March 6th, 2009 at 3:07 am

@ Dave Delay

I find your comment incredibly telling. All the advantages you quote are all things that IT/support people value, but nothing that real users care that much about: Replication, Security, Programmability. These are all hygiene issues which we should all take for granted, not vaunt as incredible features.

And in fact, that’s the reason why ‘Notes’ is as disgustingly prevalent as it is. IBM knows that its real customers are a bunch of IT Help Desk people who buy this terrible stuff – not the actual end users WHO CAN’T BEAR TO USE IT. But you know, we don’t count because after all – it’s got great replication!

Regarding your comment about ‘Notes’ not being an email/calendar programme but a ‘a runtime environment for collaborative applications’ I say – why when you can’t even get email and calendar right (which is pretty basic and was cracked years ago) would I trust you to do ANYTHING else?

IBM should hang their heads in shame…

Matthew

PS I’m running ‘Notes’ right now and it’s taking over 190Mb or memory. Not only poorly designed but greedy too. Why are you even supporting it?

Kenny said on March 4th, 2009 at 8:58 am

Just been migrated to Lotus notes after years of Outlook, and it’s doing my nut in. What a turd. What an un-intuitive, resource hungry, ugly piece of crap to be foisted on people. I hope you’re happy, IBM, this is not winning you any friends you know.

Dave Delay said on March 2nd, 2009 at 10:19 pm

Lotus Notes is a truly great software product. It is slicker than black ice in New England in January. It may not be the best thing since sliced bread, but is better than anything invented before sliced bread. Alright, I may be over compensating to counter the claims at Lotus Notes Sucks (and elsewhere), but I really do love Notes.

In the interests of full disclosure, I worked on Notes from 1996 through 2002. As a software developer, I contributed to versions 4.5, 4.6, 5.0 and 6.0. Obviously, I don’t like to hear people bash the product I worked on. On the other hand, I have also used Lotus Notes every working day for almost ten years. It is not and never will be a perfect product, but it also isn’t nearly as bad as some people make it out to be.

Let’s look at some indisputable facts:

* When it was introduced in 1989, Notes pioneered the concept of groupware.

* It is one the most successful desktop applications ever. For example, in 2000, Network Computing named Notes one of the top ten products of the 1990s.

* Unlike many products of its vintage, Notes is still going strong. According to Ed Brill, Notes still has 120 million seats (see comment #9). Microsoft in particular has repeatedly tried to kill Notes, and Microsoft has a history of obliterating the competition in many market segments (think Wordperfect, Lotus 123 and Netscape Navigator). How many products have been able to withstand sustained competition from Microsoft? Notes and Quicken are the only two products that come to mind.

So why do many people dislike Notes? Why does the anonymous owner of Lotus Notes Sucks spend hours on his web site? Why does Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame rant against Notes on his other blog? Are evil CIOs intentionally torturing their users with a defective product? That would be ironic considering the early adoption of Notes was viral**.

In my opinion, people dislike Notes because their expectations don’t jive with the original intent of the product. At its core, Notes is a runtime environment for collaborative applications, but when people complain about Notes, they are usually not talking about core Notes at all. They are talking about the Notes Mail and Calendar applications.

Why does this distinction matter? It matters because the Notes core is what a lot of people really love. The three core features I really like are:

1. Replication. This is what lets you disconnect from the network and continue to read and send mail. It’s also what lets Domino servers maintain multiple copies of your mail file. I don’t think any product does replication as well as Notes and Domino.

2. Security. Notes security was way ahead of it’s time in 1989. It is still rock solid.

3. Programmability. You don’t like the way Notes Mail works? Programmability lets you (or an IT developer) fix small problems and add completely new features in mail. It’s also what lets you build entirely new applications for your business.

None of this means IBM should disregard people’s complaints about Notes Mail and Calendar. Far from it. I know IBM takes these complaints very seriously. The Mail and Calendar applications have consistently improved from one release to the next. As a relatively new Notes 7 user, I am very impressed with the new features and quality of Mail and Calendar.

Here’s what I am really saying to people who dislike Notes: Grow up please. You may have preferred the mail application you used in your last job. You may have a dozen small complaints about how Notes works. But don’t say Notes sucks and recommend throwing it out. That’s like throwing out the baby with the bath water. Chances are your IT department has many good reasons for sticking with Notes. Have you asked what those reasons are?

Paul said on February 26th, 2009 at 8:29 pm

I’ve never had a piece of software enrage me so much as Lotus Notes, until my company switch to Notes 8, so I could have the same engagement while consuming twice the system resources. I want to physically hurt the people responsible for this product.

Stephen Charles Thompson said on February 25th, 2009 at 11:48 am

lotus notes hangs when pasting text copied from web. lotus notes hotkey for paste as text. lotus notes programmable hotkey. lotus notes add hotkey. “How to add a hotkey” lotus notes. “How to add a shortcut” lotus notes. “How to add a macro” lotus notes.

I’ve never considered myself a member of a hate group before this.

Steven A. Ojeda said on February 23rd, 2009 at 2:10 pm

Hello. A colleague referred me to this website today after we had a calendar event mysteriously disappear from our LN calendar. It’s not the first time that’s happened to me or others either. We originally had MS Outlook before being bought up by a company that uses LN. We were forced to convert to LN and everyone has hated it ever since. We dread using the appointment/meeting scheduler and the “replication” function is absolutely horrid. Whatever happened to just clicking “send” and knowing your email was safely on its way to the recipient? Oh well. It’s nice to have this website so we no longer have to suffer in silence.
Best regards.

Aleks said on February 20th, 2009 at 7:45 am

Arrrgh, I’ve got to work with it every single day. I’m part of the IT department of my company and insulting Lotus Notes to the LN Dept. is worse than insulting their mothers.

It’s like the enterprise heroine: seems to be good at first, you start to get all fucked up, and when you want to quit, you discover that it’s too late.

-In my company, 90% of the comments on notes are bad and I’ve never received any good comment on notes.
-The interface is really unintuitive, stupid, senseless, ugly-looking that reminds me of my first VB6 programs.
-The error messages doesn’t help anyone diagnosing problems, that makes me look incompetent in front of other users when I cannot fix the problem.

Well, I could continue writing, but my serotonin levels gets so low whenever I think of notes that my creativity and patience starts to go down and down until i get boring and BORING and bore you guys more than you already are with the BOREDOM of Lotus Notes.

Victor said on February 20th, 2009 at 1:57 am

i hate notes

DeathToTheCreatorsofNotes said on February 9th, 2009 at 2:33 pm

GREAT IDEA FOR THE ‘TEAM MEMBERS’ IN THE MORON ROMPER_ROOM “JAD SESSION” FOR NOTES:

Go out and create 20 other websites called http://ihateINSERT NAME OF NOTES COMPETITOR]

Then it will look like people hate other applications as much as they UTTERLY DESPISE LOTUS NOTES. That will be a wonderful waste of time that your moron “JAD session” dingabts can do instead of fixing all the thousands of things that are wrong with Notes.

And if that doesn’t take up enough of your time at IBM, maybe you can come up with the MODERN DAY EQUIVALENT OF IBM’S CONCENTRATION CAMP PUNCH CARD SYSTEM THAT THEY SUPPLIED HITLER WITH< YOU MORON PSYCHOTIC DIRTBAG.

FYI, today was another day WASTED, SCREWING AROUND WITH IDIOTIC, OVERWROOUGHT, OVER-ENGINEERED STUPID BROKEN FUNCTIONALITY OF NOTES, in case you are wondering why I HATE YOUR GUTS SO MUCH.

Thank God I found this website to blow off the ENDLESS FRUSTRATION THAT I EXPERIENCE USING THE PIECE OF TRASH CALLED LOTUS NOTES, or IBM headquarters would have gotten a visit.

JW said on February 6th, 2009 at 2:46 pm

Lotus Notes is the best email client I’ve ever used in my life, especially since release of version 8.0.2

Tim said on February 4th, 2009 at 3:43 pm

“And for all the people that use outlook and think it’s secure. I just need your pst file and I can read your email and send in your name. If I give you a notes mailfile you won’t be able to do shit with it.”

?? When I first started at a new company that was using Notes (I came from Outlook) I logged into someone else machine to do some work…I couldnt get at my email from there so had a play around and copied my email database to that computer. Re opened notes and discovered all my colleagues (the usual user of this machine( emails appear in front of me…..security my bum.

I wasn’t trying to be sneaky at all and was super surprised that I could see his full email archive.

den said on February 1st, 2009 at 11:56 pm

once again i see a moron that says to use or look at version 8. why do you people not understand that there is simply no choice? that we must use what we are given, which is usually an old version. i work for a multinational, multibillion dollar pharmaceuticals company as tech support for this stupid app. of course, i can ask all i want for some changes to be made, but it won’t happen.

Craig Birkett said on January 31st, 2009 at 11:54 pm

Why DO companies choose Lamus Notus?

I pondered this question long and hard. As an engineer I feel my sanity is tied to my belief in a rational and comprehensible Universe. Why anyone would pick this piece of S…. ! over Outlook is beyond me.

Then I saw the light in the coded language of Lotus Lovers. Lotus is not just an email system. It is much more insidious. It is a way for IT groups to foster their dream of control, their hegemony off all software. The centralized databases are perfect to enforce their policies and ensure control. The limited functions are not problem. Their pathetic theories of collaboration tools are just selling points to get upper management (who rarely dirty themselves with email) to sign off on this bill. User complaints are irrelevant. Resistance if futile. You will be assimilated.

ChuckRock said on January 29th, 2009 at 7:44 am

I can sum it up in two words IT SUCKS!!!!!

From taking hours to receive email from the person setting in the next cube to the scheduling letting you get double book or having meeting and appointments just disappear. Oh and it take forever to open and steals system resources went it is loading so you can’t do much else. I know Outlook is by far not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than this piece of bloatware!

Also, I don’t know why they call the instant messaging Sametime, it should be call Longtime or Wrongtime. I mean come one why does a instant message program need to take almost 90mb of memory run.

Again, Lotus Notes SUCKS!!!!

Alex Conner said on January 26th, 2009 at 7:47 am

Blegh. Use a Database program for a database, and an email client for email. Use the right tool for the job – that’s what sysadmins and enterprise systems architects should be enforcing.

Ruby on Rails allows for crazy fast application development, and you get a full database backend, API support (so applications can talk to each other), deployment assistance via Capistrano, and follows development best practices.

Heck, even Hotmail is better than Notes for an email and calendaring tool. Outlook + Exchange, IMHO, is amazing and ready for enterprise deployment.

R. said on January 25th, 2009 at 1:14 pm

I created a rule to send email with a very specific subject to a folder. Weeks later, Notes still claims the folder is empty. Yesterday, I checked the folder with an experimental, internal web front-end that can access Notes email. The folder is full not just of correctly filtered email, but masses of critically important mail that HAD ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO BE MATCHED BY THE RULE.

I’ve missed so much vital info over the past few weeks. No wonder I’ve been getting funny looks.

theres_no_excuse said on January 20th, 2009 at 5:48 pm

Notes (including is simply horrible for email and calendaring. I don’t care about the other stuff, and neither do the 99% of users that it’s bought for and sold to.

Not just the big stuff (described in a million entries above). The simple things indicate the uselessness of the whole thing. Just a small sample:

- no shortcut keys for reply and reply-to-all;
- no reply and reply-to-all from a calendar entry;
- selecting meeting beginning and end times from the little – clock dropdown is laughably implemented;
moving email address around different fields is a cut-n-paste nightmare;
- you can select-and-copy from some interfaces and not others;
- the performance (basic or eclipse) is pathetic;
- it doesn’t look like a native app;
- search results are near random and can’t then be sorted by date;
- the calendar interface shows popups that are the name of the icon (e.g. “pencil icon”) rather than the name of the friggin entry (hello??)
- you can’t resize calendar entries in the calendar interface through common click-n-drag (IBM, people use mice, you should try one)

I could go on until the Internet is full. Yeah, yeah, “application development speed”, “more than an email client”. My ass it is. It needs to be at least an email and calendar client, as when you add all the little stuff up the application eats away at any benefit it might actually provide. Light eating celery, using the product uses up more energy than what you get out of it.

Sunset this piece of garbage for the sake of karma.

Paskis said on January 15th, 2009 at 1:24 pm

I’ve SUPPORTED Lotus Notes for 10 years. The complaints are valid. Also, MOST companies I’ve worked with provide RUBBISH training for their staff. If they’re lucky they get an hour and a pamphlet. Yes, Notes does a lot – but most people only use the core features. The product is downright confused in so many ways – just look at the process for setting a Notes client up to clear an Internet mail account. Just look at the answer to “Where do I set up the options?” – between the location documents, tools, profiles, preferences menu, security menu, there’s stuff hidden all over the place. In 8 they tried to make it better by half-heartedly moving all the options to the Preferences, and as a result created the worst monster of an option menu I’ve ever seen.

Combine that with hopeless editing inadequacies (have you ever tried to select part of a table, when said table is over a page long?) Broken features (try right-double-click to back out of an email in Notes 8. Something that’s worked for 10 years is now broken) and you end up with a depressing user experience.

Microsoft *seem* to be thinking of the customer experience as paramount when they create software. IBM *seem* to be thinking of functionality and how ‘cool’ the platform is (Eclipse. I mean really, where is the point) and let the end user suffer.

Around the workplace – EVERY work place I’ve been – Lotus Notes is universally hated. Staff that are new to an organisation and have come from a Microsoft site are despondant when they discover they have joined an organisation that uses Notes.

And yes, in the real world I have to go out there and be all positive about it.. but it’s hard to do with a straight face.

StevieG said on January 13th, 2009 at 6:59 am

So everytime I create or move a folder I have to quit Notes for it to take effect. Did it in ver6 & ver7. Now that I installed ver8.5 (OSX) it still does it.
Awesome.

richard said on January 10th, 2009 at 6:49 pm

From a lotus notes hater to a lotus notes lover…
My company has recently upgraded our lotus notes 7 to version 8. I think I can forget all the past frustration, Its official lotus notes is now awesome, the new interface is incredible. Ask your IT people to upgrade to 8.

den said on January 5th, 2009 at 12:25 am

there are many people on this that say to use a new or different version of lotus notes. but you simply do not understand, we are not permitted to. the company decides which lotus notes is used, not the lowly worker. it’s as simple as that. if i were permitted to install another version of lotus notes, i would be permitted to not use it altogether and use gmail or hotmail instead. not this piece of garbage.

Steve said on December 28th, 2008 at 11:05 am

Russell – sounds like you need some training – you sound like a dumbass with all your questions – you clearly don’t understand the product.

Paskis said on December 22nd, 2008 at 8:18 pm

What is with the cartoon when I type in my password?
.. One I can answer. It’s a device that uses a special code to present you with a picture that matches your password. This way no other software can pop up a box, pretend to be Notes, and ask you for your password. You’re supposed to be able to recognise it – “Hey! that’s not the right little graphic! That can’t be Lotus Notes!”. IIRC, it was to allow the software to be sold to a government department, or to get some security rating or other.

LN Hater said on December 16th, 2008 at 4:00 pm

Notes is much like Novell, it needs to be put to pasture. No matter what changes are made to it, it will never satisfy todays end users and will always be over complex to use efficiently.

I loathe Lotus Notes!!!

notes_dude said on December 16th, 2008 at 6:40 am

I know lotus notes has it’s share of little bug and things that might seem odd. As a mail application it does so much more than Outlook would ever hope to achieve. I know a lot of users are brain dead “I can’t think for my self” type F5-ing office zombies but that can’t be helped either. Maybe, instead of ranting about how bad it is, you should ask someone who knows what to do to help you with your issues. If such a person is not available maybe the company should hire someone that knows it’s shit.

And for all the people that use outlook and think it’s secure. I just need your pst file and I can read your email and send in your name. If I give you a notes mailfile you won’t be able to do shit with it.

John said on December 3rd, 2008 at 8:18 pm

Lotus Notes once kicked Chuck Norris’ ass in an email showdown. Chuck slinked away licking his smtp wounds while Notes merrily compacted its databases.

Russell said on December 2nd, 2008 at 9:58 pm

1.When I hover over the icons down the left hand side I have
“Internet Explorer links”
“Favorite bookmarks”
“More bookmarks”
What is the difference between those? Why do I need three bookmark icons?
2. What is an “Internet style forward”? Why would I ever choose that? Why would I never choose that? I have no idea what it means. When I search the help for “internet style forward” I get zero results returned.
3. When I decide I don’t want to send an email and hit escape why is the default selected option “Send AND File”? The absolute opposite of what I want to do.
4. Mandatory maximum window. I can’t tile my email to see more than one at a time
5. What is with the cartoon when I type in my password? “it let’s you know if you have entered the right password” – dude, so does the enter key when I hit that
6. “Default Custom expiration” – What? is it default or is it custom, it cannot be both
7. Delete a calendar item “Do you want to delete or remove?” What?
8. “You can not delete this item because notes needs it” – what does notes need it for? I don’t need it
9. archive error – “Some items have already been pruned” – Great, what does that mean?
10. Paste in a table and it goes in as a gif
11. someone send you an image, you cannot drag it to the desktop, you need to right click, hit copy, and then paste it into MSPaint and then select save as
12. “select tools” – wait, which of the three tools menus do you mean? The File – tools, the Actions – tools or the tools button in the email
13. Is it a mail or a memo? Make up your mind.
14. On the quick links I can “Scan Mail” or “Open Mail” – what is the difference?
15. Sending an email freezes the tool as it uploads the mail
16. Replication – wtf. I don’t think I need to say any more
17. Ok, I will. The schedule for replicating. Is it in the calendar where you might logically assume a schedule would be kept? No, it is in the address book….
18….. which sucks.
19. Want to look for an address when typing a mail? Don’t look for a “To:” button, no you have to actually use the non-standard technique of clicking on the “to” label.
20. Click “View Unread” and then click “View All” it won’t put your mail back the way it was before you clicked “View Unread”
21. See a hyperlink but want the underlying URL to copy and paste somewhere? Good luck with that.

I could go on forever but I have a two line email to send and need 30 mins to do that. 1 min for typing and 29 dealing with Notes.

Vijay said on December 2nd, 2008 at 4:20 am

I’ve had a very good laugh reading all this stuff … damn funny and very witty comparison between Notes & Outlook. I’ve been a Notes Developer for over 6 years now and I do agree that is very quirky … you would probably never understand why it crashes or why Ctrl+N composes a new DB instead of a new mail.

BUT … like someone said , the more you talk about something , the longer its going to stay

So keep talking …

Ray G said on November 26th, 2008 at 8:49 pm

Great new job. Awesome new job in fact. More money, nicer office, blackberry, laptop, all the usual stuff.

But. . . they use Lotus notes. I thought “You’re kidding!? They still make Lotus notes?” My new boss looked at me as if I had just asked if they still made Microsoft.

Nice guy but he’s not computer savvy.

So I go to Borders and Barnes & Nobles to find a book to give me a better working knowledge of this ugly thing Lotus. Not one single book. Not even a pamphlet sized Cliff notes kind of thing.

I hate Lotus notes.

CJ :) said on November 21st, 2008 at 6:45 pm

I just want logically threaded conversations without having to bring up another window and wait for the “view to update.” Is that so much to ask?

StevieG said on November 18th, 2008 at 8:43 am

I hate you Lotus Notes… so much it hurts.

chris b said on November 12th, 2008 at 5:53 pm

I have a love/hate relationship with Notes…on one hand it is so powerful and on the other hand the GUI, designed before Windows 3 is a total mess.

Ironically Lotus Symphony, Lotus’ freeware office suite has a beautiful and elegant GUI!!!

aaaaaaaaaaah …come on Lotus tidy up the Notes client and let the beasty that is Notes fly!!

kim said on November 11th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

“Send email to another employee that is out of the office and get the AUTO REPLY two HOURS later. What a sweet piece of software.”

Use the latest version and get an immediate reply.”

That is really pushing reality here. Immediately?! Try 2-3 hours! I am on Lotus Notes 8 and it has caused so many problems with my organization.

Co workers sometimes don’t get my email for 4-5 hours. The software has to continually be re installed because folders just “disappear” into LN never never land!

I work for a huge multi billion dollar company- did they acutally test the software out before buying this huge piece of crap??

I want Outlook back!!

John Blanket said on November 9th, 2008 at 4:44 pm

You are just a bunnch of complainers. Notes 8 is great – actually more user friendly than outlook. You all would not be happy with any software.

Maybe you can all turn a new leaf and start tinking positive.

Have a great day!

Alan said on November 6th, 2008 at 2:18 am

Oh, and just to add, the dash key on a standard keyboard makes this weird little symbol “-” which is a hyphen, not a dash. If you want to get an en dash “–” you have to press ALT+0150.

For an em-dash, “—”, it’s ALT+ 0151.

But guess what? In Lotus Notes, they’re the other way round!

James Adams said on November 5th, 2008 at 8:00 am

Awful Awful Awful. I don’t even know where to begin. I am a user of Outlook for the past 11 1/2 years. Outlook isn’t perfect but it gets far more things right than LN.

I recently changed jobs, Italian company, somebody over there loves LN.

Z.M. said on October 31st, 2008 at 8:35 am

My company was forced to migrate from Outllook to Notes ………

Y es una grandísima MIERDA!!!!

Simply …….. What a huge SHIT !!!!!!!!!!

Michael said on October 31st, 2008 at 4:34 am

The Notes client should be better than it is. IBM are making it better now but to me it seems to be too little too late. I am a Lotus Notes/Domino Administrator. I have enjoyed working with the product. You can do a lot with it. It has 1000 times more functionality than Outlook. However the client is rubbish. So people hate it. IBM try to make it do too much. They get caught up in all the new technologies, open source, etc and forget about the core user. Fix the client first! It’s crazy. Looking at jobs, there are far more Lotus to Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint migrations than Lotus upgrades. It’s a shame as Lotus has such great potential. But IBM has killed a great product. They offer poor support also. Nothing is clear. Their licensing model is confusing. By the looks of things I will have to change into a different technology as there are fewer and fewer Notes jobs as companies move to MS. My last job was supporting Outlook. The company used this Enterprise Vault software and it was rubbish, it just failed all the time. Outlook crashes also. It’s slow and clunky. So with such poor competition, Lotus is doing pretty bad to still be losing customers. Lift your freaking game IBM!!

Stupid is what stupid does said on October 18th, 2008 at 1:39 pm

Lotus Notes is built on pile of garbage and can’t be fixed. For the sake of humanity IBM should stop developing this crap.

Round In Circles said on October 8th, 2008 at 9:06 pm

I can’t believe my luck!
I have just left one company, where we were using Lotus Notes 6.5, yet were in the process of migrating to Outlook 2007.

Now I’m at my new job and they use Notes 8, it looks slightly prettier than 6.5, it says “Hey, don’t I look pretty, don’t I look more like a real email client” but it’s lying, it’s still awful, I want to die.

I have a progress bar, it’s been animated for the last two hours and I’m not doing anything!!!
PROGRESS OF WHAT!?!?!?

DpM said on September 22nd, 2008 at 3:12 am

I use Notes; I have no choice and have had no choice since 1999. It has some real annoyances for me and some things that I would describe as ‘quirks’… when it does things that no other program does. Some things have already been mentioned here, but my thoughts (I’m working with a 7 client) are around:

1) You need to know the CTRL-Break thing, otherwise you’re not going to be a happy-puppy a lot of the time – this is useful for when it tries to do a background action when you didn’t expect it to, or when the search dialogue seems to hang – maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t.

2) Refresh… F9. I use that a lot so I’ve trained myself, but I so often found myself logging out of Notes with F5.

3) Changing menu options… I like my options to remain where they were last time I looked for them. I often get a tad frustrated when the Actions menu (mostly it is this) has a different list of items depending on what tab has focus.

4) Single-threaded processes… Notes is made up of several .exes it seems, all working in [dis]harmony. I really get frustrated when I CTRL-V (paste) something from a place like a HTML page inside Internet Explorer! Why does this take such a long, long time for me? I have got into the habit of pasting stuff into TextPad and then pasting plain text into Notes. So that means, I always have TextPad open.

5) The replication progress bar. Oh, how awful is that? I do guess it’s a lot better than version 5 or 4, but the progress bar and the %age indicators are still not accurate by any means. Often, they just sit there – saying it is 63% complete for minutes on end (granted, someone has sent something big through) before jumpting to 100%.

6) The crashes. Oh, the crashes. Where did that crazy Lotus-only windowing system come from? The one that has a black border and a red background (I think)?

7) The way that, without too much effort, you can really end up screwing up your email if you are using bullets or numbered bullets along with indent and outdent paragraph – especially if close to your footer.

But also… there’s the little things that I love. The ability to write my own litte agents that do wonderful things… like highlight an incoming email that has a Read Receipt attached to it and flag it in my InBox with a “No Entry” icon, number 92 I believe. The ability to “unlock” emails that have “prevent forwarding” placed on them. Other little things like the Permanent Pen (I don’t know if other clients have this).

I think I have suffered with Lotus Notes, but I give it some leeway, because I know it is not a natural email client. I realise I am not using it as it was always intended.

Gregory Gartland said on September 11th, 2008 at 10:51 am

To Scott Noebel, I understand what you’re saying, and I too am not real happy about the “heaviness” of the new Notes 8.x client. But IBM is working on the footprint and 8.0.2 is a little lighter. It’s the Eclipse framework that’s causing all the issues.

On the other hand, IBM is great at allowing alternatives. Instead of getting one package that can only run one way, or run under one server, they give you multiple clients that can run on multiple OS’ with multiple versions coexisting.

I also think it’s awesome that IBM is leading the way to giving people alternatives to Microsoft bloat. Now you can create a completely viable office computer in Linux with Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony and Firefox. Not to mention other 3rd party linux-based apps for 5250 emulating, etc.

IBM may not have it perfectly right, but I sure do like the way they’re going.

mikael said on September 11th, 2008 at 1:11 am

Brrrrr …. reading this website! I’m scared …….. in 3 months we’ll shift to Lotus Notes!
Are there any pills I can take to take away the pain until then? After the change I will most probably be lost anyway…. Lost in Notes! ~:o|

LC said on September 8th, 2008 at 1:17 am

I hate this fu…..g Notes client that even don’t know to proceed to a simple copy/paste from an html page, without freezing 5 min…
And I’m not speaking about a beta version of a freeware…. I’m currently using Notes 8…

Matt said on September 6th, 2008 at 12:13 pm

People can’t have been in the industry long if they don’t know how IBM operate.

They care not for hardware or software quality; their modus operandi has always been to simply BRIBE purchasing officers. How else could you move such crappy product? How else could OS/360 have ever become a reality? Those who write the cheques are the people so “keen” on IBM. For them, they are truly great products! The “fringe” benefits terrific…

And let’s face it, as operating platforms go, Windows is a profoundly shit-house one to have to develop for. A number of problems alluded to are more properly Windows bugs. Nothing above is as crappy as, say, Windows in-ability to paint consistently, frequently leaving large areas of corrupted screen for extended periods of time. How un-acceptable is that?

Scott Noebel said on September 5th, 2008 at 3:17 pm

In response to Greg Gartland – I’ve administered Domino Servers from v3-v8. Oh, and clients too. I am educated. I am certified too. What ever that’s worth these days. I attend LSphere and I attend the Notes Admin Conf on Boston. With that said, I can’t believe you told the users to install the Basic version of Notes 8 because it was by far faster than Outlook. That comment alone only proved to me that what you really are saying is this “If you load the Standard version of Notes 801, hold on because you’re in for a long ride. Its new, its slower than slow. Its full of all sorts of new features but, you shouldn’t use them, instead use the Basic “Light” version of Notes because it’s quicker”. IBM’s quality control team has gotten a lot worse. They are releasing garbage, one point release at a time. Hell, just read this IBM tech note 1317775. It’s hilarious. How the heck does this software pass quality control….Mind Numbing.

Russ said on September 4th, 2008 at 10:15 am

I have been a Notes Admin for 8 years and a Notes Developer for 1. My (new) company uses Lotus for Project and Contract Management and I have to say that it is the WORST platform for such a thing EVAR. In my prior company, no one except the owner like Notes e-mail and even HE used Outlook for the calendar. Truthfully, I can use the software and don’t find it that horrible. But the replication thing fixes a problem that technology solved 8 years ago by making internet available EVERYWHERE. It’s just a bloated obsolete, non-relational (don’t get me started!!) piece of crap. IBM isn’t leading with anything anymore. Do I switch jobs now? What do I do . . .

Gregory Gartland said on August 27th, 2008 at 6:47 am

Lotus Notes is a tool. Like any tool, it should be used for what it is good at.

Lotus databases are not relational and should not be used in place of systems that need solid relational databases (finance, sales, etc.).

On the other hand, with Lotus, companies can create absolutely wonderful workflow applications that allow almost any paper form floating around your office to turn into an interactive, routable, approval-driven system that is easy to use. These types of systems make the routing and approval process of company information fast, easy and increases accountability because everyone can see where the bottleneck is.

Lotus development is also MUCH faster than any other type of development, which allows the publication of workflow applications in a timely manner.

Instead of trying to justify getting rid of Lotus Notes (which isn’t going to happen since your company just invested big bucks in it), you might want to beg for training so your learning curve is much quicker.

Gregory Gartland said on August 27th, 2008 at 6:38 am

I am a certified Lotus end user trainer and the frustrations I see here are the frustrations I see all the time from untrained users. Whenever corporate gets the idea to change anything, users balk. Then when corporate puts no time or money into training, users balk even more.

During training, I get a lot of “My Outlook does this, does Lotus?” All it takes is a few clicks to help them find where the needed functionality exists and they are fine. There are very few things that Outlook does that Notes does not.

BUT, there are a whole bunch of things Notes does that Outlook does not. The problem is, everyone is so ingrained as to the “Microsoft” way, that when they see an interface that’s different, it confuses them.

As for client speed, if you load Lotus 8.0.1 and use the light client, it is faster and lighter than Outlook by far.

I just don’t get all the hate. If your corporation is still on Lotus 5 or 6, then ask them to upgrade to the faster 7 or 8 clients.

JUST BECAUSE IBM does not mandate “rip and replace” like Microsoft, doesn’t mean they’re bad. IBM allows old clients to work with new servers. While this is great for admins, it sucks for the users because most admins then have no reason to go around and update the clients.

AdamB said on August 25th, 2008 at 11:41 am

I HATE LOTUS NOTES! I HATE LOTUS NOTES! I HATE LOTUS NOTES!

slowest app on my pc
the archive is the dumbest
the search never finds anything useful or what i’m looking for
it should just be discontinued and trashed as it is the worst software I have ever laid my hands on

Willy said on August 25th, 2008 at 5:28 am

LN is an obsolete design that sucks processing power. As an application development platform, it fails miserably. Not much effort has been put into this software to modernize it. It is a huge ship that can’t turn in time to miss the iceberg. Why bother updating this huge mess when you can sucker buyers and make loads of money while putting little effort into it. Might as well be a virus for it hinders any work done on the computer and is completely worthless as an application development platform.

Arne S Nielsen said on August 22nd, 2008 at 11:06 am

This webpage is really funny. It’s like my kids: – I hate fish! – I hate school! – I hate, I hate, I hate!

Lotus Notes is not email. It’s also email. Lotus Notes is much more – its a collaboration client. Those of you (guess most of you are teenagers) who use chat, webconferences, unified communication, databases, search, browsers, applications, sharing, finding, building professional networks, will understand what Notes is about. Notes is a tool for professionals – not for kids who like to chat, surf and have fun. It’s a worktool. That’s why 145 million people use it every day at work. Believe it or not!

Get the latest version, connect it to a Domino server, connect to others on that server, use it, administrate it and use all the functionalities – and you’ll understand what it is all about.

Get out of your blindfold folks! Open your eyes to the world and try something new. You might learn something!

Bubbula said on August 20th, 2008 at 8:34 am

Nothing like a product that has a DELETE button when you open an email, that won’t work unless you close the tab, and hit the same delete button from the list view … so this product has been around how long and can’t close and delete an email …

what a fantastic product!!!!

lee van laer said on August 17th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

Notes is without a doubt one of the most dysfunctional apps I’ve ever run across.

Just for starters, how many other apps out there don’t support standard windows keyboard shortcuts? and what kind of idiot would design a program that didn’t?

then we could mention ntaskldr.exe, an errant applet that prefers to remain resident in memory for many minutes after notes closes, occupying 95% of the cpu overhead and freezing the computer.

anyone who thinks this software is function is delusional.

Michael Winters said on August 17th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

Keith Brooks has it summed up perfectly. Notes is an administrators dream and a complete piece of junk for everyone else that goes near it.

Users hate it, it breaks most known good design practices, it is slow and resource intensive, and crashes constantly. Despite everything IBM try to do, it still feels like some 1980’s software.

From a developers perspective it is a nightmare. Think MS Access but worse! The “applications” written on Notes are a single ball of mushed up UI, business logic and data storage. It has mind boggling limits like 64k text fields and in 2008 the piece of crap is still single threaded.

If only IBM would just follow through with one of the few good ideas they had a couple of years ago concerning Notes and kill it off.

Keith Brooks said on August 13th, 2008 at 1:03 pm

As a long time email manager(from before windows based email) not going to try to change any of your minds, you have your complaints, however misguided some are, because of your IT staff or lack of training or personal preferences.

Do you enjoy having so many multiple windows on your screen everytime you try to do something with outlook?
Why can’t Microsoft use one window and stay in it?

Why doesn’t user lookups for sending email ever work properly in Outlook?

If you prefer Gmail? Did you enjoy the 45 minutes of downtime the other day? The Cloud is really no better than your own IT people.

What if you don’t like Windows? Ah you say Entourage for MACs, perhaps but still not a great option based on incompatability with other Microsoft products.
Prefer Linux? Lotus has a MAC, Linux and Windows client.

Outlook has security? Where? As along as I log in to my pc I can use Outllok. No ID required. And that is a good thing?

Just some food for thought. And at the end of the day, if the UI is your only issue, Outlook does not allow for any customization of the UI. Can you detach pieces of it to view on a second monitor? Can you change the look and feel of the entire client? Even the background? no, you can’t.
You can in Lotus Notes.

Chibikko said on August 11th, 2008 at 2:29 pm

Im making an investigation about Mail client, on of them is Lotus Notes… and its really the MOST unpopular one in ALL this universe… yeah i know its cool for db stuff… but who cares if its been applyed to ppl who dont care or even use that perform… IBM can make a friendly version of this… or maybe DONT sell it as an easy and good software. In fact i hadnt find any kind of webpages with this kind of issues… only Lotus Notes has an ANTIFAN club! WOW! … if some one can add some about why lotus notes sucks to get email marketing It would be great!

Lee Croucher said on August 7th, 2008 at 7:24 am

Lotus Notes does indeed suck……enought said…..all for Exchange

Johnathon said on August 6th, 2008 at 7:49 pm

I used Outlook for 8 years from using Outlook 95 through Outlook 2003 then switched jobs and went to lotus 6.0. I feel like I went to hell.

I miss my logical keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+S to send, and Ctrl+N for new…

BIGGEST issue though has to be when copying Excel Data into an email. I get a frickin GIF file… WTF? why can’t I get manipulatable data??? you can’t do anything with it except print it in MS photo manager. I’d love to be able to copy it back into Excel. – Outlook never had issues like this…

Good Riddance said on July 25th, 2008 at 2:03 pm

Notes was apparently devised with a single overriding goal: to completely frustrate any human attempt to use it productively. It’s the most unintuitive, poorly-engineered waste of a user’s time… EVER. The user interface is godawfully ugly and needlessly complicated— a misleading mess of redundant control panels, contextual menus, and hidden dialogs. Functionality is a joke. Clearly, this stinking pile was the product of myriad programming teams working without cohesive oversight or user testing over a long period of time. I would nominate it as the digital information age’s prime example of how NOT to process information and tasks.

After many, many years of Notes Pain, my company FINALLY migrated to MS Outlook—and it feels as if we’ve suddenly stepped out of the Dark Ages. (I was told by an IT staffer that before the big switch, we were one of the very last large companies in America still torturing its employees with this software stain.) Notes is truly the digital equivalent of communicating with tin cans and string; and I am eternally grateful to finally… FINALLY… be rid of it. Never again will I have to see it’s cruddy “welcome screen”. Never again will I cringe upon hearing that pathetic, 1982-sounding “doodle-ee-doo” tune it uses to announce having successfully delivered an email (as if that was a task to be crowing over.)

I sincerely hope IBM/Lotus’ steaming lump of code is officially extinct soon, because nobody— nobody— should have to endure that kind of pain.

Lotus_Notes_Supporter said on July 23rd, 2008 at 8:07 pm

I am working for Philips Electronics which is one of the largest Lotus Notes customer in Europe. They are just started moving from Lotus Notes mail to Exchange , along with that all Lotus application to SharePoint and dot net. I have used lotus notes mail client for more than 5 years , now started using Outlook. I just amazed how people compare Lotus Notes to Outlook . In outlook you don’t have any command over mails, if you want to move your new mails to specific folder on run time , how can you accomplish this in outlook ? Still I am searching how to create table in your mail , since it’s always disabled for me.One of the funniest incident I encounter yesterday , Out one of the functional mail box has been migrated to Outlook . That mail box was used to get all customer mails and complaints , which has been handled by number of members in our team. In Notes when we sends an e-mail through that functional mail box , that mail goes to the “Sent” folder of functional mail box . Which can be referred by other members to know the updates. But when we did same in outlook , sent mail was saved in that person’s “sent” folder who sent an e-mail. What’s a great feature !!!!

Another thing is performance issue , most of the time connection with the exchange server always broken and makes delay in delivering an e-mail . Everyday I start my machine and go for a tea, once i back only that i can see new mails in outlook. You know those who supported outlook initially for migration , They people are saying we need to think for other e-mail solution . Because only 40K users has been moved to Outlook , still half of the users are left. More funny thing is that when I talk with our architect they itself tell it’s a such a bullshit client they have used . You know Lotus Notes mail was such a stable platform in our organization from past decades.

continue in other comment….

MihaIL said on July 21st, 2008 at 10:52 am

Dear JonM. All about your archive will be vapourise is folk. Once you setup archive, you will forget about it. You will have same mailbox in same structure at one click distance in that achive. Trust me I use LN during 2 years and never lost one single mail. But I lost mails from pst files or dbx files when file size increase over 1.5 GB. In LN limitation is around 64GB.

Charles on… anything that comes along » The Lotus Notes hating just goes on… and on said on July 21st, 2008 at 6:15 am

[...] always interesting though is that pro-Notes people who will leap into these pits of hating and try, vainly, to tell people that the fact they’re hating Notes is because (1) they [...]

Joran said on July 15th, 2008 at 8:57 am

I started 2 months ago working as a software developer developing web 2.0 solutions….using lotus notes.

During that time the things I’ve witnessed Lotus Notes in it’s multiple versions do have left me speechless. I have never seen software this bad. Let alone software that is both this terrible and this heavily used and relied upon.

Some highlights from my travels:
“Formula Language code running on the web”
There is simply no way to debug this. It actually says that in a book I read on the subject. Any formula language running in the web environment is near impossible to debug. No printline, no messageboxes, no output to javascript. Nothing. Developing successfully like this is impossible.

“IDE Text Editors: Javascript”
Within a website, should you wish to use javascript code you are presented with a text editor which Lucifer Himself created that has 0 features.
This useful editor will, upon attempting to save or even change focus, attempt to “compile” (???) your non-compilable javascript (?????) in the search for syntax errors. Upon finding anything, it will move the selector a completely random location in the code and will refuse to continue. Thanks. Occasionally the errors wont even exist, and copying and pastnig the code back into the editor will make the error go away.

Now that they’re up to version 8.5beta, the bleeding edge of Lotus Technology, where they herald the fact that they’ve achived seamless intergration with the fantastic Eclipse IDE, the bitter reality is that this “integration” is actually them puttnig the same awful editor with eclipse as the window border. Epic fail.

Notes Hater said on July 11th, 2008 at 10:09 am

I don’t even know where to begin. As an email application, Lotus Notes is the worst!!

- If you happen to be typing on your keyboard when a reminder pops up (why would anyone be typing on their keyboard), it accepts your buffered characters as input for the reminder & disappears so fast, you can’t even see what the reminder was for even if you are looking at it.

- They finally added sort by subject, but it still doesn’t help much because it considers the “Re:” & “Fw:” as part of the subject, so you replies & forwards getting sorted separately from the original & each other.

- Every time you close the app, you have to re-open the folders that you previously had open.

and on and on….

I’m not a big MS fan, but Outlook is so far ahead of Notes that it isn’t even funny.

jaded said on July 10th, 2008 at 7:48 pm

Why the f___ does it make the “ping”/new email sound when i don’t have new emails? It makes no sense. My F9 key will be the first thing to fall off my keyboard, no doubt about it. Hate hate hate Lotus Notes, for that and so much more.

It’s not that easy to complain about/be rid of LN (as suggested by Jake / 04.29.08 / 4am). A lot of the bigger companies that use LN have been doing so for years. They can’t simply change over to Outlook or another application overnight.

Tsaar said on July 7th, 2008 at 2:25 am

Lotus Notes is the most Counterproductive piece of Crap Software ever Produced.

It does not even get the basics right.
Reminders for appointments, Archiving of mail, copying mail into to-do items, all have serious design flaws and are hideously user-unfriendly.

And then I’m not even talking about cryptic error messages, unneccasary complexity, putting user preferences scattered around six or seven locations, the Utterly Retarded use of the ID file.

Right now I’m coping with the fact that Notes thinks my mailfile’s size is over it’s limit when it isn’t. Allready one hour down trying to sync my local & erver copies of the maildatabase. Sure. Fine.

This software makes me sick.

Ricardo said on July 3rd, 2008 at 9:11 am

I hate Lotus Notes. I never thought I would hate any piece of software as much as I hate this shit.
Why can’t I just copy to my machine the emails? Why do I have to select between “server/machne/shit/whereisit/blababla” to do anything, like copy my contacts? Why cannot I synchronize fastly with my contacts on my Nokia?
What about those devilish menus which changes all the time? And the fool calendar behavior?
Look at what a piece of art which come directly from Satanas himself is capable to do to drive you completely nuts: once I, by mistake, deleted the mail icon on the bookmarks menu at the left. Voila! It will never come back. Nor even if you hire the entire Microsoft development department. To fit together with the Google development department. Once deleted, it will never come back.
I’ll stop here, otherwise I’ll fill kilometers of hated comments over replication, archiving, and so on.
Please someone on Nasa send the IBM Lotus team to Saturno. Maybe there they’ll find a place where no one wants to kill them because of Notes.
And for those – IT geeks or something – two notes: 1- Everybody uses this piece of stinking wet shit ONLY for email and calendar because they are OBLIGATED to do so because of their jobs. So, f*ck off it it is a db client or whatever! It is a big shit whose only purpose is slow donw the work and raise the stress; 2- This site is called “I hate lotus notes”, if you are not aware. So, lap off, if you like it!!!!

Josh said on July 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm

The company I work for is so obsessed with Lotus Notes it makes my brain hurt thinking about it. The past few employers were smart enough to just use Exchange or Exchange and Lotus Notes for some functioning but not this employer.

The only way I have found to survive day to day is to install the Outlook connector for Domino Servers, yet this comes with some issues where people get blank emails and my mail file is always getting corrupted though still I can survive, just every once in a while I have to use notes to get messages to people whom can’t receive them from the Outlook client.

I don’t understand how anyone could enjoy this program, the interface looks like it was designed for Windows 3.11, it is really unstable running under WINE when I use Kubuntu Linux (the Linux client will not compile), it is terrible for people with disabilities seeing you have to manually edit notes config files to increase the font size and it only works 40% of the time when you do this.

Peter said on June 26th, 2008 at 7:52 am

Dear friends,

I want to ask for your advice here. I’m working in company where almost whole IT is not satisfied with Lotus notes. Unfortunately, there is one small group of Lotus notes defenders, supported by various incentives of IBM, which is doing everything to keep Lotus notes alive, going against any other platform.

That’s why we are preparing some constructive and pragmatic list of arguments why we should’t develop future applications in Lotus Notes and switch to some other platform instead. Our arguments should be good enough to make company management (consisting of non IT people) to decide that Lotus Notes is not suitable for our company.

Could anyone give us some suggestions for pragmatic arguments why Lotus Notes is wrong platform for database application development and help us to win our battle over Lotus Notes?

thank you in advance for any comment which could prevent us from future pain caused by Lotus Notes

Best Regards
Peter

jason parsons said on June 17th, 2008 at 4:42 am

Hi all,

I am in the process of migrating to notes 8.0.1 from outlook. I have imported my contacts fine however I havent the slightest clue how to import personal calendars. Does any one know how to do so without inviting the participants again?

Thank you
Jay

Veronica12 said on May 28th, 2008 at 10:38 am

Dear Col,

Are u working for Lotus support team?

Matthew said on May 16th, 2008 at 5:30 am

Why oh why did they change Notes 8 so that Ctrl-Tab no longer cycles through open windows? I used to use it _all_the_time_. Instead you have to do Ctrl-F8 and select, which means taking your right hand off the mouse…

MissHiss said on May 12th, 2008 at 11:30 pm

I hate Lotus Notes. I have turned down 2 jobs because of this stupid software. One of my close friends works in a company who has Lotus. I am considering cutting out our friendship. I can’t stand jumbled up emails.

Keith said on May 5th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

Hi All,

Hoping someone can help me as I too cannot stand Notes!! I recently starting using Outlook 2003 w/the domino connector (version 6.5.4) and from time to time when I send an email to an unfortunate Notes user they can’t see the text of my email. It dissappears. Any fixes out there? Unfortunatley my company uses notes so I wont’ be able to use the connector if this problem persists. thanks much

Andy said on April 30th, 2008 at 5:48 am

Why oh why is IBM persisting with this outdated resource hog. I cannot think of a single reason why I would choose to use this junk over Outlook. As an E-Mail client it SUCKS ASS big stylee. I know that it was not originally designed as such but what possesses a company to ditch a perfectly running exchange 2000 envirnonment for this beggers belief

PHL said on April 29th, 2008 at 5:30 pm

They who does not know please don�t give your apinon here – Lotus notes vs Exchange War is not fair … to Exchange. Try this all of you that hate notes . Take a MS application that was build in WB 3 and run it on Vista. hmmm yes it does not work. And by the time you get Next version of Ms crap VB 6 will not work ether. All of you ” I hate Lotus notes ” READ this ITS a Application Platform not a just a mail client ” Dumm assies

Lindsey said on April 28th, 2008 at 6:50 pm

My parent company dictated to us with an iron fist that we will use Lotus Notes. The agony of having to tell my users why I can’t simply reset their forgotton password, or why their names.nsf gets corrupted or why the email system just can’t be a simple easy to use program is beyond me. This program has more bugs then the Orkin Man and is so confusing that even Ken Jennings despises it. I would even vote for the old Paul Revere pen and paper method over this pain. This is why being in IT sucks!

Tom Shi said on April 22nd, 2008 at 2:03 am

Lotus Notes 8.0.1 is shining, brightly. Give a try, guys.

George said on April 15th, 2008 at 4:45 pm

I have worked many places that bosted they had a very funtional and successful system. Yes, some did and some did not. But recently I just started working in a company that is world wide and the Lotus SUCKS! BIG TIME!
Go figure, The biggest company works with the worst crap!
It’s a hog with security and presenting nothing but fustration while trying to get things done.
The IT guy seems to be proud of this junk. I think he should take the Lotus home and play with it himself while the rest of us move on and keep op with the changing times.

sylvia said on April 8th, 2008 at 5:45 am

whoever invtented lotus notes must have just had a lobotomy …. from outlook to this …. !! my favourite question: Do you want to save this …. why ask it doesn’t save anything …….

Jay Hawkings said on April 6th, 2008 at 11:36 pm

If I have a keyboard layout for a given country and an operating system that supports that country/layout, why do the imbeciles who wrote Notes think I would want to change that layout JUST for their product? One minute I’m working away fine and the next it’s reconfigured and I’ve lost half an hour trying to figure out why. Every other application is fine – including this web site/browser.

It’s like the children that wrote Notes got a book on the Windows API and some example code off the internet, found it worked and randomly built it crap unwanted functionality into a product.

Notes is the height of true counter-productivity. IBM bought a pup. It’s not got any better in the 10 years I’ve had to use it.

I’m at a loss.

Ryan said on April 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 am

The other posts have covered most of the unintuitive software atrocities that comprise Lotus Notes, so let me just throw out this little bit of icing…

Our IT-provided PCs and Laptops come with an application preinstalled called ZapNotes which is (frequently) used to stop all the Notes related processes when the client hangs, and then restarts them all. IBM made ZapNotes.

I’m serious.

Andrew said on April 2nd, 2008 at 7:22 am

So Wayne thinks it’s a matter of training, eh…?

And exactly what weird dimension do people inhabit who think that anyone should need training in how to use a mail client?

Ah, but it’s not a mail client, is it? No… It’s a db platform. Right. Except that’s not what 99% of users use it for.

And believe me, I have steered clear of ever, ever, EVER trying to develop a db of any kind on this steaming pile of elephant excreta. If the horror (oh, the horror!) of the mail client is anything to go by, trying to write a decent application in it must be somewhat akin to having your spleen removed without anesthetic… by a blind gorilla using only a rusty spoon and a rolled up newspaper.
So I’ll stick to ASP.NET and SQL for quickly and easily developing client independent db apps and not losing the will to live in the process.

In conclusion…

Lotus Notes – as chosen by high up executives, who don’t need to bother with their e-mail, because their poor, poor secretaries suffer through that in stead.

Richard said on March 31st, 2008 at 11:23 am

I use Lotus Notes 8, and I think all of the above is fixed..
ie.OOO is instant
type ahead addressing
HTML emails

I really really like Notes….
PS I don’t think our server has been down in over 2years… where I used to work (they had Exchange) it was down once a week!

Jon said on March 30th, 2008 at 6:05 am

“Also, one of my big issues is having no recent mail address caching to autofill email addresses!”

Lotus Notes does have this feature, maybe your using an old version.

Col said on March 29th, 2008 at 11:20 am

“Send email to another employee that is out of the office and get the AUTO REPLY two HOURS later. What a sweet piece of software.”

Use the latest version and get an immediate reply.

Col said on March 29th, 2008 at 11:01 am

“but in order to get any new application built in Notes you need an army of programmers”

Notes is one of the easiest/fastest application development platforms to work with. It’s common knowledge that developing in C# and .NET requires a lot more manpower.

Col said on March 29th, 2008 at 10:51 am

“Also, one of my big issues is having no recent mail address caching to autofill email addresses!”

Lotus Notes does have this feature, maybe your using an old version.

Unfortunate User said on March 24th, 2008 at 8:59 pm

My employer just switched from Microsoft Webmail to Lotus Notes and it SUCKS. Outlook is the best.

rearden215 said on March 13th, 2008 at 10:10 am

Thrashing Lotus Notes in the year 2008 seems akin to lamenting the 4k memory limits on a TRS-80 with eight inch floppy drives.

On the positive side, Notes serves as an excellent artifact of what the emerging world of distributed computing looked like from a vantage point around 1988 before networks and before Microsoft became the standard.

At that time, personal computers were being placed on nearly everyone’s desk at work and corporate America found itself with the dilemma of managing and integrating the data and work product from all those isolated workstations into something meaningful at the top level of business.

Notes seemed like a grand idea within the context of 5.25 inch floppies, character-based programs and ’sneaker nets’ and there was ever a killer app which could democratize all that information in the organization, Notes was it.

Lotus Development played ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ with it’s future development roadmap and chose the wrong development platform door for Notes: OS/2. Yeah, it was yet another Jim Manzi Mistake in the mold of Lotus Symphony, Lotus Agenda and Lotus Improv- all products which could have been great but just did not make it in business, and a mistake which could have been corrected early, but was not.

So, what the MS Windows world received in Lotus Notes was a kludge from day one as it remains. I developed Notes apps under OS/2 in 1991 and continued trying to develop apps under Windows up to the time IBM bought Lotus Development. And, I hated the work.

The biggest single downfall of Notes was it’s lack of a real database backend, so to speak, but it never really tried to sell itself as having one- developers, like myself, and customers tried to force Notes to act as if it did have one.

Instead of a true db container, we had the Notes Storage Facility (.nsf file) which was pure flat file data storage only a step or two above the facility container architecture of 1-2-3. No relational table joins, no two phase commits, no db cursor- no anything to manage ‘real’ data as the customers were clamoring for! But, it was never meant to be all that. Notes was originally geared more toward managing team collaboration data, discussion text and file directory locations and this is a long way from managing critical data at the business level. Oracle had that market sewed up so why bother?

The problem with Notes is us.

We, as users and developers, insisted on seeing Lotus Notes as being everything to all people and, like the old saying ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.’ is apropos here.

It is probably time to let Notes go the way of Symphony, Agenda and Improv- with warm memories, a few diehard users still loving the tool and a long writeup in Wikipedia. For me, I now use Chandler and iMail under OS X.

Hans Anders said on March 6th, 2008 at 1:52 am

We’re using Notes 8 and it really rocks!

Matt said on March 3rd, 2008 at 9:46 am

The only application on the planet where F5 logs you out! And who the hell thought it would be a good idea to make Ctrl + N = New Database instead of New Email. Seriously, that’s just what the average office user needs …

David Tharp said on February 29th, 2008 at 7:38 am

My day has just been made. After 5 years with Notes, quit working for two years, now I’m back with the same large outfit, and back using Notes. It has some dopey “my work” portal, which solicited my favorite web page. Spontaneously tried the first URL that came to mind, and here I am!

I can’t use Notes, with its deranged user interface and consistent ability to thwart the simplest of tasks, for more than 1/2 hour before saying, out loud, “F***ing Notes!”

Glad I’m not the only one….

There's always a middle way said on February 20th, 2008 at 8:52 am

My handy maxim is that if you only remember one thing about Lotus Notes then remember it’s crap.

That said…. Jeez there are some very dumb people posting on here! Especially the person who took two hours to add a GIF and then managed to screw it up! That has nothing to do with Notes matey….that’s just idiocy.

Aaon said on February 13th, 2008 at 3:51 pm

NSD is running.

Pri said on January 25th, 2008 at 3:38 pm

We sent an email to a client who is using lotus notes and the from email address removed the dots from the email address – is this normal? For example, the sender’s email address is “ab.ce.fg.abc@xyz.com” – in Lotus notes it shows it as “abce.fgabc@xyz.com” – please note the two missing dots. Please let me know if anyone else has seen this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Winkle said on January 19th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

Tim, you sound like an AWESOME developer that you can’t work Notes “out of the box”: can’t see data as soon as it’s added to the db? Of course you can! You actually have to go out of your way to code an application in which you CAN’T see you data. Full text indexes out of date? Well set them to update instantly then. Jesus… you can lead a horse to water.

Bill said on January 17th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

I’ve used Lotus Notes, Outlook, Mail (OS X), Thunderbird and many others. The “stupidest” e-mail client is Lotus Notes, even in its latest incarnation (version 8).

The real problem is that Lotus Notes is not an e-mail client.
It’s more like a synchronized database manager/front end. An e-mail Inbox just happens to be one of the “databases” Notes synchronizes with.

As most people have noted, it makes for a very “unusual” e-mail client. However, for syncing databases with a Notes server, MS, nor anybody else, has no equal. Since all databases are treated equally and e-mail is just another Notes application, it’s hard to make it nice as an e-mail client without doing a lot of special work-arounds. Use it for what it was originally built for and you’ll see the beauty of it.

cbfitz said on December 12th, 2007 at 4:09 pm

How did they sell so much of this lame software?
They used to say “nobody every got fired for picking IBM”…that should change.

Dee said on December 11th, 2007 at 10:18 am

Check this one out!

I just scheduled a meeting and the spell checker highlighted a problem with the meeting start date
“12/12 Repeated word”

Duoh!

Ian said on November 29th, 2007 at 6:40 am

I have just disabled my out of office and while the process completes I have fifteen to 30 minutes to let you all know how much I hate Lotus Notes:
1) Lotus Notes just crashed when I clicked “disable out of office”- Now when I try to start it it gives me the message “an error was encountered”. So I have to shut down the PC.
2) I upgraded to 7.02 and now every time I shut down the computer I have to reinitialize the settings. IT Support is lost as to why this is happening. They keep deleting the contents of the ini file. All works fine until I reboot the computer.
3) The web application continually tells me that I cannot send an email at this time. I can read email, I can prepare a response but hit send and the thing chokes. Give me simplicity instead of this rediculous system.
4) Their mail search system is illogical, impractical and slow.
5) Let me manage my own document retention
6) I don’t care if this is a “Development Platform”. My company uses this platform as an email server and that email server sucks.

Rachelm920 said on November 14th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

Some Things I hate about Lotus Notes
1. The Calendar SUCKS! I went from using Microsoft Outlook to this P.O.S. a few years back and I couldn’t use the “tasks” anymore which I used religiously in outlook. Now I am constantly forgetting my “tasks”.
2. It goes down all the time!!!!!!
3.The stationery area cannot be sorted by the stationery name. I use this a lot it helps me remember my tasks (see #1). Therefore whenever I create a new stationery I have to re-create them all, or it will show up in the wrong place, (I title them “Monday Report A” etc.) and once again I will forget my “tasks”.
4.I HATE THE STUPID SPLASH SCREEN!!!!! It takes forever for it to load, and the splash screen stays on top of every other program you have on your PC. I’ve tried to disable it, but unlike every other software you cannot!
Obviously the developers weren’t thinking of users when they implemented this software. I am an Information Tech. student, and one of the major things that is emphasized in creating software, databases etc. is to get a users opinion before releasing it!!!!OMG I wish my company would just go back to outlook, or even develop their own software. That would be even better!!!!

Ericka said on October 31st, 2007 at 3:41 pm

as a designer, not only am I unhappy because they won’t let me use a mac, I HATE lotus notes. It is the most un-intuitive piece of crap software I have ever used….not to mention I have no idea what I’m doing because my company never trained me….2 years here and I’m still stumbling around on Lotus notes…thats how bad it is!!!

Ola said on October 12th, 2007 at 4:38 am

Ctrl + Break – is the help when the shit freezes time after time

Poor little technophobes can't handle a different metaphor said on September 24th, 2007 at 10:26 pm

And this is the ninth comment. … and you said Notes is lame? Get a life!

If you are using R5 then I pity you, you are using ten year old software … as bad as using ten year old exchange.

If you are using 6.5.4 then it is only two major releases behind. Face it, it is not Notes that is brain dead it is your software administrators.

And by the way Notes is NOT mail. It is an application development platform. If you are using it for nothing more than mail, then congratulations, you get the award for using the most expensive mail client in the universe.

Islander said on September 5th, 2007 at 1:29 am

Aaaarrggh! I have just changed companies and the new company works with Lotus Notes 5. I feel like ending it all. My productivity has decreased by 90% as I p..s about trying to do even simple things. I can’t customise it, I can’t do anything with it. I simply hate it, hate it, hate it. My will to live is decreasing by the minute and I am already thinking about changing jobs. OH Lord, what have I done to deserve this!!!!

LotusNo! said on August 23rd, 2007 at 10:35 am

Lotus Notes has that super-modern-Windows3.1-look interface that makes me wanna smile everyday.

If only there were more cliparts to make me happier…

Anna said on August 4th, 2007 at 10:31 am

“Arrggghhh!” I shout to the foul white screen as Lotus Notes sucks away all my computer’s resources! Fie to the fugly calendars! Why can’t I copy and past all that I need to? What is wrong with my filters, my precious filters that functioned without flaw in Outlook and Thunderbird?!

A pox on your Domino server!!

admin said on July 5th, 2007 at 2:36 pm

Ahhhhhhggggg!! It hurts to look at it!