The Healing Process
The healing process is started by sharing your thoughts. Release your pain by sharing your experiences of Lotus Notes with me and the others here using the form below. Constructive criticism is of course encouraged (maybe we can stumble over some good ideas that IBM actually want to adopt?!?), but i know some good old fashion bitchin goes a long way to making me feel better, so feel free. Just keep it clean…..ish. Post your error messages, stories of woe (or successes) both will provide either hope or solace.
Now….. You ready?….. Vent away.
1,358 Responses on “The Healing Process”
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I notice that often when someone points out a legitimate problem they have using Lotus Notes, a Notes supporter replies with something like, “It’s really easy. All you have to do is press CTRL-ALT-F9 while holding the Shift key with your nose…” A user shouldn’t need to sit through a 5-day training class or read through a 900 page manual in order to work send receive and organize e-mails.
I used to be a certified Lotus Notes trainer, and from my first day using it, I thought the e-mail and calendaring were ****. The biggest problem is that Notes was originally designed to do document management, workflow management, collaborative processes, etc. Then, as an afterthought, Lotus decided to tack on e-mail and calendaring. Unfortunately it was like trying glue a steering wheel onto a horse and expecting it to work.
Worse yet, Lotus/IBM have continued to make the e-mail and calendaring just another Lotus Notes database, when it is painfully obvious (to anyone but a Notes programmer or administrator) that the Notes UI and its underlying architecture are counter-intuitive to users of e-mail.
To all you Lotus Notes supporters, I’ll admit that Lotus Notes can do document and workflow management stuff well, but if you want to use Lotus Notes for that, let users have a separate program that is designed to do e-mail and calendaring for the e-mail and calendaring. Gee, what a novel idea.
EVERYTHING is harder to do in Lotus notes and symphony!!!!!!
Why do these companies even think they are “competitors” with MS OFFICE!!!??? It’s insane!!!! Even more crazy are the companies who actually prefer it over outlook and office!!!! GRRRRRRR!!!!
Oh my gosh! This is by far the worst program I’ve ever used! I can completely understand why someone would be passionate enough about this app to go out and by a domain name with it in the name. We’re getting all these weird errors and now we can’t create new users anymore because Admin can’t find the registration server. We can’t rename users for the same reason. I’m trying to reinstall Notes for the other IT guy and it won’t let me in because it says the password is expired and needs to be reset, but it won’t let me reset it anywhere! Wow. I’m so happy to say we are moving to Outlook Exchange in a week or two. Praise God!!
Today, I downgraded from version 8.5 to version 7. At least Sametime will allow me to log in. It does not work in version 8.5. I don’t know if its our own IT implementation or simply LN. Maybe both conspiring against me.
Lotus Notes is quite simply the worst program I have ever used in my entire life, and I have worked with some **** programs. To note all the problems with it here would waste my youth.
Archive time,
Notes error: Document has been deleted
Sound familiar? Place fork on table prongs up, arch head and neck back, thrust eye on to fork prongs with as much force as possible. That is what using Lotus Notes Feels like to me.
Notes developers must eat with plastic sporks.
Lotus notes is trying to kill me.
Ray Moro is that short for Moron?
One of those drooling idiots
Just checking in. Notes still sucks…hard.
Why, Lord? What did I do to deserve working at a company that uses Lotus. It really makes me back over my own head with my car. If it were physically possible, I really think I’d do it.
________________________
Dear IBM,
Please add a feature to Lotus notes that allows you back over your own head.
Thanks,
Lotus Users Everywhere
I really dislike Lotus Notes. I admit that i dont have proper training with Lotus Notes, but you shouldnt have to have in depth training to read email. First i was upgraded to Notes 8.1 from 6.5. Thank god i can finally support more than one user per computer. We are moving at the speed of light here.
I was running in advanced mode, but it is such a resource hog, that it was taking forever to do anything. This is on a 6 month old laptop with dual cores and 4 GB of RAM. WHY? (by the way after hours of searching I found some registry settings for Notes that can be made that speed things up. But why do I need to make registry edits and search for hours to get an email program to run in a somewhat acceptable speed?!)
Then I had to reset up replication. Dont know why I have to even think about this, much more than making sure a check box is marked. (I know that it gives a lot of flexibility, but as an email client it sucks) I then had to make sure that it used the local replica. I went to the properties of the mail icon and set it. however everytime i came back it was switching to a different replica. I found that there is a setting in the mode properties that over rides it. Why is the same setting found in multiple places when it is over riden in some places? WTF?
Trying to sync contacts with the server? have to do it MANUALLY in basic mode, which is all most computers can a handle. This is an email client again not Photoshop.
Every time you need to change what should be a basic option, i turns into a hours long scavenger hunt to find the setting. It is not user friendly at all. Documentation is scarce.
And guess what, depending on the database desgin that you are using, the supported functions can change from one user to the next. That always makes if fun when someone says, you just click here and that option does not exist for you.
People say that Notes is not an email client. Well guess what, it is. It has database functionality, but in most places I see it is used mainly as an email client. And it sucks at that. I rather have Outlook, Thunderbird, or Mac Mail any day of the week and use a seperate application for the database front end.
I hate Lotus Notes.
Help! Just started my new job at we have Lotus Notes, not Outlook! I’m a first time LN user who has no idea how to use this frickin software, but I’m slowly getting there. One question though – whenever I get an email with a website link (or intranet) in it, if I click on it, it opens in LN. Which is fine. Except if I use LN, there doesn’t seem to be a back button like Internet Explorer has. Can anyone help? Or alternatively, is there a way I can set it up so any link I click on is opened by IE rather than LN?? Thanks guys, man I wish I still had Outlook…..
I am a Lotus Notes User by force. We migrated two years ago. I have heard many reasons about why we “have” to use Lotus Notes. The reasons are all asinine. The true reason why our companies make use this crapware is money. Lotus Notes is cheaper for a company to use than Outlook is MONEY. Period. The funny thing is that we have Outlook installed on our computers, but we cannot use them as an email client. The only thing that I think that lotus notes does better than MS-Outlook is the ability to set up recurring dates on with custom dates with and deletes meetings that would occur on weekends.
From the other posts, someone said that Lotus Notes will have a newer version. Please do not say this. I need them to change and make them program better than what we are working with now.
Here are some “Notes” to the Lotus Notes developers if you are reading this.
1. Get rid of the blue arm cursor. What decade are we in?
2. Combine the archives and inbox into the collaspable tree. No wants to click to another window to see what’s in the archive.
3. Allow me to create a task with a single form box like Outlook. This is the single most productivity add that you can do for anyone.
4. Allow me to use color coding with flags follow ups. (This is a nice feature to have)
5. Do not rearrange my columns when I delete an email. I put them that way for a reason.
6. Allow me to cascade my column settings to other folders.
To Islander and other users of what are now unsupported version of Lotus Notes I would encourage you to take your frustration out on your IT department for not upgrading to the latest release rather than publishing to this forum.
Spend a few minutes with Notes 8.5.1 and your will be pleasantly surprised. If you would like Notes to look like Outlook this is a great reference document – http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes8-outlook/
Notes 8 is thoroughly frustrating. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but actually running under JAVA has to be the idiotic idea of the century.
Take yesterday – I had 2 MS Windows security patches to install, and it went to reboot my system. Notes would NOT respond, and when I came in this morning it was STILL not rebooted! WTF!?
Please IT directors, do not suggest this product to your company. Your users will thank you.
Interesting article:
“If you buy Lotus Domino because you like the email system, it’s like buying a Porsche because you like the ashtray,”
http://www.cio.com.au/article/351964/boystown_updates_lotus_notes/?fp=4&fpid=15
I have to use Lotus Notes very day – and I really, really hate it.
It does not work on a Mac. I currently have to use it on the internet and have re-log in every 3 minutes. My IT department sent me a Citrix client application – but this is SLOW and does not enable me to access attachments from my office server or hard disc – so it’s useless.
Nothing is intuitive – NOTHING – everything needs long explanations from the IT people. Everything is centrally controlled. The icons are truly naff. It is like going back to 1986. You cannot attach attachments in a neat window – they are randomly distributed across the message.
If you send to receive form Outlook it radically changes the look of your outgoing and incoming mails.
I have passed these comment sin slightly sanitised form to the IT department but they are locked in the clutches of Lotus Notes.
One other point – it is extremely difficult + uncomfortable to read.
A major problem for an e-mail application
Engineers designing a product for engineers. That’s what LN feels like to me. Things are so cryptic and the complete antithesis to “user-friendly”. IBM are you listening? Do you even care what customers think?
Just one example (of thousands): when you use their ‘search’ function, it returns results … but you can not show “Folder” as one of the results columns! You can do this in Outlook and even cheap Outlook Express. But IBM can’t figure how to configure this for LN? Gimme a break.
So, my Company uses Lotus Notes 7 and will soon be upgrading to 8.5…woohoo!
Today’s Notes misery comes courtesy of:
1. I print out a very long email…of maybe 20 pages or more. On each successive page the font gets larger and larger so that by the end of the email only a few lines are printing on each page. Why should this be? and why can’t Notes deal with this properly?
2. I click on ‘New Memo’, you would think a quick and easy function! Wrong….5 minutes later the ‘New Memo’ screen appears and I can finally start typing my email, except…..I can’t. Because I try and enter the address of the person I’m sending it to and it takes another 5 minutes to search the address database. When it’s finally founf the name it’s looking for I tab down to the contents section…big mistake, another 2 or 3 minutes for the cursor to move down.
At least it’s Friday and I can be free of the curse of Lotus Notes for 2 whole days.
Some here say that Lotus/Domino a great development environment!
Maybe in the 80s it was but this is 2010, the web is alive and kicking some 15 years for gods sake! Replication was needed back then when everything was out of sync because connectivity was so difficult and don’t start with how it’ still relevant, only in very special occasions. As for the document-db approach, it is relevant in rare scenarios where huge scaling requirements are set (in which Domino would do you no good in the first place).
Lotus Notes is a good development platform only for the ignorant developers that were trained at it and never bothered to look at anything else…and 95% of them did so in the previous millennium.
Tying up an enterprise with this POS should be a crime nowadays. However, getting out of it could be difficult, especially if you have the same complacent devs for the past 20 years!
Sorry, but I love Notes/Domino. I think if you hate LN (Or anything else for that matter) , means you don’t get it.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool. Do you have Certified Notes Developers ? No ? Well maybe that’s your problem too!
We recently moved from Notes to Outlook. Since it looks like most people are Outlook experts here, can someone tell me how to stop an Outlook action? For example, I clicked on a folder and got an hourglass for a long time because it’s a big folder. In Notes I can hit Ctrl-Break and make it stop. How do I do that in Outlook? Thanks.
I have 7 emails selected but the bottom left status bar says I have 5 selected. Notes also says I have 397 unread messages in my Inbox, which is probably close to reality, but it is only displaying the last 12. The scrollbar thinks I am at the top so it is not letting me go up either by clicking on the up arrow or dragging the bar up and down. Clicking elsewhere and back again does not help so I have to close the mail tab and reopen it. Nice to see software in its 8th generation/version/whatever working so well.
I used Notes since IBM forced its employees to use it back in the late 1990′s. One of the good things about me quitting IBM was not having to use Notes again.
To put it nicely, Notes is a piece of garbage. Never met a fellow IBMer who ever liked it.
We joke about how IBM should have a CLAIM/ILC labor code to charge all the hours wasted because of Notes non-productivity and “suckness”.
Just trying to get my Outlook mail hit send receive, waiting, waiting, waiting …. 5 minutes goes by …oops, and error !!!! Ah no problem, I’ll just click on details and find out what the problem is….. (hold on, it’s a bit long) “Task ‘Mircosoft Exchange’ reported error (0x8004010f): ‘The operation failed. An object cannot be found.’
NICE !!!!!! Now THAT’S a helpful error. Why oh why do I have to deal with MS crapware on a daily basis ?! Make it go away, it gives me headaches.
Someone in my company talked to a couple of Notes experts (brought in to address our many concerns with the product, something we never needed with Outlook/Exchange) about speed performance issues, and here’s what he discovered.
The Client is Single threaded. Perform an action on the client and it will not return control to the UI until it has received confirmation from the server the request has been completed. I asked if there was any intention of creating a multi-threaded client and apparently it’s on the road map but focus is on the server side first.
The database is non transactional. In fact, it is not a database at all it is NSF which stands for Notes Structured Filesystem.
I was experiencing delays updating reoccurring calendar entries. I had assumed the client would create a request which would be passed to the server. The server would then update all fields in the appropriate tables related to that request. Apparently not. From what I can ascertain to update a recurring meeting, the client sends a request to the server for an update of the first calendar entry, single-threaded UI freezes Notes client waiting for response from server, server makes update to that single record and replies to the client, client sends a request to the server for an update of the next individual instance of the calendar entry, single-threaded UI freezes Notes client waiting for response from Server, rinse and repeat.
While this explanation does not fix any of the issues it does answer that burning question “What the are you doing Notes?”
Best. Software. Ever.
Also, lest I be accused of lying again, this information is from dedicated Notes experts from IBM, so if they gave me faulty info, I’m just passing it along.
Why oh why does Lotus Notes insist on stealing application focus so often?
And yes, before the LNotes fans ask, I am running LN 8.5.x with the latest ‘fix’ pack.
I hate it, and have yet to meet anybody in my department who has a good word to say about LNotes. (I work in the Technology Department…)
I’m implementing Hyper-V Datacenter, with SCCM, SCVM, Exchange 2010 DAG, 2008 R2 etc… Just imagine how much a pain is it to me to use Lotus Notes !!!
Seriously, it just can’t compare to Outlook as an email client (email what ? is it important today? nooooo
i work for a fortune 500 company in an IT related department. we, in fact, have an entire department within our tech support division entirely dedicated to LN… an utter waste of resources. prior to the conversion, e-mail issues were routed to the general tech support number. now, it is dubbed the “black hole”… (sigh)
My company made the switch from Outlook to Lotus Notes email a couple of years ago, I’ve been able to get along OK with it. Then again, I’m an open source enthusiast who swaps Linux distros on my personal equipment every time a new one comes out. I’m used to learning new stuff every evening. HOWEVER, I’ve grown to really dislike Lotus Notes email system because it seems to cause problems for external users using Outlook. Companies we’ve worked with for years have expressed their dislike at suddenly getting meeting requests that don’t seem to update their Outlook calendars like they used to.
I’ve embarassingly had to “train” clients how to deal with e-correspondence from us.
Also, I’ve not figured out how to attach an old email thread to a new email message in a way an external Outlook user can open it (I can do it for internal folks, it shows up as a “link” in the Notes email). In Outlook I could attach an Outlook mail file and anybody with Outlook could open it.
Oh well, I’m keeping the faith that Outlook is coming back. We made the switch because of a merge with a larger company running Lotus Notes for email, and word around the campfire is that it was cheaper to switch people to Lotus than buy a bunch of Outlook licenses for the previous Lotus users. I’m sure after enough headaches our company will switch over. We’ve still got exchange servers running with all our public folders accessible by a few people.
In fairness, this does seem to be an issue with your IT department and not with Scrotes.
I went on vacation, 7 work days. Came back, started up notes. It has been over an hour and a half and Notes still has not managed to provide a view of my mail so that I can work with it. It tells me that “this is view is being updated.”
I hear these days that “Lotus Knows.” I agree: it knows how not to find your email. It knows how not to provide quality software. It knows how not to be an email system.
We’ve just upgraded to Lotus Notes 8.5 and it’s just as bad as 6.5. You still have the randomly disappearing calendar entries and just hanging on the splash screen but it’s got some new tricks as well!
It tries to emulate a proper e-mail client by allowing you to authenticate via your Windows credentials. If your user profile gets corrupt and needs to be rebuilt, you then have to get the Notes ID file resent to your PC, thereby generating more unnecessary work for your IT dept.
Buttons randomly disappear from toolbars. Although you can get rid of this by completely removing and reinstalling the Notes client, why should you have to?
It’s the worst Windows running product I’ve ever had to support.
Maybe it’s all user error. If so that certainly proves that the interface is poorly designed and counter intuitive.
Lotus Notes makes me want to smash things with a hammer – then cry.
On a much happier note, rumour has it that this will be the last version of Notes we ever use. Please, please let it be true. I can’t take much more of this.
“It’s the worst Windows running product I’ve ever had to support.
Maybe it’s all user error. If so that certainly proves that the interface is poorly designed and counter intuitive.”
It seems Notes and IBM Rational garbage SW compete for who can be worse in UI design.
My favorite 8.5 feature is the one where I double click on an email message, you know, to actually read it, and Notes locks up for about 10 minutes, then crashes. As near as I can tell, the upgrade to 8.5 was pretty much all about this new feature and the color blue.
I was in Outlook moving and deleting emails along with moving, deleting and renaming folders. It was fast and worked exactly as expected. Nearly brought tears to my eyes. What took 10 minutes would have taken at least an hour in Notes.
Oh by the way, I noticed that F5 (along with F9 still) now does refresh. Don’t know if it was IBM or someone in our IT dept that remapped it but that’s one small step in the right direction.
In a meeting the other day a manager asked how many people are still having problems with Notes. Out of 20+ people all but two raised their hands. Sounds about right. Perhaps those two had zoned out and didn’t hear the question.
@Petetm re: “Hey, I’m looking for a Notes connector to Exchange but can’t find one. Why? Because MS wont’t let IBM/Lotus integrate with ANYTHING MicroSUCK (see, I can do this too). Here’s a tip, people want OPEN SOFTWARE !!!!!!”
Actually, you’ve got that precisely reversed. There are Exchange connectors for Thunderbird and Evolution, both of which actually *are* open clients, but the only third-party connector that I’ve been able to find for Notes is IBM’s DAMO, which is inadequate for a variety of reasons, not to mention unstable. I have tried and tried to find any sort of Notes connector for any other client, to no avail.
I LOVE lotus notes! it helps me sleep at night.
Yeah, me too! (I think it’s the sheer exhaustion from having my users scream at me about how I’ve disrupted their ordinarily productive, profitable work processes).
I have used Outlook for most of my IT career and had the opportunity to use Lotus Notes as a contractor with IBM for 6 months and I can tell you that I never could figure out how to make it work for me like Outlook. Sure it has more features, but I really just wanted to manage my e-mail and found it to be ridiculously difficult. The whole replication process is a pain in the butt. Rather than rant though, I’m hoping one of the IBM’ers who monitor this site can help me with an LN problem (cuz I still have to support LN). I have a user who gets an embedded link with spaces in e-mails and when she clicks on the link LN resolves the URL by deleting the spaces resulting in a 404 Not Found error in her broswer. Other LN users configurations insert the unicode %20 (in the same e-mail) and they get to the link fine. What’s the configuration that controls this? I posted this question on the official IBM forum but nobody seems to monitor that site.
This is great stuff. Here is a great and clean joke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd0svVWfFbo
******* ***** Installer…
******* ***** Client…
******* ***** Server Component…
I cant believe any ******* moron out there actually likes this piece of ****…well I guess I can…they’ll be smelly spotty greasy virgin nerds who think open source software is good as well…
******* *******…
Lotus notes sucks mother ******* arse!
lol
this post makes me wonder just what comments the moderator would reject.
heh – consider yourself moderated.
@BWhiteside
It is Windows – not Lotus Notes. Always, even in DOS time you can press ALT and numbers on numeric pad to get characters.
If you don’t know about it – then every Windows program will surprise you.
Petetm says:
June 2, 2010 at 5:46 am
Hey, I’m looking for a Notes connector to Exchange but can’t find one. Why? Because MS wont’t let IBM/Lotus integrate with ANYTHING MicroSUCK (see, I can do this too). Here’s a tip, people want OPEN SOFTWARE !!!!!!
ANSWER:
People want a software that is not faulty, functional, simple to use and user friendly. Something they can rely on. None of the features of Lotus Notes.
When we moved from MS Outlook to LN we lost many e-mails, after migration I have 2-years old meetings popping up and LN does not allow me to get rid of them because it was from someone else; to set the reminder I have to rember to click on ‘Notify me’ twice because after the first click it turns on.
Training? I thought that the current trend is to make things self-explanatory?
Come on. All LN Lovers, try ANY other mailing software (any other software, too) before you dare to comment here, guys. Because you make a mockery of yourselves. On the other hand – ‘every little help’
BTW, should it not be MicroSuckS?…
By pressing “Replay to all” I am getting an e-mail sent to everybody. MYSELF INCLUDED.
Ingenius logic.
@PETEM – yes, the movie Dumb And Dumber must have been about the authors of Lotus Notes ****.
You need to grow up and start working with adults. Let me speak to you by an example. I will be harsh, naturally, and you have the right to get offended.
One must be Lotus-Notes-minded to seperate the 2 files (or folders perhaps?…)- working inbox and archives – in the way that they become non-operative and non-cooperative. Perhaps this kind of software is good for total laymen amatours who send one meaningless e-mail per a quarter – but not for working people who treat – or want to treat e-mails as a legitimate and legal way of communication. Because in this way all information older than eg. 2 weeks, 2 months or whatever the time for archiving is set is just expired – as someone called it. PETEM; thus, your answer to me is irrelevant, overdue, expired and ****. By now, you do not exist as a customer -for example. If you do not understand such a simple issue, try to go back to school, because also information of your education is EXPIRED. Thus you have no education. You have to start from the kindergarten. And thus your answer is also ****, irrelevant and not professional – or should I call it EXPIRED? Obviously, this type of example is pushed to the edge but perhaps now you get somewhat more understanding of normal working environment.
You do back-ups to look at them from time to time, right? Kind of souvenir? Or a memoire?
More about some oh-how-bright answers – I also appreciate individuality but one has to be a total MORON to go against all commonly accepted templates (whoever they come from… would it be MS or Linux???), to which most of users and I would expect advanced users got used to.
Examples – mentioned already by some other victim use of the button F5, which does not refresh LN – I pray, why should it if this is what it usually does in so many programmes? Next time I will be carefull pressing the button ENTER because it may format some disc. Hopefully IBM server; oh I wish.
Whoa… you’re saying you do a “reply to all” and you get the email you sent delivered back to you? How did you do that?
I want that feature.
Die in a fire Lotus Notes!!!
GAH, Im going to get a heart attack using this software sooner or later.
My workplace has just announced the plan to decommission Lotus Notes & the Domino server.
HOORAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11
Do you know what they plan to replace it with ?
Where do you work? Are you hiring? Just kidding! I think.
Where do I send my resume?!?!?!?!
Got any openings?
new mail interface annoyance: if i accidentally move a folder to become a subfolder of another folder (e.g. by inadvertently moving the mouse up or down while clicking the folder), there is then no easy way to restore the folder to the top-level because you cannot drag a folder to the top level.
You should be able to do this
I’ve can do it in my old version of notes.
Grab the folder and drag it to just above the top level folder that it is currently in.
A horizontal line should appear – release the mouse button and your folder will be moved.
Looks like you can’t change the order of the top level folders (in version 6.5) they are just sorted alphanumerically.
Learn how to use a mouse.
Just use Undo. Oh wait, this is Notes we’re talking about. Nevermind.
ok ok, I can honestly say that I gave it my best shot for a year trying to use Notes as email client.
It’s NOT user friendly!!! All of our users keep even the IT dept. keep contacting the notes admin to do stuff.
It’s Heavy, a Pain to setup and install.
Great for apps maybe… but sucks as an email client.
We are going to googlelize!!! woo hoo!
You’re right.
Using it just for mail makes no sense.
Your statement validates our point. If it was great or even good at email (and calendar) then it would make sense to use it just for email. After all, comments posted here talk about how much better and cheaper it is on the IT side. And what about the users who do use more of the software’s capabilities? Should they have to be saddled with such **** for email?
Using it for anything makes no sense. I work for a large, multi-national company which requires us to use Lotus Notes. Scheduling a meeting is a joke. We are required to use two applications for the process. One (in Notes) that understands where the rooms are, and the Lotus Calendar app to actually schedule the meeting. Of course, the two don’t talk so you can’t actually figure out who’s available when. Apparently, Lotus Knows how not to make things easy.
@Kam
Doesn’t make sense to use it just for email & calendar. There are much cheaper web-based solutions that will do that for you.
It is much cheaper and better than getting all the licenses and servers required to run Sharepoint.
If set up and administered properly (by certified Lotus professionals) and using the latest version (8.5.1) it does email & calendaring as well (and more securely) than any other solution.
Seems to me a lot of people posting here have administrators who have no idea how to configure their Domino servers.
@David
There is no reason you should have to access two databases to book a room for your meeting. Even in my version of Notes(6.5), I can book a room directly from my meeting document.
Your databases are not set up properly.
The problem is with your Notes administrators.
I have the misfortune to use Notes in my job. I also have to support this POS (I work in Desktop Support). Everyday I get at least 10 reports that Notes just will not open. No error message, nothing, just will not open.
The other thing that is a real pain is “NSD is running”. There is no relevant information stored anywhere on the users laptop to say why Notes crashed.
Other Notes tricks include randomly disappearing calendar entries, every e-mail in a users Inbox showing as unread, creating a new e-mail locking a users machine for 5 minutes and Notes crashing if you have the audacity to try attaching a PDF to an e-mail.
In relation the other high end features of Notes/Domino, nobody in the organisation uses them. They’re too busy battling the poorly designed user interface.
Let’s put this another way. Notes is a car, it comes with integrated amazing Sat Nav, award winning in car entertainment system, brilliant suspension and massage seats.
The car won’t start!
Would you buy that car?
E-mail and scheduling are the Bread and Butter (98%) of what our users want from Notes. The designers seem completely oblivious to this.
No. If we compare LN with a car, it doesn’t come with an amazing SatNav or massage seat.
Don’t call it a car, though, it’s an Universal Moving Platform.
Its driver side door opens inward. That’s very cool, but you have to use the back hatch to actually get into the car.
The car won’t start if there is another car with engine running nearby.
Its intake and exaust go inside the cabin.
Its accelerator and brake pedals are under the seat. You tuck your feet under, to reach them.
But it’s got extremely powerful engine! Isn’t that cool? Oh, by the way, you have to keep your feet on the clutch pedal all the time, and press as hard as you can, or it will slip under all that torque. That’s the new cool way of using the clutch – you take your foot off, it disengages.
Yep.
@alegr: Best. Post. Ever.
And if you don’t like the way it drives remember: It’s MORE than a just a car. It’ll plow your fields and wash your windows and re-roof your house and monitor your stocks and immunize your children. If you can’t use it then you clearly are a moron who needs more driver training to use this wonderful contraption. Bah.. you Notes-car bashers make me sick. I suppose you’d rather drive your POS Ford, Chevy, GM, Toyota, Nissan, etc. etc.? Why, those are just cars for criminy’s sakee! Imbeciles.
“CTRL+N” opens New Databse or New Application depending on notes version. Why would I want to do that? Why would any other user than a Notes developer want to create a new notes database?
Why cant that open a new mail instead or ANYTHING more useful?
Because the shortcut is Ctrl-M, for new Message. Have you tried using that?
Hey Guys!!!
I would like to share the great news that our company has finaly decided to move from f*cking Lotus-Notes to the lesser of the two evil … namely Outlook.
I am such a happy guy, I love you all!!!
um – that’s great if you are only using Notes for mail & calendar.
by the way, i love how ibm defends lotus notes by criticizing its critics for comparing it to other software products. ok yes, if the universe were empty of all things but myself and a computer running only lotus notes and i knew nothing else and had no frame of reference whatsoever to draw from my life or experiences, then yes i may then appreciate lotus notes on some level.
tried using it for a year as an email client and calendaring client. it gets slower the larger your mail folders become, and any maintenance on those folders risks sending your notes replica into an inconsistent state rendering it unusable. i’ve still never successfully archived a large folder (> 10k messages) even with our admins’ help. our webmail at work is one hour behind realtime (why????), making it fairly useless. the response times for doing EVERYTHING in notes are by far the greatest barrier to user-friendliness, but there are so many unintuitive functions and behaviors of notes. the whole concept of editing and saving a sent message is so odd. it sends a duplicate message to recipients but only keeps a single copy in your sent box.. whY??? if i modify and save a calendar entry it only saves locally not updating invitees calendars. why would i ever want to do that??? notes appears to be based on a centralized database server model, yet the line between what happens locally and what happens globally is very unclear, and that is a big source of the frustration with users. it’s extremely embarrassing to do something globally you thought was happening locally, and it can be disastrous to do something locally you thought was happening globally. notes deviates from the normal ui patterns for an email or calendaring client and on top of that doesn’t provide cues or warning messages to inform a user what’s going on. unintuitive/unconventional ui + unresponsiveness + silent or cryptic warnings and erros = record worst user experience.
So, I’ve been accused of lying by Petetm. He won’t tell me what I’m lying *about* because that would involve facing up to his own inadequacies and those of his beloved software (and by beloved, I mean all 972 pages of his Notes “Quick Start Guide” are stuck together), but let’s assume that it’s about two things: Notes closing other programs upon launch and being able to run rules by hand.
1) I have verified (and had others verify) that, if a user has *any program* open with “Lotus Notes” in the title (e.g., if I have this site open in a Web browser), the Notes client will detect it as a running Notes instance and want to close it. I can reproduce this issue 100% of the time on multiple systems, and Kam has verified it as well. This is a minor but stupid issue.
2) Being able to run, not create, rules by hand. Apparently the Notes apologists don’t understand the difference between “running” a rule and “creating” a rule, so let me explain. In other email programs, when one creates a rule, one usually has the choice to allow it to run in the background automatically OR to run it on demand as needed. If anyone can explain to me how to get Notes to do the latter WITHOUT writing an agent, I’d love to hear it. Our company’s dedicated IBM rep and support engineers indicated that doing so is impossible, but I’m sure the Notes lovers can prove me wrong.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have found the answer to #1, and it’s actually the fault of our corporate IT department. They created a wrapper executable which checks to see if Notes is running and closes what it thinks is Notes if so. In short, I actually cannot blame Notes, per se, for this particular issue.
people PLEASE
try and watch this clip about lotus notes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFNtblwU5Ek
Add a comment of hate
as every thing they say is a LIE
I watched it but somehow I keep missing the part where they talk about user satisfaction and productivity.
Thanks Justin for leaving me and my 2 IBM Colleagues out of your tyrade.
Cheers
You pleople are not thinking. The thing with Lotus Notes is that is allows the user to program I/O MotherBUS OLE SQL Server to dB and Ob functions. Reading and sending mail is secondary to the MotherBUS features because of the dB programming capabilities. Database and MotherBASE OLE Mismatch BD Replication Source MotherBUS SQL is only for Bd EtherBUS T1 LAN/WAN processes. THINK PEOPLE! THINK!
notes hater pretending (badly) to be notes lover ?
I just want to know why it takes an hour to load (sometimes 2 if it crasheds the rest of my system and I have to reboot)
and if there is a “fix” (other than to trash it, which my company won’t do)
You should talk to your administrator.
My Notes takes about 30 seconds to start
- that includes pulling roaming profile files from the server.
(version 6.5 of Notes – about 7 years old)
“He had delusions of adequacy.” — Walter Kerr
Why does the Lotus Notes splash screen adopt an always on top approach. Yes I know I have opened Notes. Yes I know it is taking forever to load. Please I would like to do some other things while it loads.
Just click on the splashscreen – and it will go away!
ummm, not until the loading process has passed the “Loading…Please Wait” stage, which is after all the issues are resolved.
I HATE LOTUS NOTES!!!
I can’t believe how much of my time is wasting on this POS sorry excuse for software. The technical architects of Lotus Notes are clearly the worst sort of software developers who should never be allowed to write anymore software after Lotus Notes is discontinued (5 more years?)
Right now our Lotus Notes server is down. Can you guess how I know this? It’s because every time I click anywhere in Lotus Notes, the entire GUI completely freezes up showing a white screen and stays this way for about 5 minutes … then it comes back with a dialog box saying that the “remote system” is not responding… What kind of idiots wrote the code for this, and who are the incompetent F***s that allowed it to be shipped? All modern IBM software is **** either due to technical or cost reasons (usually both), but Notes takes the cake.
I’m so glad that my company is migrating to MS Outlook 2007 … I can’t wait.
Let me jump in ahead of the Notes Fanbois and say:
The problem is clearly you. You need to upgrade. Your infrastructure is inadequate. You need training. Notes is more than email!
Man, I crack me up.
Ever heard of a local replica of that data you are trying to get at?
It may be that your Domino server is down, but it may be that the knotted string reader between you and the server is broken or in a spaghetti wait state.
Try taking a local replica next time the server is up or your network is not down and make sure you set it to be scheduled whenever you are online. This will keep it current.
Then you will get whatever performance your laptop/PC can handle.
“Ever heard of a local replica of that data you are trying to get at?”
Why should the GUI screen lock and become white just because the remote server is down and I haven’t setup a “local replica” and some POS remote server called “Domino” has crashed again?
Anyway, I have no desire to find out anything about “local replicas.” I would have to waste many hours or days trying to figure out how to do it, maybe even weeks, going through the idiotically designed maze of Notes menus and interfaces. And knowing how buggy Lotus Notes is and how its insane its interface is, there is a high risk that I would destroy all of my previous records and/or stop receiving new emails. I’m a very busy person so I don’t have time to learn the intricacies of the IBM Notes/Domino Goldberg machine. My email is also very critical to me, and I cannot risk more data loss and service interruption than I already have to bare with Notes.
I would rather just wait for us to migrate to MS Outlook. I know that in the properties menu I will find the option to either download emails to local disk and delete them from the server or download them from the server to local disk but also leave them on the remote server. Regardless of what the default setting is, I know that the GUI screen would lock and go completely white if the remote email server goes down. This is nothing special about Outlook, even the pico email client, released in 1989, did not freeze when remote servers went down.
Mmmmm curious.I don’t see why fixoutlook.org is relevent to this site.
Anyway…
I sysadmin a Notes/Domino infrastructure. We have about 15-odd Notes/Domino servers hosting things like discussion forums, 200 various corporate applications,instant messaging, project and Sales management ssytems, video conferencing, SMTP mail gateway… Our Intranet and Website is driven totally on Notes servers and the web apps are developed in Notes.We have 2 Blackberry servers to add to the powerhouse of possibilities. Oh and we also have about 8,500 mail users on 6 mailservers. Mail users use the Notes clients, SAP Portal, or FireFox to access their Notes mail.
Oh, and I almost forgot, we host all of this on Notes servers running on *Linux* not a windows server to be seen), and theres just 3 of us in the Notes sysadmin team.
I mention this because maybe this is why the big corps stay with(or are moving over to)IBM Lotus Domino – it’s low cost of ownsership. When someone commits to Lotus Notes/Domino (with the exception of vid conf and BB servers mentioned above)all the goodies I do mention above are all paid for and are free out of the box!
And I’m sure your users all love Notes.
It is so horrible, Isn’t IBM like a big company with many money? Can’t they hire decent UI people.?
My only response to Lotus being cheaper is you get what you paid for – AN INFERIOR PRODUCT that appears cheaper but actually costs you a ton of money in lost productivity and usefullness. Lotus Notes sucks!
Standoff – have you actually spoken to your end users about their LNotes experiences? Or do you sit in your Sys Admin Tech bubble thinking everything is great?
I am sure the Domino back end infrastructure is marvellous.
But, I believe most people have issues with the dog-awful LNotes *client*.
I figured the only people that like Lotus Notes are its “advanced administrators”: given the amount of time it takes to train somebody to manage Lotus Notes and the small number of people willing to go into such grilling, you could look at it as a “job insurance software”. But obviously to keep the insurance up you need to keep LN up as well.
It all makes sense to me…:)
Many people on this site are suggesting Notes is aweful.
But Lotus/IBM would never do this to their customer base.
Anyway, have fun Notes-knockers:
http://www.fixoutlook.org/
Another popular Notes apologist response: “Yeah, well Outlook sucks”.
Nice! Let’s not forget the fact that if you want (and are mature enough) you can go directly to the blog of the lead Notes UI designer to make sugestions, (intellegent) comments …….. and yes even criticism if it’s constructive.
Ha ha ha. I used to administer a Lotus Domino system. The users hated it. I hated it. As I software designer I can see the elegance of some aspects of the design. But in practice it stinks. I spent a great deal of time feeding back constructive improvement suggestions to Lotus. I might as well have written them in the sand.
This was in around 1995. I haven’t touched it since, except for helping companies migrate to Exchange/Outlook.
It is hilarious that I have just spent half an hour reading posts from users screaming their frustration about the **same issues** that bedevilled the system fifteen years ago! We hoped the upgrade from Notes 3.30 to 4.01 would fix it – wrong! We hoped upgrade from 4.01 to 4.10 would fix it – wrong! Then we gave up. It sounds like upgrading to 8.5 still won’t fix it! Don’t hold your breath…
They do it to their employees, why not their customers?
I was a developer on notes and when you’ve worked with a IDE such as Visual Studio then Lotus Domino is ****. 4 different languages rolled into 1 to create it. Who was thinking of the stability issues? Talk about stupid. No wonder they call it Domino, it was designed to crash, over and over.
Too Cool. This web site is fun reading… you guys are joking right? LOL
Yet another “non-response” response.
I love that every Notes defender has to conclude his post with LOL. Is that part of Notes indoctrination?
I believe its because they lack the intellectual capacity to spell it correctly.
A few fun facts:
- 85% of violent offenders had used Lotus Notes within the previous 24 hours of committing their crime.
- A common hatred for Lotus Notes is now being used to bring peace to the Middle East.
- ihatelotusnotes.com is the fastest growing hate group in the world and on IBM’s watch list.
- Well testing Lotus Notes, the IBM program management team…*laughing* I am sorry, I am sorry…I could not keep a straight face. Of course they did not test LN.
“…you can not search both unless you write a Notes app to do this for you.”
I have to develop an application to search for emails in an application that is supposed to manage emails. I think that about says it all.
(yeah, yeah, I know…it also does workflows and other ****…I hope this POS is not only for email!)
One more complaint…a solution is welcomed.
I sometimes have the pleasure of being on the receiving end of VERY long email chains. Sometimes a document is attached. Yes, I can see the paper clip while viewing the “inbox”…but once I view the email (in a new tab), I have no idea that there is an attachment (unless I scroll waaaayyyyyyyy down the beginning of the email chain). There is the attachment. Yes, I know was sent with something other than Notes. But guess what…that happens a lot! *lucky ducks*
Why don’t they put the attachment or attachment indicator in the header when I am viewing an email? I mean really…really…do they even pretend to test this ****?
Do I need to write an application to do this?
Oh, that reminds me…waaayyyy at the bottom of those email chains, the font size becomes all distorted. A message that was originally type in 12 point font is now 36 point! Impossible to read (well not easy, practical, fun, or efficient). So what do I have to do…? I have to search for the old emails…but wait, I can’t! Because I have to write an application to search. Aaaarrrggghhhhh!
Have to write an application to search emails…
Not true in my old version of Notes.
Just click “View > Search View”
If you have not done so before, you may have to create an index to help the search.
There is a button to do that in the advanced search options.
You can even include attachments in the search.
re: Attachment indicator
You are right in my old version of Notes (6.5) there is no paperclip icon to show there is an attachment once you open the email.
However there is an “attachment” menu item up the top beside File, Edit, View, Create, Actions, Attachment, Help.
Whenever there is an attachment, this menu item is visible and not visible if there is no attachment.
I just cant get enough of people who write on this site telling everybody that the problem is we are not trained properly in how to use Notes. In nearly 20 years in IT, I have never once been trained on a messaging tool. The reason being that a monkey with no thumbs can work email. That is all email except for lotus notes because that is not build for users, but its built for mindless dickheads at IBM who think “user experience” is when they jerkoff over the first three dimensional women they have see, no matter how ugly she is. IBM and everybody who works for them bar about 3 people are complete and utter ******* and notes is the most pathetic piece of software ever sent into the world. Anybody who tries to justify it is quite simply a fuckwit.
Justin, Justin, Justin. 20 years in IT? and you don’t see the capabilities given to users using Notes? multi-plaform capabilities, Collaboration, workflow, Security, Security, Security. Oh. but those of us in IT are not concerned about systems working accross multiple platforms, Collaboration, workflow and such overrated things like security.. I mean like, who needs it? security hah! LOL.
Justin,
Be careful.
Apparently, according to IKnowNothing, having too much experience is “the problem”. And at 20 years, you’re probably right on the border. My 30 years was enough to elicit this response from him (her?): “Dave, seriously, I’m pretty sure you summed up all your problems by saying I’m a “30+ year IT veteran””
So, like the majority of Notes apologists here, he (she?) chose to attack the messenger, not the substance of the message.
At work I use Lotus Notes. I use M$ Outlook at home to remind myself how lame it is.
I was writing email for a half of hour to a customer and when was finished decided to spell check it. But as long as Lotus Notes have no support for my local language (surprise!), I decided to do it in old good MS Word (it cares about all users). And then guess what? Accidentally I pressed Ctrl+V instead of Ctrl+C and pasted some text from the clipboard onto my letter. But hey – I always have Undo option! At least in user friendly software. So I made Undo. And… I got clean sheet of my email memo.
I said a lot of really bad words then. Rather screamed. But my colleague just asked in two words – “Lotus Notes?”. Yea. Sure. I have this stone age featured crapware.
Before re-writing letter to a customer and spending another half of hour, I need to come back to a good mood, and writing here helps me a lot
P.S. what they say about efficiency, about ROI?
What’s your local language?
As if language actually matters. The point is in order to be “safe” with LN, you have to write your letter in Word, spell check it, then cut-n-paste into LN.
My companies IT guy said that there is no custom expiration on the archive. So I moved all my mails from the Notes server to an archive.
By lo what do I discover after a few months’ time?!?
All my mails have expired! And are dead! Along with my serenity.
I HATE Lotus Notes.
There isn’t, not by default anyway. Who set up the archive? If it was you, …. well, what do you want me to tell you? LOL!!
Dude. Please enlighten me as to what you are talking about. You say your emails are dead? What does that mean. You cannot read them? ???
So you hate Lotus Notes because a guy in your company is an idiot? Do you blame your Mom for all the “bad stuff” that happens to you too?
Subtle Blue says:
May 19, 2010 at 1:37 am
I could probably get a fair chunk of the way through War and Peace during the inordinate amount of time it takes Notes to perform simple tasks like, oh I don’t know, opening a file.
Three hours it took yesterday to replicate a database. And since Notes runs it in the foreground, I couldn’t do any other Notes-related work for an entire morning. Fortunately a colleague was off sick, and doubly fortunate I am an administrator and know everybody’s password, so I could log in as her and work from there.
.
.
.
EVERY statement is either incorrect or just blatantly false. 3 hours to replicate? Replicate what? How big was the db? Where was the db located in relation to you? How big is the pipe?
I can replicate in the background but you can’t?
How do you know everyone Notes password? You’re an admin? Laughable!!!
Sigh. No wonder nothing ever gets fixed in Notes if the prevailing attitude among its developers/fans is that the problems don’t really exist and whoever reports them is lying.
3 hours to replicate a 5Gb database. The replication is between two application servers running 6.5. The connection speed between them is around 1Gb/s. Right-clicking on a database in the workspace and selecting “Replication -> New Replica” doesn’t do it in the background. Exactly what Notes was actually doing for those 3 hours, I don’t know, because it greyed out as soon as I opened another application and went back to it. I don’t think it even replicated it properly either.
Finally, I am a Notes administrator strongly against my will. It’s only because my employer is too cheap to hire an actual one that I have to suffer this pile of horse manure every day. The day we hire an actual Notes admin and I can get on with some proper work instead, I will literally dance for joy around the office.
So, you’re an admin for a product you know nothing about. Nice ! I think I’m going to try to maintain and fix airplane engines …… and once I get frustrated enough (because I know nothing about them), I’m going to ***** and whine about how much they suck. Sound good to you?
Listen, if you want help, ask legitimate questions and I’ll do what I can to help you but please, don’t say the products sucks and then turn around and say you know nothing about it.
If you’re using you’re work station (as it sounds here) to replicate a db from one server to another, you’re using your client as a go between, which isn’t good. Meaning, the data is going from server A to your client and then from your client to server B. I think your assuming it’s just going from server A to server B … it’s not. The better and suggested way to do this is with either the admin client OR you can use the lite client on the server to push a new replica to another server. If you still have questions about this, let me know.
“So, you’re an admin for a product you know nothing about. Nice ! I think I’m going to try to maintain and fix airplane engines …… and once I get frustrated enough (because I know nothing about them), I’m going to ***** and whine about how much they suck. Sound good to you?”
You wouldn’t have to know anything about aeroplane engines to know that an aeroplane which won’t take off or fly in a straight line is a faulty and/or badly designed aeroplane. Likewise I don’t have to be an expert to spot the copious and massive faults and design errors in Notes. You cannot simply write off all users’ bad experiences as training issues or as “features” which are unfamiliar to Microsoft lovers. Notes is flawed and badly designed in many ways. Your denial of that loses you credibility.
You’ll notice I said I’m a Notes admin “strongly against my will”. I do it because my employer tells me to. Given the choice I would rather be doing something else, i.e. the things I am actually qualified and experienced in.
Thanks for the suggestions. I don’t know why you feel the need to insult people so often. You’re clearly an intelligent bloke. That sort of thing should be beneath you.
Replicate in the background… there is a novel idea.. Are any of you on Notes 8?? Any of you familiar with the replicator page? Oh, and if it takes 5 hours to replicate a 5GB database – have you checked your netowrk or your own pc resources.., you know, if you want to go 200 mph, you can’t be driving on a pothole enriched road..
We are using Notes 6.5. Upgrading to the latest version would be a corporate not an individual decision.
The network speed and the PC are fine, thanks. The problem is Notes.
I have a client who is using Lotus Domino for their web application/server platform. The client has two “web developers” who are more comfortable with Lotus Domino than more mainstream tools and technologies and are not enthusiastic about making a switch. I have been asked to provide an assessment of why it may be prudent to migrate to a different web application platform.
I would be particularly interested in understanding deficiencies related to the platform as I have very little knowledge of Domino but am very familiar with other platforms.
In addition to the fact that Apache has over 70% of web server market, IIS over 21%, and Lotus almost 0%, what other reasons would you give for moving away from this platform?
Good luck on that one
You won’t get that answer on this web site. These frustrated users are just email users. I suspect they have no clue what you are talking about. (Gang, I understand your frustration. Companies don’t provide adequate notes training for both admins and users, ‘that’ is the root of the problem with notes).
Training is not the issue. I don’t need training to successfully use PINE, or Outlook.
I think MacDonald’s sells more beef anually than Ruth’s Chris, Mortons, Smith & Wollensky and Abe & Louie’s combined … but that doesn’t mean they have a better product now does it?
If MSoft is McDonald’s then IBM is the street vendor around the corner selling cat on a stick.
How can this be the best eMail program ?? The easiest things don’t work, for example if you like to drag and drop a subfolder into the root folder. Why doesn’t that work since years ????
Works for me. What version are you using?
Training, Training, Training. Just drag the sub-folder to the root level and drop it between two root level folders (you will see a line displayed as you drag, letting you know where the folder will be moved to).
when are you going to get a version that is not from the 80′s. Man up princess and get onto version 8.5
Corporate decide when to upgrade software ******. Not everyone lives in happy lucky SMB land where admins spout baseless advice on chat forums….
OK, I thought I would finally submit my complaints and issues. I have seen some of these already posted but I’ll reiterate them.
1. Pasting from the clipboard can take way too long. I have it regularly lockup Notes for a couple minutes after pasting in the email client. What the heck is it doing?
2. Creating a new folder doesn’t always display it in the folder tree. Yes, it’s there and I can tell because if I try it again I’ll get an error message.
3. Why can’t I select a range of emails using the shift and control keys with the mouse? This is just one of several Windows features the mail client doesn’t honor that drives me batty. It just feels clunky.
4. Sometimes (maybe 20-30% of the time)when I try to add an event to my calendar I am told that there is a conflicting event but there isn’t.
5. When replying to an email with a list of recipients, if I decide to edit the recipient list, the editing is screwy and not changing the text where the cursor indicates it should.
6. Sending an email to someone out of the office takes hours to get the out of office notification back. Sometimes, I won’t even get it until the next day because it comes in late after I have left for the day. Yes, I know Notes lovers are going to say this is the fault of my administators but they have shown me the IBM documentation recommending to run the job that handles this only every so many hours. Pure ****.
7. F5 does a logout not a refresh! Nice.
My yahoo email works better and it is delivered through the browser and free!
1) Not sure. I sometimes get delays with html but nothing to bad and it’s never locked up on me.
2)Has always worked for me.
3)By this statement, I can only assume you’re using an old version.
4)Have your admin rebuild the busytime.nsf or clubusy.nsf (if clustered)
5)No idea. I’m not really sure what you mean by “the editing is screwy.”
6)Yep, up until version 8, the OOO was an agent that ran from 4am – 12am, every 6 hours. That has since changed. However, if you need an answer from someone right away, why don’t you use IM or the phone? Email is a half duplex mechanism and you can’t know for sure if the person on the other end will respond even if they are there!
7)It’s always been that way. I’m not sure why it’s so difficult to remember.
Good Questions (and there ‘are’ answers)
1. Pasting from the clipboard can take way too long. I have it regularly lockup Notes for a couple minutes after pasting in the email client. What the heck is it doing?
** It’s doing data conversion. Depending on where you copied the data from (ie. web, spreadsheet…).
2. Creating a new folder doesn’t always display it in the folder tree. Yes, it’s there and I can tell because if I try it again I’ll get an error message.
** try CTRL / SHIFT/ F9 to see if it displays, otherwise, your Friendly notes admin (LOL) can try a replace design on your mail file…etc.
3. Why can’t I select a range of emails using the shift and control keys with the mouse? This is just one of several Windows features the mail client doesn’t honor that drives me batty. It just feels clunky.
** Not sure why you say you cannot select multiple emails with the mouse and ctrl or shift? This does work
4. Sometimes (maybe 20-30% of the time)when I try to add an event to my calendar I am told that there is a conflicting event but there isn’t.
** Tell your Notes admin to perform maintenance on his Domino servers regularly to prevent corruption. Also, you can try CTRL/SHIFT/F9 to rebuild the views in your mail file.
5. When replying to an email with a list of recipients, if I decide to edit the recipient list, the editing is screwy and not changing the text where the cursor indicates it should.
** Not familiar with that technical term “screwy” LOL.
6. Sending an email to someone out of the office takes hours to get the out of office notification back. Sometimes, I won’t even get it until the next day because it comes in late after I have left for the day. Yes, I know Notes lovers are going to say this is the fault of my administators but they have shown me the IBM documentation recommending to run the job that handles this only every so many hours. Pure ****.
** Tell your notes admin to 1. Upgrade to 8.5 and them implement Router based out of office (rather than agent based OOO). The Out of office reply will then be “immediate”.
7. F5 does a logout not a refresh! Nice.
** Hmmmm. Sounds like a training issue, but you figured this one out
My yahoo email works better and it is delivered through the browser and free!
** You can view your Notes mail through the browser… but the free part…hmmm not sure what to do about that one
** Dude, thanks for listing some ‘valid’ questions/complaints !!!
WTF I just tried this ctrl+shift+F9 based on your advise and now LN crashed and I have to restart my laptop.
Thanks mate
f9 is the refresh… you drag your mouse on the left side of your mail to multiple select it…
It has its own rules and doesn’t follow the norm… which means… it isn’t efficient cause it doesn’t make it user friendly…
The F9 and F5 functionalit have been there since day 1. If you can’t remember it by now (F5=log out, F9 = refresh) I don’t know what to say. When you say “drag down the left side of the mail so select mulitple messages” tells me you’re using an old version. Again, I don’t know what to say.
It took us 15 Minutes to create an email folder the other day… I had to do a bunch of steps!! c’mon now!!! it sucks!! where is my OUtlook!
These are the steps in old v of notes
1. Open mail
2. Click Folder > Create Folder
3. Type Folder Name
4. Click OK
What were you doing for 15 minutes ?
I needed to type a “Euro Symbol” in an email the other day. My boss’s boss said it was easy – just type ALT-0128. I tried that, but my half-finished got SENT! It turns out that ALT-1 typed from the QWERTY number keys is a keystoke short cut, BUT ALT-0128 typed from the number pad, will produce a “Euro” E. Great to know that numbers are not numbers in Lotus Notes!! Of course, there is NOTHING in HELP about the Euro Symbol, or the different number key functions!!
Sorry, but this isn’t a Notes issue. Please note (no pun intended) that I am a very vocal Notes hater. I have submitted at least 2 detailed lists of Notes WTFery, only to be met with responses which pounced on an obvious typo or (in one case) implied that I’m too old and that SQL Server sucks. (What?).
Anyway, it pains me to defend Notes, but in the interest of fairness, the issue here was either your boss or you. The Alt-xxxx method for entering non-standard characters ONLY works when you use the numeric keypad. That’s because (I think) Windows uses the scancodes, and every key on a keyboard has a different scancode regardless of what’s printed on the key. So either your boss failed to mention the “numeric keypad only” aspect, or you forgot (I’m guessing he didn’t mention it, assuming you already knew maybe… ?)
To illustrate that this is not a Notes issue, open Excel or Word and try to type Alt-0128. If you use the keypad you get the correct character. If you use the top-row numeric keys, you won’t get anything.
Notes has shortcutted some common actions, as you discovered. If, in Notes, you press and hold the Alt key you’ll see the shortcut actions appear as little yellow boxes, each with a number indicating (obviously) which number to press to perform that action.
OK.. I have now defended Notes. The Apocalypse must be nigh. (But Notes is still the all-time champion in my patented Weighted Suck Formula: MP * SF, where MP = Market Penetration and SF = Suck Factor… There are apps that suck worse, but none have NEAR the MP which Notes enjoys. Therefore, Notes has spread more suck-related pain than any other piece of software… ever).
This has happened to me too. However, I KNOW to only use the number pad. I wanted to put in a ™ sign, and ended up sending a half finished email. Lotus doesn’t care if you use number pad or regular numbers – it takes them as the same. You can only put in special characters by copying and pasting from another app.
Great to see user error being misconstrued as a software fault.
Hey, once in a great while it happens. Less often, however, with LN.
Lotus Notes SUCKS!
My file open, save, and print dialog boxes are not coming from my OSes API. The way the software handles cut and paste from clipboard for formatted text completely ignores the text. The typefaces on screen completely ignore the operating system. What kind of drooling moron did not use the API of the operating system ? I know – this piece of **** software was PORTED to windows because it was written for MS-DOS 5.0. If you look at the API for it, all the function calls are 16-bit. All the function names are all uppercase letters for a reason.
I cant believe that anybody with a brain at all believes that software that is so clearly a port and obviously a port from a 16-bit system, i.e. 1994, is worth anything but junk.
It would be as stupid as storing data in a system that doesn’t do SQL and calling it a “database”. OR writing a script in a language that does not even do data types other than string and calling it programming.
This is no contest. Lotus Notes is ****, it does countless things that no software should have been doing fifteen years ago. This isn’t esoteric. Cut and paste from windows clipboard, for example, is completely basic and the fact this software is unable to do it correctly proves it is garbage. No company should use it, ever.
I’m currently comfortably using Outlook 2003 with Outlook Connector for Domino (I’m glad I found this solution early so I didn’t suffer that much with Lotus Notes).
However, I want to upgrade to Outlook 2007. Can anybody here give me steps on how to connect Outlook 2007 to Domino?
I believe you can either just upgrade Outlook or upgrade Outlook and then reinstall DAMO. I was never able to get DAMO to work with Outlook 2K7, but I did get it to work with 2K10, oddly enough.
Greg, Greg, Greg, don’t you understand? These are all features! The Notes developers know that having a consistent, attractive, functional, and intuitive user interface is a sign of weakness. What you need is to do everything inside Notes so you’ll forget about how anything else works and stop feeling so resentful about Notes.
Hey, I’m looking for a Notes connector to Exchange but can’t find one. Why? Because MS wont’t let IBM/Lotus integrate with ANYTHING MicroSUCK (see, I can do this too). Here’s a tip, people want OPEN SOFTWARE !!!!!!
I think Lotus Notes will die to the end in 5 years.
Well, thats what IBM intention few years back. But Lotus notes is still in the market.
Ok, I’ve deployed 8.5.1 to the test group, about 20 users. 3 installations failed for no reason with the wonderful exit code of 1603(reinstall works fine). A failed install DOES NOT ROLL BACK! but exits the installation in an unfinished state, with an entry in Add/Remove programs and all.
Oh, and 50% of the users got corrupted bookmarks.
But what can you expect from such a small company as IBM?
What version are you upgrading from?
Using client 7.0.1
1) When I copy and paste from something from a website, but not all websites, I can wait up to 30 minutes before the hourglass stops clocking.
2) I received two invites, which the meeting planner used the repeat function (as participants were suppose to join on or the other). She had to cancel one. What did I receive? A cancelation notice with the subject line for meeting 1…but the time for meeting 2!
3) Question…please help. I hate how I have to search my current folder and my archive folder. How can I get it all into one place…one set of folders with current and archived emails? Emails are automatically moved to archive after xx days (not that many), so I go back and forth way too often. Can I archive after 1 minute, so everything is there? Or can I create a combined view?
4) If I smash my laptop with a hammer, will that help?
Ahhh, so many people claiming LN is great, but no is one willing (able?) to address my issues and questions…????? Can anyone help? Sincerely, Unhappy Man
Actually, I have a solution for #1: turn off spell check. It made a huge difference for one of my co-workers. For #4, the answer is, sadly, no. Notes will just find its way onto the new laptop. OTOH, if you get a new laptop, maybe you’ll feel better, so maybe smashing the current one will help after all!
Regarding paste from web sites – use the Paste special option, and choose plain text. Notes and Word for that matter paste HTML into the doc and Notes will be resolving the web links.
The archive and mail files are different files, so you can not search both unless you write a Notes app to do this for you.
1) I also get delays with html, but not up to 30 mintues. Maybe 20 seconds, tops.
2)Like in a previous response I did, have the admin rebuild the busytime.nsf
3)These are not folders, they are separate databases and currently there is no way to search across two completely independent databases.
4)Only if you use Exchange on the backend.
3) archive issue
Try clicking (in mail db)
Tools > Archive Settings
to see if you are allowed to change the archive frequency.
This might be a bit trollish but…
http://shop.cafepress.com.au/i-heart-lotus-notes
http://t-shirts.cafepress.com.au/i-heart-lotus-notes
Some sites that may be helpful.
(or not)
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/community/blogs.html
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/domhelp/v8r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.notes85.help.doc/fram_what_new_85_r.html
http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/Forums_communities/Software/Lotus/Lotus_Notes
Drunk and Bitter Jesus,
I am now going to stop reading your posts now as every one I’ve come across is either a blatant lie or you shooting yourself in the foot. I certainly hope Notes doesn’t take anymore time away from your reading Dilbert cartoons. Like I said, if your going to bash something, at least be honest about it.
Good for you Pete: you’ve heard things that you don’t like, so you ignore them or blame the messenger. That takes intellectual bravery of a like seldom seen outside of the Spanish Inquisition. You either choose to disregard my complaints or you accuse me of lying. Fair enough. Your attitude is the reason that Notes is ****: the developers can’t understand that criticism is sometimes productive and has useful results.
Now I understand why Notes is so difficult for you …. you can’t even understand my simply stated post.
It’s not about likes or dislikes, it’s about FACTS ! Please let me know when you bring some to the table and then I’ll respond. Until then, I will contiue to ignore your **** filled posts.
I am absolutely paralyzed by this POS system. I have now spent 5 hours trying to find out how emails can show up in the All Documents view and not be associated to a folder, not be in my sent items, not be in my inbox, and I have never deleted a single folder in this crack pot software. My IT department is a bunch of absolute BONEHEADS, since they can’t figure it out either and I seem to know more than they do. The frickin’ blind leading the blind. GIVE ME BACK OUTLOOK, at lease I could do it myself.
There is an option for you to remove an email from a folder – So you select a message and click the Remove from folder option. This does what it says removes it from the folder but does not delete it.
I had a user using this option to delete mail. So the message is removed from the folder but no longer associated with any other folder – so it only is visible in the All Documents view.
Here’s another one. I currently have Caps Lock turned off, yet Lotus Notes is typing in caps. I turned Caps Lock on, and Notes typed in lower case. Marvellous. Every other application, needless to say, got it right.
It’s a feature! Notes feels the rage inside you, and it knows that you really want to YELL AT YOUR CORRESPONDENT!
Why does Notes kid on that the mail client, Domino Administrator and Domino Designer are three separate applications, when in fact they are just one? If you have a dialog box open in one, the others are unavailable.
Can you imagine if Word wouldn’t let you type because you had a dialog open in Excel? Shockingly poor.
Also, is there is any way to quickly open multiple databases in a Notes client? I keep finding myself having to do CTRL+O, Server Select, File Select, for each individual one. Is there some way to multiple-select a group of them and open them all at once? I have tried multiple-selecting databases in the dialog but that simply greys out the “Open” button and Notes says the file does not exist if I try it anyway by pressing Enter.
I expect someone will say “Just use the workspace”. We have thousands of databases. It isn’t practical to keep them all on the workspace.
Opening Multiple databases.
I don’t know if this will help, but when you do the CTRL-O file open, there should be a “Bookmark” button.
You can bookmark multiple databases at the same time and organise them into folders.
These folders are then available for opening from the bookmark bar at the side of the Notes client.
I believe you have to open them one at a time, but it’s not too hard to open a folder and double click the ones you want to open.
Unfortunately we have thousands of databases, and there aren’t any particular subsets I access regularly enough to make bookmarking an option. Thanks for trying to help anyway.
The mark of great software is in the users ability to leverage its functionality to achieve great things. I suspect somewhere deep in the morass that is the Notes technical model there is the potential for greatness. Unfortunately it is barricaded from view and utterly useless to the end user. Replication between my laptop and Blackberry has become a joke (lucky for me I love sorting through emails 2 or 3 times); search is an embarassment; time selection is heinous; contact management is abysmal and now even my daily schedule is utterly unreliable (more time wasted confirming scheduled events are actually occuring). Notes’ primary contribution to my productivity has been to reinforce the value of a good paper based backup.
Replication between your laptop and Blackberry? You’re going to have to explain that one to me. What are you trying to accomplish?
Your Blackberry doesnt actually communicate with you Laptop.
The Blackberry communicates to your Mail server and your mail file on the server.
I but you are over quota on your mailbox.
USER ERROR LOL
Here’s one for you. I open Outlook, and the first email in my inbox is already highlighted and can be read in the side pane….. mind you I haven’t logged in yet. Nice security !!! Then it has to go through some gyrations to get me my most recent mail. HUH? Why isn’t it there to begin with? Now, an hour later, at the bottom status bar it says “Folder update 97% complete.” Great !!! You let me know when your finished so I can actually start working.
> Here’s one for you. I open Outlook, and the first email in my inbox is already highlighted and can be read in the side pane….. mind you I haven’t logged in yet.
If you haven’t logged in, how did you open Outlook?
Here’s a quick hint to all the Lotus lovers out there: you don’t need a login for your email program, because the operating system itself has one. If you’re to the point where you can open Outlook, you’ve already authenticated with the computer and you don’t need to do it again.
This is called “single sign-on” and has been around, oh, 15 years now. Maybe Notes will catch-on and use it in another decade.
> Then it has to go through some gyrations to get me my most recent mail.
By “gyrations” you mean… downloading it? What does Notes do? Have it delivered instantly by tiny elves?
> Now, an hour later, at the bottom status bar it says “Folder update 97% complete.” Great !!! You let me know when your finished so I can actually start working.
You can start working instantly. You don’t have to wait for the download to finish.
In another news flash for Notes fans, there’s another technology out there called “threading.” It allows an application to do two (or more) things at once! This incredible revelation has been around about 20 years now, so Notes should be implementing it any… minute… now…
Here’s a quick hint for you, pay attention now. You DON’T have to be in the same domain as your Exchange server … don’t even have to authenticate with the domain ( that the Exchange server is in) until you launch Outlook. Just for the record, Notes has had single sign-on for many, many years now.
Notes DOESN’T have to download mail it just presents it when you open your mail file but apparently Outlook/Exchange doesn’t understand that. It’s called a client/server model and perhaps Exchange and Outlook will catch on one of these years. I can I start working instantly if Outlook needs to “download” my emails?
Here’s some advice, please know what you’re talking about before you respond, you’re just embarassing yourself.
BTW – Still didn’t address the security issue with Outlook …. no big surprise there but why, DEAR GOD WHY do I see 2 Inbox’s and 2 Sent “Items” (not sent MAIL … apparently I wouldn’t be sending mail in an email program) when I open Outlook ?!?!?!?! I each isn’t enough? Why do I need to create search folders to search my mail? How do I reply with an attachement ….. please tell me I don’t have to go into 12 menu levels to find a check box for that ? How do I NOT reply with &^%$ing HISTORY ALL THE TIME !?!?!?!
UGGGGHHHHH, I guess MS thinks it owns the world. Just let me know the next time you upgrade …uuuhh migrate to the next version of Exchange because you CAN’T UPGRADE !!! You have to build another environment hw/sw and the port ALL the data over. Yep, that’s convenient. What a POS that is !!!
So…. we’re agreed then? Outlook sucks too? When you get right down to it, ALL software sucks. It’s just a matter of degree.
And Notes seems to have taken suckiness “to infinity and beyond!”
1. Authentication: Outlook (2003, at least) has an option to prompt the user for credentials. So if you’re not in the domain, you’re still OK. But if you’re in the domain, what’s the point in having second credentials?
2. Doesn’t have to download mail: Outlook allows you to not download mail, but why you would not want that? In any case, it keeps your cached mailbox and you can open your old emails offline. It also gives you an easily accessible option (and enabled by default) to only download headers on a slow connection. And while it’s downloading emails (which is the same as “replicating” in LN parlance) you can see your older emails.
3. Two Inbox and Sent Items: One must be in Favorite Folders? Right-Click menu->”Remove from Favorites” does wonders. You should trust your feelings that the software will probably have means to do what you want. This is not LN, after all.
4. Create search folders? What? Ctrl-F or Ctrl+Shift+F. Ctrl-F is a standard shortcut for find in like 99% of Windows software, but I’m afraid it does something different in LN (like deleting something or crashing?).
5. Reply with attachment? Whose smart idea is that you want to send the same file back to the guy who just sent it to you? If you select Forward, it will keep the attachment. But if you still want to pass the attachment, a drag-drop from the original email to the new one works 100%. Never crashes or anything. You don’t need to save it anywhere or anything like that. Just drag-drop, or copy-paste. Whatever suits you.
Coworker (asking me at 10:00): Are we still having our meeting upstairs?
Me: You mean the one at 1:00?
Coworker: It’s on my calendar for right now.
Me: Nope, 1:00.
Notes apparently can’t grasp time zones.
Also, Notes enjoys periodically resetting the replication interval to 60 minutes from something more useful like 5. What makes this especially awesome is that it does this with “sent” email, so outbound email may not go anywhere for up to an hour. Here’s a thought: SEND THE GODDAMN EMAIL! YOU’RE AN EMAIL PROGRAM!
Sorry, my expectations exceeded reality there for a moment. I’m sure it will happen again.
check your reopliaction settings, your mailbox may be set to high priority and your sending to low.
5 mins for high 60 mins for low.
USER ERROR LOL
Its all in the help file, F1 on the keyboard
I’m not sure what a “reopliaction” is, but assuming you mean “replication,” I have *repeatedly* reset the replication settings, and Notes keeps switching them back. Explain that as a user education issue.
See, now you’re going to confuse him/her. Does one go to Help or press the F1 key !?!?!?!?! OH NOOOOOOOO, TOO MANY OPTIONS IN NOTES !!!!! LOL.
Timezones??? check your operating system, that is where they are calculated.. oh, that is Microsoft
As luck would have it, today’s Dilbert mentions Notes!
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-05-14/
Ahhh, reading Dilbert cartoon … this must be more of that productive time that Notes is wasting. LOL!
I could probably get a fair chunk of the way through War and Peace during the inordinate amount of time it takes Notes to perform simple tasks like, oh I don’t know, opening a file.
Three hours it took yesterday to replicate a database. And since Notes runs it in the foreground, I couldn’t do any other Notes-related work for an entire morning. Fortunately a colleague was off sick, and doubly fortunate I am an administrator and know everybody’s password, so I could log in as her and work from there.
Well, it gives me something to do while I’m waiting for Notes to respond to a simple request like deleting some emails.
I absolutely loathe Lotus Notes with every singular cell of my body. I would rather send interoffice mail, or send a carrier pigeon, or create smoke signals, or use a tin cup with a string, than have to use Lotus Notes to send another e-mail.
Can someone please explain to me why so many major organization implement this atrocious piece of s#&*. This time bandit has stolen hour of my life and caused a great deal of mental anguish to me and my peers. This thing reduces productivity to less than a “Null pointer”.
I only pray and wish that the individuals involved in the development of this god foresaken product suffer with terminal diseases, along with their children, thereby eliminating the gentic malfunctions that ultimately results in people creating a product such as Lotus Notes.
Object variable not set? Go FL|CK Yourself Lotus Notes.
Very few Virus’s
Multi Purpose, web site, instant messaging, collab, custome databases can all be on one server.
Good value for money.
For christ sake, all you need to do is create and send/recieve an email. It does it.
oh, and proven to be more reliable than any other mail system.
It has it quirks, the older pre- version 8 is pig ugly, 8.5 client is java based and can be slow, but it works.
Cursed be the Notes developers who decided that one cannot just run rules by hand. No, you have to write an agent to run a rule. That’s certainly a good use of my time, and it’s not as though every other email client that has rules allows you to run them by hand. No, Notes is special. FLN
In my very old version of Notes,
just click Tools > Mail Rules.
No agent involved.
Still the same in the latest version. There nothing diffcult about it as Drunk and Bitter Jesus would have you believe.
So, following logic, if that is wrong, one has to assume that the rest of his/her posts are also incorrect.
I note that you either didn’t read my post or didn’t understand it.
I don’t know why I keep reading your mind-numbing incorrect posts …… I guess there’s an entertainment value somewhere. That being said, this is yet another example (of many in here) that is COMPLETELY WRONG!!! I think I’m going to find a website on something I know absolutely nothing about and just rail on it relentlessly in the hopes that someone may think I know what I’m talking about.
So tell me *how* I’m wrong, Brainiac. I have found no way of running rules *by hand*. And, per IBM’s *own support people*, you have to write an agent to do so. You won’t be able to answer me with anything useful because now you’re just lying about what Notes can and can’t do.
OK, stay with me on this one (apparently you find it very diffcult). In your mail file, in the naigator (the panel on the left side) go to Tools -> Rules. Now, create your rule !
Hopefully I didn’t lose you with those extremly brutal and esoteric instructions.
Okay, dipshit, I know how to create rules. I cannot RUN them by hand. Do you know the difference between “create” and “run”? If not, that goes a long way towards explaining why Notes sucks so much.
What is the equivalent in Notes to Outlook’s Run Rules Now function?
Depends what version of Notes we are talking about.
I figured out the reason that Notes was closing Firefox, and it wasn’t an issue with Firefox at all. No, Notes will scan the running processes and look for anything called “Lotus Notes” and attempt to close it. So, if you have a Web site up (this one, for example) with Lotus Notes in the title or a Word document or anything at all, Notes will think that the program is another Notes instance and want it to be close. FLN
*closed*
absolute rubbish. i have been working in IT for over 10 years both on Notes and Exchange this has to be one of the stupidest things i have heard
And yet you can’t seem to locate the shift key.
I tried this theory with 3 different versions of Notes with Web sites, word docs, spread sheets ….. guess what? Just another garbage post from you.
I’m just waiting for the day you blame Notes for the Gulf oil disaster.
I have successfully replicated this issue 100% of the time with Notes client versions 8.0.2 and 8.5 on multiple systems under multiple different user accounts.
OMFG! Just when I thought maybe Petetm was right it happened to me! Notes froze and after staring at a white screen for a minute, during which time I opened this site on my other monitor, I used the trusty KillNotes program. The only thing open on my computer was this web page in IE. When I reopened Notes it popped up the message that Notes was already open and would I like to close it. I thought it was odd since I ran KN but sure, I wanted to and clicked Yes. It killed IE and then opened Notes.
To see if it would do it again I opened this site, ran KN then opened Notes. It did it again. I tried it again but this time I went to Google where I did a search so it is listed in the Windows Task Manager as “lotus notes – Google Search – Windows Internet Explorer…” This time Notes opened WITHOUT killing IE.
I thought maybe Notes is programmed to kill this site. Nothing like messing with those who despise you. But I tried it making sure Lotus Notes was capitalized (Lotus Notes – Google…) and Notes killed it.
Final test: saved a Word doc so it showed up as “Lotus Notes.doc – Microsoft Word” and it freakin’ killed it!
It is looking for a capitalized “Lotus Notes” and killing it. CONFIRMED.
It’s possible. Let’s say that the BP execs scheduled a meeting to correct their safety deficiencies. Unfortunately, they used Notes and…. well.
LOL(added to show that I am an accredited Notes Admin!)
I had some thoughts this morning about the three major categories of issues that users encounter with Notes. First of all, let’s isolate the discussion to what users, not admins, care about, which is the client, specifically the email/PIM application built on top of Notes. Further, let’s consider three broad categories of issue: speed, stability, and usability.
First, speed: as I’ve discussed elsewhere on this forum, the speed of the client is appalling. Even when using a local replica, the responsiveness of the UI when doing simple tasks, such as creating a new email, is sluggish. Deleting large numbers of emails takes quite a long time, such that I am obliged to do something else. I could mention other examples, but suffice it to say that the speed of the client is poor. Before I hear the comments about the quality of my hardware, other applications do not have these issues, it’s only Notes.
Second, stability: Notes has become more stable with the 8.5 release, so kudos for that. When it does crash, however, it’s unbelievable that I have to go in and manually make sure it’s really died, which seems ridiculous for any sort of modern software.
Finally, usability: this is where I think most users run into issues. The Notes email/PIM UI strikes most people as unintuitive (see the rest of this page for examples), and this wouldn’t be such a big deal, except for the fact that creating an intuitive UI for email/PIM functionality is a solved problem and has been so for at least the past decade. Outlook, Evolution, Thunderbird, whatever the Mac uses, iPhones, Blackberries, etc., all have varying degrees of customizability, and they’re all straightforward to use. None requires extensive training for anyone who has ever been near a computer before, and they all have an equivalent feature set to Notes mail and PIM. Simply put, the Notes UI is dated and cumbersome, hence many of the complaints on this forum. The users are starting from the expectation that the software should be easy to use, which doesn’t seem unreasonable, whereas the Notes developers and supporters seem to think that it is. That’s the major disconnect, and that’s why the users are so unhappy.
Given the responses of the Notes supporters here, I’m sure that last bit will fall on deaf ears, but hey, I thought I’d at least try to contribute something productive to the discussion.
Excellent summation, D&BJ.
And yes, it will fall on deaf ears. I haven’t seen a group so absolutely blinded to the obvious faults of “their” product since the tobacco company executives testified before congress. But I’m sure those execuives were only pretending. I think these Notes moonbats are dead serious: Notes is the best software every invented by anyone, anywhere, anytime — including the future. Heck, Notes is the best ANYthing EVER created. I can practically hear their cries of ecstasy as they contemplate the stone-cold raw sexiness of notes while they whip up some multi-platform shared-environment Notes app with one hand and doing God-knows-what with the other hand….. ermmm… sorry, where was I? I forget. Oh well, Notes sucks. Nice post.
Speed, if you have a big mail file with a huge ammouns of documents it will get slower and slower. Its a single file on a windows file system. Watch your HDD light litterally stay on as you open up your local mailfile.
If you can archive do so. Perfomance goes up considerably.
8.5 crashes, Java is the usual suspect on this. I hate java, cause more problems than it solves.
UI has been poor for a very long time, didnt change for 10 years. 8.5 has tried to address it but probably to late. Bad IBM strategy.
What about outlook though, MAPi is dated and poor, when you log in to another pc, it downloads all your mail to the pc, but im on a poor line, oh well wait for that 3gb to download etc. the network guys hate.
and PST files, where is the control. I need this email restored, it was on my other pc which is now dead…
Try restoring a few emails in Exchange, exchange is one big database, when it goes wrong (its windows so it will) everything stops.
Now an Outlook UI with a Notes backend would be good. have a look at DAMO, ibm actually made a prodcut to do that but never pushed it.
I had two invites for 1:00 pm Eastern today. One was for corporate webex that is also happening tomorrow at 2:00 Eastern. No problem, right? I went into the invite and switched it to tomorrow at 2:00. COnfirmed the change and looked at tomorrow’s calendar and found it listed at 5:00 because the original invite was created by someone on Pacific time. No problem, right? I dragged it up to the 2:00 time slot and confirmed the change with Notes. Now it is gone from the calendar and is nowhere to be found. I tried using the crappy search function but no luck. POS.
Notes deals fine with time zones.
Check your Location settings, there is a radio button to use Operating systems time zone settings.
Again its all in the help files, you do have to read a manual sometimes.
My time zone settings are correct, as I would have expected since the invite (and others) initially showed the correct time for my location. And why did it disappear? I did NOT delete it and the confirmation box showing the date and time correctly displayed what I wanted. Notes deals fine with time zones, except when it doesn’t.
you also have to verify the TZ of the Owner.. the calendar invites calculate your TZ off of the Owner
Turns out this is a bug. Calendar items sometimes disappear when times are updated. You would think IBM would fix something major like that right away. So when are they? The estimation they gave our IT is version 9. They have known about it at least since 8 was rolled out. I don’t know if it is a bug in earlier versions as we were happily on Outlook then. Yesterday a meeting time was changed and later we got a follow up email listing the new time and day telling us to double check that it was still on our calendar. Ridiculous to have to do that.
Whiners! Go buy a Mac and camp at Starbucks! Leave Notes to the productive people!
I don’t own any Apple products and don’t like Apple fanboys who ignore all the **** Apple gets away with while cursing MS. That said, I can understand why a lot of people like their products. Microshaft, the last thing you want is for Notes users to be exposed to Macs since after they see how easy it is to use they will complain 10x more about Notes.
If I were in IT, I would make everyone except me and my bosses use Notes. My bosses would be grateful and my productivity would appear great compared to everyone else saddled with LN. Raise + promotion!
Obama should tap IBM to help America regain (perhaps “keep” based on your personal views) a competitive edge. IBM could pull Notes from the U.S. and give it away free to the rest of the world. Our productivity will go up, theirs will drop, problem solved.
Yet another reply attacking the messengers, rather than the substance of the messages. Can ANYbody here address the specifics of Notes slam-head-into-desk-inducing behavior?
And, yes, there are a lot of posts which are just “Notes sucks” and “Notes is slow” and other not-too-helpful comments. However, there ARE many examples of genuine WTFs and those seem to be either ignored totally or replied to with some combination/variation of:
* “Quit whining, Notes rules”
* “It’s more than email”
* “Get training”
* “Upgrade”
SQL Dave
I’d like to help the less negative posters to this forum (not that there are many).
However I’ve never seen Notes behave the way some people are describing. I’m not saying they’re lying, but that something is seriously wrong with their systems.
I work for a company with thousands of people all using Notes every day.
If it behaved the way people are describing, we would either get rid of Notes or fix the behaviour.
Hard Luck, I also work for a company with thousands of Notes users and the one thing that unites us is our frustration with Notes. Crappy UI, lots of bugs, erratic behavior, meetings disappearing or showing the wrong time for some invitees but not others, etc etc etc. How can information included on an meeting invite only reach some recipients and not others is just one question that arose this week. Upper management has acknowledged the problem (not that they could ignore it since their own Notes installations suck, their Blackberries are useless half the time and their calendars are often incorrect) and the company is devoting a lot of resources in trying to fix it. At least that’s what we’ve been told. So far we see no improvement but I sure hope it gets better. Being a big company we can get help from IBM no doubt but I don’t know if that is a plus since they had a hand in the roll out. Unfortunately IT can’t sit at everyone’s desk waiting for Notes to do something stupid so they can see all the behavior first hand. Like freezing for 15 minutes then showing a bunch of new mail in the inbox that is from over a year ago. Thankfully killing Notes and reopening solved the problem but WTF?
TO PETETM who replied to me on 04 May.
Recap – I use LN 8.5.1 and Domino 8.5.1, with default mail.ntf and note, I am talkign about the EMAIL feature and nothing else.
Petem, I will sincerely appreciate that you tell me how to move a mail from MailboxA.nsf to MailboxB.nsf WITHOUT invoking the Archive function. You think I have not tried looking for a solution? Both nsfs are open as tabs in the client side by side.
In OL, I can open 2 psts, and drag any mail to another pst arbitrarily.
I’m saying that IBM says that Notes is “document centric”….pffffttttt if you cannot even make an email as a discrete document. Rather, it is all stored as in some massively hacked poor excuse of a db template called mail.ntf….but of course which the poor user could hack if they were given **training**
I tried to make BLOATS my friend you see, but it rejected all my advances. I spent time on IBM forums and kbs to understand how to work better with it, and I also came across some article that explained that if you made more COLUMNS SORTABLE in an nsf – it will incur a PERFORMANCE PENALTY WTF????? BECAUSE…each sortable column creates a stored meta-view or some **** to allow it to be diaplayed…OMG
I can click to sort by column on (almost) any type of app and it’s instantaneous. But of course, LN is SPECIAL because it uses a special castrated database grown from a flat file. And I suspect an email is purely an RTF blob with special formatting hacks to make it resemble email, which in turn is referenced via some bizarre pointer scheme implementation.
I don’t know, pete, why not enlighten us. I will give you a thumbs up if you explain this properly.
So far, the only plus point I can see with LN is the “All Documents” view which is nifty instead of looking thru multiple folders to find something by date. OL should get this feature….heheh….
@Gil (apparently, the threading on this site only goes a couple levels down): my company was running a 20,000 seat Exchange infrastructure before we had Notes rammed down our collective throats, so you are, in fact, wrong. I appreciate that you’ve acknowledged that the UI sucks, so kudos for that!
Gues what? Next week we are moving from MS-Outlook to LN. So I will join this support group before the pain starts. Maybe it will be like taking a flu shot.
Amazing website! I’m having so much fun reading it. As a front line Support Specialist, I often deal with people who whine about Lotus Notes. It seems like a lot of people who are not happy with Notes are “ohhh, I changed my password 2 hours ago and forgot it” type people.
I had a woman become infuriated once because our compnay was aquired and wee needed to migrate to Notes/Domino. Why was she so upset? Because Notes didn’t change her
to an actual smiley face!
Nice feature Outlook.
nice feature, ihatenotes.com! What if I don’t want my colons and parenthesis turned into a smiley?
:/ 
>:)
So, what you’re saying is, you had a user who had a feature in Outlook that doesn’t exist in Notes. Yeah, that sounds about right.
I want to say that go and look now at Lotus Notes 8.5x and then reply to on your own comment. New version is really mile stone in lotus notes.
In my MST I changed the [INSTALLDIR], [PROGDIR] and all other gazillion properties pointing to %PROGDIR%\IBM\Lotus\Notes to “C:\Lotus\Notes”, but it still installs to %PROGDIR%\IBM\Lotus\Notes on some computers, depending on old installations. The MSI package is the worst I’ve ever worked with, out of thousands. It takes AT LEAST 30 minutes to install, which adds up to 3500 hours in my organisation with 7000 computers. Why not release an UPGRADE PATCH?
And I haven’t even mentioned that I have to write AutoIT-scripts to deploy the configuration files.
But yeah, you are right. Forgetting your password in Notes is a pain in the ***.
Wrong. I never forget my password and Lotus Notes does indeed sucks. Gaps in functionality, unconventional UI, dependence on scripting to create the most basic of customizations…yup, it sucks.
Why is the most important holiday of all left off the United States holiday import? The 4th of July, our Independence Day is left out of the holiday import. Thanksgiving and Columbus Day are there, but the 4th of July isn’t? WTF!
Count yourself lucky. Have you tried to import public holidays for Scotland? You’d think IBM might be aware of the existence of a nation they have at least two offices in…
Because your system admin has not added, ask him to and it will appear every year.
Please bear in mind the rest of the world doesnt really care for the 4th July
@Nick Halliwell
and
@NotesAdmin
As Anders pointed out (thanks Anders!), the “Ctrl-V” was a typo, obviously meant to be “Ctrl-Z”. Well, obvious to those with an IQ >= to whatever Anders’ IQ is, I suppose.
So, it’s a “bit strange” (not “but strange”, as you typed…speaking of typos)? A BIT?!?? No, it’s retarded. UNDO should UNDO EVERYthing about what I just did. I will give you kudos, however, for being the first Notes apologist (that I’ve seen) to actually admit that Notes has anything even approaching a flaw.
And finally, since my typo seemed to flummox you, you typed:
“Must probably be a SQL thing to make start for scratch everytime you remove a partial mistake.”
Yeah, must probably be. Make start for scratch everytime am bad.
@JonBon:
Why was your comment (“latest version”) directed at me?
This morning I wrote a semi-hate mail to a client. After thinking things through I decided I shouldn’t send it, so I went into the Outbox and “marked it for deletion.” The next time I replicated it sent the “deleted” message. FML and FNL
Uhh I meant FLN not FNL…Doh
1) What’s an Outbox? Do you mean Mailbox?
2) You “Marked it for deletion” but DIDN’T delete it?
Kind of like saying, I never mailed the payment in for that bill …. but I wrote the check out.
En Argentina también odiamos el LN! Aguante el Outlook!!!
LNotes is for stuffy companies living in the 90′s. It’s slow, non-user friendly, and so consumed with its security most people spend more time trouble shooting it than actually working. I shouldn’t need 16 gigs of RAM to run a friggin’ program.
My phone does a better, more efficient job at handling email and files.
Lotus Notes is without the most innovative Application Development platform ever created. You lot are incredibly ignorant and obviously know little about technology….keep trying fellas.
Peter,
Your comment validates this site.
Enlighten us genius! just tell us what we humble inferior minds dont know maybe you’ll solve all our issues and we’ll feel no more pain.
God… it’s so irritating to come to this site wanting to vent some pain caused by the stupid lotus notes and actually find some idiot defending it… If after all the frustration I had today, I met a guy like you IN PERSON saying what you just said, i’d probably make him swallow the LN CD without chewing!
Some words that don’t exist in the Lotus Notes dictionary:
email
emails
emailed
emailing
internet
liaise
Not true, all those words are in there. If you’re going to rail against something at least be honest about it.
Petem -I believe no dishonesty was meant. I just typed that list of words into LN 7.02 and all of them were caught by the spell check as errors.
I agree, all the words are there but Lotus Notes decides for itself randomly if what you typed is correct! I’ve noticed if you get a red squiggle under “with”, go back and delete and retype the “t” and voila, Lotus decides the word is correct after all.
All but the last is fine in my version (Release 8.0.2 FP2 SHF58) but it does not recognize voicemail, rollover, many plural words and so many common words it is one more reason why Notes is the butt of many jokes around here (not too funny though since it kills effeciency and productivity).
“Voicemail” … all one word huh?
Yes, voicemail is acceptable as acknowledged by other programs. You could have easily Googled it before posting here. Is their simple user interface too offensive to you? Regardless, the spell check “feature” of Notes is laughable. Speaking of spell checking, I unchecked the option to “spell-check messages before sending” but yesterday, as is typical of Notes disrespecting individual preferences, it started checking messages and I had to uncheck the box again. Did it twice within an hour.
Oh and quick quiz: If you want to turn off the “spell-check messages before sending” option, where would you find it? If you said File — Preferences — Spell Check you get an F. It is not under Mail — Sending and Receiving either. Instead there is an “Outgoing Mail Checking” section on the Basics tab under the Mail tab when selecting the Mail option/tree.
Just for kicks I pasted the above in Notes and this is what it marked as incorrect:
voicemail (as mentioned above)
Googled (as expected)
disrespecting
uncheck (but apparently “unchecked” is fine)
Word and Outlook only flagged “Googled” as wrong.
Today’s hilarious glitch: I open Lotus Notes and receive a message that Notes is already open along with a prompt to close it. Although I have not opened Notes in this boot cycle, I figure it loaded something in the background. No, what Notes does when I click “Yes” is to close Firefox.
Here is a great find! Add and edit a flag to an email then use your mouse to select the time….You can not double click on the time…WTF
You have to use a stupid *** check mark in the bottom left of the box… We gez I wish all programs had a stupid check box BECAUSE that makes SOOOOOOO much sense…..
Die Notes Die.
I could gripe about lots of stuff, but I won’t. Not a fan of the software, but just want to make it fit my needs.
I will ask if any of the Notes supporters can solve these two issues (notes 8.0.2:FP2)
a- Via customize my view, I set it to 1 row. This frequently gets reset to 3. So I’m constantly resetting it to 1. Why does this change? And is there any setting where I can make it default to 1 and stick.
b- my contacts seem to periodically revert to an older version. I have a contact who has a new email. I’ve updated it and saved it, but every week or so, it reverts back to the old email address. Any idea why?
I understand that this could be how my company has things set up, and not a function of notes though.
Also, one of the comments I see a lot of here is ‘user education.’ I’m capable of becoming a power user, but I’m nervous to deviate too far from the standard config because I don’t want to render myself unsupportable by corporate IT. (Just like I don’t mess with the underlying unix stuff on my wife’s mac. I want her to be able to get apple support as a generic user not trying to explain what I did)
John, #1 is a “feature” of Notes. Notes knows better than you do what you need to look at, so stop fighting it. I assume that this must be the attitude taken by the developers, because I have the same issue (or did, before I switched back to Outlook) in 8.5, which means they couldn’t be arsed to fix the bug.
#2: Presumably also a feature. Notes knows that you didn’t really mean to update that contact information, so it reverted back to the contacts you *should* have.
After reading through the comments it is quite apparent that there are two types of LNotes users…
1. People who love LNotes – ie. those who work in IT and who admin the infrastructure, develop for it etc.
- People who hate LNotes – ie. end users, those who have to use the client everyday for email, calendar and contacts.
I think it says a lot about Lotus Notes…
I was wondering if this site is sponsored by Microsoft?
I find Notes superior to other products. Unfortunatelly most of users see it exclusivelly as e-mail application, AND
most of users need training which they usually do not get.
The fact that you need training just to use email says it all…
… this is getting so old, but once again: Read my numbered list of Stupid Notes Tricks from Feb. 21 and PLEASE tell me how training would help.
What about those who work in IT (.Net, Java, SQL, Websphere, etc. developers and DBAs, network admins, support desk jockeys, server admins, etc.) but who just use it for email, calendar, and contacts?
That group is generally of average or above intelligence, has lots of experience using AND designing UIs, and has seen a wide variety of applications. Their near-universal dislike of Notes says a WHOLE lot about it, IMO.
Agree with that SQL Dave… how about a Lotus notes that has the old 6.5 icons but running on 8? A Lotus notes that changed my windows password instead of the Lotus password? A Lotus notes that leaves every reader in the world to ask what is wrong with my email formatting? How about creating an event that spans a couple days but not the entire day (i.e., Monday at 8am to Wednesday at noon) without having to use the repeat option? Email pushed instantly so I don’t get 20 emails at once from the folks who are rapidly firing off emails on their Exchange server realtime? Not even our IT experts can tell me why it does what it does sometimes. Not a fan of Microsoft, but Exchange blows Lotus out of the water.
I work in IT and I am a programmer. I try to write applications that are as close to obvious what you need to do just from the UI standpoint. I assume it is written in Java because it looks like a piece of ****. I click on an email and give it an 8 or 10 count and then I get my email. Very few logical commands are easy to find either through the menus or the toolbars. IMHO companies that use LN are just throwing money down the drain and may just be MS haters. They care not about productivity.
I also love some of the LN defenders on this site. Learn some english and get some grammar skills before you post.
LN needs to die a slow and horrible death. It is slowly killing me and my coworkers each day.
Our corporate IT group won’t let us use DAMO, and IBM, of course, doesn’t want people being exposed to the realization that the Notes client is an abomination, so they don’t make DAMO readily available. Nonetheless, I was able to find an older version of DAMO and got it to work with Outlook 2010 Beta (DAMO crashes Outlook 2007, no surprise). The ingestion of data into Outlook was far from perfect, but suddenly my life is so much better. My changes to views just work! I hit any button in the UI, and Outlook just performs the action! I delete a few hundred emails, and I don’t have to wait five minutes for the operation to complete! If corporate IT comes for my copy of Outlook, I just have three words for them: Cold. Dead. Hands.
@Petetm: You seem like an all right guy, but you just don’t get it. Every software product has bugs and issues, and there’s always something that could be done better. The problem with Notes is that there are just so very many things that it does badly.
I don’t disagree that there are issues with Notes but every piece of software has it’s problem, no matter how mature it is. Good God, IE hangs/crashed on me at least a couple times a day and that’s just serving up website for christ sake!I’ve had my trials and tribulations with Outlook (bugs, not working the way “I” expected it to ……) but someone out there please show me one application, one software product that is perfect. Please show me that. I understand that those who have used Outlook all their lives and are now handed Notes … well, it’s a whole different animal, I get it. However, to even think that MS is the way to go and to believe it’s the defacto standard is very dangerous and quite honestly, naive (the F5 thing for example was in Notes loooong before MS had it). I have read quite a few comments on here and tried to help the ones that asked an honest question or had a legitimate gripe. The ones that just whine,… that’s another story. Personally, I’m getting away from anything MS (Ubuntu, Mint ….. Notes will run just fine on both and Domino can run on Ubuntu server although it’s not supported) something that keeps me away from that petri dish of an OS (and Outlook is no better when it comes to viruses).
I guess at the end of the day there are those who are willing to try new things and look for better options and then there are those who just follow the crowd, accept things the way they are but will whine all day if they don’t understand or won’t spend the time to resolve their own problems….. because again, after reading a lot of these posts, most are self inflicted.
Pete,
The problem is not that Notes works differently from Microsoft products, and that the vast majority of people here are either too stupid or too in love with Microsoft to be able to use Notes (which is what you appear to be suggesting).
The problem is that Notes *doesn’t work at all*. It’s slow. It crashes frequently. It loses data. It forgets user customisations. Even the smallest problems require a highly trained administrator to fix. It’s unintuitive and inconsistent. It may be easy to administrate, but it is *horrendous* to use. It’s written by Microsoft-hating super-nerds, for Microsoft-hating super-nerds. It’s poorly designed, poorly written, and has clearly never been properly tested.
Hating Notes doesn’t mean people love Microsoft. I hate Microsoft. But at least their products have been designed with the end user in mind. What you have to remember is that for a Notes administrator, you are an expert in Notes because Notes is your entire job. For the ordinary end user, you have no need to be an expert in Notes because Notes is only a tiny part of your entire job. It’s just a tool to send email. If that doesn’t work, it can massively decrease your effectiveness at what your job really requires you to be doing. Most people don’t have the time or the inclination to become trained experts in Notes.
You’ve basically echoed what I said, which is that no product is perfect. My personal experience is that Outlook is faster (even when connecting to the exact same Notes server as my Notes client), more stable, more intuitive, and has a more aesthetic UI than Notes. That’s a relative statement about the virtues of the two products, not a claim that Outlook is perfect. I am certain that you will not address this statement, and that no other Notes supporter will, other than to, once again, blame the user or IT or to claim that Notes is more than a PIM. To restate, in the same environment, connecting to the same server, running on the same laptop, Outlook is better at the feature set that it shares with Notes, even allowing for the incompatibility issues created by using an outdated copy of DAMO. I defy you to claim that somehow reflects well on Notes.
As one of the Admins at my Notes/Domino running enterprise. I feel your pain, but the fact is, for large scale enterprises that require five 9′s uptime (google it) the Notes Domino environment DESTROYS Microsoft’s mail server/client solution. Domino offers redundant clustered servers, spoke hierarchy and multiple databases, as opposed to a single database for the environment. Above about 1000 users Outlook/Exchange is simply not a good solution.
I will give all you (rightfully) angry users your nod here. The UI in Domino/Notes is horrendous, difficult to user opaque and doesn’t have good error traps. And it is NOT easy to admin, the admin and configuration of the environment follows the same model as the client, it is not a toy. It is a old school hard care database environment.
If you have the staff, you can do some amazing things with it due to the fact that you can develop in-house applications that run on Domino. But the Client is a horribly interfaced beast.
But the server..it kicks the bejesus out of Exchange. It is grown-up software. It runs, and it runs solid, and if you architect it right, you can run a 50,000 user global enterprise with it. Which you CAN NOT with Exchange, the only company that even tries it is Microsoft, and they have something like 1 exchange box per 100 users if you look at the global setup.
That, in short is why companies use Domino, because in the end, uptime is king.
I hate lotus notes because I always get sent with emails that are returned receipted. I already know how avoid having the return receipt delivered, but now I’d like to mess with the senders. I’d like to figure out a way for Lotus notes to send several return receipts to the sender once I open the email. Even if I have to close then reopen the email to send a return receipt, that would be fine too. Any ideas?
So that’s a Notes problem? You’re kidding me right? Sorry, you should even be allowed to post here with that comment.
Sorry PTm that you have to spend time reading my comment. I guess I’m not in your class of IT nerdness. Take your comment to this website owner and suggest he have a better registration process.
Now go back to your mother’s basement and play with your Commodore 64.
Yes, it’s a problem for me. No it’s not a joke.
Once again, it sounds like your sarcasm detector is on the fritz.
Mike, sorry my last post was too difficult for you to understand, let me try again. Return receipts are NOT explicit to just Notes. Almost every email client has that option.
BTW – this more about common sense than being a “nerd” or “geek” but don’t let that get in the way of your vitriol.
What next? You hate Notes because it has a Send button or maybe because it has an Inbox?
As an IT guy i can truly say this sucks. Email..sucks.. Databases(glorified flat files) sucks. Applications… i’m okay with them if developed correctly.
true story… 8.5.0(I think) does not support the “mail to” feature with multiple profiles. wha wha what? who knew that in 2010 multiple users could use the same machine?I know it gets fixed shortly, but seriously. ****.
Personally I think IBM has collected kiddie porn pictures of CIO’s in order to perpetuate this filth
ref
when your company has to buy a program called Medic Pro for Lotus Notes…just to terminate processes that are left over after Notes crashes…..you know you hate Lotus Notes.
why not just run “nsd -kill” ?
When IBM has to create a program called “Kill Notes”, you know that they know it is a piece of ****.
Having been forced to work with Lotus ‘See, you CAN polish a ****’ Notes for the past two years, I have had problem after problem.
Since then, I have fount it to be ridiculously slow, unresponsive, user-unfriendly, unreliable and generally frustrating beyond belief.
Today, after clicking reply to all (with history, as what is the point of it without the history???) it took 7 minutes of egg timing before I was able to compile my brief reply.
‘Surely there must have been a lot of previous emails and a lot of people on the email.’ The apologists mutter in their little fantasy world.
No. It was a response to a three line email, with only two other people included.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, on clicking send, I received a copy of the email, with myself in the ‘to’ and ‘cc’ boxes instead of the names that were showing just 30 seconds earlier!!!
In short, I hate everything about Lotus Notes, and want to rip it’s nipples off with a rusty pair of pliers.
“Today, after clicking reply to all (with history, as what is the point of it without the history???)”
If you don’t know the answer to this, perhaps you shouldn’t be using email to begin with.
No, he’s right. There is no need for Reply Without History. How often is it actually used by an ordinary end user? For those who really do need to reply without history, how hard is it to do Reply With History, CTRL+A, Delete?
Loaf,
Contact your help desk, your client is not configured right. I’d tell you what to fix, but you don’t want to hear it I am sure.
You all just need better admins and developers… not to mention training!!!
We all need Outlook. It doesn’t need the level of adminstration, development, or training. It’s called making something user friendly.
We all need Notes administrators to die a horrible death. Never such a ****.
Hello Sent View?! A Inbox folder and a Sent View. Was there no one sober when this piece of **** was designed.
Try to find a mail you send. A column “Who”?! WTF is that. Can’t it sort with “From” and “To”?
Bah, I hope you all die. Not a MS fan, but Outlook and any other email client in the universe is better.
F*ck all LN-fans
Ok, why does IBM need to pretend to offer this highly secure system that requires ‘user ID’ files stored on local machines?!?! Because of this complication, everyone uses the same basic password over here… nice security. The admin doesn’t even know how the process works. Oh yeah, the ID vault is our savior…that’s right. That hacked on cobbled together piece of ****. We have the latest version SQL DAVE, it’s still a piece of ****. In fact, we need the latest PATCH that was just released for the latest version, so we can keep the db from blocking everyone from access when the ldap pool runs out of threads or whatever that problem is, that they’ve finally (hopefully) fixed. Guess what – IT administrators shouldn’t need specialized training to add users to a database. In fact, as far as I’m aware – most applications work with AD and shouldn’t require their own directory hierarchy. Oh sorry, you don’t use AD – fine, stick with notes..you are used to beating your head against the wall coming up with cobbled together solutions and building your own infrastructure from scratch so you can retain your job security and feel like a personal genius.
“everyone uses the same basic password over here… nice security”
Now THAT’S just bad Administration, nothing more.
“IT administrators shouldn’t need specialized training to add users to a database.”
So ANY IT admin should be able to add people to ANY application? That’s funny.
“most applications work with AD ”
And when AD goes down (which it can and does), then what do you have? NOTHING !!!!
It’s sad I have to explain this.
Dude, your AD goes down? You have some major issues then, other than Notes!
Dude, it happens and what’s the only thing running and functional when it does ? ….. go ahead, say it …. don’t be shy……….. THAT’s RIGHT, the NOTES/DOMINO infrastructure !!!!
AD down? Dude you are insane. AD should never go down. NEVER. I have 12 years as MS admin and have never seen AD down.
You want to answer legitimate gripes, I’m all for it. How do I keep the folders open, I’ve been told you can’t? How to I make ESC stop closing tabs? How do I get notifications about calendar appts,WITHOUT having it take over my entire computer? How do I set columns to default in certain places (the attachment icon to be on the left instead of the right – I am forced to fix this manually all the time)? How can I forward a meeting invite and have the person actually be able to accept it? How can I keep meeting invites in my deleted items in case I need to reference something (or in case Notes decides not to process the acceptance, which happens regularly)? How can you get the day at a glance to change based on the time of the day (after 9AM, my 9AM should fall off)? How do I copy an address out of the Global Address book? If you can actually answer even one of these questions, I would be amazed, since my IT dept has told me none of these things can be done and they are extremely basic asks in my opinion.
Ya, if you are running a Microsoft shop sure, but don’t try to run it across international lines, because AD doesn’t localize.
And don’t try to have your shop be a big one.
And if you can’t manage passwords. I don’t know what to tell you.
Thousands of people around the world are using Notes without the problems you people are having.
ergo: You’re doing something wrong.
Get some training.
If a product only works acceptably for a small minority of its users, that suggests the product is faulty, or at least that it’s unintuitive and poorly documented.
Instead of telling us we need training and better administrators, why can’t Notes instead be made more robust and stable (so it doesn’t need administrators holding its hand with their fingers on the pulse 24/7) and user-friendly (so it doesn’t require training)?
That’s correct.
Thing is, Notes works fine for the majority of people who use it.
@hard luck said
“That’s correct.
Thing is, Notes works fine for the majority of people who use it.”
How do you know that? It seems pretty clear to me that the only people who like it are administrators and developers, whereas virtually all end users hate it. Guess what – end users vastly outnumber admins and devs.
I’d even go as far as to say that those who experience no problems with Notes are such a small minority that their experiences are statistically irrelevant.
Millions of LN users suffer from your stupid application.
I hate that piece of sh*t.
There are less than 1000 people posting to this website. Hardly indicative of millions of sufferers.
Anyone that is using Lotus Notes for mail only is an idiot.
Just use Gmail you numbat.
Yea, it can do so much more, just not very well!
yeah, put your corporate info on google’s system so they can query it for advertising, and if they see something they like, maybe they’ll sell it.
How many large organisations do you know of where employees are permitted to use the email client of their choice? Given the choice, 99% of Notes users would happily chuck it for something else.
If people in large organization could choose their email client, then this website would not exist. No one would choose LN.
LN does all other advertized things poorly too.
I read this on the bathroom wall:
“Here I sit pondering what log floats,
then I look down to see LOTUS Notes!”
Sorry Dave. I tried, but apparently my response pissed the moderator off so he nuked it. Peace out.
Is there no way to put the ‘FROM’ and ‘TO’ fields in the inbox/ sent/ folder views?!! This activity is so simple in Outlook and such a must have!!
Agree. WTF no “from” and no “to”?!
Personal productivity killer nr1: LN
try to use All documents or Received/Sent by sender or by recipient views, incorporated in your mailbox, or create your own personalized view ^^
I suffer from depression because half my job is using Lotus Notes. At random times, it will freeze in the middle of an e-mail, I won’t be able to access my e-mail and/or calendar, and just recently I changed my password to synch with my Windows password and my computer got kicked off of the company VPN and is no longer trusted. And now, databases that are supposed to send me an e-mail when updated no longer send me an e-mail, it can’t even do the simplest tasks. I lose countless hours of productivity every week because of Lotus Notes. I am using the latest version and have been using Notes for 4 years. I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning because I dread each and every day that I have to use Lotus Notes.
Frigging awesome! I LOVE this site! I’ve been a Notes developer for over 15 years (and many other things for more than 20) and I’m laughing so hard I’m shooting milk out my nose right now! My favorite posts are from the so-called “IT veterans” who are whining the loudest!
I don’t have nearly as much time on my hands as SQL Dave apparently but I had to jump out and give a heart felt wave to all of you who have found like-minded misery. It does my soul good to see y’all suffering.
Dave, seriously, I’m pretty sure you summed up all your problems by saying I’m a “30+ year IT veteran”. Do I really have to reply to the rest of that diatribe? Lets have a discussion about that POS MSSQL server for a few hours and all the years I’ve tried to get that garbage to do what I wanted. Or better yet, let’s get together and code a multi-platform workflow application complete with email and calendaring with an Exchange / SQL backend that works on a desktop and web and mobile platform. We can race. You start now and I’ll start in about 6 weeks with Domino and I’ll still beat you by about 5 months with more functionality.
If you don’t like the Notes client, go open Outlook and point it to the domino server and be done with yourself. Life’s too short to get this worked up over an application.
On second thought, don’t do that. Reading this stuff is incredibly entertaining!
To IKnowNothing
YOU SAID:
Frigging awesome! I LOVE this site! I’ve been a Notes developer for over 15 years (and many other things for more than 20) and I’m laughing so hard I’m shooting milk out my nose right now! My favorite posts are from the so-called “IT veterans” who are whining the loudest!
** “so-called”? Are you implying that I’m lying? I just wanted you to know I’m not a novice. Why is your 15 years (or more than 20, depending what you meant by “other things”) worthy of inclusion here and, presumably, a cause for us to respect you, but my 30 years is “so-called”?
** “whining”… That’s interesting, that you can determine tone-of-voice from something typed. That must be a skill you picked up during those 5 extra years doing “other things”. Why is it whining? What’s the difference betweeen whining and complaining? You lose credibility as a serious, rational defender of Notes when your first comments are pejorative.
YOU SAID:
I don’t have nearly as much time on my hands as SQL Dave apparently but I had to jump out and give a heart felt wave to all of you who have found like-minded misery. It does my soul good to see y’all suffering.
** So let me get this straight: Many of the complaints on here are short and not always descriptive (“Notes is slowwwwww!”). But when I give you a nice numbered list of very specific behaviors suddenly it’s “TL;DR”?? Most of you Notes bigots seem genuinely perplexed at what all the fuss is about, so I thought I’d take a shot at giving you some very concrete examples. My bad. My next post will just say “Notes Sucks” so you can reply “It’s more than email”.
YOU SAID:
Dave, seriously, I’m pretty sure you summed up all your problems by saying I’m a “30+ year IT veteran”. Do I really have to reply to the rest of that diatribe? Lets have a discussion about that POS MSSQL server for a few hours and all the years I’ve tried to get that garbage to do what I wanted. Or better yet, let’s get together and code a multi-platform workflow application complete with email and calendaring with an Exchange / SQL backend that works on a desktop and web and mobile platform. We can race. You start now and I’ll start in about 6 weeks with Domino and I’ll still beat you by about 5 months with more functionality.
** How does “30+ year IT veteran” sum up all of my problems? Again, rather than addressing the issues I raised, you resort to… well… I’m not sure WHAT you’re resorting to there, but it’s definitely not Notes-related.
** “Diatribe”? See my comments above. We have complaints so we’re “whining” and writing “diatribes”.
** And what in THE fark does SQL Server have to do with Notes’ shortcomings? (I bet if you gave me a list of your top 10 peeves about SQL, I’d agree with 5 of them).
** “…multi-platform…application…desktop and web…blah blah”. Ah, there it is. The old “Notes is more than email” chestnut. True enough, but as one poster here asked “Why does it have to suck so hard at email?”. And, once again, it DOES NOT ADDRESS MY ISSUES. (I’m detecting a trend here).
YOU SAID:
If you don’t like the Notes client, go open Outlook and point it to the domino server and be done with yourself. Life’s too short to get this worked up over an application.
** If only. We tried using the Outlook for Notes client. Our company made us stop using it because they couldn’t remotely control how long we archived our emails. Using that client is now a fireable offense.
** I’m probably 10 times more “worked up” over the lack of any coherent, issue-based response on this forum than over Notes itself. I’ve concluded that the folks at IBM/Lotus just don’t know how to write useable software (more evidence: Lotus Sametime, which does not even have an undo when typing a message, and which does not allow searching in a specific chat or in chat history for a specific IM partner; it DOES allow searching, but the search is always through one’s ENTIRE CHAT HISTORY… c’mon.. really?)
Here’s a summary of our “conversation” so far…
ME: Notes sucks. Here’s a bunch of specific reasons (as opposed to just complaining about slowness or bad Notes administration).
YOU: Ha ha! You’re old. I don’t have time to read your reasons. SQL sucks. Notes is Everythingware!
So… here it is May 10th (almost 3 months later) and I still do not have any Notesies willing to look at my numbered list of WTF behaviors and even TRY to defend them.
Dave, perhaps a website called IHateLotusNotes is not the best place to find constructive help on Notes.
The Notes mail client is a piece of ****, most day-to-day users agree.
Admins might say, “not really, it’s fully customizable, if you don’t like it change it, or have your admin change it”. Another Notes pusher might say: “Notes is so much more than a mail client, you’re clearly missing the bigger picture”. But here’s the ugly truth: To most Notes email client users, **people who just want email and calendar functionality**, notes is a ****** piece of software that has an unintuitive interface, is annoyingly slow, uses up too much memory, crashes frequently, and will often fail to run after crashing without downloading terminating sub-tasks manually and running applications to clean things up.
Notes mail client reminds me of the programs I used to write freshman year in college. Professors used to say: “write a program that does this”, I would then write a program that would do “this, that, and some more of that”. As I mature I learn to give people what they want of me rather than what I want them to have.
I’d like to think the developers of this product are somewhat conscious of why typical users hate it so much. I suspect they’re just focusing on fulfilling the needs of a different audience, admins and corporate power-users.
When I started using Lotus notes I hate it big time. But once I used it e.g. have to do bit of research on shortcuts and learn the operation. I loved It specially 8.5 is the best one they have released
While browsing using the internal lotus notes browser, I hit F5 to refresh the page.
Guess what? F5 in lotus notes means “Logout and reset all my icons and workspace”
Worse still, after loading up, it crashed, and then I have to run Zapnotes.exe to clear up leftover processes.
Now I can’t find my inbox!
I hate lotus notes.
Have you ever tried 8.5.1FP2? No? Please do!
Ehrm, your website speeks books. Was it done with those awesome xPages? No seriously, Notes 8.5 looks WAY better, but it’s still a huge mess, as unintuitive as ever and when you get past the welcome screen it’s still ugly as hell. Not to mention that xPages are total **** and I would never use Notes as my database for a Webapplication. And yes, I work with it on a daily basis, have set up websites on top of it and did so for the last five years.
I am currently an Admin in work for this piece-o-cr@p. I was never given proper training on it and was just told to get on with it!
It never does what it is told and no matter what right you give people for it, the system just refuses them!!
Stupid thing. I wish they would just get rid of it completely
Using latest 8.5.1 in Enterprise environment. Crushed and was unable to start after that. Support stuff spent whole day trying to fix / re-install without success. Took 1 day to re-image PC and 1 day to restore all programs. After one week crushed again. Probably will take as long to fix. Is it worth it?
I just tried to paste something and received the most useful error message to date:
#29:5
What a joke.
I feel your pain Neverhatedsoftwaresobadly…Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse I ran into the exact same issue after my previous rant…Now I realize this website isn’t just therapy but also a good place to come and see what the **** else kind of odd behavior can I expect Lotus to exhibit next. I’m so sick of hearing it’s way more than email. Exactly! It is way more but that doesn’t give it an excuse to handle email poorly. Just cause my swiss army knife is way more than a knife I still expect the basic knife to function reliably.
I hate lotus with a fiery passion. Apparently I’m a terrible email administrator. I have notes expiring, I’m over my quota, and somehow I seem to somehow corrupt my database on a regular basis. To try to deal with my quota issue and not get locked out from sending emails I decided to archive. Little did I know that archiving also means deleting from the my normal inbox view. This is absolutely absurd on so many levels. The fact that a single view can’t show archived and non-archived docs at the same time is piss poor usability for this day and age. Beyond that the fact that I am forced to be the sys admin of my own email is ******* stupid. Nuff said.
I always thought that archiving was done in purpose to lighten a database, and not keeping it with the previous size…
yet if you wished to keep a copy of the email in your current db when archiving, try to do so: Action > Archive > Archive settings > Advanced > do not delete mails when archiving…
ln will archive them but will not delete the initial mails…
I’m about half as productive on this stupid app (Notes 8.5.x) as on Outlook. And I’m about twice as likely to go postal on my co-workers when using Notes. (Happily I’m only making a point and would never harm another human being, however, I *DO* get more easily ticked off in every job in which I’ve been forced to use Notes). Calendaring security – are you kidding me – you have the option of not sharing your calendar, to-do’s, and contacts or sharing your calendar, to-do, and contacts. No granularity? I mean WTF! Oh, and the calendar details in the scheduler never work either. Oh, and even on my 8GB Windows 7 x64 system this thing will consume an entire 32-bit memory space, so I usually am forced to use webmail anyway because Java sucks so bad.
I dont even have lotus notes and I hate lotus notes! No i am not kidding. Over the recent few days i have seen a lot of ads for lotus so this morning i thought i would expend some time to look into it. After 40 minutes on the website i had no more idea what the devil the product actually does than i did before. So i called customer support and they asked me which product i was calling about. I said i dont know i cant tell what it does. S they asked what do you want to do with it? i said i dont know because i dont know what it does.
So i searched for someone at corporate to speak to to state hey you web portal doesnt sell product. It is written to sell something to IBM lotus developers i think. We low and behold right back to customer service in India and again who would you like to speak to? well i dont know i would like a general number at corporate to inform senior management that this is a problem! “well if you cant tell me who you want to speak to i cannot help you!”. So undaunted i dont stop there. I call IBM corporate. They inform me “now get a load of this”! that they have nothing to do with Lotus! So i said dont you own the company? Dont you want to know that i cannot figure out how to buy this software? The answer Contact customer service in India and tell them your problem!
if its this hard just to buy it i can only imagine why you hate using it so much.
I wish you well.
We have a 3000 line vbscript in place used to start Notes so it will roam from PC to PC. I’m sure there are whole email clients that aren’t much longer then 3000 lines. WTF? How many band-aids can you slap on this ****?
Who goes FROM Exchange TO Lotus? I can answer that now. Idiots, that’s who. I can’t imagine what this is costing us in terms of support. Rip out a perfectly good email system that just works and replace it with one that just refuses to. Worst. email. client. ever.
lotus notes managed to triple meeting book me. Although does tell me when i’m booking an adjacent appointment.
Like I care!
multiple bookings in same time slot = fine.
Appointment same time tomorrow = panic!.
Who wrote this ****? He should be in politics writing spin speeches….
I hate Lotus Notes (and Sametime) because:
* It takes ages to load
* It is bloated with features that are not necessary, I just want to check my email
* It takes lot of memory
* Solution load features when necessary
* Emailing is a nightmare
* Simple formatting is a nightmare
* Rules are very poor
* Archiving is very poor
* Automation rules are very poor
* Crashing needs to find all the processes left behind
* UI is not simple and intuitive
Compare Web versions Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail not in specific order, launch brower and login very fast!
Compare to Outlook where to start! Very fast, user friendly, easy integration with Office, Sharepoint etc…
Lotus Notes is not for the dumb people. Those who cannot use lotus notes are not fit for working because their IQ level is very low.
You people just do not know how to use notes !!!
I have used all the versions from R5 to R8.5 and all the versions are equallly good.
Rather than cast aspersions on our intelligence, how about addressing some of the specific issues we’ve raised. (You know, like the list I put here on FEBRUARY FIRST!)
Lotus Notes is the Black Eyed Peas of email database systems. ie Absolutely f**king terrible
I support Lotus Notes and every single day i see something new and absolutely ridiculous with this app. It is **** beyond belief. I have asked work for a paycut in exchange for not having to work with this program. There are not enough words in the english language to describe how utterly f**ked Lotus Notes is.
Lotus Notes was designed for those who think that Outlook is a bad email client.
Basically, try Lotus for a while, and now that you’re stuck with it…
Don’t you wish you didn’t complain about Outlook?
Let’s just recap on some of our favourite “features” of Loshit Notes:
- 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.
- Stupidest logon screen ever
- 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.
- Need to cut-and-paste into an e-mail from the web? Sure, just wait 5 minutes while it does something
- When you get new mail, an icon shows up in the system tray, but it doesn’t disappear unless you double-click on it to switch to Notes. In other words, if I switch to Notes on my own (i.e., with alt-tab) and then mark the new mail as read, the icon doesn’t disappear
- Occasionally, I’ll get the new mail icon for no reason. I double-click it, it switches to my inbox, and I have no new mail. WTF?
- Sending and receiving emails from outside the company is amazingly unreliable. Half the time, an email that I send out (or an outside email that gets sent to me) never gets delivered (WTF?). The other half of the time, it gets delivered hours and hours later, and the timestamp won’t even match. For example, I can send an email out at 11:00 AM, the person on the other end won’t receive it until 4:30 PM, and in their inbox, it’ll be timestamped as 2:30 PM. ???
- Half the time when I quit it, it hangs. If it happens to NOT hang, it actually takes longer to quit than Photoshop (yes, Photoshop!). During the course of the day, I might have 10 – 15 different programs open, and I can actually quit ALL of the others before JUST Notes quits!
- I have e-mails unread in a folder (apparently), but these “unread e-mails) cannot be located anywhere
- slowest app on my pc
- the archive is the dumbest; seriously, what is all this replicate/local server/rubbish
- the search never finds anything useful or what i’m looking for
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.
- 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)
can’t alt-tab between e-mails
- can’t copy and paste formatted text without notes hanging for 5 minutes
- have to click refresh or F9 to see a new e-mail
- task tray icon sometimes shows a new e-mail and there isn’t one
- when it crashes, you need to reboot or use Kill Notes app to restart – what kind of $hite ships a Kill My app function with it? LOL
- items that appear in inbox are not necessarily in all docs
- sorting by column only works ascending or descending for some fields
- annyoing splash screen
-out of office replies seem to come out at random
- replicas/replication is just so technical (yeah yeah, go on about user error/training, but you can set up an outlook PST in 5 seconds and its obvious what is in there – I don’t want a training course to use simple software – this isn’t 1960 anymore)
- even the database app (to so-called great feature of this “product) are a POS in terms of UI
- Outlook has never crashed out on me in 5 years and works as a Windows product should
OK, a lot of folks defend LN on the basis that it’s not an email client. Let’s mention some things that are nothing to do with email and see what happens.
The Java client. It’s big, slow, bloated, consumes heavy resources and slows your desktop to a crawl.
It always likes to steal the focus. Why? The focus belongs to the user, not the application. I launch Bloated Goats, wait what seems like forever for the Java **** (or even the native client for that matter) to load, open a browser session while that’s happening. Bang. The splash screen steals the focus. Switch back to browser, navigate to a web site. Bang, the stupid logon dialog steals the focus. Switch back to browser, start reading a page. Bang. The app itself steals the focus. Not to mention the way the stupid modal-but-yet-not-modal properties dialog messes with your Alt-Tab order (particularly if you have the Client and one or more of the Designer and the Administrator open at the same time).
That’s just obnoxious and ignorant design. YOU ARE *NOT* THE MOST IMPORTANT APPLICATION ON MY PC! Sometimes I like to run other things, and in 2010 I *EXPECT* any application to be a well-behaving citizen.
The **** with ID files, and the general total lack of proper centralised admin. Managing a Goats network is like stepping in a time machine back to the early 90s. Whee, I have to walk around visiting *every* *single* PC if I want to update configurations, provide new applications, or whatever. Again. Setting up a user is a joke. Register them, generate an ID file, go to their machine and launch Goats. Give it a user name and a server name. Browse to the ID file. Get rid of the stupid welcome page and put the workspace back (for all that it’s horrid at least users can *find* *their* *stuff* on it). Generate shortcuts to their applications. All done manually and all done locally. Didn’t we leave that party, like, *years* ago?
The designer. Ugh ugh ugh. Resize the code pane and the form pane shrinks. Visual Studio solved this problem over a *decade* ago. Try and find a specific field on a form. Go on, I dare you. #0C:03. Playing guesswork with how the final form is going to be visually laid out. The properties continually switching away from what it last was.
This is just touching the tip of the iceberg, but I will admit that there are some good things. The NSF format is neat, and the debugger is quite good, for example. But the overall experience is like a good steak covered in a mountain of steaming dog ****, and is inexcusable in 2010 (and should have been inexcusable long before now).
wow. All that I have read so far from the “haters” is lack of education..
1) why should Notes conform to F5 when it has been using F9 since its conception?? F5 came later in the technical life.. Remember WordPerfect? Not to say that it cannot grow and change, but one of its primary benefits is backwards compatibility.. Yes, you can still run version 1.0 database on a 8.5.1 server and read the content data.. Lastly, Really ??? this is what you complain about??
2) you can’t delete or remove an attachment??? seems much like user error to me.. I highlight the attachment and hit backspace or delete… No issues no pop-ups – Never had that issue EVER…
3) Notes is more than email and has always been.. more of a full featured collaborative client. I can do way more with this client and modify it to meet customer needs than I ever could/can with Outlook/Exchange..
4) Outlook goes hand in hand with the work “VIRUS” – hackable, unsecure, put my information on the outside of a bus and send… Never had a virus outbreak !!!
5) Domino is multi-platform. Can Exchange say that??? run on Linux, AIX, AS400, Windows …
6) Notes has been more advanced in the security and protection of data – protecting the server, the database, form/documents, fields… encryption security keys before they were well accepted by the internet… grow up and get a real mail client..
and to the guy who posted the response on 2/1.. RIGHT ON Brother!.. if Notes Sucks then you need to look at your version, Admin, Developer and technical support staff.. **** in => **** out many complain about what they and or can’t do with Notes, but they are still using a release that is 10 years old.. Upgrade! It is unfair to compare Outlook today to version 5 or 6 of Notes..
The editor changed my link to one that didn’t show up as many relevant articles…thanks Ed… You work for MS ?
http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&safe=active&ei=tkjES5H-Cs6PsAaU4JWsDg&sa=X&oi=spellfullpage&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=2&ved=0CAYQvwUoAQ&q=I+hate+out+outlook&spell=1&fp=8ad4ec2e82acecdc
There is NO way to cut a table into 2 or more tables…in Lotus…
But of course I should’ve expected that.
So, I just copied off the top 1/8 and pasted it, then copied the next 1/8 and pasted…ad infinitum… then deleted the original.
Lotus is inf. worse than even the Vista explorer with no up arrow !!!
Shoot me, please !!!
I just rescheduled a meeting for tomorrow and the Lotus Notes Meeting Reminder keeps popping up at my screen saying my meeting will start in the next 30minutes. Why? Why?
What ******/s worked on and updated Lotus Notes to 8.5? If only I had them in a room with me for 5mins alone their ears would ring to eternity!!!!!!!! #$*@#&*@*
For goodness sake test it on a select group of users first and obtain their opinions instead giving users what you think they need. I can’t believe the I.T. world pays you ******* so much for so little – such a complete stuff up!
Heed this “If it aint broken don’t fix it” the old Lotus notes was far more user friendly.
IBM should stick to manufacturing computers instead of dabbling in software, but then again not even microsoft can get it right! Frustrated user!
You think you have it bad as a user try being administrator for a day and supporting the show stopping virus spreading nightmare.
Why the hell I can’t do a spell check, when Accept or Decline a meeting request with comments. IBM I wish you would have made this **** much more user friendly.
I attach a gif to an email. I check to make sure the attachment opens before sending which it does ok. Then when I close the attachment a message box says “unable to locate program”. What is this? it opened the file so surely it could locate the program?
Illogical, unnnecessary, time wasting, etc etc etc.
I been sitting here looking at the Notes 8.5 startup logo for an hour now, just waitin for the opportunity to eventually put in my Notes password. I’ve tried every zapnotes and killnotes antidote I have on my craptop, but that Notes logo just sits there, all yellow, just staring back at me defiantly.
Cool. Not many companies build absurd comedy into their software. We should thank Lotus for that.
So i’m trying to set a meeting that goes from 9am to 5pm, the drop down menus in scheduling window dont show am or pm, so i just choose 9:00 on the start, go to end and choose 5:00, now i have an appointment that goes until 5 (something or rather, cant tell if its am or pm) next day (which of course cant be saved because its more then 24hrs), so i change the end date back to the right day, all of a sudden the meeting time is -4hrs long (which again i cant save as its impossible to reverse time) Maybe i have my settings wrong, but why is it impossible for me to set a meeting that crosses noon???? I know this site is usually reserved for rants with no response required (except for you of course our beloved petetm, you always make me laugh) but can someone please explain the illogical solution that LN has decided on to achieve this??? Tried looking at 12/24hr setting, standard working times etc, no luck for me so far – stupid lotus notes…
If you think Notes is bad try using Lotus Connections or Lotus Quickr, these products are pretty much unuseable.
Just for reference I have been notes developer for 18 years and would not use the Notes client over a browser if given the choice.
everything that can be said about Lotus Notes probably already has been said.. and i agree with all of the other purgees out there – Lotus Notes sucks.
for the last 4 years i’ve been working in a corporate IT environment which is controlled by head office in Germany, and i’ve been a pleb in Australia. when i started the corporate standard for laptops was a Lenovo machine with 512Mb of RAM. Opening Lotus notes and then opening about three normal text emails seems to take up ALL of the available system RAM… so everything from that point on happened at a snail’s pace… i finally found joy with a laptop with 3Gb of RAM – at least i can do more than one thing at once if i have Lotus open.
Lotus notes is the suckiest POS for rendering html based emails that I have ever seen – it can incorrectly render something coded in strict HTML 3.2 – which every other email client has been able to successfully render since the standard was ratified in about 1997.
i’m so over lotus notes that i can’t even be bothered ranting any more.
bloat-us notes serves as a counterpoint to intelligent design
On Feb 1, Tim Paque said: “And if notes itself is crashing all the time your IT Department sucks.” Well, I’m in an IT dept. that has a Notes server that crashes all the time, and we’ve been working with IBM for 3+ months to fix it, and they haven’t a clue. I’ve come to the conclusion that if your Notes server doesn’t crash, it’s pure dumb luck and not due to a “superior” IT staff.
Well SQL Dave, CTRL-V is paste not undo, thats CTRL-Z, so perhaps that is why you are having problems. CTRL-Z is undo for all windows apps I have ever used including Notes. D’OH!!!
It was most likely a typo. Why don’t you just try it yourself? Notes does NOT undo color formatting.
Oh god! We are migrating to Lotus Notes as we are now part of Bureau Veritas.
why does it soemtimes open attachments as proper files with filoename and then sometimes as temporary files with a temp file name? it means having to save the file – then go and find it to modify it to send it back rather than modifying it, saving it and sending it. just more time wasted, looss of train of thought etc etc
Using 8.5.1 and its complete junk. Still haven’t got scrollbars working properly!
It’s 9:25am and am ready to spit blood, bloody hell I HATE IT I HATE I HATE I HATE IT!!!
I tried to send an email and it didnt even go through! arrrgh im so upset. And now the supplier will question whether I will buy his pump or not, and not give me a true price
Lotus Notes – designed to impede the true earnings potential of any company or corporation. The not so Windows application! Which really battles to communicate the right message to those who are limited in their I.T. brain capacity. Anyone advocating Notes regardless of version has the distinction of being “U/S” and should quite frankly work in a meaningless state department….Or can only use one of their cerebral hemispheres….
You know, reading these comments, I came up with a common gripe… I don’t give a flip about powerful applications and system admin. As a user, Lotus Notes, which I MUST use for e-mail, is not as friendly, compatible and functional as Outlook. I’ve used Outlook for as long as I can remember after Banyan Vines (anyone remember that one???). The SINGLE BIGGEST issue I have with Notes is “Winmail.dat” files. Attachments from anyone but fellow Notes users come in as “Winmail.dat”. Tech support has been unable to fix it, and my fix is either have them mail it to my Yahoo account (which always works) or skip the attachments (I’ve also had to have folks FAX, yes FAX!, attachments to me!). We JUST went to version 8.0.2, and thank goodness it remembers previous addresses now. There may be some sort of tech junk that makes Notes some sort of logical choice, but I honestly don’t care. Outlook works better, looks better and is more intuitive than Notes for e-mail. I can’t even choose my appointment reminder sound, making that function pretty worthless too. Anyway, I get it Notes is more than e-mail, but you know what, I DON’T CARE, because all I need is an e-mail/calendar application and Notes is what they give me, and there are far superior e-mail applications out there. I will agree, the upgrade to 8.0.2. was better, but it’s still sub-par. Don’t even get me started on Lotus Notes “mail jail”.
ATIS says:
March 29, 2010 at 5:25 am
You know, reading these comments, I came up with a common gripe… I don’t give a flip about powerful applications and system admin. As a user, Lotus Notes, which I MUST use for e-mail, is not as friendly, compatible and functional as Outlook. I’ve used Outlook for as long as I can remember after Banyan Vines (anyone remember that one???). The SINGLE BIGGEST issue I have with Notes is “Winmail.dat” files. Attachments from anyone but fellow Notes users come in as “Winmail.dat”. Tech support has been unable to fix it, and my fix is either have them mail it to my Yahoo account (which always works) or skip the attachments (I’ve also had to have folks FAX, yes FAX!, attachments to me!).
This is completely UNTRUE and there is plenty of docs on this. Hey guess what !?!?! It’s an MS (i.e Exchange) problem and if your tech support can’t read, don’t blame the product. What’s wrong with you people !?!?!?
You Saved Me ! Thanks!
After reading a few comments on this website I will not pursue any further the use of Lotus Notes as an email option for my office.
Used LN in 1990 to 92, all that we had at the time, DB’s not bad, email sucks. Neve used or saw it again until recently. A friend got it 5 years ago and went nuts at work, still not the same today. LN is a real WOOF. I just was transistioned from 7 years of MS Outlook to LN 8.0.2 and have been loosing it since. What a DOG. This was part of a company merger effort to improve technology!!! Now most of us feel it was a step back in time, around 10 years. I feel so much younger now!!!!!
I forgot one funny thing: if you use the “Out Of Office” feature, you have to (logically) give the start and end date to send the out-of-office reply to people who send you mails.
But after the “end date”, it is NOT switched off automatically. In stead, you get a e-mail from the Notes application with the question to please turn off manually the out-of-office reminder… Why can’t the program automatically shut down this feature ? I don’t understand that the LN developpers were able to create a feature that send you mails after the end date in stead of just writing a scrip to end the out-of-office. This is a typical example of the inintuitive user interface.
A lot of a LN fanboys don’t understand why normal user hate lotus notes:
- if you paste some content from an IE page, it takes 5 to 15 minutes on a new Quad-core PC to be paste in LN 8.0
- If a LN server goes down, another available LN server does not automatically take over immediately, the user first has to click away 10 error messages that the original server is no longer responding, before another server takes over.
- If LN s already open and you click the LN application again, in stead of switching to the open application, you get a confusion error message
- The search function for mail is terrible: most of the time it shows the wrong results and the mails with the keywords are not even displayed.
- if you are lucky to find your e-mail via the find-function and you open it by double clicking it, watch out NOT to print it, because it will print automatically EVERY mail from the find results in stead of just the open mail you want to print
- …
@SQL Dave
Copy and paste….what part of copy do you not get? If you copy red text you therefore paste red text. Just like with to color copier you have at you office. Undo = ctrl+z paste is crtl+v. I must agree with you that it’s a but strange that the format (ie red text in your case) is kept after you undid the paste. Must probably be a SQL thing to make start for scratch everytime you remove a partial mistake.
guys.. go learn how to use email application… i’m sure u are very happy with stolen technologies like outlook….. lotus notes is surely more than email application…
I’m sure this has been answered by someone.. just can’t seem to find it with all the posts here. I send a lot of large .pdf files and whenever I hit Send, Lotus Notes freezes while it slowly (or my bandwidth) slowly processes the file. I have 8.5.1 ver.
Is there a way to hit send and let the email send in the backgroup so that I can keep working on emails? I think this is how Outlook works. Thanks for the advise!
My biggest personal issue with lotus notes, since I am forced to use it on a daily basis has to be the extraordinarily crappy search feature! it takes 20 minutes to search for anything and you have to do it one folder at a time. In todays world of email clients, indexing and providing instant search is a standard feature but for lotus notes if you want this feature you will have to pay $70 and buy it from another company with their Copernic Desktop Search (Corporate Edition)… Its highway robbery! There is a google desktop plug in that will allegedly handle this task but I have never been able to get it to work.. I dont think any one has.
Another gripe I have is how sometimes my meetings mysteriously disappear from my calendar or how sometimes I receive no notifications but… I just chalk it up to how ****** lotus notes 8.5 truly is… Dont get me wrong.. I am not a fan of outlook/exchange lock in but I would murder for it now.. I once worked for a company that had groupwise and it was 100X better!
PS.. I think you guys should add evolution/groupwise to the poll of “Which Mail Client would you rather use?”
@SQL DAVE – CNTRL-V is paste.. CNTRL-Z is undo..
I just love how after setting up a mail rule last week now every time I log in and go to my Mail tab it brings up the rules page instead.
I just love how my customized view settings disappear several times a day. Sometimes Notes refuses to bring up the correct View menu even after I click into other folders and to the calendar and back until Notes decides it has punished me enough for changing the crappy defaults. Luckily sometimes Notes will restore the view after I click on another folder then click back but not always. Who the hell thought the default view was good? Whenever I show someone how to change it they are geniunely excited about how much better it is.
I just love how I had an email open in its own window and I clicked on Reply All (from the email’s window) and Notes created a reply to the first calendar item in my Day At A Glance side window instead. How is that even possible???? I closed the bogus reply and opened the email again. Just to test it out, I tried it five more times the exact same way and it did it again on the second, third and fifth time (not the fourth!). Of course Notes crashed on the fifth time. After using killnotes I reopened Notes and was able to do a proper reply.
I just love how once in a while, including a minute ago, I dragged and email from one folder to another folder and after flipping out for a few minutes, Notes instead moved the entire folder to an unrelated and definitely not selected third folder. And after moving it back of course I have to customize the view again.
I just love how when replying to a fax address Notes will chop off the second @ symbol and whatever follows it (name@number@RFAX).
I just love how Notes screws up any image I paste into it so I have to mess with the height/width percentages until it looks normal again.
I just love how when I delete an email before I let it show up in the preview pane (can we please get the three line autopreview like Outlook has???) Notes thinks for a while, then shows it in the preview pane, then deletes it.
I just love how sometimes after I delete, mark an email as read or unread or move an email from my inbox, the focus of Notes switches over to the Day At A Glance calendar side window.
See everyone, there is so much to love about Notes.
We’ve just been upgraded to Outlook from Lotus Notes. I’ve suffered Notes for 8 years and now it is absolute bliss… No hangs, no minute-long searches, no clunky interface that doesn’t work as you would expect… the list goes on… The admins bang on about how wonderful Notes is all the time, but I’m pretty sure it would be hard to find an end-user who would prefer Notes over Outlook (especially once they have used both)… At the end of the day, the problem is that Notes is a jack of all trades, master of none. Suck it IBM, you’ve lost another big customer
My company says “Goodbye IBM. Hello Google”.
Yay!
Question here — is it possible that if I add someone to a recurring meeting I’ve already set up and then delete their response (which seems to be handled differently than the 20 or so others who were part of the original meeting) do they get removed from the meeting? It looks like that may have happened to me. I can’t find the answer anywhere and I figured if something so annoying could happen, a place with this URL would be able to help.
I have been using MS Outlook for the past 6 years, now my Company has been taken over by another Company which has mandated Lotus Notes, it sucks! MS Outlook was a breeze, Lotus notes is damn slow,impairs my productivity. Its a bane for people like me who have to send atleast 200 emails a day on work!
Lotusland (from Zombieland) :Rule #1: Cardio – try to get in some exercise while waiting for commands to execute.
Rule #2: Doubletap – always click something twice, becasue the first one won’t register.
Rule #3: Always wear a seatbelt – Lotus crashes often.
Rule #32: Cherish the little things – like when you used to accidently send an e-mail prematurely on Outlook becasue you acted too fast. Or when you used to get work done. It won’t happen with Lotus Notes.
Ah, brethren…to find you at last…I have gnashed my teeth, cried alone in dark closets alone no more…I hate negativity in any form, but Lotus Notes? REALLY! There is no excuse…I wonder about the people coding this ****…how do they sleep at night? Here is my fix…I forward all my work Lotus Notes email to my iPhone and deal with it there.
Hi can you help me?
when I receive emails from accounts outside my “office” meaning private email accounts, the display font is set to 1 and they are unreadable…I always have to Copy&paste&increase font which is not acceptable! could you help me?
I can’t believe there are people on this site who support this P.O.S. Seriously any email system stupid enough to sort all the RE and FW together, can’t be applauded on any level. Then there is LNs inabilty to allow cutting and pasting inside itself.
So you recieved an email with a friends info inside and you want to place it in your “adress book”, oh sorry, I meant patheticall inept “contact list” can you do it , of course you can, you just retype it all.
Chris, you have to be kidding… Adding contacts into your personnal address book is just 3 clicks away (Tools > Add contact > OK)…
What a bunch of crybabies. All I hear is whhaaaaaaa. shall I call the whhaaambulance.
All admins/devs/apologists – just accept it. Users of Notes do not like it. Argue all you want – but in the end what is truly important is the user experience, and that is where Notes fails.
More than mail? Okay, sure… but it does mail. Most people use it for mail. If you have Notes, you most likely do NOT have another mail solution. What applications do users spend the most time in? Internet and E-mail. Don’t give me the ‘training’ excuse. Guess what – a properly designed application isn’t going to require training… especially an e-mail application.
Oh, and, man, I got a laugh when the admin below mentioned backward compatibility from version 8.5 back to version 1. Seriously? You think that’s a good thing? So, by comparison, should I be upset that I can’t run applications written for Windows 3.1 in Windows 7? Backwards compatibility is a good thing, yes, but – come on. That argument sounds, to me, like you’re just saying Notes is still the same piece of junk it was 15 years ago.
“Oh, and, man, I got a laugh when the admin below mentioned backward compatibility from version 8.5 back to version 1. Seriously? You think that’s a good thing? So, by comparison, should I be upset that I can’t run applications written for Windows 3.1 in Windows 7? Backwards compatibility is a good thing, yes, but – come on.”
it is not so about applications, it is more about data…
try to open an access 97 db with Access 2007 software without a converting tool…
Try finding someone who wants to go back to Lotus Notes 1 from 8.5. Or are you saying they’re basically the same thing? They must be if you don’t need any conversion to be done .. right?
how to set mail view sorted with latest messages at the top in Lotus notes 8.5.1. Evertime I close and open LN it goes back to the oldest on top and then i have to keep scrolling up/down. Anybody know how to fix this?
As a consultant, what I find is that since the Domino server tends to be very dependable, over time companies skimp on their admin staff – often they have too little training on Notes and are supporting too many other things: other software, hardware, phones, blackberries,… As the years go by, the server keeps delivering mail, but few things get updated and new features don’t get implemented. By the time management wakes up, there are a lot of pissed off users. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Is anybody on this forum really looking for answers? As with most apps, poor implementation and maintenance = poor app
I’m sure there’s a Ihatemicrosoftexchange website also. I’m reading the venting and seeing that most of you really have sh1tty adminstrators, architects… probably helpdesk people who found their way into designing your email systems. Yeah, Notes sucks when sucky people implement it. I spend my days fighting tooth and nail with those people to try to keep some sanity in our system.
Our company has a 54gb shared mailbox in Lotus Notes. It opens quickly and there has not been a single complaint about it. Try that in Outlook/Exchange!
I like to call it “Lotus Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!tes”
@noob1
Who’s asking?
I typed download in an email. It flagged it as a spelling error!
This is from a piece of software that is downloaded!
Also it spellchecks the fw and re every single time even though it put them there itself.
i agree that lotus notes is “more than just an email client”. so if it is that clever why not fix something as simple as a spellchecker, something simple as information boxes that are irrelevant?
@Caliber FX Pro
Sir I take offense to your comment, I am an experienced developer and system admin at my corporation and I hate Notes with all my heart and soul.
Also, I just tried to reply to an email, but began typing too quickly and buggered up the options in my Inbox. Now all my email is greyed out, and its very difficult to tell what is and isn’t unread!!
I really, truly, hate this PoS app.
Here’s a new one:
1 – Right click on a file in Windows and select “Send To” –> “Mail recipient”.
2 – Notes opens up a new memo with the file as an attachment. OK so far.
3 – Discard this new memo
4 – Try to repeat Step 1. Windows Explorer will crash and I must restart my machine.
We’re using v6.5.1. OK this is 6 years old, but come on, 2004 isn’t exactly the Jurassic period as far as software goes. There are countless other bugs and examples of interface shoddiness in this version of Notes, all of which would have been as completely unacceptable 6 years ago as they are now. I have several applications at home which are much older than 6 years (including my copy of Outlook), none of which behave as stupidly or damagingly as Notes.
To tell you the truth, I was amazed Notes was even able to reach Step 2. Whenever I try something in Notes and it actually works, I am genuinely shocked. Yesterday I finally managed to get my “size” column to display in KB, and yet when I logged in today Notes had lost all the changes I made.
I hate Lotus Notes. I just thought I would state that explicitly in case it wasn’t clear from the above.
** SOURCE – RE FAQ REGARDING OUT OF OFFICE, **
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=475&uid=swg21212467
QUESTION 6: Can you customize the “Welcome Back” message, the “Disable Reminder” message, or the default wording of the e-mail notifications sent to all senders of e-mail?
ANSWER: In short, No. It is possible to customize these messages, but these types of customizations to the template are not supported.
These types of modifications require changes to the complex LotusScript code of the Out of Office Profile form and the Out of Office agent. Lotus Support will not be able to assist customers in customizing the Out of Office default text in this manner.
The only customizable messages are in the “Out of Office Message” and “Special message” tabs of the Out of Office option in the Notes client and Domino Web Access client.
user friendly much?
try making it so it is more easier to customize you ********..
**** you notes/ibm… **** … you…..
Had to respond to the few “you are the master of your domain, smack the IT guy and all will be well”. I work a small firm and the IT guy is the boss who does not have time to train or make any changes one might want. Outlook was thrown out and Notes comes in with no training. I used to use Outlook tasks to manage files with my staff. Worked well. To Do’s? Not so much. Any changes or updates made by staff do not end up on my task views. I get blank notices. To Do’s are only listed about 95% in date order. When you have hundreds of to do’s this is a problem. After months of being told I was a complaining nut bar, I finally found the solution. Have to add another piece of software. Many calls to some secret guru later and the boss tells me that I am correct but he won’t fix the problem and won’t buy more software.
But hey, there is a great feature that links calendar to to do’s, correct? Not so fast! Firstly, it appears to put tasks that are due in the future on the list. But only SOME of the tasks due in the future. Why? Who knows. But worse still, when my tasks were moved from outlook to Notes, there were repeating tasks moved over as well. It appears that now these repeating tasks cannot be erased without purchasing yet another piece of software which, you guessed it, is not happening. So I now have about 60 tasks that I can never erase. Gums up everything since many are now 1 to 5 years overdue!!!
My eyesight is fairly rotten so I have to change the font on the email. My boss is so paranoid, that I cannot change the email font off of 10 point (also known as teeny tiny) so I change the fonts to large which makes 10 point readable. My computer settings are also changed to enlarge everything on the screen. What could be the problem? Well, the headers also enlarge and they are not attached to the body of the email. What I am left with is an entire page of blank space with a few words on the header and the body of the email in a little window of 4 lines and a scroll bar. If there attachments I usually have to print the email just to see what the body actually says as the attachments have their own window. Printing an email just to read “see above” does seem like a waste. The issues also make the preview screen pretty much useless. I have pointed out the problem to my boss and he says that he does not have the problem as his eyes are good and he had a double wide screen. Hmmm.
My boss is so paranoid about administrative control that we cannot change anything. There are no apps. There is no way to change, for example, the calendar so I can see the entire work day on the screen without scrolling. There is not live chat or live text. Nothing. This was presented to us as our email and calendar program and there is to be no other use for it.
I could go on and on, believe me. But I will stop here.
And let’s not even comment on how well Notes (doesn’t) handle daylight savings time!
Oh yeah: what do I hate the most about notes?
Notes’ alergy to copy and paste. From the Excel-to-picture annoyance to the lack of copy-paste functionality in password prompts, this really takes the program into the 1980′s. IMO, copy–paste of passwords using a password manager is one of the best practices for security–one which notes turns it’s nose up at.
* It’s more than e-mail: Yes, but the horrible e-mail functions are quite enough, thank you. Given license, the devlopers of this fine product lack utter concern about end-user functionality. I don’t care if the thing gives pedicures, I would like to view, edit, send catagorize and archive my mail. No, but hey… This program lets you plant trees in China!
* Get the latest version: This is so that current documentation will always refer to a slightly different version. Good strategy, as the developers seem most interested in blaming the end-user for the audacity of unreasonable requests, like ‘sending’ mail. But the server administration is so easy–likely because no pesky users can actually do anything.
* Get training: Probably not the best idea, this would be like Ghengis Kahn sending his troops to sensitivity training. The informed user is even less satisfied the more he/she knows about what this embarrassment of a program is supposed to do.
Lotus real-time strategy **Eyes Only**
Use Sametime, e-mail is soooo 20th century.
Read all about my Lotus Notes troubles at:
http://frankoregan.posterous.com/my-email-woes
It tells the tale of a man at the brink of email madness.
Everything is up to the system administrator to configure it correctly. When configured correctly it works perfectly! I love it, offline mailbox, prepare your mails and when you have an internet connection, replicate and it’s all done.
For Each oProcess In colProcess
strProcess = oProcess.Name
Select Case strProcess
Case “notes.exe”
‘MsgBox(“Killing Notes”)
oProcess.Terminate()
Case “nlnotes.exe”
‘MsgBox(“Die hard crappy ****”)
oProcess.Terminate()
End Select
Next
Does anyone have Lotus Notes 8.5 BETA for linux ?
I had been using LN 8 beta on linux for 2-3 years and I’ve accidentally deleted my download. The BETA is no longer on IBM’s site, they only have 8.5 eval which it time limited to 60 days so I can’t use that.
So now i have to boot to windows in office as we use lotus for mails.
If someone has the beta RPMs i would really really appreciate if you could upload and give the link to me.
Thanks in Advance.
Amitabh
(amitabhr at gmail)
“It’s more than just email”… correct… but why does it have to do the email part so badly?
I turned off using the built-in web browser in preferences. Open an email, click on a FTP link, and it opens in the built-in web browser. Then Notes crashes because it doesnt support FTP.
Lotus Notes is wothless. When our company was purchased, we were forced to migrate from Microsoft Outlook to Lotus Notes. They are also going to make us use the SAP database application. Aren’t both these applications from the 80′s? I do not know of any other company on planet earth that uses Lotus Notes. Lotus is a POS. I rather eat vegetables than use Lotus Notes. Lotus is slow and inefficient. I guess IBM thinks that having this samtime chat feature is going to help their cause. I just assume use the Yahoo instant messenger.
I have Lotus Notes 6.5 at work. Whenever I print an email containing the chain of all preceding emails – the original plus responses, they all print on a single page – one email on top of the other. A single email several pages long will print out on however many pages required. Please tell me how to fix this! Thanks
Today’s topic is: away from home.
I was out of the office for a week, visiting another outlet of our chain. So, I used the web version of LN (8.5) to view my emails and send off some. It worked very nicely and wasn’t too slow either. Happy as a clam. I left most of the emails I received in my inbox, so I could check them over again upon my return to the office, just to make sure I had not missed anything. I had moved only a couple of non-important emails to some folders. A couple.
When I got back I noticed that all my folders, may be 25 total, had a number of unread messages in them. I don’t leave unread messages in my folders. I read them all, lest I forget to act upon them. So I check the folders to see what messages are unread. Totally random. Hmmm. Odd. Strike 1. So I right-click on the folder to change all emails in that folder to “Read”. No can do. Silly me. Strike 2. It must be in the Edit menu. Nope. I had to do a search. It told me to use the Edit/Unread Marks.. menu option. Still did not mark the files in the folder as Read, though. Strike 3.
But I understand, this is the fault of the developer/administrator for not programming Notes Server properly.
You know what is also their fault? That LN does not log me in the chat server any time I put the computer to sleep. It realizes it is not logging in, but the dialog that asks me for my password does not accept it. I have to close the dialog box and then click on the icon in the status bar to log me in.
Again, I realize this is the fault of the developer/administrator. We just cannot assume software works straight out of the box. I needs, well, programming.
Oh, by the way. I wanted to share my contacts with my colleague. I could share my email, my calendar, but not my contacts. I did not want to share my calendar or email, I wanted to share my contacts. They’re opened to share on my end, but the client on my colleagues computer does not allow to open another person’s calendar. The help file is wrong, the steps laid out in the helpfile are incorrect. I do not get a submenu when clicking on Contacts as you get in Calendar or Email. So I can’t open my contacts folder on someone else’s computer.
Last comment. We use a corporate email address list. So, if I start typing, the address bar suggests the email address of the person in the list. Nice timesaver. What would be even better if it presents a list of people that satisfy the already typed characters, not just the first person that appears in the list, so you can pick one quickly without typing a lot of characters. Even better, it can sort the list by most often used email address. Like Apple Mail, for instance. Is there an app for that?
There is a WTF here too; I decided to enter an address book entry for a colleague with some personal info. The colleague also has a corporate entry, of course. Every time I send this person an email, a dialog box pops up asking me what address to use, even though I always use the same corporate email address. Sometimes it asks me this twice, once when I press the send button, a second time when it actually sends the email. The same happens to my own entry for my personal email, so when I have to send an email to myself I end up clicking, clicking, clicking. Urgh.
The thing I hate most about Notes is that in spite of all its shortcomings and what-not, it’s ever so omnipresent… why tf does everyone use it!!!
The action taken to local and national disasters is noble but it’s a damn shame that so many citizens take advantage of the sad situations.
I mean everytime there is an earthquake, a flood, an oil spill – there’s always a group of heartless people who rip off tax payers.
This is in response to reading that 4 of Oprah Winfreys “angels” got busted ripping off the system. Shame on them!
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/08/19/crimesider/entry5251471.shtml
I’ve been using Lotus Notes since I started at IBM about 2 years ago now. And eventhough I started out liking the theory of database-based email I’ve quickly come to the realisation that in reality this isn’t such a good thing.
Firstly, Notes is way too bloated, I know you can do everything with it from creating websites to making coffee. But honestly, who uses it for anything except it’s email and calendar? All this extra functionality makes Notes incredibly slow, not to mention horribly complicated. Even I think it’s complicated, and I have a Master’s degree in computer science. I’ve worked with things like the Quake 3 engine code and the Linux kernel code and they eventually made sense to me, unlike Notes. Imagine what it must be like for the people who don’t have any experience with pcs. I can’t even begin to imagine.
Now slowness you could get used to and one could learn to navigate it’s way through Notes with a few years of courses. What I will never understand is how you could make a program that is so horribly bugged in every aspect. Isn’t any part of Notes tested before it is shot in the face of the innocent masses?
In fact every one of my colleagues has problems with Notes, however they never have the same problems. There’s problems with replication, there’s problems with sending/receiving mail. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong on somebody’s Notes somewhere. In fact I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the millions of features that Lotus Notes has there’s a “Random Bug Generator”. No two bugs are alike and nobody’s going to have any clue how to solve it.
I don’t know where to begin to describe all of the problems with notes. Why does it use it’s own horrible notation of email addresses? What’s with it’s DNS notation? What’s the use of the replication or why isn’t replication hidden from the user? Why do mails need indexing before they can be searched, aren’t they stored in a database? Why is doing anything to your emails so slow? Aren’t databases supposed to be fast? Why would they make a program (zapnotes) to kill a notes process when it has crashed again instead of fixing the crashes?
I really admire the (inevitably) amazing sales people we have here at IBM. How else could you sell a piece of horrible code like Notes to the public, and even get repeat sales. I’m baffled to be honest.
Nunca habia tenido que utilizar un cliente de correo peor que lotus notes, como puede una empresa pagar para esa porqueria…. los de software libre deberian de crear un cliente de seguro que haga lo basico, Correo, integrar cuentas, agenda, punto, hacer un filtro es lo peor…..
Lotus notes always crashes when I try to send mail and I happen to be receiving mail at the same time. After that happens, it is frozen forever and the only way to get it working again is to restart my computer.
How could that be normal?
Notes is quirky I must admit. I have used it since version 7 and came across it when working for a technology company. Now I run a small consultancy company I’m considering installing the Collaboration express version. The reason why is because it is priced very well for SMB solutions, very good remote replication, and strong security. It runs Domino runs on Linux servers, and You can even get notes to run on a linux desktop. And I can sync with my Symbian based phone. Nothing comes close to ticking all those boxes.
This makes for a very strong worm/virus resistant messaging platform
Yes it’s quirky. At the end of the day , if it helps put information at my finger tips to make my company generate revenue, then I’m happy.
I’m a bit concerned about the reports of crashing, thats why I’m running a trial of version 8.5.1. I never saw crashing on version 7.
Take look at a higher picture. Notes is 25 years old. Must be doing something right
Still stuck on Notes 6.5.5 at work. Envy all you 8.5.x users there!
I Currently work in a bank as administrator / developer / baby sitter / ice crusher and so on. I have a database thats 17GIG, undergoes alot of changes daily but operates well within the limitations set by IBM on Lotus Notes 8. For the third week not the f#$%ing database consistancy checks at 2 in the morning. There is nothing running on the server or the physical box, the piece of sh#t database ******* criminal snot thing crashes and consistancy checks. I have contacted IBM, I have considered burning down the building… I don’t know what else to do. Had many various admins in and nobody knows what the hell is wrong with it. to IBM, FIX YOUR BALLSUP REPLICATION! IT DOESN’T WORK PROPERLY. I don’t want money anymore. I just want the companies I work for to leave me alone. Houses and cars are not worth this sh#t and my wife left me already anyway because I was always at work so thats that dilemma sorted. This is going to lead me to drink, I wish I was dead, then I change my mind and wish everyone else was dead and it was lotus’s fault. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Some american IT prick is ruining lives. We should gather up the towns folk and Slay them.
thanks very much.
have a nice day.
This whole website is living in the past. Where we stand today Lotus Notes is the most modern collaboration environment on the planet. It has links to social networking applications as well as a killer web interface and iPhone integration. Give it up and realize it is the modern collaborative tool that needs to be given the credit it deserves.
Calvin:
You might want to have a look at Roaming Profiles. They are designed for situations like you describe.
Calvin Foo said on February 17th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
password is saved in the id file, not in the server.
If I have to use multiple computer, I have to add the id file into all the computers I need to use. Imagine I got 20 staffs, who will be using 20 workstations around the buildings… and on and off, staff come and go…
So you can have 2 IM clients with sametime WTF…One is a standalone and one is intergeated in Notes…But wait theres more the M******r F*******g notes version does not have the feature I use the most…THE SCREEN SHOT button!!!!!! Are you kidding me take it back to the drawing board IBM or file it under “EPIC FAIL” Your program sucks.
Replication? What the **** is that. Its 2010. I’m sure in 1988 it was revolutionary and state-of-the-art to have a local copy and a server copy that were kept in “sync” by some convoluted, complicated, error prone, highly manual setup replication process, but hasn’t email/calendar capabilities progressed past that? Oh, that’s right…it has! Lipstick on a pig…
Just upgraded to Notes 8.5, and now I don’t have any other choice then to use the webmail interface.
With 8.5 Notes, which in earlier versions was very slow, the application now needs 10 minutes to start. At least. One good thing though is that once started you can hardly shut down the program. So in one sence it’s a stable software.
In a couple of weeks my company will move over to MS Outlook and Notes is budled of to where it belongs; in the recycle bin or rather the container for combustibly material.
To all you Notes lovers that defend this ****, I don’t care about who my job’s Notes developer, admin, or IT certified person is…I just want it to work. My IT/Developer has nothing to do with the fact that you can’t Recall any email message or that the search options are the worse.
Sorry dude. Yes you can Recall messages in Lotus Notes (8.5) and Notes has long had a more powerful search mechanism than outlook. You can full text index your mail file and include attachments, along with various other options for searching.
I not only hate lotus email and calendar, but the databases we have are sh** too. With email and calendar, the list is too extensive to name. I do have to remark on the email folder. Creating a folder takes forever then the folder might move on it own accord!! The databases are slow, crashes constantly, not at all user-friendly and has ATROCIOUS search capability. I wish LN would die already forcing us to go another route.
PNC bank is switching from outlook to lotus notes…… why are they so blind????? lotus notes sucks!!!!! why would anyone choose lotus notes over outlook??????
Probably because they don’t want to get hacked to death. This IS a bank right? I suspect many Exchange / outlook users don’t even know they are hacked. …. bliss LOL.
Apprantly we are now the biggest user of this Lotus Notes “email” application. A certain very high up the chain member went to an IBM confrence and was asked to come up on stage, bad idea for IBM. It was said …”it was the worst decision I has ever made!”, never mind a pin drop you could hear a feather land on the floor with a crashing sound.
sure… ahh ha… LOL.
pliz help me my lotus notes 6.54 is corapt and it ask me for repai, i real need to use it
i real need lotus notes 6.54 coz i made a mastake and its need to be repail
No reminders for a meeting on the default setting WTF?
My email box is full, I delete my email and compact and replicate still cant send email 2hrs later WTF?? – need to wait a day WTF???
I can’t sort my email by folders I have to delete my sent items by hand WTF????
My emails are sorted from oldest to newest on the default (easy fix but WTF?????)
No copy paste ??????
No drag and drop text ???????
No saving of induvidual messages ????????
Who unleashed this horrible piece of **** on the world????????
I hope they burn in hell
Thats it for today.
I have two issues now with this excellent tool:
1) my calendar shows me a meeting at 1PM EST and 12PM EST to all other meeting invitees? How come?
2) I click on the calendar icon in the workspace, then I move to a different tab, and then, the calendar tab is gone. I click on the calendar icon in the workspace again, click on another tab later, and the calendar tab is gone AGAIN. Screw you Notes…
@Lindus: try running Exchange on Linux…
@Calvin Foo: set up roaming profiles.
I really understand all the Notes haters. It’s a personal thing, it’s awkward, it’s too different. Much like my father who hates a PC and adores his fax machine…
How come we have people in the world already using Notes 8.5 and I, as an IBM employee, don’t have it? It is not even available for download here. Congrats, IBM. Congrats
Drunk and Bitter Jesus said on February 17th, 2010 at 9:20 am
In re: the notion that one should upgrade to 8.5 before criticizing Notes: so, what you’re saying is that it took the Notes developers eight and a half major version releases to get to a point where the product was decently stable and usable? And this is your argument that Notes is good? REALLY?.
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No, it has always been stable but if you deploy it (like anything else) in a hack manner, you will have problems. As technology evolves, so do people’s needs/wants/requirements. Therefore enhancemetns and improvments are put into each new release ….. again, just like any other product.
Are you saying that outlook is the same now as it was in earlier releases? Same functionality? Please tell me that’s not what you’re trying to imply here.
Zheez said on February 11th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
I fondly call this crappy system BLOW-TUS notes because it totally blows.
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BLOW-TUS notes ……….. Oh I get it !!! AHAHAHAHA Ahahah aha ah
hah ……… good one.
Caliber FX Pro said on February 17th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
PeteM, why do you insist on defending the indefensible. No one is disputing that Lotus Notes is more than just email and calendar. What everyone is saying is “why does it have to do email and calendar so badly?”…
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I can find just as many (if not more) flaws and pecidillos in Outlook, as I have to use that client as well. The thing is, instead of wasting my time on a board to whine about them, I do a little research/investigation, find out what the problem is and resovle it. Honestly, if I tell people that a lot of their questions are answered in the help file, they complain that they don’t have time to read it yet they have plenty of time to come on here to ***** and moan. Please, if you know of a flawless product out there, let me know and I’ll buy it.
A very good start would be firing all the developers and the QA division responsible for releasing this POS application especially for e-mail. (Piece of Sh_t) I actually needed to create a line item in my time keeping to attribute all the time I now waste managing e-mail. Spell check, suks , Create a hyperlink I dare ya, suks, On line help, suks, Archive (what were these people thinking?) suks!
Killnotes is undoubtedly the most well-designed piece of software carrying the Notes name.
Note: I use 8.5.1, and Domino is ALSO 8.5.1. I was previously on 6.5.5 (sob sob sob) and 7.0.3 (sob sob). After using 8.5.1 for 2 months, I still need 2 sobs. It’s not much different from 7.x, just fatter.
To all Notes lovers, especially those with Dev experience, like Escobar Driver, you keep saying the same thing – get your admin to update the db/view/tweak or get the user to tweak the db/write a script/create and run an agent etc. WTF is it with this view thing and screwed up pointer mechanisms that don’t behave intuitively.
I just want to store my email my way, in my own folders, and really treat an email as a discrete object, just like REAL MAIL, REAL DOCUMENTS. Come on, IBM keeps touting the document centric feature of Notes/Domino and “convert all your paper processes” blablabla. I cannot even drag and drop an email between 2 mail databases. Why????? And as has been pointed out, dragging a mail to your desktop creates a URL to it. This means after archival, sending or forwarding mail from your archive causes Blotes to behave in completely unintuitive ways.
Why would users (I have been in IT for 15 years and can fix my own hardware and am handy with lots of software, though not as a dev) want to bother themselves to write a freakin script to make Notes behave like every other mail client? Some guy called LotusNotesEvangelist was saying “I can make Notes behave anyway I want”. Well, all a user expects is an intuitive email and calendaring experience, not be a scriptmonkey to tweak the way a FAKE db behaves just to retrieve email.
And do you think the admins will entertain all user requests because of some mailbox feature of notes that fails in comparison with, say Thunderbird or Outlook? I’ve used OL Express, TB, OL, Zimbra, and god, finally came across the abomination that is Notes mail. I’ve tried to make it my friend, but it’s completely antisocial unless you code it.
Please, none of the “haters” here dispute it’s more than email, and really, to re-emphasise what some other poster said, FFS, make the email behave the way that all other email software should, and not make excuses about “Notes as a mail client is not the best way to use the db features”.
If that is so, then dump its email features and co-opt TB as a front end.
Man, 8.5 versions just to get most of the basics fixed. I know OL has its limitations too, but I don’t get any frustration out of using it for mail and calendaring, and it treats emails as discrete documents, and behaves intuitively, far more than can be said for BLOTES.
Lastly, M$ shoved its Ribbon interface as a non-removalbe option (unless you pay for a script), and that sucks *** big time too.
“I cannot even drag and drop an email between 2 mail databases.”
Sure you can, so I’ll just stop reading your post right there as I’m sure the rest is **** also.
GBPBot said on February 16th, 2010 at 7:12 am
The day is nearly here when we can get rid of this piece of **** for good. Today I had an email open and decided I would delete it. The obvious thing to do therefore, is hit the delete button on the keyboard… Not so with Lotus Notes… “Cannot instantiate UIDocument” It works when you don’t have the email open though… Obviously there will be some valid reason for the error I received, such as “Lotus Notes is not just for email”
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Works for me in 8.5.1.
GBPBot said on February 16th, 2010 at 7:14 am
Woops!… I almost forgot… Out of office messages. I sent three people an email on Friday. One of the people was on vacation between Friday and Tuesday. I received their out of office notification on Monday afternoon. WTF?
By default version 5 & 6 out of office agents don’t run on the weekends. R5 will run once a day at 1AM and version 6 will run every 6 hours between 4AM and 12PM. I hope this helps but I suspect it won’t.
And for the Lookout fan boys that complain about Notes error messages, here’s one I got from my Outlook web mail today. Yep, real nice.
“501 – Header values specify a method that is not implemented.
The page you are looking for cannot be displayed because a header value in the request does not match certain configuration settings on the Web server. For example, a request header might specify a POST to a static file that cannot be posted to, or specify a Transfer-Encoding value that cannot make use of compression.”
Drunk and Bitter Jesus said on February 19th, 2010 at 11:54 am
Here’s an additional thought for those of you claiming that using Notes for email is overkill. IBM markets Notes Server/Domino as an Exchange replacement, therefore it is clearly IBM’s intention that Notes should be used in that way, which means that it is not unreasonable of implementers and users to assume that it ought, in fact, be capable of replacing Outlook and Exchange. The fact that the Outlook/Exchange-like functionality is inferior can therefore rightly be held as a criticism of IBM’s implementation of Notes.
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Couldn’t the same be said of MS and Exchange. They market and sell Exchange as a Domino/Notes replacement. However, if you have Notes apps in your environment, they somehow forget to tell you about all the other products and associated hardware(share point, sql ……) you’ll need to buy in order to replace all the functionality that comes with Notes. Where’s the ROI again?
Calvin Foo said on February 17th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
password is saved in the id file, not in the server.
If I have to use multiple computer, I have to add the id file into all the computers I need to use. Imagine I got 20 staffs, who will be using 20 workstations around the buildings… and on and off, staff come and go…
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Imagine using a feature called Roaming User.
Roaming users doesn’t solve his problem. You still have to manually deploy the user.id file.
Petetm said on February 4th, 2010 at 8:26 am
Every different car I get into has the lights, wipers, shift, radio …among other things, in different places.
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If Notes was a car, the switch for the wipers would be in the glove box under a “More” panel. The switch would be labeled “dihydrogen monoxide removal.” Being different is fine if it is well executed and intuitive. Notes is neither.
It is hard to describe how much I dread using Lotus notes. It sucks. How could IBM come up with such a sucky product. If you want to slow down the productivity of your team – convert your organization to LN. I don’t even know where to begin.
1. Crappy formatting of emails
2. Wicked slow
3. Have you tried to use MSWord as an editor – what a joke! You must try it – it shows how crappy the whole design of LN is. Totally unusuable. Did I mention you can not attach a document if using Word as the editor?
4. How about “completed” items in your to do list continue to show and you can not stop making them show. What moron designed this.
I could go on and on.
Well… I’m STILL waiting for a cogent response from Notes apologists/defenders. On 2/1 I posted a lengthy list of Notes behaviors that are, IMO, indefensible. These are behaviors that — for the most part — can’t be shrugged off with the Big Three retorts:
* It’s more than email
* Get the latest version
* Get training
And while I’m waiting, I discovered ANOTHER “What In THE Hell Were They Thinking down at the Lotus Notes Center For Dysfunctional Programmers” behavior. This latest forehead-slap-inducing dorkage is best described by an example. Thus:
You get an email from someone and in it they stated: “I like the song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, and that sentence is in red.
You start a reply: “I’ve never heard of ” and then, rather than type that song title, you scroll down to their email, select Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and copy it into the clipboard.
Then you scroll back up to your message, position your cursor after “heard of ” and do a paste.
D’OH!! You dummy. You forgot to paste as plain text, so the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious in your reply is now red.
No worries… Just press CTRL-V (undo). The red Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious disappears, so you then do a paste-unformatted-text operation.
WHAT THE FUDGE!?!?! It’s STILL red. Press CTRL-V again, re-disappearing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Try typing ANYTHING at that point and what you’re typing will ALSO be red.
In other words: Undo will undo the pasting of the TEXT, but will leave the formatting of what you (accidentally) pasted in place.
Yeah… probably a feature, that.
Gimme a break. What a POS application.
Here’s an additional thought for those of you claiming that using Notes for email is overkill. IBM markets Notes Server/Domino as an Exchange replacement, therefore it is clearly IBM’s intention that Notes should be used in that way, which means that it is not unreasonable of implementers and users to assume that it ought, in fact, be capable of replacing Outlook and Exchange. The fact that the Outlook/Exchange-like functionality is inferior can therefore rightly be held as a criticism of IBM’s implementation of Notes.
What I find interesting is that one has to massively overdimension the hardware to get Notes working even remotely acceptable compared to other mail systems. And don’t even get me started on the web-client. The comparison is like nuts and melons, one hard and tough to crack, the other soft and smooth and juicy.
Why anyone uses this POS is beyond me as there are open standards where people can choose their own clients and nobody has to suffer for a full bloated system which is very, very seldom used in its entirety.
how can we be using the 8th version of this horrible system?! it was created in 1985, and i find it hard to believe 8 versions existed. i feel like i am using 1985 software. lotus is the worst. everyday a new problem. we switched from outlook to lotus and i want to throw my computer out the window 10 times a day!
when your company has to buy a program called Medic Pro for Lotus Notes…just to terminate processes that are left over after Notes crashes…..you know you hate Lotus Notes.
As I read these comments, I can’t help but feel empathy. I too use 8.5.1 and it is the biggest piece of **** EVER. The list is pretty much endless as to what it does/doesn’t do that I won’t even dignify the POS by listing any. Let’s just say it’s the only mail/”everything else” client that I have to close in order to open any IDE or else my machine grinds to a halt.
My question out there to you guy’s who use Outlook instead of lotus notes, what is your solution for archives over the network?
I have experience with all version of lotus notes for applications and for e-mail solution. I can say the older version would make me mad… now with the lates one, it’s really not that bad, tell me what you think?
Lotus Notes V5 – Very Very Bad
Lotus Notes V6.5 – Very Bad
Lotus Notes V8 – Better but Bad
Lotus Notes V8.5.1 – Good
Another great feature about lotus notes is that when it crashes it most of the times refuses to start again !
password is saved in the id file, not in the server.
If I have to use multiple computer, I have to add the id file into all the computers I need to use. Imagine I got 20 staffs, who will be using 20 workstations around the buildings… and on and off, staff come and go…
PeteM, why do you insist on defending the indefensible. No one is disputing that Lotus Notes is more than just email and calendar. What everyone is saying is “why does it have to do email and calendar so badly?”… this is what Notes proponents fail to address and why no one but admins and developers will ever like using Notes.
In re: the notion that one should upgrade to 8.5 before criticizing Notes: so, what you’re saying is that it took the Notes developers eight and a half major version releases to get to a point where the product was decently stable and usable? And this is your argument that Notes is good? REALLY?
You mean like Windows 3, nope 3.1, no that would be 95, wait that’s not right, it’s ME, no that sucked, how about XP, hold on, Vista, yeah that’s the …… huh? Oh sorry windows 7, yep THAT’S the one that’ll work.
At least most of you ppl get to use version 8, we are still stuck with 7, and will probably continue to do so for another five years or so… This is probably the most ugly, non-user friendly and simply just frustrating program I have ever come across.
They are planning a rollout of version 8.5 of this crappy ****.
I am planning to better leave the company before this date ….
I am forced to work with this **** since more than ten years and i hate it more than ever.
Woops!… I almost forgot… Out of office messages. I sent three people an email on Friday. One of the people was on vacation between Friday and Tuesday. I received their out of office notification on Monday afternoon. WTF?
The day is nearly here when we can get rid of this piece of **** for good. Today I had an email open and decided I would delete it. The obvious thing to do therefore, is hit the delete button on the keyboard… Not so with Lotus Notes… “Cannot instantiate UIDocument” It works when you don’t have the email open though… Obviously there will be some valid reason for the error I received, such as “Lotus Notes is not just for email”
F9 to refresh for the win \o/
******* peice of ****, wont let me copy and paste between two mailfiles even with full access administration, “you are not authorised to preform that operation” , checked mailfile acl can see my admin group in it as person group manager, cant create new folder again not authorised… this thing is fucked… seriously how ******* hard is it to just copy and paste some mail from one mailfile into another… **** you for inflicting the world with this ****.
Are you listed in there explictily/individually as well?
We archive e-mails automatically every couple of weeks (two I suppose). My workflow is longer than two weeks, some tasks last months. I open Inbox. I open archives to find the original e-mail. I sent e-mails. I do not find my sent e-mails. But I do. In Archives – sent. Some of them. At random.
There is a movie “The Sum Of All Fears” (or something like this). Is it about IBM getting a dominating position on the market? Or was it “Armageddon”?
The working mail file and archive are 2 SEPARATE mail files. So, yes, if you send a message from the archive it WILL end up in the sent view of your archive.
There was a movie Dumb and Dumber …….
just tryied to open a zipped PP-Presenentation. It crashed 5 times !!!! Unbelivable f… b…s this program better of with good old MS-Outlook
ROY SAID ON JANUARY 8TH, 2010 AT 8:17 PM
Sharing my thoughts for all of you : you don’t have the slightest idea about you are saying – all of you are using a fantastic and powerful software with hundreds of features and capabilities only to send and receive email ????
You goose Roy, of course that’s all we are using it for. Believe me, give us all a choice and we would go for a simpler, more user friendly email platform that works, fact is, most of us dont get a choice at our places of work… We do have to put up with dimwitted IT staff however ranting on about all the extras it has – why dont you go sell used cars?
This is too funny not to pass along, guess this is an Outlook ‘Fail’…
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=3iH&num=50&q=i+hate+lotus+notes&aq=f&aqi=&oq=
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=3iH&num=50&q=i+hate+lotus+notes&aq=f&aqi=&oq=
Interesting site. Full disclosure, I am a Notes fanboy, in fact I’m a developer and admin and have been since the mid 90′s (started with Rev 3.2). We use Outlook/Exchange at work and I use Firefox, Thunderbird, and gmail at home.
Couple of comments.
The site should really be renamed ‘I hate Notes Mail’ given that seems to be the major focus of the venting.
I don’t use 8.5.x so I can’t really comment on the UI but I know that it’s possible to use alternate ‘skins’ for mail; it’s just a db and your developers/admins can do magic if it makes sense for your business.
You can access Notes mail via pretty much any client you want to use if you can get to your mail server via smtp (and I know that is not always possible).
I will NOT blame the user for bad experiences with Notes mail. Your business has failed you, your admins have failed you, and your developers have failed you badly.
All mail clients suck; I hate all of them, each for different reasons. You tend to love what you’re used to.
99% of the ‘**** features’ I’ve seen CAN be tweaked to work the way you want; either via user customizations (personal views for instance which your admins/devs SHOULD be able to help you figure out) or by having the devs tweak the design for you.
Replication is totally awesome; nobody does it better than Noes, nobody. When it goes bad, it is almost always the admin’s fault or a training failure.
Bigger issue – Notes is not a mail platform; it is an entire development and deployment environment as well as a web server. When your business needs to put together an app that does something, Notes is a single source environment that allows for very rapid development and deployment. The MS stack is horrific; IIS, Sharepoint, SQLServer, .Net, C#, workflow, yada yada yada…dear god, to build a simple workflow takes forever and every time any bit of the stack is updated, the whole thing collapses like a deck of cards. Notes has an amazing backward compatibility record; apps done in version 1 still work in 8.5.1. When we migrated from 4.6 to 6.5, I had to change exactly 2 lines of code across hundreds of dbs (and the apps would have continued to work if I hadn’t made the changes). Additionally, the update took about 3 hours start to finish and would have gone faster if we hadn’t had a dns (ie Windows) problem.
So yeah, I like Notes, a lot. If you’re not happy, find your admin and your devs and beat the loving **** out of them. They’re supposed to support YOU not the other way around. Find a power user, talk to them. You have some responsibility for your experience with any piece of software.
Are you out of your mind? You think that Lotus Notes is a good software development platform? What kind of developer are you? Let me guess … you’re the not-so-smart kind of developer who somehow ended up as a Lotus Notes programmer (I really feel sorry for you!) and is now too lazy and and incompetent to learn anything new or sophisticated (such as .NET or Python or C++ or whatever).
I learn a new programming language every 6 months or so. I would never want to write a single line of code in Lotus Notes, let alone trap an entire enterprise web application inside this crappy email client.
My laptop has Lotus Notes on it. I want to toss it out the window as I’m speeding down the freeway, hopefully with a convoy of big rigs right behind me.
I fondly call this crappy system BLOW-TUS notes because it totally blows.
I think it’s funny people solely compare notes with outlook…you know, you really have to compare notes with exchange and sharepoint….come on now, if you’re going to tout how fantastic notes is and how exchange can only ‘hope to be like it some day’, you’re realy missing the full picture. Then you start looking at other office apps and how they all tie into sharepoint and outlook and not to mention sharing AD integration and none of this notes ID nonsense, and it all seems to come together. I don’t know why anyone would have a microsoft shop with notes for email and collaboration…come on now. Usually the notes gurus i run into are all anti microsoft maniacs that would drool over anything as long as it doesn’t say microsoft on it, so i’m not expecting a real fair comparison from them, but at least start to get your platform comparisons on par with each other. Like some others have noted, there’s a problem when seasoned IT professionals can’t figure out this application, i’m sure if all I did all day long was Lotus, and got a cert, I would be a fan…my job depended on it!! Plus i’m sure it WOULD take my full time attention to maintain. It’s just that for many of us, this is only a fraction of our daily tasklist, and when every little thing requires getting a certified professional to come by and bail you out, it gets a little old when nothing else in the enterprise needs similar support since you can actually put some logic against it and figure things out.
Haha I love this site… one of my favorites starts with the very beginning – software licensing of Notes. I love that IBM is completely unable to coterm all my license renewals to one annual license renewal. My company has bought licensing over the years in small batch upgrades, a few in march, a few in august, a few more the following june, etc. etc…. so all through the year I get IBM emails (if they even are sending to me and not previous employees), I have people from accounting asking me what this and that is for, i’m constantly pushing paper around and stopping actual work for this silly accounting nonsense and wondering if it’s something i’ve already approved, etc. You know, the corporate process at its finest. To remedy this, I’ve spoken to as many people as I can at IBM, and they all said that bringing all the licensing together for one annual payment was simply impossible. I sure hope they can dedicate resources to make this miracle of accounting a reality someday.
To Tim Paque and others:
What? No response to my post of 2/2? Please note that I did not resort to name calling and I did not complain of “slowness” or “crashing” (which is all you seem to address in your response). I listed many instances where the thing just DOES… NOT…. WORK. Or works so blatantly counter-intuitively as to render one speechless.
When I attach a file and then decide it is the wrong one and I cut it from the email it says that “this operation cannot be undone, are you sure etc etc”. So I cut it. Then when I close the message it asks me if I want to save the message. If I say no then it keeps the attachment – so the operation can be undone!!!!!!!
stupid, unneccesary, waste of time
Who thought F9 was a good idea to refresh your inbox when every other app on the planet used F5 for refresh. F5 in Notes locks it!!
A new feature I have just noticed, sometimes the font will change part way through typing a mail.
Load of ****!
Why can’t I copy and paste an email address from a received email?
I have to add it to my contacts and the way LN does contacts is illogical, back to front etc etc etc.
I am still using this ‘good’ old 6.5 version of Notes, of course it’s not my choice, do you really think that I would use notes if I had the choice ?
But when I read the post of SQL Dave (February 1st, 2010 at 1:45 pm), and that I see all those bugs (or feature, call it as you want if you have to sell it) already in previous version, I came to this conclusion : do not upgrade since you just get a bunch of new bugs and no improvement or bug fixes.
IBM Domino Administrator has F9 as Refresh. Most other applications have F5 as refresh. This non-conformity is an annoyance.
When I get a new e-mail notification in my toolbar, It doesn’t show up in my inbox unless I sort ‘by order received’ twice.
After shutting down notes, I have to reboot the computer to bring up Notes again.
I’ve just received an upgrade to 8.0.2 a while back and it’s just not intuitive. I had to search help to find out where I change the Calendar to show Sunday as the first day of the week. Why did I even have to do this?
I’ve grown up using computers, I’ve got a degree in Computer Science, I work in IT yet Lotus Notes (8.0.2) makes me want to scream pretty much every day I use it. The interface is nonsensical.
I am not a MS fanboy by any means yet Outlook makes me happy (and productive… something LNotes supporters seem to forget).
@TIM PAQUE: So, all of the people who hate Notes so very badly do so because they, their developers, or their IT department are incompetent? What color is the sand in your hole?
So all you who hate it think Outlook is perfect then? LOL!!!! Hell it disconnects from ITSELF!
Notes isn’t perfect, that’s for sure but I’ll take it over LookOut any day.
Shortguy said on January 29th, 2010 at 4:41 am
@Tallguy: Wow… You “upgraded” to a version released in 2008. Congratulations.
Petetm said on January 19th, 2010 at 6:41 am
Tallguy said on January 14th, 2010 at 9:21 am
My company recently “upgraded” to LN 8.0.2………….
Stop right there. You’re using a client that came out over a year ago rather than using 8.5.1? I don’t even know what to say at this point.
During the last year or so my company upgraded its LN users and switched its Outlook users to LN 8.0.2. I was switched after 8.5 came out so why wasn’t I given the latest version? Well, we have over 40,000 employees in locations all over the globe. By the time you train the IT staff, test the software in various scenarios, do all the necessary server ****, roll out the program to the employees and do troubleshooting — and do that all over the world — it is not surprising a new version was released. They are certainly not going to interrupt the roll out and start over with another version. And since when do companies upgrade every time there is a new version. The problem isn’t that 8.0.2 is over a year old but that it sucks. In computer terms Outlook 2003 is older than dirt but it functions a lot better than LN. Maybe now that the dust is settling on our upgrade/conversion my company will move us to 8.5. I doubt it is half as good as you think it is but we’ll see.
OMG why can this system not cope. Why when you need to do something in the calendar does it do a complete faul, freeze and cause a re-set!! Arggg please take this sytem away!!
siampudan said on January 28th, 2010 at 10:46 pm
Petetm said on December 29th, 2009 at 7:29 am
As I’ve stated in a previous post, like ANY database, just because you delete something, that doesn’t mean the space is immediately recovered. Ask your admin (assuming you have a competent one) to compact your mail file.
You (Petetm) are a MORON ibm employee or LN admin or something…. ALL I want is a simple email client. From all of your explanation in this site it shows that this shitware is only half ‘good’ from admin side (and this not even 100% correct)… NOT from USER experience !!!…
I guess my problems happens because of this LN stupid local replica something… we here using notebook, so somehow the admin sets automatic replication with a hope we still can open email using the nb elsewhere without connection…. and it clearly doesn’t work well (the replicate thing)…. Because the local replica somehow doesn’t ‘communicate’ with the mail server and it doesn’t represent the actual inbox storage in the mail server….
And I.. AS A USER (not admin) should care about this technical thingy???
Why if there’s something wrong it should be solved by a ‘competent’ admin????
What I do as a USER is delete the email and make sure my storage doesn’t exceed the limit, right?
So the next incoming mail doesn’t bounce, right?
Is that too much to ask from A USER??????
You (Petetm) along with other ibm employee who build this **** should be burn in hell for sins you have commit.
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See, here I try to help and this is the whinny, name calling garbage that I get back. Nice! Enjoy your misery because be assured, I certainly am !!!! LOL !!!!
SQL Dave said on February 1st, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Some of the things you’re experiencing may be bugs, I’m not sure. You can look at the fix list for 8.5.1 which is the latest release to see if it resolves some of the problems you’re seeing; especially in C&S.
That being said, I appears as though many of your complaints are based on a comparison to MS in general and Outlook in particular.
I guess you and others believe MS is the standard and seeing as though you have SQL in your name, it’s no surpirse. That sort of sheep mentality is really quite sad but let me use an anology to show you why that’s wrong. Every different car I get into has the lights, wipers, shift, radio …among other things, in different places. Who is the standard here? With your thinking, I assume it would be your car maker, but I say it’s mine. Now, I get to rant, rave and rail against YOU’RE make of car because it’s not my version of MY standard. See what I’m saying here? By reading some of these comments, I can only assume that people in here have software that does everything for them; reads their mind, types and executes everything they want done. I can also assume that they have never, ever had to read a manual, help file ………. to figure something out for any product, software or not. Everything in their world is just intuative, no learning curve involved, EVER. Please, someone, point me to those products/software because that sounds great!
rootus said on February 1st, 2010 at 11:48 pm
hee PETETM
Don’t you have some windmills to fight?
We have Notes 8.5 now.
You should start is before getting something to drink and don’t hurry on your way.
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.
.
Sorry, I’m going to need a translator for this one. It’s like you just typed random words ………. hold on, let me try.
Cereal, notepad cables and trees are not the final tissues or radio coat check, things.
How’s that?
webapps in the spellchecker suggests slang.
How about that?
With some Citrix users the March 31st 2010 appears twice in their Notes calendar????
No one seems to have an explanation/solution for that…?
Maybe lotus notes developers live on an other planet with a different calendar?
As far as I know after March 31st comes April the 1st.
By the way, I can DRAG AND DROP ATTACHMENTS from Outlook 2003 INTO LN 8.5.1, which are completely dissimilar APPLICATIONS, but I cannot drag and drop anything among NOTES APPLICATIONS…..or “databases”…….eh, IBM, ?????
I forgot to add my Notes version before FANBOIS say …”plz get a life and upgrade from v5.”
I am using 8.5.1, that all singing all dancing savior version.
The first thing fanbois say is “get some training”, “it’s more than email”, “use 8.5″
YEAH RITE
Another rant.
I just made a File>Applications>NewCopy archive for SPEEDIER access instead of always connecting to the server for refreshes.
Remember it is a COPY. COPY.
I then proceeded to move my sorted mail from the server mailbox folders I created into the archive. I tried to do a drag and drop move but it says “not allowed” since they are DIFFERENT document stores.
So, I have to select Action>Archive>Archive Selected Documents after selecting the mails. They disappear from the server mailbox folders into my archives folders.
So, logically, I deleted the now EMPTY server mailbox folders, with a warning that all subfolders will be deleted from THIS DATABASE. Now…..the same folders which I lovingly sorted all my mail in the archive are ALSO DELETED!!!!!!!!
WHYYYYYYYYYYYY???????
What kind of MAIL CLIENT is this that treats mails as pointers, views, linked documents……ahh…I only want f**ing MAIL
Oh, it’s more than email……***sob sob sob****
I work for a magazine company and commission hundreds of images per year from illustrators and photographers.
The thing is, it corrupts EVERY ******* IMAGE I SEND and FAILS TO LOAD ATTACHED IMAGES. This is ******* USELESS.
Carrier pigeons are more effective. ******* CAVE PAINTINGS are more advanced than this utter pile of ****.
hee PETETM
Don’t you have some windmills to fight?
We have Notes 8.5 now.
You should start is before getting something to drink and don’t hurry on your way. With a little luck it’s started when you come back.
Twice a day I get a phone call: Notes has crashed and won’t start again. Than I show them to run killnotes. The best lotus software ever written.
Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Kicks butt.
If you have a 8.5 or 8.0 then upgrade.
After that:
If your server is slow, then your Admin sucks.
if you applications are slow then your Developer sucks.
And if notes itself is crashing all the time your IT Department sucks.
If you are the Admin/Developer or IT Dept, and you think Lotus Notes Sucks. It only sucks because you are the one taking care of it!
For PETEM and other Notes defenders/apologists. Here is a list of behaviors I slapped together.
Note:
* – I am using 8.01
* – I fully recognize that one or more of these issues might be a ‘training’ problem, but seriously… if a 30-year IT veteran can’t intuitively figure it out, that MIGHT indicate a problem (especially in light of the existence of all the other Notes haters).
In no particular order, and with expected/normal behavior [in brackets]:
1-Meeting reminder pop-ups give focus to Notes when Snooze is clicked. [How about, LEAVE THE FRIGGING FOCUS WHERE I WAS WORKING BEFORE THE POP-UP. Better yet, see #9 below]
2-Despite having checked the setting too many times to count, auto-accept does NOT always auto-accept a meeting. I have not yet detected a pattern as to when it does and does not, but after multiple years I know it’s not a case of me having the setting wrong. [Uhhh...just work]
3-This is minor, but Internet URL “hotspots” are not active in edit mode.
4-When I click Open on a meeting reminder pop-up (you know.. in order to OPEN that meeting’s calendar entry), for some meetings (repeaters, I think) I then get a list of instances of the meetings and have to tell it which instance I want to open. [Gee.. I dunno.. how about you open the instance of the meeting that you JUST REMINDED ME ABOUT!!!]
5-Clicking a column heading (Subject, From, etc.) sorts the emails in ascending order, as expected. But clicking it again returns the list to the default (date) order. [It should sort the list in DESCENDING order of that column...I think this Windows standard was created around version 3.1]
6-Clicking Open on a meeting reminder pop-up causes (eventually, see #4) Notes to come to the foreground, as expected. But that pop-up remains (stupid) and STILL HAS FOCUS (uber-stupid). [How about the pop-up goes away since I don't need to be reminded about the meeting any more since I just said to OPEN THE DAMNED THING.]
7-This happens when the messages are sorted in a non-date order: Selecting a message, then selecting another message using shift-click results in what, so far, appears to be random messages selected. I have not yet detected a pattern as to which messages are selected. [It should select every messages between the first and last selected messages...just like it does when they're in Date order]
8-Meeting reminder pop-ups always have 10 minutes as the default time to snooze, even if there’s less than 10 minutes until the meeting.[Do like Outlook: Default to 1 minute prior to the meeting.. and Outlook's reminder pop-up is "live": if you leave it up for more than a minute, the # of minutes to snooze automatically decreases. Must be MAGIC]
9-Meeting reminders do not need to be big, intrusive, regular pop-ups.[A system tray reminder should at LEAST be a configurable option].
10-When sorting message by subject, the default (this kills me) is to include “RE:” and “FWD:” when sorting. So, good luck seeing all messages pertaining to a particular thread together.[Outlook seems to have solved this... the emails sort by the original subject, ignoring RE: and FWD: (even though RE: and FWD: ARE in the subject lines. I fixed this for myself with a Notes script, but how many ordinary user can do that. This one is just inexcusable IMO]
11-Right-click-drag. While this might have been a good innovation in the early days of Windows or GUIs or whatever, I think most people have trained their muscle memory to left-click while selecting some text and then right-click in that selected text to get the context menu (copy, cut, etc.). With Notes, you can select while right-clicking which means if you don’t have the mouse perfectly still during the right-click of the “normal” (left-click-drag, right-click for menu) operation it will think you’re selecting something DIFFERENT and you’ll lose your original selection.[Behave "normally", i.e. like the "standard" Windows behavior... or at least let me turn off right-clicking somewhere]
12-Select a table in Word, or some cells in Excel, and copy/paste them into Notes. You get essentially a screen-shot of what you pasted. [Pasted Excel cells should be -- if not editable -- at LEAST selectable so one could copy a particular part without having to go back to Excel, which you might not be able to do if someone ELSE sent you something from THEIR spreadsheet]
13-Scenario: I want to see all emails from Quincy. I click the From column header and the emails are sorted in ascending order, as expected. Now I want to get to the Qs quickly. Can I type “Q” to do so? noooooo. [When sorted in From, To, or Subject order, let me use a single keystroke to quickly get to somewhere far down in the list, rather than forcing me to scroll there. You know, like Outlook does. (Are you sick of hearing that yet?)
I have 2 more about Sametime, and since I haven't found http://www.ihatesametime.com I'll put them here as it reinforces the ineptitude with which IBM/Lotus designs user interfaces (this is the standalone version of Sametime):
1-If you insert an animated GUI of your own in a message thread, you can no longer copy that thread. That is fairly new behavior (in the past, it would just ignore the GUI, which was fine since you were probably going to paste that thread into some text-based app).
2-Chat history search. Another off-the-charts ******-level "design". When you search, it searches ALL CHATS WITH EVERYBODY. [Let me limit the search by person and/or date range.. usually I know I discussed "Topic X" with "Person A" in the "last 2 or 3 days", so why in THE hell should it search ALL STORED CHATS to find "Topic X"???]
3-The coup de gras: No flippin’ UNDO. Change your mind about deleting that block of text? Too bad… gotta re-type it all. Accidentally paste something in, overwriting what was there? Too bad. [Undo people. C'mon.. it's been around since BEFORE WINDOWS for Gates' sake!]
So, there. There are probably lots more I could come up with if I took the time, but that’s a start. I eagerly await the gainsaying, refutation, justification, and rationalization that is bound to be leveled at each and every one of those items.
This should be fun.
Wait! Not ’nuff was said. Also WTF is up with pasting into a lotus mail message? 60% of the time, it freezes my computer all the time.
GARBAGE
Lotus Notes mailman error. ‘Nuff said.
How can I group my messages in a sort-like debate fashion? Is it impossible? I consider myself a computer power user. How can it be so damm difficult???!!!!
r65 error ….. thankyou.. that really norrows down the problem
Using v8.5…is it really possible that I can’t cut and paste a simple text line from an email to a new email ????????
Starting a search in my Lotus Notes inbox kills my Lotus Notes inbox.
We are on notes 8.5 client setup with replication and IE 8.0. The user cannot launch any http embedded addresses in the client program when they click on it. When he mouse-overs the internet address, it turns into a pointing hand … but when the user clicks on the hyperlink … nothing happens.
has anyone seen this before?
Thank god the end of the world is in 2012… if I continue working with Lotus Notes I’ll pull the trigger… Why doesn’t copy/paste work with this application… Why ?
The agenda is never update, I’ve logged/cancelled conference calls, why doesn’t my agenda update itself ?
This morning , I’ve tried to modify the text font of a email .. everytime I was selecting a font, LN was randomly selecting another one. I hate Lotus Notes … I really do. I’m thinking about printing Lotus Note brand name on toilet paper , it would surely be a commercial success
Killnotes also still works on version 8.5.1 and 8.5.2 beta. =-)
@Tallguy: Wow… You “upgraded” to a version released in 2008. Congratulations.
Petetm said on December 29th, 2009 at 7:29 am
As I’ve stated in a previous post, like ANY database, just because you delete something, that doesn’t mean the space is immediately recovered. Ask your admin (assuming you have a competent one) to compact your mail file.
.
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You (Petetm) are a MORON ibm employee or LN admin or something…. ALL I want is a simple email client. From all of your explanation in this site it shows that this shitware is only half ‘good’ from admin side (and this not even 100% correct)… NOT from USER experience !!!…
I guess my problems happens because of this LN stupid local replica something… we here using notebook, so somehow the admin sets automatic replication with a hope we still can open email using the nb elsewhere without connection…. and it clearly doesn’t work well (the replicate thing)…. Because the local replica somehow doesn’t ‘communicate’ with the mail server and it doesn’t represent the actual inbox storage in the mail server….
And I.. AS A USER (not admin) should care about this technical thingy???
Why if there’s something wrong it should be solved by a ‘competent’ admin????
What I do as a USER is delete the email and make sure my storage doesn’t exceed the limit, right?
So the next incoming mail doesn’t bounce, right?
Is that too much to ask from A USER??????
You (Petetm) along with other ibm employee who build this **** should be burn in hell for sins you have commit.
Lotus notes is pathetic.
Today’s most pathetic “feature” – can’t undo move of hundreds of search results to the wrong folder.
Onward.
Jay
I was typing in Lotus Notes a minute ago and it COULDN’T KEEP UP!
What a piece of ****
Lotus Notes is the only program that ever urged me to close other programs before gathering enough RAM to print of a simple email.
I vow to never work at a company that uses this hunk of **** anymore. If Notes is this bad, I wonder how many suckers use other Lotus applications. My advice to IBM/Lotus is, “just rewrite the damn thing”
My company is on the verge of getting ridding of this POS! I can’t wait. I have been living in Notes hell for ten, long years now. I can’t imagine there is any other software out there that is this bad. My least favorite “feature” is editing text and tables… This thing is so 1980′s. You can only undo once? WTF?
Drunk and Bitter Jesus said on December 26th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Having now gone back through the entire list of comments, one thing jumps out out me: where the Notes “haters” attack the software, the Notes lovers attack the users. If the only way you can defend your product is with an ad hominem, what does that say about it? Another point jumps out, actually, which is that the Notes defenders talk about how easy it is to support and develop, whereas those who dislike it talk about how unpleasant it is to use. I would love to hear someone actually address the criticisms of the *client* as opposed to the server.
——————-
The reason could be that in almost ALL the comments below, the problem is NOT a software problem but rather a user problem.
I have to admit, reading some of them, I have to admit that I wonder if some Lotus Notes Admin got their certifications in a Cracker Jack box!
Most poeple are using LN for email only.. This is the same as using a ‘dozer to prepare a garden…
I would suggest you talk to your admins if something does not work .. If you have no success, then talk to the managers. If this does not work either, then find a new job.
LN is a kickass software and it will basically do what you ask it to do.
10 plus years without any Rip and Replace! Now find me one software that can claim the same thing!
Lovely. I get a meeting notice from a client, open it and Notes performs it’s normal action – i.e it crashes. Now all my new mail that arrives from now on is no longer marked as unread in Bold so I have to try an figure out what ones i have opened and which I have not. Really handy when you get 200 plus emails a day.
Pony
I just got migrated to Lotus notes and I hate Lotus notes
All mail systems have their problems
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=active&ei=1KpeS4L1Dpn80wSUl7Rp&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CAYQBSgA&q=why+outlook+sucks&spell=1
I love Notes !
Never have I felt so strongly about a piece of software and this forum gives some solace. I like to file my mails in folders eg sorting all mail related to a single project in the project folder. I’m sure this is a reasonable practice.
This was fine in Outlook but imagine my consternation (I have some stronger words) when I had to use Notes after switching organizations. The “Sent” folder is a “view” and you cannot move your mails without deleting them forever. This is just so dumb and leads to ever-growing Sent folder.
The workaround is EVEN dumber…..
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-Creating_a_Sent_Mail_folder/index.html
This article was posted in 1998 and you better count the number of times the word “confused” appears in it. And there are repeated warnings NOT to f* around with your mail template for a 90% solution.
……”Since the introduction of folders in Notes Release 4.0, users have often confused them with views. Views, on the one hand, are a flexible way to display groups of documents based on a selection criteria. This criteria can be as general as “all documents in the database” or as specific as “documents that were created after a certain date and contain a particular value within a particular field.” Folders, on the other hand, are a flexible way to organize documents. A document does not need to meet specific selection criteria to be stored in a folder. Typically, users create folders on an as-needed basis and place documents in those folders by a set of loosely-defined rules.
One place users get the most confused about folders and views is in their own mail databases.”………
And to think that IBM trumpets the “document” feature of Notes as closely replicating the paper based workflow….I can file my paper wherever I want can’t I, and make copies whenever I want as well….
And…replication….well….
A list of things that can go wrong with replication
http://lotus-blogs.blogspot.com/2008/01/lotus-notes-replication-few-common.html
I’m just trying to do my job…and am seriously attempting to streamline the way things are done, but…Notes won’t let me……it needs to be administered….with caution…..
Sigh
Just for the lucky people that are using a half-way decent email app.
Enjoy every day as if it was your last.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh.
And sooner or later there will be a day when you, too, will get to enjoy the craptastic application known to office men and women around the globe as Lotus Notes.
When this day comes, don’t forget this one thing.
Somewhere in the world, some unlucky guy is being tortured by having high current electricity being applied to his ballsack.
This guy is off even worse than you.
Just a little bit about myself while I’m waiting for Notes to finish a seemingly easy task.
I don’t want to design and share databases.
I don’t want to have to make an agent just to avoid sending return receipts.
I don’t want it to crash every second time I do a search.
I don’t want to have to “kill” my email application using another application.
I don’t want 4 preference menus, none of them giving me the possibility to change the preference I’m looking for anyway.
What I do want is an email and calendar app that works and that offers some basic functionality, such as being able to change my standard font for all emails that I sent, or being assured that the same calendar reschedule will be sent to all invitees without discrimination.
I want it continue functioning when I have some other office apllications running.
I want out of office message sent to all people that mail me within the selected period, not to random people at random times.
I want a To do list that can properly and reliably be displayed on the calendar.
I want to archive mails without the ever-present fear of overwriting my complete archive.
I want to use the same UI as all other programs working under windows use (off course it can be argued that this abomination know as Lotus Notes is not really working under windows anyway)
The dinosaur application known as Lotus Notes is just a burden to me and my RAM/processor time. There is nothing about Lotus Notes that makes me happy. I avoid ever shutting it down just so that the next morning I wouldn’t have to face the retardedly happy faces of the people of the start-up splash screen.
The database developers can have this damn piece of ****, just give me something that works properly!!!
Got to go now, it seems that Notes is finally ready pasting some plain text I copied from wikipedia into a “New memo”, which appears to be Notes speak for email.
Lotus Notes is so slow. It’s faster to deliver mail personally than using Lotus Notes.
Every complaint that I’ve read on this page can be explained with one word: lazyness.
You see, Lotus Notes is a complicated piece of software. It is intended to be setup and administered by people who have been certified in the technology. Unfortunately, many people just “wing it”, and that leads to all sorts of problems. If you’re too lazy to get certified, you should not be in charge of the product!
I have noticed two things in my 15 years of designing Domino applications:
1) Notes developers are generally lazy (except me, of course – lol). They don’t take the time to correctly design an application. Later, when changes are needed, the changes are usually made on the fly with no documentation or much thought about how the changes will affect the application. This is because updating Notes apps is easy – maybe too easy, and the person writing Notes apps is often a power user, not a certified application developer.
2) Domino administrators are generally lazy. When a new release comes out, they leave legacy users as they are. New users get the new settings and features, but legacy users are usually left in the past. Part of this is IBM’s fault. The administration client does not have many tools for updating user accounts in batch. The administrator must update each user’s settings one-at-a-time.
So, yes. Notes has it’s problems (just like every other peice of software that I have used – including Exchange), but most problems are caused by a lack of knowledge about the product.
“You see, Lotus Notes is a complicated piece of software.”
HAHAHA!
” It is intended to be setup and administered by people who have been certified in the technology … Notes developers are generally lazy (except me, of course – lol). ”
Consider getting a real job and real technical credentials.
Darin said on January 4th, 2010 at 9:21 am
I don’t know if this is Lotus’s fault, or whoever made this particular database for checking out books… But Why oh Why would I search authors by first name rather than last name? WTF.
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That would be the developers fault. At least you had the common sense to ask where the problem is rather than just blame the app like everyone else.
I am a designer of html emails and one of my clients uses Lotus Notes. I don’t have the program and wouldn’t consider for a mere moment polluting my computer with it, so I can’t test to ensure my beautiful work isn’t going to look like a bag of ***** to my client. My emails look great in Thunderbird, Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail…. but Lotus notes always has a problem, no matter how clean the code. Errrrr….. it sticks in my craw.
Lotus is awful, i prefer Microsoft Outlook
How do I hate thee? let me count the ways:
1. Folders. my current big gripe of the day. I right-click on a folder I’ve created to make a sub-folder, which it does let me do. I click ok after naming it, and after a good 30-60 seconds it finishes the task of creating it. Great, so why doesn’t it show up in my list of folders? Ooooooh, so I have to close out of my mail database first, and then re-open it, a process that takes at least 2 minutes. ok, fine, good. Let’s open back up my mail DB and check my sub-folders. Not there? oh, wait, it looks like it created a second, temporary version of my folder, with my new sub-folder listed underneath it. Hmmm, interesting. Okay, lets drag and drop my new sub-folder under the “real” folder. Good, okay, looks like it’s working. So where’s my sub-folder? Why doesn’t it show up where it should alphabetically? oh, okay, so it shows up at the very end of the various sub-folder under that folder. okay, lets close out of my mail DB again and see if that does anything, thereby wasting several more minutes (tick-tock, tick-tock, walk away from desk, come back…). All right, opening back up mail DB, checking folder, and….yes! There’s my sub-folder right where it should be, and that second temporary folder is now gone. Okay, let’s move some emails into my new folder! ******* ridiculous that it should take 10 minutes to create a new sub-folder! I can’t even tell you how I ever finally discovered that I have to follow this stupid process every time I need to create a new sub-folder. If anyone can tell me a way to make folder creation work the way you would expect it to, i’ll be forever in your debt.
2. This was going to be a laundry list of things I hate about notes, but I don’t have the energy to put them down in any detail right now. Quickly, though, they have to do with…
3. Notes crashes several times a week, then having to reboot to get it back up, then having to wait an additional ungodly amount of time while it performs consistency checks on the 37,000 dbs I work with everyday.
4. receiving out-of-office notifications from people LITERALLY 6 and 8 hours after i send the email, sometimes even the next day. This could actually be the single-most ridiculous things about notes…
5. I will leave you with one thing that does tend to help at least a little bit with the frustration. Anytime notes crashes and you’re prompted to send an error report describing what you were doing at the time of the crash, I find it very therapeutic to put extremely nasty messages in there describing just how much i hate notes…
My company was just acquired by another company and converted us to their standard of Lotus Notes. You have got to be sh—me. Lotus Notes has to be the worst piece of garbage software out there. Non-intuitive, non-user friendly, does not allow for normal user choices. I can not believe any friggin company in this day and age would buy this ****. Things that used to take seconds with Outlook now take minutes, if at all possible.
If IBM puts this out, I would not do business with them on anything because the designers are clueless as to what users want and need.
To think I would long for the days of Bill Gates…
PETETM: Sarcasm, perhaps you’ve heard of it.
I had the razor blade to my wrists …. and then I found you.
I use to hate Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, that is, until I switched jobs and am forced to use Lotus Notes…
Outlook, I was wrong to leave you baby, want you back now…
“Roy said on January 8th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Sharing my thoughts for all of you : you don’t have the slightest idea about you are saying – all of you are using a fantastic and powerful software with hundreds of features and capabilities only to send and receive email ????”
Roy, why would that be our choice? Do you think the workforce gets to choose which email client it uses?
Perhaps the fact that we are being FORCED to use this so-called ‘fantastic and powerful piece of software’ for a purpose other than which is was designed could be the cause of most of these problems?
Why would anyone – ANYONE EVER – choose this piece of **** over any other product. Like Chris below, I’ve been at work two days and face the future of my job with LN. Delete the invitation email to a meeting after you’ve accepted it? Yes, it deletes the event. WHYYYYY? Trying to delete an email? Well of course, it stays in your inbox until you log out. Trying to arrange a meeting? Whyyyyy does it seem to choose a random date to start the scheduling from – today’s favourite was Feb 16 2007. Thanks. Helpful. Whyyyyy does it take so long to do anything? Why would you have the default option to reply without the history? Why? How would that be helpful in any normal circumstances? Why do I want that hideous ‘T’ box near where I’m typing text? I just need a cursor. As in EVERY OTHER PROGRAM. Whyyy when I select text and right click to copy it does it then choose to re-highlight to the nearest point of where I clicked? Whyyyyy?! Arrrggghhhh! (I love this blog)
Roy said on January 8th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
“Sharing my thoughts for all of you : you don’t have the slightest idea about you are saying – all of you are using a fantastic and powerful software with hundreds of features and capabilities only to send and receive email ???? ah ah ! LOL! It’s the same of calling a brain surgeon to take care of a tiny pathetic wound or using a ferrari to drive only 10 meters . You are using what… 1% of the capabilities of this fantastic software ? All the complains are pathetic. Day by day more and more companies are using Lotus Notes, it’s an intelligent choice because we can share databases and develop all sort of flexible and secure applications to run on it without limit.”
Hmmm…
1. When users almost universally hate a program, apparently Roy thinks that doesn’t matter as long as the program has capabilities many users will never utilize.
2. At least PeteM will address specific complaints instead of making comments like “all the complaints are pathetic.” Sure some are but some are not. PeteM is not always right but at least he tries. (For example, sometimes Notes DOES put all the attachements at the bottom even when the sender did not do that. It happens more often if an Exchange server is involved but I have also seen it happen with Notes to Notes emails using only a Domino server. No doubt he’ll blame this on our IT people too.)
3. I’m sure a brain surgeon would do a wonderful job taking care of a pathetic wound. Notes trying to do email and calendar is not so good.
4. If this is how good 1% of the software is, I’d hate to use the other 99%.
5. Why does IBM allow you to “share databases and develop all sort of flexible and secure applications to run on it without limit” while they allow the email portion of the software to suck so bad? Probably because they know if the IT people are happy with the product they will buy it regardless of how it kills user productivity.
6. Since I, along with most of the users out there, only use Notes as an email client, it sounds as if you are in agreement that we should not be forced to use this software. Can you please tell our IT people to get us off of this ****, er, out of this Ferrari so we can drive our 10 meters in comfort.
chas said on January 8th, 2010 at 6:03 am
“By chance, I did not capitalize the folder name, and the neatfreak that I am, wanted to change the first letter to be capitalized afterwards. WRONG! No can do. LN(8.5) says: “A folder or view with this name already exist”. First rename it to something completely different, then to the capitalized version.”
Chas, it appears Notes is incapable of renaming a folder. From what I can tell, it is only pretending and is instead creating a new folder with the new name, moving your emails into that folder and deleting the old folder. That would explain why you couldn’t just change the capitalization and why any custom settings for the folder will switch back to the default. But I could be wrong since such “fantastic and powerful software” would never act this way. I guess being able to properly rename folders is not on that list of “hundreds of features and capabilities.”
Would take way too long to ***** and complain about this useless program. Being forced to switch from outlook to lotus has added an extra hour to my day just to deal with its horrible e-mail applications.
I actually have considered quiting my job to be free of its headaches!!
Jim said on December 31st, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Riddle me this fanboys. How do you configure NOtes to sort email by multiple fields, say file size then priority then date?
You can’t do it, because for all talk about Notes being multi-functional and a database client first, it really doesn’t even have the most basic functionality of the simplest productivity software. It is not a DB client it is a pretender–in all things. To get NOtes to perform a simple field search would require a ground up complete redesign of the the client and server softwares. It is a car without an engine.
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Hmmm, well I’m trying to do that in Outlook and guess what, no can do. Now, if you’re talking about Notes dbs, you can do it if it’s coded correctly and it absolutely will do field level searches even in it’s basic form.
If you’re going to rail on something, at least be informed.
chas said on January 8th, 2010 at 6:03 am
one last one – I couldn’t find an email I needed as part of an email conversation because someone had replied and not replied with history(!), how daft is this distinction – if I send an email to someone the original is useful to have in the reply text – unless you are a dveloper worried about kb of space.
I eventually managed to find the email in my archive by searching all documents, but it took a while as notes distinguishes between capitals and lower case (!) stupid. So I had to search twice once with a capital and once without. I thne sent a reply from the archived email. later I went to look for the reply in my sent box but it was not there. I did a search again (two actually, one with a capital, one with lower case) and could not find it. I thought no, not possible, but perhaps it is in the sent folder of my archive? Yes it was. So an email I send to day replying to an archived email gets archived immediately and not at the correct archive time.
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1) I typically don’t need people to reply back to me with history as I know what I previously wrote but that’s just me. It’s an option for people to use as they wish.
2)Searching is NOT case sensitive unless you create the FTI that way. It is not on by default. Go back, recreate the FTI without case sensitivity.
3)I believe I answered this for someone before, but your mail file and archive are two seperate dbs, you just so happen to be able to mail out of the archive. So yes, when you send mail from the archive, it will be in the sent folder of your archive db.
Tallguy said on January 14th, 2010 at 9:21 am
My company recently “upgraded” to LN 8.0.2………….
Stop right there. You’re using a client that came out over a year ago rather than using 8.5.1? I don’t even know what to say at this point.
Eye Bee Bollox said on January 15th, 2010 at 7:03 am
Why why why??
Why can’t it be better? Why is it so ****?
Reduced productivity by 90%
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Why why why can’t people be specific about the issues they are having rather than just whinning. WHHHHHYYYYYYYY!?!?!?!?!?!
Khorne said on January 16th, 2010 at 4:58 am
LN server does not serve encrypted messages to anything else than it’s own brain-dead client. When you use IMAP, it presents you with a “real” e-mail containing only one sentence. “This message is ******* encrypted”.
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Yes, that is true because it uses the keys from the id files to encrypt and unencrypt the message and if you’re using ANY client that doesn’t use the id, then yes, the message can’t be unencrypted. However, you can use DWA to read the message. Not sure why this is confusing to you but I assume you’re not an admin.
@PETEM, are you Peter Mullarky?
imho, if you have to learn to use the system the hardware just for using mail, of course it isn’t good enough. Yes, there are databases within it, etc, etc, etc, and all the advantages, but the hurdle to go through to use those is just too much, let’s say compare with some web systems?
I can see why some might.. but you can pick on almost any product. I’m watching and cleaning up our upgrade from Notes 7.0.1 to 8.5 and finding it a rather pleasant update.
We’re moving hundreds of exchange users over to notes with mixed reactions too.. some are indifferent, it’s half a dozen of one and 6 of the other. Others don’t like the change, don’t like the differences… and some seem to genuinely like it. Funny to see some former outook users very happy with features many of the notes users take for granted.
Can it be improved more? You bet…. will IBM continue to improve it? Based on the last 2-3 years, I believe so…
So crunch your feedback, make it at least a little constructive (simply referring to it as “****” isn’t helpful) and bundle that bit of joy up and pass it along. Trust me.. they’ve been actively looking for feedback and getting people to beta test. Give ‘em something to chew on and see what they do….
Can’t believe all the morons on this site. I’ve used Outlook, Group Wise, Notes, Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo and more for email. All have their own user interface but it’s not rocket science using any of them.
Most of you are just showing up your own stupidity.
LN server does not serve encrypted messages to anything else than it’s own brain-dead client. When you use IMAP, it presents you with a “real” e-mail containing only one sentence. “This message is ******* encrypted”.
Why why why??
Why can’t it be better? Why is it so ****?
Reduced productivity by 90%
My company recently “upgraded” to LN 8.0.2. IBM decided to pack in lots of new features such as “widgets.” As standard with Notes, there are some good ideas, just poor execution. ForSome thoughts:
(1) RSS feed… Sometimes it works. Sometimes is doesn’t. Depends on the day and if Notes is having a good day.
(2) A browser within Notes. C’mon IBM! That is ridiculous! Improve the mail and calendar UI before you decide to put a browser in Notes. Do I use the new browser? Ummm… No. Why? Compatability and crashes. If notes crashes so often just opening emails, imagine how often it would crash if I used the browser and the page had flash?
(3) The “new” mail UI. It is still the same mail. The right hand scroll menu isn’t contextual (still). It remains the same size always. The UI isn’t as insulting as it used to be. My eyes don’t start bleeding immediately. It usually takes about 2 hours. Then they bleed.
(4) It is even slower than previous versions of Notes.
(5) Buttons appear and disappear at random. Click Get Mail button… Wait… where did I Get Mail button go?!!! Once I start Notes again, the Get Mail button returns. Apparently it just needed a rest.
I am happy to say that Killnotes still works with version 8.0.2. It just happens to kill 3 processes rather than 2.
Here we are in 2010 and this piece of **** software is still around, and I’m still stuck with it. So far I’ve been at work two days, and LN has brought my system down 3 times, and wasted 1 hour of my life. At this rate I’ll have lost 120 Plus hours by year end, and that would make this a good year!! Of course I’d rather have those 3 weeks combined into a vacation as opposed to periodic 10 minute breaks staring a white page waiting for the world’s worst written code to finally close. Does anyone know a good hacker who can write some nice viral code to complete uncompile every single install of this ****…
Hmmmm where to begin… I should be yelling and hollering along with the rest of you about the limitations and/or general suckitude of Lotus Notes, but instead, something a little different.
We are in the middle of a large Notes 6.54 to Notes 8.5 upgrade and I’m managing the rollout. It has NOT gone well, to say the least, but first…
Notes 8.5 is a generally stable and nice product to work with.
Most of the problems that we’ve had are related to previous Notes installations (on images and builds) and not to the upgrade itself.
Most of the other problems we’ve had have been with Notes databases and inadequate testing. Generally, the client is good! So, it’s not perfect. What is? People are lining up to bash every other product out there, unless they have something worse to compare it to, so what makes this any different?
You have to install Notes without any virus scanners running, or lockdown tools running or just about anything else running. Then it should work for you.
Right in the middle of a chat with some VIP dude (forced to use the sametime embedded in Notes 8.5.1 ) a ******* crash… of course I can not restart notes without restarting my entire PC, VIP mad because he thought I left… AAAGH
Why my e-mail messages disappear from sent?
What do Lotus Notes and a stone tablet have in common?
a.) Both are easy to support
b.) Both are resistent to viruses
c.) Both are useful to beat co-workers with
d.) Both Suck for communicating
e.) All of the above
I caveat this by noting that I wrote a whitepaper while working at IBM in 2002 entitled, ‘Lotus Notes is the Devil’ (no one there cared…). My firm recently upgraded to Lotus notes. Top three issues: (1) When I delete items in my mailbox it sometimes deletes calendar entries (I guess because it gives focus to the calendar entries in the other window during some update routine?) and of course sometimes I don’t notice it did it and miss meetings; (2) It will periodically ask for the password over and over after locking, never letting me back into Notes unless I use Killnotes; (3) It will periodically freeze, not just itself, but the whole system where I can click on things and different windows but no program will start or respond or run, including Killnotes. Actually I do feel better, thanks!
When tearing through your inbox, if you accidentally delete a message – no problem – it sits in the trash for a while and you can recover it.
HOWEVER – If you accidentally delete a “calendar event” document from your main mailfolder, there is no recourse – it’s gone forever. This is confirmed by IBM’s IT help desk – I find it hard to believe, but they say that is indeed the case.
Brilliant…
My Lotus Notes insists that the default duration of a meeting or appointment is 45 minutes. It’s easy to change, but apparently impossible for Notes to remember this after a restart (which is as usual always combined with the compulsory logging out of windows).
It annoys me everytime I have to schedule a meeting or appointment, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone that can solve this feature.
Sharing my thoughts for all of you : you don’t have the slightest idea about you are saying – all of you are using a fantastic and powerful software with hundreds of features and capabilities only to send and receive email ???? ah ah ! LOL! It’s the same of calling a brain surgeon to take care of a tiny pathetic wound or using a ferrari to drive only 10 meters . You are using what… 1% of the capabilities of this fantastic software ? All the complains are pathetic. Day by day more and more companies are using Lotus Notes, it’s an intelligent choice because we can share databases and develop all sort of flexible and secure applications to run on it without limit .
one last one – I couldn’t find an email I needed as part of an email conversation because someone had replied and not replied with history(!), how daft is this distinction – if I send an email to someone the original is useful to have in the reply text – unless you are a dveloper worried about kb of space.
I eventually managed to find the email in my archive by searching all documents, but it took a while as notes distinguishes between capitals and lower case (!) stupid. So I had to search twice once with a capital and once without. I thne sent a reply from the archived email. later I went to look for the reply in my sent box but it was not there. I did a search again (two actually, one with a capital, one with lower case) and could not find it. I thought no, not possible, but perhaps it is in the sent folder of my archive? Yes it was. So an email I send to day replying to an archived email gets archived immediately and not at the correct archive time.
It looks like the is and ts are not dotted and crossed by notes.
But it’s a good database IT say. So what, I don’t use it as a database, I use it to send emails. Tosh!
Soemone sent me an email with a puke green background. I wanted to remove this as I had to forward the email on. I could not find in the menus any reference to background so I used the help menu. I typed in background colour under search and no results came up. So I tried color and Igot a few results (I am using english, am in england but it can’t understand english).
So I find the section to add or remove backgrounds – it says open the email in edit mode (done), then go to file, documnet properties – there is no document properties in the file menu – yet again notes is useless, not intuitive, not even logical.
I agree with studley – why can’t I copy and paste the email address of a sender? Why is te only option to enter it into my address book? I may not wish to have it in my address book? In any case because the contacts from the address book of notes is cumbersome, illogical and always prints off on two pages rather than one I just use txt files. Easier to read quickly, print off on one page, can be copied and pasted to other applications etc.
I copied a word from the contents of an e-mail and pasted it to a field ‘Search for’. Pressed Search.
No documents found.
Today’s topic is: Folders!
Right click on Folders to create a new subfolder. Oops, no, wrong. All you can do is select Document Properties (huh, of a folder?), Forward or Print (Again, all the contents of the folder or also the subfolders?). Silly me, to create a new subfolder you need to click on a subfolder. How to get the first subfolder? Don’t ask.
By chance, I did not capitalize the folder name, and the neatfreak that I am, wanted to change the first letter to be capitalized afterwards. WRONG! No can do. LN(8.5) says: “A folder or view with this name already exist”. First rename it to something completely different, then to the capitalized version.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Soren, I am forced to work with this POS, but I am not a M$ fan. I have thrown all my PCs out the window a year ago and will only buy or recommend Apples. I hate Outlook with a passion. So, not just M$ lovers here..
Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes Developers (0.001%) think it’s great.
Everyone else (99.999%) think it’s a piece of ****.
I think Lotus Notes is great…
… at being a piece of ****.
Seriously, this is absolutely the worst piece of software I’ve ever used – completely non-intuitive.
@ Soren on December 21st, 2009 at 10:55 am
Hate to break it to you, pal, but I’m no MS fanboy. When I scream at Notes, I do it out of the earshot of the mail admins for fear that they will replace it with Exchange.
Give me a Zimbra, or Apple, or Google open standards solution anyday.
Whew… we finally upgraded from Notes 6.x to 8.x where I work. WAY better! Now my email is almost 1/10th as good as Outlook. My suicidal thoughts have gone away and now I’m just in standard depression mode. AWESOME, IBM… just AWESOME!
Why does it take 3 minutes to copy text from a web page and paste it into notes? It’s just text for gods sake! And why when you paste in an excel table is it inserted as an image????
I don’t know if this is Lotus’s fault, or whoever made this particular database for checking out books… But Why oh Why would I search authors by first name rather than last name? WTF.
“An error was encountered opening a window”
i.e. the shitwrap failed to close properly – please restart your computer and then went for the inordinate amount of time for Notes to restart
actully this may be a blessing in disguise as other apps will run better when Lotus “give me all the resources” Notes is not running
Riddle me this fanboys. How do you configure NOtes to sort email by multiple fields, say file size then priority then date?
You can’t do it, because for all talk about Notes being multi-functional and a database client first, it really doesn’t even have the most basic functionality of the simplest productivity software. It is not a DB client it is a pretender–in all things. To get NOtes to perform a simple field search would require a ground up complete redesign of the the client and server softwares. It is a car without an engine.
Help! My employer is seemingly stuck using custom lotus notes databases forever because they got some freakin certification a few years ago.
I guess I should look forward to the 5-10 sec delay on updating some field somewhere, and of course those notification emails (delayed 5-10 min) telling me and my manager what I just did in that database.
Of course, that is if the modal search dialog has let me back into the app to do anything…
“Help! My employer is seemingly stuck using custom lotus notes databases forever because they got some freakin certification a few years ago.”
Find a new employer. You are surrounded by idiots.
Chas said on December 23rd, 2009 at 8:48 am
Sorry Pete, it is not fine. Inline attachments? When I receive an email the attachments are always at the bottom of the email and never in line.
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What isn’t working as far as spellcheck goes?
The attachments are at the bottom because that’s where people are putting them, it’s not Notes putting them there.
Bart said on December 11th, 2009 at 7:13 am
I just started at this large company. I figured I would have to start using a PC (sigh), but now it turns out I would have to use LN (sob). I had used it in a previous life and remember the day of joy when I left that company.
The one thing I thought I WAS going to get is shared contacts. However, the corporate IT person stated that “we haven’t figured that out yet”. Mind you, LN was implemented well over a year ago.
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So you blame the software because you have incompetent IT people?
Hmmmm, interesting.
siampudan said on December 15th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
why this stupid so called email client keep sending me warning message: “over quota error report” when I already cleared my inbox and this moronic application stated: “you are using 30% of your storage” ???? wtf????
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As I’ve stated in a previous post, like ANY database, just because you delete something, that doesn’t mean the space is immediately recovered. Ask your admin (assuming you have a competent one) to compact your mail file.
RelaxedSysAdmin said on December 21st, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Well! After 4 years supporting a 60 seat Notes site we migrated our client to Exchange. I have been a follower on this site for a while now and regularly found myself nodding wanly and smiling sadly in sympathy with others’ similar experiences. To all the non believers I say this – we have replaced four servers with a file server, exchange server and hosted Sharepoint…….
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Wait,…. you had 4 Domino servers for 60 people !?!?!? Talk about a bad implementation. Good thing you went with Exhange because you have no idea how to roll out Notes/Domino. BTW, have fun with those Exchange and Sharepoint upgrades.
Shannon said on December 21st, 2009 at 7:46 pm
I can’t believe when you send an email it has to be “sent” twice, in my case over a slow WAN.
It first sends using “send outgoing mail” and then it has to replicate the same email in your sent folder back to the server. You basically have to double the bandwidth for sending emails!
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That’s because you’re working off of a local replica but to correct your statement, it’s NOT sending it twice. It’s putting the mail in your local mail.box, then, when you replicate, it sends it out to the server. There are advantages and disadvantages to working of off a local replica but you can change it to work directly from the server.
Drunk and Bitter Jesus said on December 24th, 2009 at 11:55 am
I originally used Notes back in the version 4 days for a help desk ticketing platform. I am now compelled to use version 8.0.2 for PIM functionality, and I’m relieved to see that, in the intervening decade, IBM has not chosen to implement any substantial enhancements or changes to the user interface.
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You’re kidding me, right? Are you saying that the interface looks the same as it did in previous versions? When I see posts like this, it just invalidates all the rest and just make them look like incessant whinning with no credence or credibility.
I always used Outlook for work and now, I changed companies and I HAVE TO USE Lotus Notes. It’s horrible. Have you tried to copy/paste from a web page into a LN email note (oh, excuse me, a “memo”. Or how about Ctrl n (oh, excuse me, a Ctrl M). Replication? What’s up with that? How about drag and drop a note into your calendar? Sorry, not possible. Change a title of a note and save it to a folder? No. Don’t even get me started on the Contacts.
tom said on December 10th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
i hate it because while changing a co-worker’s archive settings, it automatically deleted her current archives without confirmation! now i just want to hide in my cubicle in shame and disgust!
can we kill lotus notes with fire, please?
Notes doesn’t “automatically” delete anything. YOU caused the problem and now it’s the software’s fault? Typical. I would consider another vocation were I you.
Always freezing when doing a search!
Why does this piece of software exist? In Lotus 8.5, the address book no longer gives me the option to categorize my contacts by the last name I choose: yes, I can choose between first name – last name, or vice versa, but the program chooses the division. Sorry, but half the time the programs guesses wrong. So, a name that I just edited was “re-interpreted” and now when I search for it, it can’t find it. What a waste of electrons…
Having now gone back through the entire list of comments, one thing jumps out out me: where the Notes “haters” attack the software, the Notes lovers attack the users. If the only way you can defend your product is with an ad hominem, what does that say about it? Another point jumps out, actually, which is that the Notes defenders talk about how easy it is to support and develop, whereas those who dislike it talk about how unpleasant it is to use. I would love to hear someone actually address the criticisms of the *client* as opposed to the server.
I originally used Notes back in the version 4 days for a help desk ticketing platform. I am now compelled to use version 8.0.2 for PIM functionality, and I’m relieved to see that, in the intervening decade, IBM has not chosen to implement any substantial enhancements or changes to the user interface. It’s good to know that in these times of change, we can count on IBM for consistency. The same can be said for the Notes PIM–even when I change my view settings, they revert back to the default, so I don’t have to worry about the pesky issue of customizing the program’s appearance, thus enhancing my productivity! Clearly IBM knows what I need better than I do!
try this if you like pain and suffering: let’s say you get an email from a customer with someone new cc’d you’d like to add to your contacts. Try copying and pasting that, no can do!!!! you might get the ENTIRE EMAIL pasted into your name: field, or Notes hangs for several minutes while if thrashes around trying to figure out what to do when you highlight and right click Copy. But you can’t add someone from an email unless they’re the sender or you first forward the email and then highlight and copy from that.
Who wrote this kaka sw anyway?
my company switched to LN not too long ago. I find it hysterical (read: incredibly annoying) that my password to log in throws a “does not meet length requirement”, but it accepts it anyway. Then a modal pops up alerting me that Lotus is not my default email client, and would i like to make it so. Regardless of my selecting “don’t ask again”, i’ll be greeted with this modal tomorrow. and that’s just to get the damn thing running.
here’s another fun bit, try scrolling in your Contacts database. If you have a lot like I do (2000+), it jumps around and skips huge chunks of names. Like today, scrolling up from the S’s looking for a name starting with Pap…, and I noticed it goes from Mer… to Pel… with nothing in between. Where’d all the rest of the M’s, N’s, O’s, and half the P’s go to???? Does Refresh fix anything?? no. Pull the elevator all the way down, and now I’m in the M’s!!! WTF???? so try clicking repeatedly on the down arrow, no joy, stuck where I am, no downward movement at all. Fun. Not! So I have to collapse all and re-expand, then drag the elevator to where I (hope) the Pa’s are and pray the scrolling doesn’t break again or I’ll have to do it all over again. Lord God Almighty, all I want for xmas is a real PIM/Email tool, is that too much to ask???? Osama Bin Laden must be behind all this, that’s the only thing that makes any sense.
Petetm said on November 16th, 2009 at 6:58 am
Spell check works fine for me. The attachment will be where your cursor is; it’s called inline attachments. As opposed to Outlook where it just lumps them all together. Personally, I like to be able to put them where I want in the body of the message so with multiple attachments, I don’t have to refer to them in the attachment line, like OL.
Sorry Pete, it is not fine. Inline attachments? When I receive an email the attachments are always at the bottom of the email and never in line. Sometimes if the email is long enough you wonder if there are actually any. At least with outlook all the attachments are at the top of the email so can be seen straightaway instead of having to scroll through the whole message.
I swear to god I’m going to scream or throw this f#$(% computer out the window. Or both. Then I’m going to set it on fire and shoot it with a machine gun. I just upgraded from notes v7 to notes v8.5.1 and now the all this piece of **** will do is load the splash screen then crash. No errors, no explanations… the splash screen loads, asks me for a password, then it vanishes. Looks like I’m on my way towards another 45-minute reinstall! F*** YOU IBM AND F*** YOU LOTUS NOTES. I hope every single IBM facility on the planet spontaneously burns to the ground.
When I first started using Notes, I assumed that my employer was using a horribly outdated version circa 1995, due to numerous fucked up design choices and the total lack of adherence to modern UI convention. The error messages were reminiscent of debug code I wrote in ******* COLLEGE. “Invalid Operation”?!? WTF… because that’s really what the end user wants to see.
Imagine my shock when I realized that my version of Notes was c. 2007!
I’ve since installed Thunderbird and use IMAP/LDAP, and thus I’m able to avoid Notes except when using the calendar. Which brings me to another point: why the **** doesn’t Notes support any open calendar formats?
I can’t believe when you send an email it has to be “sent” twice, in my case over a slow WAN.
It first sends using “send outgoing mail” and then it has to replicate the same email in your sent folder back to the server. You basically have to double the bandwidth for sending emails!
Well! After 4 years supporting a 60 seat Notes site we migrated our client to Exchange. I have been a follower on this site for a while now and regularly found myself nodding wanly and smiling sadly in sympathy with others’ similar experiences. To all the non believers I say this – we have replaced four servers with a file server, exchange server and hosted Sharepoint, and here’s what we are seeing:
- even the receptionist can manage the contact list now
- User satisfation rating has gone through the roof
- Email support requests have gone from 80-90 a month to… 3 last month
- switch utilisation is down nearly 60% (no roaming users popping into the office, forgetting to switch off replicate and replicating all over the shop)
- the company logo can be inserted into a signature with linking to a website. How’s the technology people!? Amazing…
- server utilisation is bugger all
- backup size and times have dropped
- BlackBerry server replicates contacts without b*sh*t agents having to run
- Out of Office… works
- Out of Office… doesn’t work when you turn it off
- if you want a Calendar you…well click on it. If you want to share your calendar you.. share it. If you want… ah it’s all there in front of you – just click on it
- NO AGENTS
- AGAIN – NO AGENTS
- did I mention NO AGENTS?
- people can drag and drop. Just like their interface, all that functionatlity is consistent
- the… I’ll stop as I am getting sore fingers.
The list goes on… Vale Notes. Long Live the Notes.
Just not an any of our servers ever again…
I just don’t understand what were they thinking when they designed the storage system for emails on notes… it’s so complex to manage and counterintuitive. PST files were simple and straightforward.
I am developer and certified in both Lotus Notes and Sharepoint.
Lotus Notes is a fantastic system. Few frustrations here with Lotus I do understand, but most comments here are from childish ms fanboys without education and patience.
Domino includes web server, replication, security, mail, advanced application design and much more in one product. With Microsoft you need to install separate products like IIS, Exchange, SharePoint and more to compare it with the Lotus Domino Server.
Most comments at this site are based on old client versions, lack of education and in some cases incorrect server administration from the IT-personel.
If you use version 5 from 2002 and you haven’t had any education then I understand your frustrations. And the old versions of Lotus Notes were indeed uggly.
When I use Outlook there are many things that cant be done which are easy in Lotus Mail.
But this site seems to be the home for MS fanboys. It’s like selling your old BMW and buying a new Mercedes – and complaining about the cupholder in the Mercedes. An example: There are many (MANY) comments here about shortcuts… Well, use Release 8 and the shortcuts are streamlined to Outlook. Others complain about error messages caused by lack of network… others talk about speed. Lotus is in general fast and reliable. I have worked with web servers, which we didnt touch for 5 years, because everything, including upgrading worked fine. Finally we forgot where we had placed the server…
Lotus Notes can be compared with SharePoint. SharePoint is a great product. SharePoint is good-looking (better than Lotus Notes) and is very well connected to Office. But its database structure is bad, workflow capabilities are low, and site developers will quickly reach the limit for the product. You need to be .Net developer to really do something in sharepoint. In Lotus Notes you can develop databases and application easy without being a prof developer.
I work as consultant on both systems… Normally I dont want to discuss with fanboys. I can see advantages in both systems
How come enabling spell check for all mail documents is under Actions-Tools-Preferences.
Yet changing the default web-browser is in File-Preferences-Location Preferences.
Simple bit of design work to group all Preferences together geez. I hate notes so much!
I H8 LOTUS NOTES!!!!
Oh that feels better already…
in lotus notes there is a function to send your work collegues a “special – Phone message” and yes this is a fantastic feature! unless you do things out of sequence, then lotus notes (undoubtably) SCREWS YOU OVER.
If you don’t enter the recipient in first and press enter then all data that you have entered into the note (including callers name & phone number) are deleted!! WHAT A STUPID SYSTEM!!!! WHO INVENTED THIS????
I mean really, what receptionist has time to fiddle and enter their collegues name in full & wait for lotus to accept it while the caller is ratteling off their phone number…. Give me a pen and paper any day! it beats cranky collegues who don’t know why you’ve sent them a blank phone message and ask you who it was and what the phone number is… Uh sorry the information you need is contained in that… Oh Blank phone message… F@#$!
I just found this site and ordered a clock and couple of mugs. That way I can record the amount of time I waste on lotus notes…. I had outlook for years, then I switched employers in 2008 and got saddled with notes.. Had I but know how bad it was I never would have changed companies..the $10K-$15 K a year increase wasn’t worth it. I hoping that someone on here will be able to tell me how to install Outlook so that it links to my Notes server, and the Bozos in IT won’t notice.
I’m an end user which was forced to use Lotus Notes when I took this job two years ago. The frustration is further increased since my last job of 8 years was using MS Outlook. Further compounded as my currnet company relies on it’s end users to backup their files (including email and shared drives). This is perplexing to me.
Heck even our computers are crappy IBM lenovo junk. AHHH
I’ve ran into the exact same problems most have posted about already, so there is not much to re-typing these in too much detail.
I don’t use the core features of Notes, so I could care less what it is strongest at. Besides less than 20 people at my company may be using these features…….the other 1,000′s of us are not. At this point I’d rather migrate my work email and calendar over to gmail. It provides more space as well.
- poorest email app I’ve ever used.
- can too easily copy/modify prior email text to make someone look to say something different.
- slow
- once Notes completely erased my emails off my local as well as the server, no root cause could be found.
- replication is a joke
- horrible GUI
- ……heck it gust goes on and on, I’ve lost my will to type anymore.
When sending a email, I selected “Save & File” and the file selction dialog box popped up. A moment later a Lotus Notes “Your have email” Notification dialog box popped up. This caused a deadlock – I could not close the Notification and I could not select or cancel the file selection. I eventually had to reboot my whole PC sort things out.
“Lotus Notes – the best email system available at my company”
The best way to fix most Lotus Notes problems is to goto killdisk.com and download there free client. simple install the software make a boot disk then select the drive notes is installed on and proceed to format your problems away.
You could forward every thing to gmail, but then you are left with CRAPware on your pc.
Lotus Notes = Cockney rhyming slang for “a **** that floats”
I hate notes, ******* piece of ****.
notes never ceases to amaze me at it’s unintuitive nature, complete disregard for people’s work processes, or any modern part of user interface design.
It exists ONLY to serve as an example of how not to do it.
I’d love to tell my kids “if you work hard at school, take other people’s thoughts into consideration and strive to excel, you will do well”
On the other face of it Lotus Notes flies in that statement
“if you are slow, studid, dumb, fat, lazy, couldn’t give a **** you will somehow be an internationally adopted (but hated) money making tool”
Notes must be destroyed, by Arnie, John McClean, Stallone, I don’t give a **** – it just has to go.
Oh, man, I hate Lotus Notes too. Been using it for 10 years at the company I work for but I still dont like it. Please god, send us an Microsoft exchange server and send our domino server to satan, guess he would love it.
why this stupid so called email client keep sending me warning message: “over quota error report” when I already cleared my inbox and this moronic application stated: “you are using 30% of your storage” ???? wtf???? already passed three f*ck*n days !!!!!!! shouldn’t it refresh the information in mail server already???? f*c*in hate this piece of ****, and I’m stuck with it !!!!!!! aaagggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh
You think you hate Lotus Notes? Sure, it sucks to use, but try to DEPLOY the retarded program. The msi-package consists of nothing msi-related, but instead runs a legacy setup as a custom action. The fact that I cannot simply remove the desktop icon is only mildly annoying. The fact that IBM sent me a 650 MB installation to upgrade from 8.5 to 8.5.1 is irritating. But that the moronic upgrade just hangs and doesn’t start at all with no error logs is hate worthy. Now that I think about it, it was exacly the same when i deployed 8.5.
We recently merged with a larger organisation hence why everyone in my office now feels the pain and misery of having to contend with this waste of code everyday. I use to be efficient in my job and now I’m regularly half a day behind answering or sending emails. The worst thing is the head honcho’s know how useless this program is but do not want to admit that they were f**king stupid to ever consider using this piece of ***** and will not go back to using a gloriously simple piece of software like Outlook. (Oh, how I took you for granted my friend).
I really don’t care what extra benefits Lotus gives the spasticated techies in the server room, I just want to be able to SEND emails, READ emails and not have LN grind to a halt twice a day.
I feel like Bruce Banner at work now, I’m forever on the verge of exploding into a hulk style rage and beating the hell out of my computer, colleagues, bosses, clients, anyone I can get my hands on.
Is it too much to ask, that once a mail message is “responded to and sent”, that the original message be allowed to “close”? My “mouse elbow” is being dangerously overstressed causing corrective surgery to be executed years ahead of a normal wear and tear PC operators schedule.
And what’s up with not being able to “print all history” in mail messages? I need to ingest Dramamine before the arduous task of “open/print” is executed 10, 20 times — and even then — who the heck can read the history with the IBM programs cockeyed formatting??? A document with multiple correspondents indents and takes up so much space, must print e-mails takes up twice the paper that is necessary. Think twice before printing an e-mail … I honestly but LN(h)8 must be responsible for destroying many a forest. I(h)8 Loser Notes!
And I can’t even discuss “Meeting Planning and Contacts” … it is all so very painful having come from and electronic messaging system that was clean, efficient and user friendly.
I’ve been know to fall into a deep depression when scheduling outside Webinars that politely and professionally ask if I would like to have the confirmation and dial-in information placed on my Outlook Calendar … Oh Brother … would I EVER!!!
Sign me: Sulking in da Burgh but it’s nice to know I’m not alone!
What is it with that splash screen? I know I am starting Lotus Notes, why does the splash screen have to sit in front of every other application? Jeez I hate Lotus Notes.
Another painful LN story:
My boss calls at 23:40 at night and asked me to send me some report to revise and send back.
23:45 LN is up and running waiting for the email
00:15 LN decided to give the boss a call asking where the email is.. he told me he’d sent it 30 min ago!
00:20 I decided to restart LN
00:25 LN is up again and received the email!!
00:35 revising the report was finished, ready to be sent back
00:50 email sent (LN took 10 min to upload 1.6 MB attachment on a 7.2 Mbps connection!!!!!!)
01:15 boss calls asking for report
01:55 right now still trying to send the email again without LN dying on me!!!
2 hours 15 minutes so far, only 10 min real work and the rest 125 min are wasted by LN!!!!!! and I have to wake up 7 am tomorrow.
Decided to send it from my private Gmail account in the end!
I hate Lotus Notes to death!
I just caught up on reading a month’s worth of postings here while waiting for Notes to finish processing a meeting invite acceptance.
Also, Notes didn’t waste time pissing me off today. I opened a meeting from the calendar and selected File — Print (from menu of that window of course, not the main Notes window) and did it print the invite? Noooo, instead it printed my daily calendar which was on the screen behind in the main Notes window. WTF?? So then to just to test it I went back to the inbox and then back to the invite and tried again and sure enough it printed an email from the inbox and not the invite. I then hit the print icon and holy cow it actually printed the invite. Then I decided to push my luck and try to print an email also needed for the meeting. I opened it and uncollapsed the sections Notes thought I didn’t need to look at and hit the print button. The email printed but with the sections still collapsed. Hit the print button again but this time I hit the preview button. Everything looked good so I clicked ok and it printed out the email with the sections collapsed again. Double WTF!! I then tried File — Print and it printed okay. What a bunch of ****.
My company just switched to Lotus Notes and we have a number of Access databases that use the docmd.sendobject command to automatically create emails. Apparently this doesn’t work in LN. Also if you make a hyperlink to an email in Word, it doesn’t work with LN. It will open LN because it’s teh default email app, but it won’t create an email. Unfortunately, a thorough Google search doesn’t even give me any hints. Apparently Notes users don’t even bother asking the questions?
I just started at this large company. I figured I would have to start using a PC (sigh), but now it turns out I would have to use LN (sob). I had used it in a previous life and remember the day of joy when I left that company.
The one thing I thought I WAS going to get is shared contacts. However, the corporate IT person stated that “we haven’t figured that out yet”. Mind you, LN was implemented well over a year ago.
Snuffware
The most frustrating thing is when you have opened an attachment already, then try and drag the same attachment from the email to a folder – it just crashes the whole thing.
When I read these comments I can make two assumptions:
1. All the people that hate notes have never had any interest in working with it and want to use a program that forced down everybody’s throat and thinks you are to bloody daft to work a computer.
2. Support at these companies must either really suck or these people never called their IT department to to ask for help.
All the “problems” posted here are so typical for MS Outlook users.
Maybe someone should go to their companies and give them a little training on how to use the product. It does required a little more intelligence than your basic amoeba.
” All the people that hate notes have never had any interest in working with it and want to use a program that forced down everybody’s throat ”
You are half right. All the people who hate Notes have never had any interest in working with it. I don’t know why anyone would ever have any interest in IBM Lotus Notes Domino Database WebSphere Failed Software Shitshow.
But you are wrong about Notes haters wanting a program that forced down everybody’s throat. LOTUS NOTES is the program that is forced down everybody’s throats. It’s forced down our throats by self-important, loser IT “executives,” employed by incompetent IT departments at mega-corporations. When these IT executives selected Lotus Notes (a) they were not technically competent to be making such decisions in the first place, (b) they were easily bribed by IBM with free dinners, box seats, ballpoint pens, etc., and (c) their only guiding principal was that old IT adage: “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Now email is a very old technology and it was recognized early on that although a common communications systems was required it was not a good idea to force a client client or server software down everybody’s throat. So different communications protocols and standards were created, the most relevant one in this discussion being the IMAP standard that was created in 1985 at Stanford University.
By using IMAP, the and server developers and administrators are free to choose (or create) whatever server software they want, as long as it follows the IMAP standard. This allows them to have the freedom to use whatever technology they want based on their needs … whether the documents are stored in a “Domino database” or are stored on papyrus doesn’t make a difference as long as the IMAP standard is followed. And the users are similarly free to use or create any kind of email client software they want, as long as it can communicate with an IMAP server. By following standards we get freedom, choice, productivity, cost optimization, etc. By using Lotus Notes we get get royally ripped off by IBM for the privilege of having ****** software rammed down our throats.
Chris said on December 8th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Lotus Notes is like marmite…. marmite is disgusting!
Pssst, Chris, just a little advice. If you have to explain a joke, then it’s just not funny to begin with.
i hate it because while changing a co-worker’s archive settings, it automatically deleted her current archives without confirmation! now i just want to hide in my cubicle in shame and disgust!
can we kill lotus notes with fire, please?
DC said on November 5th, 2009 at 6:58 am
Also…why no ‘open with’ for attachments? WHY?
What version are you using !?!?!?!??! Like others have said, if you’re going to post issues, at least be using a version that’s NOT 14 years old.
Matt Gorden said on November 19th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
It takes about 2 minutes to render an html email… why? Because Lotus Notes sucks. When I accidentally delete a meeting invitation from my inbox I go to the trash to recover and what do you know… it’s not there… why? Lotus Notes sucks. But I guess it’s just a training issue, isn’t PETEM?
Nope, sounds like a setup issue to me. Please don’t blame the software if it’s not installed/setup correctly. 2 Minutes for an html message? Check with your admin, I’ve never seen that. It should open like any other message.
By default, deletions stay in the trash folder for 48 hours. Check the advanced properties tab of your mail file and make sure soft deletions are enabled and you can set the time limit to whatever you want.
OR, you can just blame the product and say is sucks. It’s up to you.
The Truth said on December 7th, 2009 at 9:24 am
There are several points here mentioned again and again.
6. Further Notes fan comments: This site is slowing down, so Notes is better now with the latest release.
THE REALITY: No, the latest release sucks too for all the same old reasons…slow, errors, resource hog, non-intuitive interface, compatibility issues with other mail systems, etc… As the market share continues to shrink and people just come to terms with the fact that they are stuck with these problems, fewer posts are coming in.
7. Final thoughts: Notes has not been fun for users or IT. From inception to present, the complaints have been consistent. I particularly enjoy the few posts of Notes developers or admins claiming that their user populations are perfectly content and there are no problems….ever. I understand that this is how you make your living, but please. I’ve worked with hundreds of Notes developers and admins over the years. Not one would make this claim where someone could hold them accountable (e.g. not anonymously on a message board or blog). We all know that one is a load of garbage, so don’t bother. And BTW, Notes IS ugly….old versions and new.
I’ll just stick to the last two for now and if needed I’ll comment on the others.
1)Yep, 8 was slow, 8.5.1, no way. IE takes up almost as much memory as Notes and it just a BROWSER. Put Notes 8.5 and Outlook side-by-side and it’s diffcult to tell them apart. As far as “compatibility issues with other mail systems” is concerned, please explain. BTW, let me know when Exchange can run on something other than Windows. Market share is decreasing? Show me.
2) I’ve never, EVER said there were no problems and no product can say that. However, as I have admind both Domino and Exchange, I can say without a doubt, Domino is easier, more flexible and more reliable than Exchange. Along with having a lower TCO.
Stephen said on November 23rd, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I have just wasted an hour looking for emails that I swore I’d sent to colleagues recently… and finally found them in the ’sent’ folder of my archive, even though my archive is only meant to be items 60 days and older and these were sent in the last month.
I’ve now learned that when you forward something out of an archive, the messages ends up in the sent folder…. OF THE ARCHIVE, regardless of what date it was sent. Counterintuitive and counterproductive.
In your opinion. However, your mail file and archive are two separate dbs/mail files only linked via your archive settings. Therefore when you send out of your archive, yes, the message will be in the sent folder of your archive db.
tom said on November 25th, 2009 at 1:56 am
Petem said on November 5th, 2009 at 8:53 am
If you’re doing it correctly, you don’t. Are you just doing in the directory and deleting the person?
I delete user from domino admin. Find user, right click and delete.
Then you need to go into the Admin Db and approved the deletion. From there, adminp will take care of the rest. That should do it for you but if not, let me know.
MrNotes said on December 8th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
@PETETM Nov 12th
Sorry you feel that way. Be assured. All posts are published unless extremely offensive. (Takes me a while to approve them some times)
Please feel free to counter punch or assist….. can’t help feeling that assist would be the better option thou. ; )
Fair enough. That being said, I will be more than willing/happy to help folks with questions or issues they’re having with Notes. However, if you just whine and complain (see post by The Truth), no chance.
Florence said on December 2nd, 2009 at 8:36 am
Anyone else feel the need to make a http://www.ihatepetem.com site?
What a tosser.
LOL !!!! Hey Florence, that’s petetm. Let me know when it’s up and running.
nice logo
I am forced to use notes at work, but I give out my gmail account to those who really need to reach me. I check my notes account every two weeks. And as with any other office email situation it gives power to people to email everyone in my company. It is not my bracelet you found in the womens’ bathroom in a different city, don’t email the 250 people in my building! There is something about notes where you can’t figure out what you want to do but these idiots can figure out how to spam the entire company.
iNotes has for years been much better than web-outlook (or what is it really called?) and Microsoft has not yet accomplished to copy all the functionality from good old Lotus Notes into Sharepoint server (old Frontpage – great!).
Quite funny to hear that someone compares Google Mail and Outlook 2007 with Notes 5 or 6.5. What I read here mostly have no relation to Notes as software. Get rid of those people who set up and administer your Notes infrastructure and get the good ones. Email are randomly sending and receiving, no outbox (where is an outbox in Google mail btw??), no “year” in a spellchecker suggestion (just checked, it’s fourth fro the top) and other bullshit – or you lie, or your admins are incompetent. If you say “unintuitive” and mean “not as in Outlook” – it;s your own issue since you’re sitting in your mind limits and can’t get rid of your outlook stereotypes. And the same people say Google mail is great when just composing new mail is a challenge for a new user. Those complaints about attaching when in the subject box – I heard this so many times but most of the people remember it from the first time they get an explanation. No, people on this site are stubborn in their stupidity and are proud of it. Subject field is a plain text field and body field is a rich text field, so simple as this. Try to “attach anything” to a text field in InfoPath or enter text in numeric field, would you be surprised to see an error?
I work in two different organizations and one uses Exchange/Sharepoint/InfoPath and another – Notes. I can compare how much issues do you get in Exchange environment what you never heard of in Notes/Domino environment. Someone here said – “in properly designed application you never need replication” – this text just indicate the level of misunderstanding of the modern communication systems complexity by those people. Outlook replicates also, how do you think your local pst-file is filled in with mails? Ever got “communication with Exchange server is lost” and then “is restored” every 30 seconds? Or “communication lost” and Outlook freezes for minutes so I can’t even read my old mail? Unsent emails are left in outbox forever and even not sent after those issues got fixed so I had to remove it and create again – did this ever happened in Notes? How easy is to set up a cluster in Exchange? This is just a bloody mission impossible! With Domino I can do it in 10 minutes. In Outlook you have _no_ applications, therefore it’s very easy to create just a new application and all you need is to migrate the pst file. Notes must support the legacy apps because your bloody organizations are still sitting on 6.5 and may decide years later to move to Notes 9 and will be complaining if their custom apps would stop working – and it will not since I have seen quite complex applications that are working unchanged from version 6 till version 8.5.1. Probably most of those haters are blonds, I have no idea.
This is in version 7, so maybe its fixed. Why is there no highlighting of spelling errors? Also, you’d think that without having highlighting, there would be some easy way to start up the spell checker. But, there is no shortcut key for it (at least not one listed in the menu). Dumb.
@ ROMULAN
LOOOL! Man, I hope I reach all these great things soon
I’ll quit my company soon and one of the reasons in the high blood pressure caused by useing LN!
I came across this site by accident… bit like one might step on a dog dropping by accident
This is all pretty funny… what’s this… a site for people/companies who have some agenda? Guess one can start a site for anything… perhaps I should start the “I Hate A Round Earth” or “I Hate Fresh Air” site… you guys could swing straight over there as well and dribble on…
If you have to go to the trouble to set up a site to can a product then it speaks of the attacker rather than the defender.
“I consider it a mark of great prudence in a man to abstain from threats or any contemptuous expressions, for neither of these weaken the enemy, but threats make him more cautious, and the other excites his hatred, and a desire to revenge himself.” – Macchiavelli
@PETETM Nov 12th
Sorry you feel that way. Be assured. All posts are published unless extremely offensive. (Takes me a while to approve them some times)
Please feel free to counter punch or assist….. can’t help feeling that assist would be the better option thou. ; )
Here is a prime example of why I hate lotus notes. I am composing a message, to consist of a subject and an attachment. So, when I have entered the subject, then click the attachment button, a ******* dialog box appears to let me know that I should have clicked the body of the message first. But it doesn’t then add the attachment anyway. You are left to wallow in your wrongness until you do things the Lotus Notes way, by clicking in the body of the message, THE ONLY PLACE YOU WOULD WANT OR BE ALLOWED AN ATTACHMENT, ANYWAY. I Hate Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes is like marmite…. marmite is disgusting!
In Windows 7 I can pin any application to my taskbar without issue, but, of course, Lotus Notes does not work!
I quit IBM a few months ago and immediately had the following feelings as I was freed from the clutches of LN:
1) Reached Nirvana
2) ******
3) Euphoria
4) Found God
5) Gmail’s unconditional love for mankind
Looking at more comments added after I was released from the LN prison, it just reaffirmed my believe that I WILL NOT WORK FOR A COMPANY THAT USES LOTUS NOTES!!!
The fact that LN has the quirky ability to hide/conceal/embed/disguise all those frequently used functions into their F**King UI reminds me of the movie series “National Treasure”. It simply requires the brilliance of a treasure hunter (and his cute blonde girlfriend) to find all the clues needed to achieve the ultimate goal of actually archiving my mails or create a bloody folder.
Oh yes, if it’s any consolation to you long suffering LN users, the entire Singapore government will be migrating their Lotus infrastructure to M$ Sharepoint and Exchange.
The good news: Finally being able to use email in the way it should be.
The REALLY BAD news: I don’t think they can actually migrate so many legacy Lotus apps!
There are several points here mentioned again and again.
1. The problem: Opening Notes is slow, searching is slow, contacts are slow, Notes is slow.
The rebuttal: Notes is really great if implemented properly, but your IT people are either using an old version or haven’t implemented it correctly.
THE REALITY: Notes is slow. When IBM implemented the old version it was slow. When IBM implemented the new version it was slow. Maybe it could be faster if implemented in a different way, but that’s a HUGE problem if the implementation is so complex that few can get it right….including IBM.
2. The problem: It’s hard to use, nothing works right, errors everywhere…
The rebuttal: You users are ignorant or under-educated.
THE REALITY: If it were more intuitive, more training wouldn’t be necessary.
3. The problem: The features suck.
The rebuttal: Replication is the best thing ever.
THE REALITY: Most of the rest of the world doesn’t use replication because in a well designed piece of software, replication shouldn’t be necessary. Stop extolling the virtues of something that was put in place to patch inadequacies.
4. The problem: It’s so hard to do
The rebuttal: All you have to do is
THE REALITY: Try developing an intuitive interface, and then people won’t complain that it’s hard to use.
5. Further Notes fan comments: There are far fewer Notes complaints to be found on Google…
THE REALITY: Since the truth in market share is somewhere between the 40% reported by Gartner (way high considering so many companies just pay maintenance for a few legacy apps and haven’t used the mail for ages – Gartner counts these as mail users) and the 10% reported by Ferris (probably much closer but low because many don’t want to admit they’re still using Notes), the fact remains that a much greater portion of the business world is using Outlook/Exchange. Given this, yes, more problems are reported for this platform….and honestly, most of the Notes base doesn’t bother to complain because they’re no longer shocked at their ongoing difficulties.
6. Further Notes fan comments: This site is slowing down, so Notes is better now with the latest release.
THE REALITY: No, the latest release sucks too for all the same old reasons…slow, errors, resource hog, non-intuitive interface, compatibility issues with other mail systems, etc… As the market share continues to shrink and people just come to terms with the fact that they are stuck with these problems, fewer posts are coming in.
7. Final thoughts: Notes has not been fun for users or IT. From inception to present, the complaints have been consistent. I particularly enjoy the few posts of Notes developers or admins claiming that their user populations are perfectly content and there are no problems….ever. I understand that this is how you make your living, but please. I’ve worked with hundreds of Notes developers and admins over the years. Not one would make this claim where someone could hold them accountable (e.g. not anonymously on a message board or blog). We all know that one is a load of garbage, so don’t bother. And BTW, Notes IS ugly….old versions and new.
Won’t even cut/paste from an email to another email! … don’t assume anything with Notes!
Perhaps Lotus Notes it too powerful – some of the ways it approaches data are clearly outside what I & other experienced developers expect a DB system to do. That said, the language really needs adopt a number modern tools to “protect” its users and programmers: stronger data types, better enforcement of … well, almost anything, something like JavaDoc, better enumerated types, and the ability to trace and map field dependencies.
I’d also like to see a *much* better UI Designer with better control of tables, etc.
(My personal wish is that it didn’t use the semicolon as a delimiter…)
Now, some super experienced Notes Guru or an IBMer will chime in and say “Well it does that if you do this…”. Maybe part of the problem is the lack of really good documentation and examples.
I have spent 15 years in companies that used Exchange and have now come to one that uses Lotus and am ready to slit my wrists. Our version (8.0.2) cannot handle something as simple as close original message on reply.
There are so many other better products out there, but I’m stuck with this POS. Clearly I did something very bad in a pervious life to be saddled with LN.
I don’t understand! The rules system is driving me insane! All I want to do is forward emails that come from a specific email address, but no matter what I put in the field for “Condition: Sender Is” it ignores the rule. It doesn’t accept straight email addresses, and it doesn’t accept short names. It just completely fails to acknowledge that anything is there. This system may be the worst coded piece of fail-sauce on the planet. I think I’d rather use Netscape Navigator to check AOL email than deal with this horror fest. I finally just setup a rule that forwards all email sent to my lotus notes account to my Gmail account. Even THAT took an hour of my time that I will never get back.
when you have to type killdomino and you wished it actually killed something…. thats when you know your company has lotus!
I thought this site was for people that hate Notes but it seems to be full of defenders and Notes lovers… Boring!!! How can you possibly defend a product that doesn’t know how to interpret hyperlinks natively out of the box and keep a straight face?
I hate Notes because I don’t know what the orange icon represents, and I find the collage of people and graphics in the start-up screen doesn’t properly represent my experience…
I would replace the start-up screen with groups of confused people crying and waiting around in empty meeting rooms. Maybe show people that had to downgrade from other systems kicking their own ***, or high paid IBM contractors giving each other high-5s while communicating exclusively on something other than their Notes clients!
I would for the record keep the start-up screen birds on a wire image… I assume this is a artistic representation of the brain power used to build the interconnect from Notes to all other mail systems on the planet…
And I can’t find right-click flagging or intelligent message sorting anywhere with this Notes piece of ****… And why doesn’t it write errors to the event log so they can be grabbed by industry standard log scrapers?
All you Notes lovers.. Take off your Cosby sweaters, get a hair cut, close your BBS account, step out of your bomb shelter and smell the coffee. Every time you make a comment it sounds like “Well on my ship the Titanic, you get extra ice-cream when you die, and what could possibly be better than ice-cream?”
Also, you lovers have your own websites to pat each other on the back, right next to the cute cats, pen top trolls, and beanybaby links on your custom Notes homepage. Use it…
F5 is logout instead of refresh?! Cruel developers indeed. I’ve been using notes for years, and that one still gets me occaisionally.
Anyone else feel the need to make a http://www.ihatepetem.com site?
What a tosser.
Btw, I’m sharing this with everyone at work…They can feel my pain
As far as I’m concerned Lotus Notes is the most horrible piece of **** e-mail in the universe. It is completely useless in a work environment and slows everything down on my computer. Unfortunately I’m stuck with it. If it were up to me the company would have ditched this years ago along with all the other **** that IBM produces. What do they do anyway? I mean besides sip on lattes and talk about Battlestar Galactica. I hate this program so much that I open it only to check my e-mail and then close it. I’m late on replying to most if not all of my e-mail but I still don’t care. Even to see this piece of **** in my toolbar makes me want to smash my computer to pieces. If I could I would forward all my mail elsewhere but I don’t think management would be too pleased. The only reason I can think of that they still have this “program” is that they’re getting some kind of deal from IBM. The fact that IBM has to give people deals to get them to use their piece of **** Lotus Notes is just a testament to how useless they really are.
Everybody hates notes, but in our agony we forget the poor lonely developers who go to work everyday developing again and again on this complete mess of a program. My suggestion for getting this application up to date again, is to completly delete the whole thing and redesign everything. The most hateable thing on notes is this continues adding of features and bugs with no structure behind. It seems, on every new version they develop new features, and those simple things like formating and writing an email is still a heart attack. Just see the File Menu of the 8.5 Client. We have an Open item with submenu open application. When you go 2 steps down you have an application item with a submenu open. Two things close together which could be combined. And this bug is provided in almost every thing you do.
Puhh, now it feels better. One word to the notes developers: Handle it like Microsoft in Windows 7: Less features, more structure, easier interface !!
All I want to do is link to an Excel 2007 document from within a Lotus Note (6.5) email…
Oh and another thing. Why does the mouse scroll not work on the panel which the mouse hovers over? It means you have to click inside somewhere before you are allowed to scroll in it. This is not normal. EVERY other application works like aforementioned. Your mouse is in a scroll pane you can scroll in it. All GUI frameworks like Java Swing have this built in. Notes GUI is just the flakiest ****.
1,157,524K of private virtual memory!!!!!!!!!!!!
ARE YOU F@#$%G KITTING ME????!!!!!!!!!!!!
What is this piece of **** doing? My OS does need so much RAM to run
Sometimes when Lotus Notes gets blocked (dont ask me why), the only way to run it again is to restart the computer. Is there a fix or workaround this problem?
I receive an email every time someone posts a document in a Lotus Notes teamroom, with a link to open the document.
The link does not work. You have to wait at least an hour and then it works.
I imagine that this is due to the frequency of updates to the databases, but could Lotus Notes not do something about this frustrating situation?
pls correct: … product of MS
@Oscar Snerd
Compare lotus notes with not only outlook but also with sharepoitnt.
If LN is a piece of s*** then what can you say about sharepoint? I can’t find words to say what big piece of it sharepoint is!!!
And I must deal with this “ingenious” product of MC
I am trying to highlight about 60 emails and shove them all in one folder. My company uses v6.5. Can anyone help me? I can’t use shift to highlight all. Please tell me I don’t have to individually move each one. Not even Lotus can be that diabolical???
either: Edit – Select all > Actions > Folder > Move to folder
or: select the mails you wish manually > Actions > Folder > Move to folder
I reckon Google could seriously compete with IBM/Blotus if they really wanted to. I bet Google could make a web application that did everything Blotus does, but logically and fast.
heh!
, but incidentally he must be using Lotus Notes….hence, all this fuss…
Whoever created this website must have been kicked out of the company because of his lame brain
Stone Age people…get a Lotus Notes 8.5 and get a life!!!!!!!!!!!!
Petem said on November 5th, 2009 at 8:53 am
If you’re doing it correctly, you don’t. Are you just doing in the directory and deleting the person?
I delete user from domino admin. Find user, right click and delete.
Hi heres a meeting request please double click to open the email to accept it, even though you have read the whole mail in your preview. and as for marking an email as read or unread .. i can just sh#$t a brick!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG spelchecker what a piece of s#$%#t it doesnt work ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i hate lotus notes
I’m running Notes 8.5.1, and all the changes to my views in mail and to do’s get reset back to defaults when I start my laptop every morning. Not every time I reboot, just once each morning. I can set it all up and it will be fine all day, even if I shut down completely for an hour and then power back up. But the next day, bingo!, all is reset. This only applies to my mail and to do list, the calendar and contacts are ok.
My IT guys have talked to IBM, said ‘try 8.5.1′ (I was on 8.5) no joy. They gave up after that (IBM).
Any thoughts on this? anything I can try? making my bookmarks.nsf read only perhaps??
btw, I’ve used both Lotus Nuts and Lookout! for years, dating back to the early 90s. Thankfully mostly outlook, or I’d be insane. I can say without hesitation that having used both extensively and over multiple versions, LN is a tool of Satan, and it’s ‘developers’ should all join him down there for a BBQ.
Outlook has had it’s issues too, but compared to Outlook ’97 it’s come a long way. Much better than it was. Notes doesn’t seem to have really improved, still a royal PITA.
I have just wasted an hour looking for emails that I swore I’d sent to colleagues recently… and finally found them in the ‘sent’ folder of my archive, even though my archive is only meant to be items 60 days and older and these were sent in the last month.
I’ve now learned that when you forward something out of an archive, the messages ends up in the sent folder…. OF THE ARCHIVE, regardless of what date it was sent.
Counterintuitive and counterproductive.
I’m in the same boat as Tortured Soul, forced to switch from Outlook to Notes (we’re currently on 8.0.2, FWIW) by the company that bought us.
Sweet Zombie Jesus, I’ll accept all of Note’s other flaws, all I want to do is let me copy text from my browser to an email without it taking half an hour! Even Microsoft figured out how to make that happen.
Well, bunch of comments have been deleted this morning.. I knew I should have printed it off ..
Oh well. People need to cry and they will do it while silencing those with positive ideas…
Good luck in your healing process.. Notes is a kick *** application but it seems some rather delete comments instead of learning..
Skip
However, the site icon is funny. Good work on that.
)
*Sigh*, I hate notes, I hate the way they are written on paper with some being black, some white, some with a little tail and others without. And what is it with those bars, tic-tac-toe symbols and that lowercase b? Let’s not even talk about those two odd symbols at the beginning of every partition, one looking like a fancy-schmancy ampersand…
I also hate lotus. Pffff… What does that flower think it is being so white amongst the muck, being all perfect like that?
Oh, wait, sorry, meant to post to ‘IHateLotusFlowersAndMusicNotes’… Damn Bing with its crappy search mechanism prentending to be as good as something else when it really isn’t and with its rabid legion of fans who won’t look at something else, really understand it and instead post flame posts (or setup fanboy sites) about how better their software is better based on version 1.0 (or even beta) of the other sofware. Get the drift or am I too subtle for the audience here?
So I declined a meeting invitation with comments. It does not enter it into the calendar as being declined. No entry at all. Wanted to view the message I sent and it says open the Grouped Entries view. Where the hell is that? Not even mentioned in the help menu (the most unhelpful help menu I have ever used), on none of the menuse in any folders, inbox, outbox, calendar.
Again Lotus Notes triumphs over common sense and logic!
I came here while I was googleing “Lotus Notes 8.5 on Ubuntu is ******* slow”.
@John said on November 6th,
I seriously hope you are NOT the admin of that company……………
John said on November 6th, 2009 at 9:18 am
A user calls the help desk and says “I forgot my password, can you reset it” and the help desk person says blah, blah, blah and it takes them hours and many return calls…
——–We reset passwords on the fly and 8.5 has a Self Password reset..——–
Somebody sends out an email that they should not have, calls the help desk to ask where the retrieve mail button is located…
—-That feature is in 8.5.. But really.. Send means Send! User should try Draft first.. then revisit..——-
Users add all kinds of great stuff to meeting invitations to prepare their participants, and find that when they archive nothing changes…
———??? I am not sure I follow you on that one…——-
User has a hard-disk crash and when he logs in to another pc, he had to use an old password…
—–? Try Client Sync. or password retrieval process.. —–
User gets married, changes name, and then weird things start happening, like buttons don’t show up, access is denied…
— Again,, I seriously hope you are not the admin admitting to such things… I can point you to some very good people to help…——
Just another day in paradise…
@ everyone who hate LN.. Lotus Notes and Domino can be upgraded from any version to the latest one without Rip and Replace and .. OH ! Users do NOT lose ANYTHING in the process! What a concept!
It is called Lotusphere 2010!!!!!
@ OUtlooker.
Why bring back problems from old versions? 5.1.4 is prettyyyyy old!
Do we judge Windows and Outlook by what they looked at version 3.1 or 95? OH! Hold On! There was NO Outlook at version 3.1;;:(I know 95 got the “recycling bin” (ie:the garbage can Mac had for years!) but did it have Outlook?)
@ Chad
The attachment will get dropped where YOU decide it gets dropped
@ Natalie..
Yup, just like Matt said.. http://www.notes.net.
@ Bud
What version are you using? I always seen Outlook do that. Maybe ask your admin to correct (or upgrade..)
@Tortured
Yes, I admit, this is a little harder. You might need (you or your admin) a designer client to go into the database itself and find out it got corrupted and dbquerydocumentdeleteext subroutine does not exist anymore.. Replacing the template should fix that problem. If the SR is in, delete it and replace the template.. By the way, if you are a developper, try Lotus Notes designer and show off by making some xPages presentations… I got a new guy here who came up with a whole program in less than 4 weeks… and he had never worked with Lotus Notes or xPage before….
@ Pete
We do NOT need a “I Hate Outlook” webpage. Most of us are nice enough to keep quiet when we cannot come up with something nice to say about something…… Come see and party with us Jan 17 to 21st and see how 6500 plus (This year might even be higher) Lotus fans (and even the Microsoft spies) are treated!
It takes about 2 minutes to render an html email… why? Because Lotus Notes sucks. When I accidentally delete a meeting invitation from my inbox I go to the trash to recover and what do you know… it’s not there… why? Lotus Notes sucks. But I guess it’s just a training issue, isn’t PETEM? Because, even though I don’t need training in the thousands of other apps that I use everyday, Notes is somehow different… God I hate this piece of ****.
this can’t be right! notes is the best written software ever.
Lotus notes is the most unintuitive and unresponsive email client I have used. I was surprised to read on this site poeople defending it.
I’m shocked. It’s ****. It’s that simple.
I dont care if I using MS Outlook, a web interface or an open source client on linux. They work and I dont have a second thought about it. I’ve never hate a software program so much.
Help! I upgraded to LN 8 and now sametime is slowin my other programs down ’cause there are these plugins atached to word and outlook. I don’t know how to get rid of this disease!
help me!
Because Lotus Notes is so rubbish at everything including spellchecking then it doesn’t deserve a positive comment.
I typed in yeat by mistake as the t key is next to the r key so it is easy to do. There was no suggestion for year in the spellchecker.
It also can’t cope with Nokia PC Suite as it has just duplicated all the entries in the calendar and on my phone so my phone has no memeory left and the calendar in Lotus Notes is full of double entries.
What a load of rubbish – never happened ever in Outlook.
you didn’t dare to think it was your Nokia PC Suite that was guilty…?
Another thing to vent… A few days ago I was writing a critical and very important email, then it refused to send for some reason (although being connected) so I decided to save to drafts, restart and send again.
So I clicked save to drafts, went into drafts to check it’s saved (have to do this in notes for being a stupid software), found it in the drafts, saved and perfectly sitting there… I restarted and when I opened LN, the mail just wasn’t there!!! DRAFTS FOLDER WAS EMPTY!
This is the perfect way to make a corporate torture its employees more and more, it’s not about salaries or vacations or downsizing now, if you wanna torture them to death, force them to use Lotus Notes.
Yeah… and to all the idiots in here who think Lotus notes is heaven and we’re just a bunch of whiners… tell me something… Why sometimes do I have to restart NL to get an email even if it says it’s perfecetly connected?
And why it gets random mails and when I restart it, I receives an email older than the ones already arrived???
Yeah, and when I restart sometimes it asks me “some pending mails in outbox, send now??” and there’s no “view” button or I cant seem to find an outbox to see this pending message!! Again, the outbox might be there hidden somewhere in the stupid UI, but it’s an OUTBOX for god’s sake! it should be right next to INBOX!!
I HATE LOTUS NOTES!!
To the smart @$$ Greg down there, Since we are all whiners, and you are the hot shot know-it-all… tell me one thing
Why on the same internet connection and the same laptop Outlook is 10 times faster than Lotus? Why Mr. Lotus Genius you think it takes few minutes to open a new msg when it is, well, NEW!
heh, I don’t know… o_O mine (“New memo” mask) opens in one second…
Live with both: Support both: Migrate between both: figure TCO for both…. You’ll see which really is the better solution. – Oh – you’ll need to compare the 10% of Notes functionality that makes up the functionality of Outlook/sExchange.
… consider also: If you don’t have control over your IT environment – do those in charge really have it in order? Badly deployed messaging environments really suck (more that usual).
@Outlooker. Lotus Note 5 is no longer sold and support for it as a product ended 4 years ago. It is like saying windows sucks because of something lacking in windows 95.
The latest version is 8.5.1 and does have multiple undo options.
Less Lotus and more just IBM bull:
We have just started to use quickr in our office and for our mobile area managers, the new pcs we bought come with Windows 7, and with no downgrade path to xp we decided to stick with 7. All the machines have 4gb of ram so ideally we wanted to use 64 bit windows 7.
It is possible to get quickr running on any vista machine, but try and install it on 7 and you’ll realise that IBM has actually made it impossible to install it. Not just ‘we won’t advise it and won’t support it’ but a full on ‘you will not do it’.
Win 7 has been coming for ******* years, how can a company like IBM not even have a beta quickr connector out there for it.
I intend to become the CIO one day, and when that day comes, I intend to replace Notes. It will be my legacy, and I will be revered for it by all my colleagues who have to struggle through every day with the worst UI ever slapped on a mail/calender app. Now what’s the easy way to resize a column in a table?
wow….whiners galore.
try this:
compare the versions of LN to MSO that was available in 1999.
compare the versions of LN to MSO that was available in 2002
comapre the most recent versions of LN and MSO available
then whine about differences between the two that would be more legit.
But comparing LN ver5 to MSO 2007 come on….might as well compare a 2007 chevy to a 1908 model T, of course the chevy preference will come out on top.
quit whining here if your comparing new MSO to older LN. You should be complaining to your organization to upgrade instead
What the f**k is it with changing colour of text? I am writing an email and want to change some bits here and there with different colours. I highlight one small paragraph red. Now every time I click somewhere else and type, that becomes red too. I highlight ALL and change to black, but no matter where I type… again… it types red. I can’t get rid of it. THIS IS NOT HOW NORMAL TEXT EDITORS WORK YOU IDIOTS!!!
Lotus notes is torture, cruel, unusual, and makes me want to strangle the developers
I was forced to upgrade to R8.5.1 as long as R8.5 Designer was nightmare to use and finally stopped loading at all. HATE IT!
After upgrading I found that speller does not work with my local language anymore. HATE IT!
Recently I was taking part in MS developers event. Now I see that Domino dev. tools lag at least 10 years from MS.
chas said on November 12th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Lotus Notes spellchecker is useless. It cannot recognise half the corrections that MS Outlook does. It prioritises the corrections according to recently saved and not most common.
Also when I attach a file sometimes it attcahes it in gthe middle of a word causing more confuison for the spellchecker.
Spell check works fine for me. The attachment will be where your cursor is; it’s called inline attachments. As opposed to Outlook where it just lumps them all together. Personally, I like to be able to put them where I want in the body of the message so with multiple attachments, I don’t have to refer to them in the attachment line, like OL.
rootus said on November 13th, 2009 at 2:47 am
You’r right. it should be below.
For your beloved Lotus it does not matter.
The bullshit I encounter with its gui would be cause for hilarity when the software was for free.
Complain all you want but if you can’t/don’t give examples, it’s just empty, baseless whining.
Outlooker said on November 12th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
In the help file for Lotus Notes 5.1.4,………..
No need for me to read any further. Do you realize you’re using a version that’s over 10 YEARS OLD !!?!?!?! I’m going to get an Outlook 98 client, find a blog and rip it to shreads. Sound fair?
Hey PETEM – I did google ‘I hate Microsoft Outlook’ before posting, guess what, each site contained only a few straggling complainers, usually tech-geeks like yourself complaining about wasted code and other **** 99.9% of users dont notice or care about. These sites just cant compare to the united mass of VIOLATED Notes users you can find on this website (Vive le Revolucion!). Look at the quality of the links, not the quantity…
Ever heard of FTFM? LN is a very powerful piece of software if you understand how it works and how to use it properly. So many people use it are not trained on how, so just complain. I use both LN and Outlook, and can see the benefits or drawbacks of both, however LN is far more than just email, where as Outlook is just email.
I took a new job to and found out that my new company uses lotus notes 6.5. I was happy to finally get work. But now i want to ******* DIE.
MATTM said on November 12th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Or you could just enable “Make URLs into Hotspots” in the preferences. All http://….. are automatically converted. Wow, how difficult!!
This has been around for many versions; nothing new.
This is another example of how Notes is not user friendly. In Outlook (I am using 2003) if you paste in or type a URL in a message it automatically becomes a link that turns blue and is underlined AND the user can click on if they want to test it. In Notes (using 8.0.2) you either have to create a hotspot which at least turns the text blue but clicking within the text and/or modifying it sometimes kills the hotspot and the user is not allowed to test it before sending the email out…or…you need to enable this option under the Basic Notes Client Config option and Notes does not turn the text blue or allow you to test the link so users might not be aware they have this option enabled or that it is working. Also if you go to Create — Hotspot — Link Hotspot it does not have a value in the URL field like you might expect once again making the user think it did not work.
Oh, and if you go through the Create Hotspot process and later decide to modify the URL you’ll find the Link Hotspot menu option is grayed out. Instead you have to right click on the hotspot and choose HotSpot Properties (not sure why spot is capitalized here). A user could spend some time trying find the edit Hotspot option in the menus before finding this. Or they’ll think they have delete it and create a new hotspot. I didn’t see anything when doing a search of the help file for editing hotspots. I saw stuff about creating, formatting and removing but will admit I didn’t have time to fully read through all of the sections.
@PETEM SAID:
Please use them because I have no idea what any of this means. Is “unther” one of your small words?
You’r right. it should be below.
For your beloved Lotus it does not matter.
The bullshit I encounter with its gui would be cause for hilarity when the software was for free.
It is that I get payed to use it. Otherwise No f…g way!
In the help file for Lotus Notes 5.1.4, the topic “Undoing Mistakes” advises, “You can undo your last editing action if you made a mistake.” Therefore, shouldn’t the heading be, “Undoing Mistake”? You’re allowed one mistake, that’s all. (And buying Lotus Notes was it!) Heck, even this simple text box allows you to undo (Ctrl+Z) and redo (Ctrl+Y) ad infinitum, whereas LN just leaves you ad nauseous. Outlook is positively nirvana compared to this!
I see, so if you attack Notes, your posts stay on here but if you counter-punch or (god forbid) try to help, the posts get deleted. Gotcha. Then just keep whining like petulant little school girls.
Lotus Notes spellchecker is useless. It cannot recognise half the corrections that MS Outlook does. It prioritises the corrections according to recently saved and not most common.
Also when I attach a file sometimes it attcahes it in gthe middle of a word causing more confuison for the spellchecker.
For all the MS fanboys out there, maybe someone can tell me what this descriptive Outlook message means, “The messaging interface has returned an unknown error if the problem persists restart outlook.” WTF kind of message is that !?!?! No **** there’s problem, now I can’t do anything. ARRGGGGGGGHHHHH.
Or you could just enable “Make URLs into Hotspots” in the preferences. All http://….. are automatically converted. Wow, how difficult!!
This has been around for many versions; nothing new.
Natalie said on October 28th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Here are the crazy steps you need to follow to create a hyperlink in LotusNotes:
1) Enter the text you want to appear as the hyperlink in the mail message (eg: Google)
2) Select the text and from the menu bar click on Create –> Hotspot –> Link hotspot
3) Enter the desired URL in the Value text box. (eg: http://www.google.com) and close it
4) It will add the hotspot and select ‘Show border around hotspot’ to display a background highlighting around the link. Otherwise apply underline (press Ctl + U)
5) Send the mail to the recipients
** The link will not be active until you send the mail. If you click on the hotspot before sending it, it may not work.
Blotus Notes is an unrelational hodge-podge of unorganized BS. The only use for this nonscalable software is for a discussion database for a small group of idiots.
Written by geeks, for geeks.
On November 5th, “Said On” commented that “I hate Outlook” score more hits than “I hate Lotus Notes” in a Google search. (64,000 vs. 48,000). I submit that there are problably ten times as many Outlook users as Lotus Notes users, so you have to divide the “Outlook” number by ten to get parity. Furthermore, I submit that most Lotus Notes users have some experience with Outlook while few Outlook users have had the misfortune of dealing with Lotus Notes. I suspect that the numbers of people who have used both extensively and say they prefer Lotus Notes are very rare indeed.
Is it too much to ask to print an email without cutting off the right freakin’ margin?????
I love that calendar entries won’t update unless you open the entry or email … so if you aren’t reading all of your emails, you won’t know that the calendar has changed because it WON’T update.
My company was acquired by another and they switched us to LN. Buddha help us, this is the worst piece of garbage I’ve ever used. Got in this morning and trying to delete anything says: Cannot find external name: dbquerydocumentdeleteext
LN throws constant cryptic errors all the time, but this latest one is a laugh riot. If my programs ( I am a developer ) exposed that kind of **** to users, I’d be fired.
What a piece of junk….
I always hated it, since I started using it and I think I’ll keep hating it till it dies or I do! Now a stupid new update messed up my context menu with a STUPID “Send to Lotus Notes” entry upon right-clicking any file and it does nothing but killing Nautilus, they should call it “**** Notes” instead, the only reason I use this ****** software is that I’m obliged to do so, NOTHING ELSE!
I work for Lotus Support, but opinions are my own.
@Rich, your description of Designer seems dated. Domino Designer 8.5.1 actually has intellisense for Lotusscript as well as other new features (like save code even if it doesn’t compile). Free to download as well. You also link to a 3 year old article. Notes/Domino has changed a lot since then.
@George, your correct about the cut-paste issue and it is logged and being addressed.
Personally I think if all you want to do is complain and nothing else then this is a great site to do it. It is an interesting read, some valid comments, some based on using older versions of the product.
If you are actually looking for solutions and don’t have a support contract I recommend the LDD forums.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/community/
Or if you want to make (constructive) suggestions on the product then ideaJam.
http://ideajam.net/
GP said on October 29th, 2009 at 7:14 am
If Lotus Notes is so good – where is the ‘I hate Microsoft Outlook’ webpage? What a piece of **** LN really is…
You can’t find anything if you don’t look for it. Just google it, you’ll get plenty of hits.
I cant believe that in the time its taken to copy and paste (i know… but I had to!!!) some text into a email and then send it… I have managed to make a cup of tea, find this website and write this post… Actually, the email is still sending as I type…
Why would someone create, produce, buy or use (having it work doesnt count as ‘use’, im specifically talking about someone going out of their way to use LN) this software???
It is like someone below wrote: “pure evil”
Jess said on November 5th, 2009 at 11:31 am
My favorite Lotus-ism so far is how “Send and Receive Mail” – clearly an ACTION last time I checked out its status as a ******* VERB, is nestled under the “Tools” menu. Unfortunately indicative of the organizational system of this shitware. WOW.
Now we’re going so far as to dig into conjugation……. too funny. Anyway, if you don’t like it where it is, move it ! That’s the good thing about Notes, you can do that easily. WOW.
Matt Gordon said on November 5th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
So, LN starts showing me only unread emails.
It’s a button, View All/ view unread. Most people find it fairly handy but I guess because you don’t, the product sucks. Oh well.
George said on November 5th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Petem (or should I call you Yoda?), I said that the application doesn’t copy and paste in a way that people expect. How does that invalidate my assertation that I am fairly computer savy? I didn’t say I found it confusing/couldn’t understand it, I used it as an example of a simple thing executed badly.Confused you are
Not confused at all and you can call me whatever you’d like. As far as cut and paste goes is it the standard ctrl+C ctrl+P or the edit meun that’s throwing your users off? What are the expecting?
Joshua said on November 6th, 2009 at 10:40 am
I know I’m not supposed to use DAMO (Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook). It’s no longer under development, only bug fixes from here on out, etc. But my users hate the Lotus Notes 8.5 Client. So I tried Outlook express with IMAP to Domino, what a mess. Slower than iNotes or the non-replicated 8.5 client. I tried Thunderbird with IMAP but had similar issues. Also, some emails don’t have message bodies. They do in iNotes and the 8.5 client, but not when downloaded with a STANDARDS based IMAP client.
Did you run the conversion utility on the mail files so users can access them via IMAP?
@PETEM
“GIMME-OUTLOOK-BACK said on November 3rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
I just “upgraded” from LN 7 to LN 8.5.
Even though 8.5.1 came out a month ago?”
Just for pure curiosity (I can see I am on 8and1/2) – does it change anything?
Petem – groups… YOU WISH! I suppose it may depend on a version or type of the client you have but… Yes, I can create a group.
But this **** will not recognise it. But it MAY be too difficult to understand why if you cannot experiment…
Copy and paste does not work in Lotus Notes in many cases, particulalry when you copy some text from the website. Paste special – forget it. FAR TOO DIFFICULT for LN. Cheat it – use Notebook or Word or Excel, paste it there first then copy again and paste into you crappy LN – they somehow deal with this mission impossible. Interesting.
Now, another curiosity:
I forwarded an e-mail from archives.
The e-mail reached the addressee – HURRAY, Euphoric about this success. But this e-mail is not in SENT. Well, OK, it was not SENT. It was FORWARDED, wasn’t it? Moreover from ARCHIVES, not in a normal way, e.g. creating a new one. Perhaps I should type it all again.
Not enough?
I have more than one reminder. I mark one to snooze it. Set the time, check if it is ticked; fine, one ticked, the rest unticked. Click SNOOZE.
Gone.
All of them.
I stopped checking, no point. It is at random, anyway ;P
Use the notebook and a pencil/pen/inkpen/marker.
Or a clay tablets and stylus. Much more f*****g advanced, efficient and reliable.
Try the folowing with the LN6.5.*: minimize the window. scroll down (you may have lot of folders). Then maximize the window…and yes, the scroll bar disappeared. You cannot scroll back up to your inbox. Has it changed at the 8.*?? cal. automate function does not work. meeting invitations does not disappear after accept…LN6.5.5 from 2005 vs. outlook 2003? which one looking better?
Outlook from earlier! How can a company choose such a bad app. just because of the DBs?
LN is like stepping back to 1997. I could accomplish more with a simple gmail account and some clever keywords.
Notes developers: At the risk of sounding harsh, do us a favor and commit suicide.
I know I’m not supposed to use DAMO (Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook). It’s no longer under development, only bug fixes from here on out, etc. But my users hate the Lotus Notes 8.5 Client. So I tried Outlook express with IMAP to Domino, what a mess. Slower than iNotes or the non-replicated 8.5 client. I tried Thunderbird with IMAP but had similar issues. Also, some emails don’t have message bodies. They do in iNotes and the 8.5 client, but not when downloaded with a STANDARDS based IMAP client. So I tried DAMO, yes I know I shouldn’t use DAMO. All recent emails have message bodies, but not older ones. WTF! I hate Domino and may have to stop selling it. It’s worse than Exchange (gasp!).
I’m running out of antacids so I’m going to have to move all of my clients to either Hosted Zimbra or Hosted Exchange accounts.
I did find one way to run Domino – as a POP3 server.
A user calls the help desk and says “I forgot my password, can you reset it” and the help desk person says blah, blah, blah and it takes them hours and many return calls…
Somebody sends out an email that they should not have, calls the help desk to ask where the retrieve mail button is located…
Users add all kinds of great stuff to meeting invitations to prepare their participants, and find that when they archive nothing changes…
User has a hard-disk crash and when he logs in to another pc, he had to use an old password…
User gets married, changes name, and then weird things start happening, like buttons don’t show up, access is denied…
Just another day in paradise…
nsf = fear, pain, hate, confusion, relationship killer, move in to studio flat alone, loose the kids, turn to drink, turn to class A’s….I’ll let you know how it ends!!!
Hey James Collie! Still waiting for you to pop back in and tell us what non-relational “thinking” is good for. You’re strangely silent on this matter. Perhaps some boffin from IBM could pop in and explain that to us. Looking forward to hearing from you.
So, LN starts showing me only unread emails. I guessed it must be some kind of filter setting so I went in search of the culprit. Having used software for 20 years I assumed that I would click on “View” – “Show” – and then select an option like “Show All”… Not so… Notes is so finely in-tune with nothing that you have to select “Actions” – “View All”. What a finely tuned piece of **** this software is. I can’t wait til they’ve migrated us to Outlook (which won’t be long now!)
My favorite Lotus-ism so far is how “Send and Receive Mail” – clearly an ACTION last time I checked out its status as a ******* VERB, is nestled under the “Tools” menu. Unfortunately indicative of the organizational system of this shitware. WOW.
Petem (or should I call you Yoda?), I said that the application doesn’t copy and paste in a way that people expect. How does that invalidate my assertation that I am fairly computer savy? I didn’t say I found it confusing/couldn’t understand it, I used it as an example of a simple thing executed badly.
Confused you are
As a Notes/Domino developer of 12 years I have been almost morally offended by IBM’s negligence towards developer productivity and total disregard of intuitive design with their “Domino Designer” (DD) product. In working with Java and Ruby recently, I’m almost *driven* away from developing in DD (I refuse to call it Lotus since my personal belief is that Lotus/IRIS would have never allowed the platform to remain so lame).
Shame on IBM for letting the LotusScript code window in DD so severely lag behind a good text editor (like TextMate on the Mac or even TextPad on the PC). With efficiencies like “real” line numbers, move/duplicate/delete entire lines with simple keystrokes. Suffice it to say that other than lacking type ahead (a.k.a. IntelliSense), TextMate’s VB.net plugin gives me a better place to code my initial LotusScript than the Domino Designer does!! (Oh… and what ever happened to the DD for the Mac?)
The lack of a class viewer is a joke. I can write user defined classes, but not view them in a tree. Then there’s the inability to save my LotusScript if it won’t compile — this may be *the* greatest contributor to my active prayer life! I could go into the shabby script debugger, but am becoming so frustrated just living through it all in this post that I should really stop.
Until I began working in tools that *really try* to make a developer’s efforts efficient, I didn’t know what I was missing. If you are a Domino developer that would contest my assertions as to the serious neglect by IBM in turning DD into a viable IDE, I would have to insist you apply the following statement to yourself:
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to Domino: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
from FerdyChristant.com (2006)
http://www.ferdychristant.com/blog//archive/DOMM-6VSQZ9
FOR THE SAKE OF SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN…
IBM, please come to bat for your developers and bring the DD from a mid ’80s implementation to somewhere in the present decade!
rootus said on November 2nd, 2009 at 1:01 am
So I’m not the only one.
We call it Klotus notes.
Klotus has something to do with testicles in Dutch.
Far more appropriate then the flower Lotus.
Now I have a stationary unther all my mails.
Can’t get rid of it.
Asked my supplier but got no answer.
And for Mr PETETM: I have plenty small words for LN.
Please use them because I have no idea what any of this means. Is “unther” one of your small words?
GIMME-OUTLOOK-BACK said on November 3rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
I just “upgraded” from LN 7 to LN 8.5.
Even though 8.5.1 came out a month ago?
Graham Boddy said on November 4th, 2009 at 4:27 am
Why on earth when I empty my trash, delete all unwanted messages from my Sent Items and Received Items, does my Notes database not get significantly smaller.
Graham, when you delete from ANY database, it leaves, what some call white space. Meaning, just because the documents are gone, it doesn’t mean that space is relcaimed right away. You need to run compact on the mail file to get the space back. BTW – this also true with Outlook/Exchange so please don’t think it’s a “Notes” thing.
tom said on November 3rd, 2009 at 4:34 am
Why when i remove user form lotus directory completely i must go to accsess group and remove him from there manualy? WTF!?
If you’re doing it correctly, you don’t. Are you just doing in the directory and deleting the person?
I just upgraded to Notes 8.5.1 and ever since I did, when I type an e-mail I get dots and the character “|” appearing. It is quite annoying since the cursor and these line appear. The cursor doesn’t blink so it makes it difficult to determine where you are in the message. I contacted our Notes Admin and received the typical “I never heard of that”. This is the ONLY application that this is happening in. Has anyone experienced this and if so, did you resolve the problem ?
Also…why no ‘open with’ for attachments? WHY?
Lotus Notes throws salt in the eyes of children.
@GP
Everyone one hates MS. Only frustrates hates Notes.
Google finds 48 000 for I hate “Lotus Notes” AND… 64 000 for I hate “Microsoft outlook”…
So what is hated more ?
Most troubles with Notes come from not reading docs, wanting all things to be intuitive, wanting things to be copy or similar to MS Outlook or so… Notes are more mature than Outlook and because of it MUST be different.
Does anybody know how not to include signatures in replies? I guess the option must be there (somewhere) and I just cannot find it.
I’m sure not everybody does what I currently do – manually delete the signature in replies. It’s especially annoying as you highlight the last line of the signature when LN decides to highlight all of the original message below it. That really sucks.
Why does Notes hang for a long (5 minutes) time when I try to paste text copied from the Internet? I’m on Notes 8.0, but I remember the same problem in the previous version I was using also.
Thanks.
Scrotus bl00dy notes – is piece of f**(*** sh***!!
Why on earth when I empty my trash, delete all unwanted messages from my Sent Items and Received Items, does my Notes database not get significantly smaller. The View “All documents” seems to still contain all of my emails, so I have to archive and then delete from this view. Bit hopeless …..
once again, compact it… (defragmentation principle)
John said on October 20th, 2009 at 8:49 am
My company have successfully solved the the lotus repeatedly crashing problem. I.T. have written a program which everyone now keeps on their desktop, “Killnotes.exe”. Instantly removes lotus notes from your sight, and the processes list.
Best piece of software i have on my workstation.
yep we have killnotes too.
couldnt manage LN without it
I just “upgraded” from LN 7 to LN 8.5. I’m really enjoying the new feature where LN crashes when I run the spelling checker on large, unsent messages. Yesterday, I smashed my keyboard (literally into pieces) because of it.
Right now I’m in therapy – yoga position, deep breaths and mantra-chanting “At least it’s not Novell GroupWise”.
I’ll even take cc:Mail (remember that?) over this **** – any day.
Why when i remove user form lotus directory completely i must go to accsess group and remove him from there manualy? WTF!?
the AdminP database will take care of that, no worries…
So I’m not the only one.
We call it Klotus notes.
Klotus has something to do with testicles in Dutch.
Far more appropriate then the flower Lotus.
Now I have a stationary unther all my mails.
Can’t get rid of it.
Asked my supplier but got no answer.
And for Mr PETETM: I have plenty small words for LN.
IBM SHAME ON YOU to release such a unfriendly, unreliable software.
Lotus Notes a top software of the past.
A dinosaur of today.
Won’t surprise if DEAD TOMORROW.
IBM who are you paying to program the software: monkeys, the blind & deaf or slackers?
Just look at this picture… thats all I have to say.
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/366603/Lotus.png
allison said on October 19th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
i was in my trash and i went to restore an email and accidentally hit restore all and then ALL my f***ing trash went into my inbox… what a **** button anyway and wouldn’t it pop up asking if i was sure like it does when i delete stupid piece of **** email program go an jammit
Sooooo the button did what it said it was going to do and you’re b*tching about it !!?!?!?!?! Ohhhhh, hold on, now I see …….. I didn’t ask you if you were a complete dope, it just assumed you could read.
Got it.
LN 8.5 = H1N1
Cannot believe all the comments here. Have been using Lotus Notes for over ten years and find it easy to use, intuitive and problem free. Maybe you should all sell your computers and get a pencil and write a letter. . . WTF?? Do not try to deflect your ignorance onto a piece of software!
George said on October 21st, 2009 at 6:11 am
I feel sorry for people like Sky Trento who are too dumb (arrogant, obnoxious…) .. I have many years of IT experience as a developer so I am fairly computer savy.
…they can’t even get Copy and Paste to work like people expect!
Yep, real savy you are. Copy and Paste? You’re kidding me, right?
Dan said on October 23rd, 2009 at 11:37 am
how do i set up a contact list, or a “group” as its referred to in LotusBlows?
1) Open you personal address book.
2) Click New -> Group.
I hope that isn’t too difficult to understand.
LN Sufferer:
There is an option to customize the default fonts under File – Preferences – Basic Notes Client Config – Display – Default Fonts button. Unfortunately the options given are only for the font itself, not color, size or other options. You can however customize the Permanent Pen option by opening a new message, clicking in the body section of the email, set the text properties using the Text menu and then selecting Text – Permanent Pen – Set Permanent Pen Style. Whenever you want to use that text style click on the Permanent Pen icon. Unfortunately there is no way to activate the pen by default. That would be too easy.
Creating a stationery and using that for all messages is another option although that involves more mouse clicks for each message then clicking the Permanent Pen icon.”
For web links without listing the entire string:
1. Copy the link and paste it into the email.
2. Highlight what you pasted and from the menu select Create > Hotspot > Link Hotspot
3. On the first tab you will see a Value box next to Content. Paste the link into the Value box (the Type should be URL).
4. Click on the little checkmark to the right of the box.
5. X out of the programming box and the link will now appear blue.
Note: the link will not work if you try to click on it but once you send it the recipients will be able to use it.
6. Modify the text of the link in the message. The value you put into the properties box will not change so the recipient “should” be able to click on it ok.
If Lotus Notes is so good – where is the ‘I hate Microsoft Outlook’ webpage? What a piece of **** LN really is…
I feel like crying and screaming. I was driven to the edge of an emotional breakdown this morning. Unreliable, not transparent, slow, messy and old-fashioned, primitive, user hostile piece of ****.
multiplying opened tabs with no reason, removing all reminders by one press of ENTER (default settings – “DONE”), marking e-mails as read before you notice that you got one, but showing that you got one five minutes before it is actually in you mailbox, spellcheckerlimited to the 3-years old todd’s vocabulary. The only good thing about it I find is chat, which can be easily replaced by MS messenger with the benefit of all.
On the list of stress agents I would place it above divorce, home movement, Crohn’s disease and haemorrhoids. Of which two first ones CAN be avoided.
No, no, no… LN wouldn’t be the Detroit Lions.
If LN was an NFL team, it would be the Arkansas Razorbacks.
Yes, I know the Hogs aren’t an NFL team (Soooie, pig! Go Hogs!) … that’s the point – LN tries to be pass off as being something it’s not.
Here are the crazy steps you need to follow to create a hyperlink in LotusNotes:
1) Enter the text you want to appear as the hyperlink in the mail message (eg: Google)
2) Select the text and from the menu bar click on Create –> Hotspot –> Link hotspot
3) Enter the desired URL in the Value text box. (eg: http://www.google.com) and close it
4) It will add the hotspot and select ‘Show border around hotspot’ to display a background highlighting around the link. Otherwise apply underline (press Ctl + U)
5) Send the mail to the recipients
** The link will not be active until you send the mail. If you click on the hotspot before sending it, it may not work.
PeteM – you are pathetic and I bet you are an mac faboi too lol. These and so many other users find LN to be cumbesome, unfriendly and bizzarely non-conformist to accepted standards of usability for software. Why do you have such a problem with that? Why do you stoop to insults? I stoop to your level because it seems you are incapable of behaving like a decent human being. GFY.
I see only stupid users posting on this site. You guys don’t know the first thing about common sens
Dan, if you can’t create a group in your personal address book …………. then I don’t know what to tell you. I certainly hope you don’t drive though.
Lotus Notes 8.5 is much better then anything else. Although it is not fast, but it offers al functionality you need!
Big multinationals use Lotus Notes!
how do i set up a contact list, or a “group” as its referred to in LotusBlows? i would expect it to be somewhere under the “Contacts” tab but ding ding ding! nope! once again, the terrible developers failed to use logic/rationale/intuition when designing this Shitburger of an User Interface, so in the meantime i’m left to manually type all of the contacts on every email. which is not fun. oh, and i tried using the “Help” but it said to go to the Groups View. Well guess what, I don’t have one of those, so what now, dipshits? i’ll send the developers my medical bill from the carpal tunnel i acquire from using their sorry excuse for a mail client
Good lord, what a piece of ****. Using LN is like stepping back in time, ala “Mad Men”. I’m surprised you don’t have to punch cards to create an email. Speaking of which, is there a way to permanently change the default font on email? Is there a way to simply insert a web link into the email without having to list the entire URL string? I can’t believe how cumbersome & user-hateful it is.
I would be better off using this web page to communicate to my collegues than use Lotus Notes, at least I know they would get!
If Lotus Notes was an NFL team it would be the Detroit Lions
we would be better using actually letter mail
Use the Outlook Connector Plugin. Please do! It’ll be the greatest thing that could happen in your worklife!
Here it is http://www.microsoft.com/DownLoads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8ebbba59-5f17-4e52-8980-c4f0dfa92d65&displaylang=en
Beg borrow or steal admin permissions once and install it. Do it! Its completely worth it!
Here’s some help on getting admin, but usually social engineering works better http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/
RE: 2) how do i reply to a meeting? I don’t want to change the status of the meeting – just reply to the meeting owner.
Forget replying to a meeting. How about the Remove vs. Delete?!?!?!?
Do you remove an email w/a meeting invite? or Do you delete an email w/a meeting invite?
Lotus sucks so much, its a resource hog. Since when did email clients started to become as heavy as a game or photoshop. Sometimes I wanna check something in my mail when someone is calling, and than Lotus decides freeze. What the ef???
I hate this program with a passion, I will never like it again. Retards who engineered this software.
Hi All lotus expect,
i’m using lotus 8, every time when i launch lotus notes it will hang. I notice especially if i quickly close the home tab after enter the password it will not hang, is there a way to disable the home tab ?
I feel sorry for people like Sky Trento who are too dumb (arrogant, obnoxious…) to understand why people don’t like Lotus Notes. I have many years of IT experience as a developer so I am fairly computer savy.
From a user’s POV Lotus is a terrible piece of software (POS). It is well understood that Lotus is good to administer but guess what, users don’t care about that, we care about the day to day pain that is working with LN.
Badly designed, clunky, too many options, slow…they can’t even get Copy and Paste to work like people expect!
As for your list, I have never had any of those things happen to other email clients, maybe you just don’t know enough about them.
So, in short, easy to admin but terrible to use does not make a good app. Most would argue that this misses 50% of of what a good app needs. Give me webmail and the filesystem any day.
I’ve been automating Outlook for years now and, complain about M$ all you want but, the documentation for the Outlook Object Model is so complete that it’s ridiculously easy to write programs to do just about anything.
I’ve been searching for weeks now for comparable information on Notes. All I can find is the same code to create and send an email over and over again. I even sent an email to the IBM Notes/Domino support team and attached the OL CHM and PDF files as examples of what kind of help I want but I haven’t heard back.
POS!
no tell me, is the Word 97 doc compatible with 2007? no? maybe the script in the ln doesn’t really change in purpose to access all previous db created under older versions…?
who knows ^^
ice said on September 9th, 2009 at 1:16 am
LN must be forward looking – they allow achives in the size of GBytes. Good thing I can buy 8GB thumbdrives now.
My archive is 1 GB big. I’ve deleted almost all the big files in it and it is still 1GB big. What gives?
Here’s another nitwit that knows nothing but feels it’s the software’s fault. Psssst, it’s called compact and you’ll need to do that in most mail dbs, not just Notes. If you need me to explain this to you, please let me know and I’ll use small words.
After reading some of these posts, I’ve never heard such whinny, petulant little children in my life. Honestly, is it that hard to click a button, put a check mark next to a message or (god forbid) actually read a help file? Pathetic.
JoeBillyBob said
Do you really need so many choices? or how about just reply to all? Do we need: (reply to all with history only / reply to all w/ history and attachments/reply to all/reply to all w/ internet-style history)
I’m thinking you’re just not smart enough to even own a computer. However, to answer your question, “reply to all” ….. ever heard of an email storm? No? Didn’t think so.
My company have successfully solved the the lotus repeatedly crashing problem. I.T. have written a program which everyone now keeps on their desktop, “Killnotes.exe”. Instantly removes lotus notes from your sight, and the processes list.
Best piece of software i have on my workstation.
where is the TO shortcut, (CTRL shows shortcuts and what a bunch of useless ones they are.)
do i really need a shortcut for “delivery options/Flag/Attach file” (while i’m on “attach file”, why do i have to click the main body of the email before it will allow me to attach something? where did i think i want to put the attachment? canada?
why do users call me asking where their attachments went? (right down the bottom of a 15page email. is normally the answer.
anyway , why is there a shortcut for “display” or “more”?
wtf useless.
i try and send and email without the mouse ohhh fun …well u can’t if u need to use the “To” button,
how do u save an email with an attachment in it onto your desktop, u cant ,
how do u save an email with no attachment, print to pdf?
Automatic archiving = more places to loose stuff more places to search , makes employees lazy with email organisation, well , what’s the point ur probably not going to find that email anyway.
Calendar works really well with all the colour options , but i’m past my pre-teenager years to be that excited about the crayon colours.
reply to all sometimes does not appear.
everything in the folders sometimes does not appear.
“make available offline” is probably going to be a very important option.
bottom line Lotus notes 8.5 is ten years behind windows 95
and i now have to support it,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeLGj1ywLYA
Lotus notes – Lousy pathetic software
It annoys & bugs you right from the second you launch the application:
1. First with the splash screen that remains on top of all your open applications
2. Menu items – which are for mentally retarded i guess
3. Can not attach an email ! wtf is that!? you can only foward the email
4. doesnt remember the email addresses anf people, need to lookup everytime you are sending the mails
5. **** load of steps the user has to go through to for doing trivial tasks/configurations
Clearly the bosses who approve of Lotus notes as corporate email have lost it or over dont care about the employees productivity.
i was in my trash and i went to restore an email and accidentally hit restore all and then ALL my f***ing trash went into my inbox… what a **** button anyway and wouldn’t it pop up asking if i was sure like it does when i delete stupid piece of **** email program go an jammit
I don’t know what you biatches are whining about. We use lotus notes and I have saved thousands of dollars with fewer servers and streamlined development.
It’s just sooooo easy.. Even though IBM suck c.ock with marketing. I realised that whining about notes was such a stoopid thing to do. Because I was (like all you), I was brainwashed by M$ brilliant marketing and c.rappy technology. Once I saw the light and realised that Domino was the a great development platform as well as a cheaper email system.. There is no way I would go back to Exchange. Besides Exchange 2010 requires me to ebay my 32 bit server and buy a whole new freaking box! Bill “Rip-and-Replace” Gates is laughing all the way to the bank ’cause i gotta buy me new a O/S from Bill before i can even install that Exchange!
But Lotus lets me do inplace upgrades simply by inserting the disk and clicking “next”…. ahh… so eassy.. you gotta be dumb as dog$hit to not be able to work it out…
I hate Lotus Notes.
Firstly, kudos to you guys for coming up with this. Let me know if I can support in any way.
The thing is, I am a systems analyst supporting the Domino environment for a client. Coming from an Exchange background (which sucked monkeyballs too) to this was the single most harrowing death defying (considering that am still alive, having survived the miracle of administering this **** product 24/7), painful and disgusting experience of my life.
Its not that it just sucks, it sucks more than all the new born babies in the world put together would at feedtime.
Cheers,
M
I have only used in one of my contract jobs for six months. I have always been Exchange user and when I used Lotus Notes 7, it was like I have gone back 10 years. It has the most disgusting un-user friendly interface for all. I look forward to going to back to Exchange in my next assignment.
I thought I’d spell check an important email in the usual way, so I ran the check… “No misspellings found.” Wow I thought – nice one! Got it all completely right first time! However, my self doubt was kicking in, so I ran another spell check just to be sure. “No misspellings found.” This seemed too good to be true. The next time I deliberately typed a load of random letters and numbers into the email and ran another check and guess what… “No misspellings found.”
I now spell check EVERY email in MS word. I want to punch Lotus Notes in the balls.
JoeBillyBob, to reply to a meeting owner open the calendar item, go to Create then Reply. At least in Notes 8.0.2.
I hate Outlook. Wish I could have my Lotus Notes 8.5 lite back again…but alas my new company is MS Gold certified….yay.
Whiners are typical PEBKAC users. Most everything you’re whining about can be changed, modified or tweaked to do exactly what you want to do. I used to do tons of Lotus Notes end user training. Whiners would come into my class and say “Lotus Sucks”. When I asked them why, they would say “because it doesn’t do this, or that or the other thing”. As soon as I showed them that it really DID do those things, they shut up.
If you’re going to complain about a horrible product, complain about ACT! or PeachTree. Those products are truly horrible.
Lotus Notes, Sametime, Quickr, Foundations, etc. are all excellent products when used where they’re supposed to.
You can’t find any information how to use or configure lotus notes. NOvell had the same problem that why Windows server is much better it simple and easy to use
Forgot to add… how the hell don’t I have an outbox option?!! so I click send and I found out I have forgot to add a recipient or forgot to add an attachment and “oooh! sorry! it’s too late! you already clicked send” what the **** is up with this?! why don’t I have an outbox and a scheduled send/receive like outlook!
And you know what? It might have it but since the UI is too damn stupid I couldnt see it! maybe!
Please note that I came from electronics/programming background, I KNOW how software works!
it’s the worst thing ever created!! it’s the best blood pressure raising thing!! sometimes I keep banging my keyboard with both closed fists because of this ****** ****** software that my STUPID company forces me to use!!
IT SUCKS!! WORST THING EVER!! I open an email it spends 5 or 10 min to open, I select new msg, it takes 5-10 min to open the new msg, even all the menus and options are so not user friendly!! A piece of ****!! When I used outlook with the same company before everything was smooth and took seconds to open!
I used to be a fan of IBM when I was a kid, now I hate their ***!!
I have finally been liberated from Lotus Notes!!!! Yay! We’re on Outlook 2007 now, and rid of LN 6.5. Hmmm… let’s see… off the top of my head, here are a few of the wonderful end-user things I’ll now get to enjoy:
In my calendar view, when I choose to look at 5 days at a time, they’re laid out side-by-side M-F, instead of LN’s god awful M, T, W in the left column and H, F in the right column with all items of the day lumped one right after the other. Yea, that was really useful and easy to read. Great job LN!
If I need to sort by name but then want to go back to the regular view of newest emails at top, all I have to do is click ONCE on the date column. In LN you have to click twice on the date column, b/c of course it wanted to sort the oldest emails at the top — like that’s really useful.
Here’s my favorite — now, when I get a meeting notification Outlook just flashes the reminder in a dialog box that blinks in the status bar. Not so easy with LN. LN has to literally take over control of your computer and completely interrupt you in whatever you’re doing (god forbid you be in the middle of, oh, I don’t know, actual work.) There’s no option for that to not happen, unless of course you choose to not be notified at all… which, again, god forbid you ever concentrate on your job and then forget you have a meeting.
Folders are so much easier to create and view. In LN, every time I launched the software I have to manually open the personal folders. Oh, and if you decide to get ambitious one day and organize yourself by deleting folders you no longer need, LN won’t make it easy. You delete the folder, then LN collapses the personal folders and makes you click on the plus symbol to open them up again so you can repeat the tedious process of deleting.
FINALLY, no more clicking on the “reply” or “reply to all” button to get a drop-down menu so that I have to purposely choose to include the message history. WHO IN THE HELL DOESN’T INCLUDE THE WHOLE ‘EFFIN THREAD OF AN EMAIL BY DEFAULT!?!??! I dunno… maybe the rationale behind that was to save file on the servers, but I call BS on that. If IBM can’t handle their email bandwidth (sizes), but Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail can, then IBM needs to get the hell out of the email business. Please. Pretty please.
How freaking STUPID is it that when you receive an email and are reading it, you can’t easily see all of the recipients of the email. There’s a stupid form field (really? REALLY!?!?!) that is only like two lines in height, so if there’s a lot of people on the recipient list you have to tediously scroll to see who is on the email.
Outlook has auto fill in the To: (cc:, bcc:) lines. This means you can type just a couple of letters of someone’s name and the program recognizes who you want. All you do is press enter. You think it’s that easy with LN? Uh. No.
The calendar function in LN is poor (and that’s being kind.) You can’t easily forward a meeting to someone who wasn’t included to begin with. Deleting (canceling) a meeting is spotty and isn’t guaranteed to let all invitees know it’s been canceled. If you choose to decline with comments and find that you’re just typing too much and don’t want to continue with the decline … guess what? You’re committed. No turning back. Stupid.
What the hell is that freaking stationary **** at the top of a “memo”? You’re forced to have something… can’t just have it blank. What are those freaking designs? From the ’80s? Get real. Very unprofessional.
It’s so nice to now be able to close Outlook and it … just close. No need to answer two pop-ups first. God forbid LN make anything easy for the user.
Oh, I could go on and on. Lotus Notes is truly an embarrassing piece of software that IBM should be ashamed of. It is my firm belief that every … and I mean EVERY … executive that signed off on that POS should be fired for incompetence.
How do you know if a Lotus Notes programmer needs to be horse whipped? When he writes option menus with things like:
[Set Replication Schedule]
-Prompt to replicate when Notes shuts down
If anything is waiting to be sent -IF OUTBOX IS NOT EMPTY
If outbox is not empty?! You almost expect to see:
If outbox is NOT NOT empty
…..please don’t tell me that the NOT NOT is actually in a newer version, I think I might go postal.
so we just switched to notes and it’s horrible. Clearly ibm/lotus/domino/whomever needs more people to focus on the UI – while this program may be great from a tech perspective it’s a horrible kludgy mess from the user perspective (open/edit/view/save/cancel when you open an attachment) Do you really need so many choices? or how about just reply to all? Do we need: (reply to all with history only / reply to all w/ history and attachments/reply to all/reply to all w/ internet-style history)
So my top 2 annoyances i hope someone can help me solve:
1) keyboard shortcut to inbox? (not mail – inbox)
2) how do i reply to a meeting? I don’t want to change the status of the meeting – just reply to the meeting owner.
Chris,
YEP amongst many other problems, such as threading.
I get the envelope that there is new mail, however it won’t appear until I open a thread.. refresh doesn’t even work.
What a dumb *** piece of software.
—–
Chris said on September 17th, 2009 at 7:11 am
“Has anyone else encountered the issue of not being able to scroll using the scroll bar or trackball within Lotus? Or the scroll bar will be at the very top of the inbox, but as soon as you hit the up key, you realize you are nowhere near the top of your inbox.”
—-
I love Lotus Notes. When someone sends me work to do I can lie to them and tell them that I never got the email. Because we’ve had so many problems they believe me every time.
Thanks IBM
I dont understand why people are so scared of change. All software has its own benifits and cons aswell if you have doubts on this remeber how many docs has MS word lost, also in my experiance i have seen most notes crashes are caused by bad hardware. working on both mail systems one is not better than the other i suppose people just like to *****.
I use and support Lotus Notes for a company and it does indeed blow. Little things like having to click on the body of the email to add an attachment is just retarded.
I feel sorry for all you guys who are either too dumb to use Notes or who work for a company with admins that are too dumb to use Domino. Over the last three months I’ve had three clients forever lose valuable email from corrupted Outlook mail files (2 gig limit). I have NEVER had anyone lose email in Notes.
I have NEVER seen a corrupt Notes database in over 1000 client installs.
Notes has NEVER been the object of a virus.
No virus has EVER harvested email addresses from Notes and used them to send spam.
Besides email, we have developed and distributed scores of rock-solid, titanium-secure custom Notes applications with NO need to install, configure and tinker with VPN,s database back-ends, programming frameworks and the like. The applications just roll out. Updates appear “magically” with each replication.
We have Domino servers that go YEARS between reboots.
We have Domino servers running on Windows, AS400 and Linux (as in FREE Linux).
Microsoft Exchange admins are a dime a dozen. Lotus Domino admins and developers are IN DEMAND.
OK. I’m done. You can all go back to sleep now.
Yes,James Collie….I, too, am dying to know what good non-relational thinking is when it comes to DB construction and development. Please…enlighten us.
By the way, the next time i have someone tell me lotus notes is soooo powerful, yet they’re also the ones still using IE 6.0 (mostly because notes doesn’t play well w/ 7+), keeping the crappy default XP taskbar, and double clicking hyperlinks… i’m going to kill them
I do find it funny the people who defend LN by saying it’s a training “thing” or an “understanding” thing. As a computer engineer who grew up plugged into a T1 line for most of my life, and as a person who has programmed applications for all areas of the business world (engineering, finance, manufacturing and services), I’m amazed at the old school philosophy on thinking about software.
Just because software “CAN” do something, doesn’t mean it’s a successful software. If I built the worlds most fuel efficient car, but my target audience couldn’t find the gas tank… i’d fail. This is why so many people hate lotus notes, it’s not design with users in mind.
Tools need to be intuitive, easy to learn, and NOT require an admin to do things such as archiving. I am one the most proficient users of a PC i know and yes I hate friggen hate notes. I hate it for trying to be all it can be. I don’t need an email client, a database, a workflow system all in one. I want the best of breed, i want gmail, or outlook, and i want business workflow software, hell, i’d take a paper daily planner over Lotus’s calendar.
I’ve not had the pleasure/displeasure of using notes 8.x yet as my company is even more *** backwards than IBM running 7.x, but from what i can tell, it’s no better. I don’t need to see all my widgets on one screen, i have that already, it’s called my windows desktop.
My only hope with the new google wave is that it revolutionizes the way people interact. Google is intuitive, customizable for those that WANT to get that fancy, and quite frankly as a whole they have much better “designers” (note do not confuse programmers with those that design) than many large SW companies.
Anyhow, my 2 cents, to hell with lotus notes and thank god for DAMO!!!
The best thing about Notes is that as long companies use it they will never have enough people on the help desk. My company is learning that now. They hired a bunch of us for the migration from Outlook, and the more people they migrate the more they have to hire for support. As the migration winds down the call volume climbs. I may just laugh when the Notes support team is larger than the whole entire rest of the help desk.
But I feel bad every time a user calls and I have to tell them they can’t do that anymore. Or their 1988 style ID file is corrupted and I have to send them to security support to have an ID file recreated. Notes is so secure that the only ones who can’t access it are the authorized users. Every other network dependent application on the planet authenticates to a server where access can be secured, but Notes scatters security files to every PC that needs access, where it can be cracked at will, and corrupted by a sideways glance. Then the first and last thing Notes does is replicate the corruption to the backup copy.
Also, check out twitter.com/lotusnotessucks
It is the tool of the devil
Shave my poodle!, it is NOT true that the latest version (8.*) won’t refresh your inbox automatically. It is true however, at least in our experience, that it is very buggy and often you will need to click on the refresh button (or hit F9, not F5) to retrieve messages you should have received long ago.
continued from previous posts…
21c. The signature starts on the first line forcing you to move it down.
21a. Add a couple of blank lines to the top of the signature.
22c. Notes adds the signature every time, even when replying. Outlook had options for new messages and for replies and forwards. Notes does not differentiate making you delete the signature over and over since most replies do not need it.
22a. Under File – Preferences… – Mail – Signature tab you can turn off the automatic append option. You will need to remember to insert it when required. Note that if the signature contains legalese that’s required on all external email then forgetting to insert it when necessary might mean big trouble.
23c. Outlook allowed for multiple signatures, Notes does not. Some signature for external emails are required to be very long due to legal and other statements. Internal emails can use a much shorter signature but Notes does not allow for such a selection making you manually change the signature when desired.
23a. Create text files of the different signatures you may want to use. Save it in C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\Data. When you are ready to insert a signature, click on the More button, select insert signature and select the Import from File option. Then double click on the text file you want and then click OK.
24c. Double clicking on the text in an email does not highlight it for copying but instead opens the message for editing.
24a. Be careful not to double click but instead highlight the content with your mouse cursor. Note that double clicking while the message is in edit mode does highlight the text for copying.
25c. When you reply to an open message the original does not automatically close. A setting in Outlook lets you choose this option. Very handy.
25a. There is no option for closing the original message automatically, which for most people is another annoyance. However, if you use the Preview pane to view your message, you can click on the “Reply” or “Forward” options from the toolbar and it will not open the original e-mail.
26c. When Notes sorts by subject it does not ignore the Re or Fw.
26a. Sucks, doesn’t it?
27c. You cannot drag and drop out of the trash can. You must restore the email then go find it (assuming you remember which folder you deleted it from) and then, if desired, move it to where you want it.
27a. Another minor annoyance to that sucks. (If you can’t remember where the email was stored, select it in All Documents then click the drop down next to the Folder icon on the toolbar and use Discover Folders to see where it is stored.)
28c. The folders I created/moved are not in alphabetical order.
28a. Close and reopen Notes.
29c. When you are reading an email there are only options on the toolbar to go the next or previous unread message, not read messages.
29a. Press the backspace key to go to the previous message or the enter key to go to the next message, regardless of whether it has been read or not.
30c. There is no autopreview option to show the first 3 lines of an email without having to open it or use the preview pane.
30a. None. This is one of the most missed features of Outlook.
31c. Unable to specify the default font and color for new messages.
31a. There is an option to customize the default fonts under File – Preferences – Basic Notes Client Config – Display – Default Fonts button. Unfortunately the options given are only for the font itself, not color, size or other options. You can however customize the Permanent Pen option by opening a new message, clicking in the body section of the email, set the text properties using the Text menu and then selecting Text – Permanent Pen – Set Permanent Pen Style. Whenever you want to use that text style click on the Permanent Pen icon. Unfortunately there is no way to activate the pen by default.
Creating a stationery and using that for all messages is another option although that involves more mouse clicks for each message then clicking the Permanent Pen icon.”
32c. I hear the ding letting me know I have mail but nothing new is in my Inbox.
32a. Try double clicking the notification icon in the toolbar near the clock, clicking on other folders and then go back to the Inbox, try the Send and Receive Mail option under Tools, try closing and reopening Notes (you may also need to reboot). Also, if you have rules set up check for new emails in the other folders.
33c. The Inbox shows I have # unread messages but none are in my inbox or the # is incorrect. Also, sometimes unread messages are showing but the inbox is not bolded and there is no #.
33a. According to tech support this is not expected behavior and the help desk can investigate if it becomes a problem. In reality this happens frequently and based on posts online this is an ongoing Notes annoyance. You cannot rely on Notes to tell you if you have new messages or how many unread messages you have. Be sure to click on the Inbox occassionally and hit refresh if necessary to see whether or not there are new emails.
34c. The popup in the lower right corner of the screen does not give a preview of the message.
34a. None.
35c. When I type someone’s name it does not autopopulate.
35a. Before clicking to another field or hitting tab, first hit enter or type “,” or “;” and it will autofill or give choices if there are multiple possibilities.
36c. When I click on a hyperlink within an e-mail, the website opens within Lotus Notes, how can I change this so it opens with Internet Explorer?
36a. Click File>Preferences> Web Browser, then select “Use the Browser I have set as the default for this operating system”. Click OK.
37c. Cannot attach another email.
37a. A very handy feature that is missing in Notes. Using the export or save email as record functions and then attaching it is definitely not the same thing. If the email is not too long you could do a print screen and paste it in.
38c. The letterhead pictures have disappeared from the emails and do not appear in the letterhead preferences either.
38a. They should eventually come back. Perhaps holding a saence will help.
39c. The fax contact I set up under Outlook does not work in Notes.
39a. Send a fax from Notes using the following in the To line: Recipient@faxnumber@RFAX. Recipient is the name of the person, Faxnumber is the 10 digit number without a 9 or 1 in front. Example: John Smith@4125551234@RFAX. You can attach Word, Excel, PowerPoint and text files. A cover page will be created automatically.” NOTE: I DON’T KNOW IF THIS WORKS ACROSS THE BOARD OR IF THIS IS UNIQUE TO OUR COMPANY.
40c. When Notes prints an email it does not put your name at the top. This can makes it harder to sort through the papers at the printer.
40a. To print your name at the top of the page: File — Application — Properties — Database (in the drop-down at the top of the options box) — click on printer icon (make sure the drop-down at the top still shows Database and did not change to Document) — Type your name in the header text box. Click the check mark to enable it. You will need to play with the font so it prints better (use Print Preview to not waste paper).
41c. Selecting multiple emails is not as easy as it was in Outlook.
41a. Notes prefers you place a checkmark next to the emails instead of using the common keyboard and keyboard/mouse commands to select multiple emails. At least you can hold down the mouse button and select multiple emails at once if they are next to each other.
42c. Cannot print out a To Do list
42a. Click on the Open button and select To Do (or go to the Home tab and click on the To Do icon. This opens the To Do tab. Expand the categories of items you want to print, such as In Progress and Not Started. Then go to File — Print and under What to Print on the Printer tab click on Selected view. If needed, the Page Setup tab has the option for Landscape.
43c. When I click to delete a meeting accepted email (or other calendar item) Notes gives me a message about how deleting the item could be bad and asks if I want to remove or delete it.
43a. In Notes, removing and deleting are two different things. Notes does not want you to delete emails associated with calendar items. Instead you should choose the remove option. To make Notes do this automatically, go to File — Preferences — Mail (or click on Calendar and To Do, then the Mail tab) — under the Basics secondary tab select “Remove without asking” in the “When I delete a calendar document from any Mail view or folder:” option.
44c. Cannot snooze items using hours or days.
44a. Notes only gives you the option in minutes. This gives you the opportunity to test your math skills. Hint: 1440 min per day.
45c. Emails I sent show the first person on the To line as the sender in the Sender column instead of me.
45a. When sending an email you know you will want to file in your Inbox or one of your folders, instead of choosing the Send and File option you can put your own name as the first person on the To line. That way when the message is listed in the Inbox or folders other than Sent it will show your name. Sure others might think you’re an idiot for sending emails to yourself and snicker at you as you walk by the water cooler but you can take a few minutes to enlighten them.
46c. On dual monitor systems, emails start opening up on the opposite monitor for no apparent reason.
46a. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for this and after a while Notes will stop this nonsense behaviour.
47c. Notes tells me a meeting conflicts with another one when there is nothing on my calendar for that time.
47a. None.
48c. When an alert pops up on the screen and you close/dismiss it then the focus goes back to Notes instead of what you were working on.
48a. Notes is crying out “Look at me!” but all you want to do is work on something else. Fine…I guess you’re just not as committed to this relationship.
49c. Moving and renaming folders was quick in Outlook but takes a while in Notes. Also, renaming a folder causes you to lose the customized view set up for that folder.
49a. None.
50c. Sometimes when I export a message it doesn’t save it with the attachments.
50a. Always double check to ensure the attachment saved along with the email’s text. Excel attachments usually export okay but not Word. Export the email message as RTF (be sure to type in the extension with the file name since Notes is not smart enough to do that) and then save the attachment. Then open the saved message and paste in the attachment.
51c. Not all of a message exported.
51a. When exporting, Notes will not export any section that has been collapsed. Notes often decides to collapse sections on its own, especially when replies go back and forth, so you have to remember to expand all of the collapsed sections (go to View – Expand All Sections or click Shift+) before exporting.
I’m sure notes has all sorts of super-powerful features which make it a good choice for some organizations, but what I simply CANNOT FATHOM is why IBM apparently doesn’t have anyone who specializes in user interface design. A very basic UI evaluation would reveal SO MANY simple, easy-peasy things they could do to make it better. C’mon IBM, you can do better! It’s not that hard…
I didn’t realize just how good Entourage was before Notes was thrust upon me…
To James Collie said on September 30th, 2009 at 10:47 am… “Relational thinking is good for some problems, but not for all.” Please tell us what non-relational thinking is good for… I’m dying to know.
@Sam log in offline and you should have no trouble access local nsfs
I cn’t decide if I should logon to Lotus Notes and check my e-mail tonite, or drink the bottle of drano under my sink. Drano sounds better. I want to ******* die
Hey, is it true that the latest version (8.*) won’t refresh your inbox automatically, and that instead you need to push a stupid no-name button? How on earth can that be an enhancement over previous versions??
One of my favourite “features” on the 6.5 version is its random ability to lose my preferred web browser (location preferences). There’s no way it’ll remember it’s Mozilla and not IE. Every time I open the aplication, there it is again…
Definitely, LN is the best and most expensive crapware I’ve ever used.
For all those who say the problem is the user, and LN is the best (just misunderstood):
OK, I’m willing to admit the problem is in me being uneducated (expect I don’t understand how does this link with LN being painfully slow and crashing once every 2 days – I’m using version 8). On the other hand, if you don’t want to sound like those 1337 kiddies in PC games (“zomg, u sux! I pwn thiz game! lern to ply!”) why won’t you point us to some intuitive unskilled-user friendly online tutorial, or something, instead of just telling us it’s our fault, since we’re stupid (unskilled)?
Thanks for any replies.
To NotesDeveloper re:Sep 24th post
You must be very frustrated. Learn to use Notes with a non-relational mentality or you will certainly fail. Relational thinking is good for some problems, but not for all. There are powerful features in Notes that a relational system cant begin to duplicate. The converse, which you have clearly stated, is also true. Coding relational processes into Notes is inefficient, error prone and non-scalable.
Can you please do a t-shirt with logo from the homepage on it? I’d buy it in an instant… the three people with the guns and noose sums up how I feel having to endure Notes each and every day!
a-freakin-men. I’ve got a team of about 14 that would buy the one with the logo&guns in a heartbeat. The noose is nice, but the logo one…brilliant….
I don’t know which is worse – loosing your contacts and schedules because you didn’t have a backup, or using Lotus Notes every day. It’s a toss up.
It just sucks. How anyone can defend it is almost comical. It is as intuitive as a Chinese lesson written in Russian. How IBM is making $$$ from it is beyond me.
My absolute favorite thing is in your first month after moving from Outlook, how many times you close the entire application when you finish reading an email. Close second is the inability to forward calendar invites.
It is literally painful
I recenlty began using notes8 after 10+ years as a window/exchange/outlook admin. I havent used domino/lotus since 4.5OS/2 days and heard nothing but bad. I want to THANK you guys for all the help you have given me in figuring out how to use the ‘lovely’ piece of ‘software’. I SOOOO miss my outlook/exchange.
Lotus notes gave me the clap
What a piece of **** product. My goodness
I am facing a problem, while printing from Lotus Notes, some extra marks and symbols appear on the print. I am not able to get rid of the same.
I have a question. I am using LN8 with password enabled on the server. If the password expires, will I still be able to access my local database? and, what happens if the account locks, can I still use my local db ? thanks in advance
Oh I hate hate hate hate this piece of **** software. Its so **** and affecting everyones productivity
To Integro, who claims that disgruntled LN users just need training..
I am a CLP in both Sys Admin and App Dev. (yes, an old certification path for older versions–but clearly I HAVE training)…
LN is the WORST piece of %^&^% I’ve ever had to develop in. It is NOT a true DBMS. It is not relational. I must “fake” the relationships and work SO MUCH harder to get less result. Refresh issues are rampant because it does not use tables: information is stored on documents, which must be refreshed, or pulled from views, which much be refreshed after the docs are refreshed. This is server-taxing, time- and bandwith-sucking, and overall, a fundamentally bad concept.
LN is like the Mafia: they create the problem and then make one pay dearly to mitigate it. They put out a product that lets people who don’t really have the developmental background create low-level but passable DBs: if you can use @Functions in MS Excel, you can develop a very rudimentary DB in LN. Then, much later on, the business, or business unit realizes only too late that they are trapped in a very bad situation. This is because the functionality of and dependency on the DB scales up over time–as it always does–and the need for an experienced developer becomes apparent when process and workflow become more intricate. Most often, however, an experienced developer is not available because the company can’t or won’t spare the $$$ for the manpower–which is almost always why the non-developer produced the DB on LN in the first place.
This leaves the business unit in the unfortunate situation of being dependent on a solution that limps along, not meeting the need. They can’t get rid of LN, but they STILL don’t have the $$$ to bring someone in to either make it work like it needs to, or to get rid of LN entirely (an EXTREMELY expensive proposition). Either way, theywill have to spend more $$$ than they would have had to in the first place if it had just paid for an experienced developer working with a REAL DBMS.
Like I say…LN is the Mafia.
try to find out a concept that brings the ln to light and refreshens it, instead of complaining, my dear developer…
Upgrade to the latest version, get training, grow up
I am glad I have finally found you. After 3 hours of wasted time fixing up the mess done with this buggy **** (L8) I needed some kind of support. It had to be there. I was going completely mental! Unfortunately my company will definitely be the last to drop this faecal detritus.
I can feel you pain.
Chris said on September 17th, 2009 at 7:11 am
“Has anyone else encountered the issue of not being able to scroll using the scroll bar or trackball within Lotus? Or the scroll bar will be at the very top of the inbox, but as soon as you hit the up key, you realize you are nowhere near the top of your inbox.”
Yes, we have had the same problems. Thankfully not often.
Sparky said on September 16th, 2009 at 9:32 am
“the majority of comments on here are people whining about issues that can be easily resolved.”
There are so many issues that can only be resolved by rewriting the program.
“quite a few of these assumptions are incorrect and / or could be remedied by learning something about the program that you are using.”
Which ones? Care to enlighten us instead of making general statements?
“you might be suffering with under qualified IT staff or administrators.”
Our IT dept doesn’t have the time to fix IBM’s goof ups. Even if the back end is set up 100% correctly the front end still sucks.
“I have put Domino into places with an Outlook front end”
That would be a great improvement over using the Notes front end. We still have Outlook (we still use it for shared mailboxes that cannot be switched to Notes due to an incompatibility with another program). Can I set it up to receive my emails? What problems could that cause since such a set up is not supported by my IT dept? What about the calendar?
“Just because you used one product for a long time and now you have to use a new product does not mean that the new product sucks.”
Absolutely correct. My department has embraced numerous changes throughout the years as a way to gain effeciencies, reduce errors, cut costs and achieve results that seemed impossible just a few years ago. Unfortunately going to Notes was a step in the wrong direction. At least version 8 is tolerable even though it does suck.
“spend some time to learn it.”
The more we learn, the more it sucks. Death by a thousand annoyances indeed.
I think LN is some off-spring of OS/2. Or is it the other way around?
It’s built like a tank but used in the city. It crashes into everything.
I accidentally deleted something somewhere over the weekend. LN did not want to start saying some thing like “hey! I can’t find a file. i’m not telling you what. Good luck finding it. Goodbye!” There goes my Saturday cause my IT doesn’t work on Saturdays.
Come Monday, my IT VNCs me and copies a file here and there. And voila! it works. I could have done that too, but nobody outside the admin world knows how to do it.
Not sure what happened to my post. It’s scrambled up and parts are missing. I’ll repost when I get a chance.
Chris said on September 17th, 2009 at 7:11 am
>>Has anyone else encountered the issue of not being able to scroll using the scroll bar or trackball within Lotus? Or the scroll bar will be at the very top of the inbox, but as soon as you hit the up key, you realize you are nowhere near the top of your inbox.<>the majority of comments on here are people whining about issues that can be easily resolved.<>A good portion of these comments are sophomoric at best and quite a few of these assumptions are incorrect and / or could be remedied by learning something about the program that you are using. We could argue back and forth by what’s better and why but when it comes right down to it you have to get the facts right otherwise you are just whining.<>Others of you might be suffering with under qualified IT staff or administrators.<>I have put Domino into places with an Outlook front end<<
That would be a great improvement over using the Notes front end. I have Outlook on my machine (we still use it for shared mailboxes that cannot be switched to Notes). Can I set it up to receive my emails? What problems could that cause since such a set up is not supported by my IT? What about the calendar?
My company just switched from Outlook to Lotus notes and I have to ask. Why??? Technology has advanced ten fold and Lotus Notes still stands as the best e-mail from 1989. What the hell??? I am just glad I found this support group.
I made a long list with whats is failing. I cant be bothered to write it all down so i I’ll just say, it sucks ***. I will soon leave my resignation so I can stop working with this ****.
Ps. I want to crush the teeth of all of those who claim it is ok or even good.
Why must I see the same 2 persons on the splash screen when I start LN? Who the heck are they anyway? They must be the two most hated persons in the LN world. Poor chaps.
Has anyone else encountered the issue of not being able to scroll using the scroll bar or trackball within Lotus? Or the scroll bar will be at the very top of the inbox, but as soon as you hit the up key, you realize you are nowhere near the top of your inbox. One of many daily frustrations of the Lotus. Quite possibly the shittiest software ever created.
My work is using LN v7. Was just told the other day we are upgrading to v8.5.
I want to ******* kill myself.
I’m also open to being murdered.
You just need some training. Go to http://www.integrotraining.com!
HAHA…. Someone forwarded this website to me…hysterical. The best part is the majority of comments on here are people whining about issues that can be easily resolved. Rather than wasting your time surfing the internet for places that will listen to you cry about Lotus Notes, spend a few minutes speaking with your I.T. department about your issues. Just because you used one product for a long time and now you have to use a new product does not mean that the new product sucks. You’re just being a baby. Pull up your big kid pants and spend some time to learn it. In the mean time, here is a tissue… boo hoo…. poor you.
Vincent said on September 10th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
>How do I move the IBM lotus e-mail notes into a folder?
Vincent, I can can drag it into the folder, but I am using LN8.
some of the comments I’m reading on here are a joke, if any of you work in IT i feel sorry for any company you work for and you clearly don’t know how to even use a computer so shouldn’t be using Lotus Notes in the first place.
KRE, now I have to stand for the people that express their opinions here: they probably have no choice… you know…
people should use tools they are adapted to them, and the ln seems to be a tool far too advanced
Honestly, If you gave a project team the task of designing a terrible piece of email software, with a lousy user interface, gave them no budget and a very limited time to produce it, then reduced the number of the team to one or two but kept the same constraints, took the final product and infected it with a virus, changed some of the code around for the sheer hell of it and then hit the box it came in with a 15lb hammer, it would probably still work better than Lotus Notes!
I am blessed with Notes version 8. Sadly, the admins has disabled Forwarding and IMAP so I cannot have it send to Thunderbird. However, I discovered that I can set the Reply-To: field in Delivery Options / Advanced in the New Memo section. Is there a way to enable this globally across Notes as a default for all Emails?
What crazy fool in IBM who has been using MS products all his life decides to use F5 to lock the email client? And use F9 to check for new mail? Isn’t there a refresh button? Oh yes, but this Refresh button hangs the client. But it says F9 on the button. Oh wait, there’s another way to refresh by clicking on a little empty sqaure at the top left hand corner of the email list.
Pasting text insists on keeping formatting so you’ll multiple fonts for no apparent reason (as if you want your e-mail to look like a ransom note), and there’s apparently no way to disable this. There’s a way to “paste special” which will let you past it as text (what you probably would like to do with crtl+v) but there’s no hotkey for it. I’m reduced to ALT-e-s-t-enter in order to paste text. It’s either that or copy, paste into Notepad++, cut, paste into Lotus. Why can’t they just have an option to paste as text by default?
How do I move the IBM lotus e-mail notes into a folder?
LN must be forward looking – they allow achives in the size of GBytes. Good thing I can buy 8GB thumbdrives now.
My archive is 1 GB big. I’ve deleted almost all the big files in it and it is still 1GB big. What gives?
how about compacting? it’s like a defragmentation…
There is no help for this crapware in the world wide web!
From what I see, there’s no expert in this field.
So many questions are left unanswered in the forums.
The keyboard shortcuts are so limited. I can go the whole day without touching the mouse with Outlook and even gmail.
I typed in a website url in the ‘address’ field. It decided to open internet explorer. Doesn’t Notes have its own browser?
There’s no way to delete the url through Notes. So, now my colleagues and boss know that I surfed to jobsdb – well it was for an official purpose. But try telling that to IT and anyone else who accidentally sees it.
The only way to remove it is to modify the notes.ini file. Duh.. do I need to be a programmer to do simple things on notes?
anything is settable in the Location setting you log into…
Oh my god !
thank you, i’m not alone nearly crying every day with this **** !
Won’t make the list of what i hate, is already here.
sure, some apps we have are great … but ****, ‘working’ with this is a mirage …
you just fight … find a mail, or just a name in the destinator’s bar makes me mad …
Why is it, for ***** sake, that Lotus Notes does not register moving a mail item into a folder as an undoable action? What lazy fuckwit of an interface designer was allowed to get away with this irritating and frankly sanity damaging omission?
I need to find an important email that I sent ages ago to Kathryn. Easy, I’ll just click at the top to sort by name and check all of the “Kathryn Burton” emails – which are in handy date order. Hmmm the email isn’t here….but I know I sent it! Oh God. Please say I sent it! Where is it??! Who did I send it to?? Jesus! (Cue 5 minutes of panic)
Oh, there it is. Miles down the list after the hundreds of “Kathryn Davis” and “Kathryn Edwards” emails. Lotus named all my reply to mails to “Kathryn Burton”, while my originals are filed under “Kathryn.Burton”.
Why?
___________________________________
Yet another partial success from Lotus Notes.
My inbox lists mail with their size in BYTES? so a fairly small attachement of 2 mb is listed as 299,973 which is not so helpful in this day.. search the help or the web for how to change it… nothing so far… thanks for the 80s feeling again lotus!!! (or how about catching up to 20 years since counting file sizes in bytes was useful).
It does suck for end users!!
I am an unwitting Lotus Domino admin, from an admin perspective it can do almost anything related to Mail, Support, Application development, Collaboration, Auditing, Clustering, Mobile and Internet mail,calander,chat,IM. however- it’s an all singing all dancing peice of proverbial. End users hate the interface, are confused by the amount of configuration, for example none of the end users on this network can perform an email archive without assistance, and I can’t say I brame them.
As pointed out already, notes is really for developers and I’m sure IBM are delighted that ordinary businesses are using as there mail server/client, it is far far far to OTT for most medium business, about 10% of its functionality is actually used, comparing it to Outlook doesn’t really do any justice you’d have to compare it to, MS outlook, outlook express, outlook for mobile/PDA (whatever that is?) MS IIS server, MS sharepoint, the dot not framework and SDK, the entire knowledge base of all those servers, MS SQL server and whatever MS use for audting.
It’s well passed it sell by date and this kind of Macro application is a throw back to the 80′s. So count me in as an admin- I HATE LOTUS
Is there a license fee required for this product? You can’t possibly need to pay for it.
Why can outlook open up and i can have my email in less then 5 seconds where lotus notes takes over 20-30 seconds to even open to the home screen! I can’t stand that you have to choose what you want to sort by instead of just clicking the top menu bar. Our company does not even make application for domino! Why we pay $25K a year on this **** when i can buy 1 server and 1 exchange license and not pay a thing for 5+ years!
The software is very easy to install and configure. last worked on R5 10 years ago and went right to 8.0.2! Sametime IM is cool for being FREE! But besides that, it’s a piece of ****. It’s as bloated as MAC tiger OS! BLOATWARE!
The problem with doing alt+tab between emails is how many tabs people open on Notes. I’ve seen 20 + tabs open, add that to the Windows windows that are open, it’s quicker to point and click that tab through 30 windows. And you try telling the user to not open so many tabs and tell me where that gets you.
Why can’t Lotus Notes just tell me when I receive an email? I can only choose between:
a) A new mail notice that constantly pops up every couple of minutes (there’s no new mail in the inbox).
b) Turning off the notifications and never be informed of new mail.
Also, why can I never see images that are pasted into my emails from friends that are lucky enough to have Outlook? I just get a little red box. After reading up on this, it turns out that it’s because the original image html link is broken. I understand the premise of this, but, FFS I don’t care! Just work! EVERY OTHER EMAIL CLIENT HAS NO PROBLEM WITH THIS, I HONESTLY CAN’T BELIEVE IT COULD THIS ****. So after some more (wasted) time reading about this I found the solution. Great! All I need to do is simply view the html source code of the email, find the code relating to the image, paste it into a browser and…….oh. That doesn’t work either.
Lotus Notes sucks balls.
everytime I have to defrag the computer I have to move the big (+1GB) DBs to a different drive and then move them back again….why?…they can’t be defraged correctly…is that a problem?…well its my bloody inbox thats the biggest problem!
Thanks to Lotus notes for mysteriously deleting all of my ‘Sent Email’ prior to April for no apparent reason. I didn’t really use it anyway.
automatic archiving on? ^^
I try removing a duplicate folder that i accidentally added to help organize my mail, well notes decides to remove the folder that actually contained the organized mail instead of the one that was empty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BLOW IT OUT YOUR *** IBM!!!! NOTES SUCKS!!!!
When creating this post, I entered my e-mail address as “first last/USBX45/DIV1/NARND@LTV” then came to my senses and remembered that Lotus’s special addresses don’t work with anthing else on the planet.
My actual comment pertains to the spell checker. I work for a technical company that has lots of acronyms and obviously Blotus doesn’t recognize any of them. When I was using outlook, it was easy to configure an option to ignore words with numbers or multiple caps. I have poked around in the uber-friendly menus several times with no luck. Today, I broke down and used the help. Obviously, I am not very bright; there are multiple “preferences” selections under the various menus and I was not looking at the appropriate one. To further my stupidity, I apparently was not aware that the spell check settings were located under the “International” tab. Admittedly, I am a WMA; I am not familiar with all the languages on the planet. To my surprise, some other country uses ALL CAPS and yet another country uses NUM83R$ in their language, and therefore in order to ignore those mispellings, I must go to the international settings page.
BTW, I would love a T-Shirt with the noose and two guns logo on it, so I can alternate between that and my “I hate lotus notes” one. I changed my Vista User Account Icon to that and it brings a smile to my face every morning when I log in.
Addedndum… Many times, by the time notes finishes “thinking” about whatever it was that I asked it to do… I FORGOT WHAT THE HELL I WAS DOING WITH IT!!@(#*&$@#$@#$@*#$&. Please, I’d love to get other things done while you’re “thinking” about whatever it is that is taking such an UNRESASONABLY LONG TIME TO FIGURE OUT!!!
Why can’t notes do whatever it’s doing when it’s taking its time opening an e-mail, opening a “database” record, refreshing a damned view, etc…etc…etc.. in the GODDDAMMNED BACKROUND LIKE EVERY OTHER SOFTWARE OUT THERE!!!!!! WTF!! You are a slap in the face to the general meaning of PRODUCTIVITY!!!
A good portion of these comments are sophomoric at best and quite a few of these assumptions are incorrect and / or could be remedied by learning something about the program that you are using. We could argue back and forth by what’s better and why but when it comes right down to it you have to get the facts right otherwise you are just whining.
Others of you might be suffering with under qualified IT staff or administrators. There is a lot to be said for those that know and those that pose as knowing. I have found my self being in the mix of with both of these situations and a good IT staff and administrators make quite a bit of difference.
As a Messaging & Collaboration Principle Architect I support and run the Microsoft side and the Domino side (as well as a few others) and to be brutally honest there is not that much that is different when you get down to the bottom of what you are doing the functionality is almost universally the same albeit in different places here and there.
The issue at hand is what are people familiar with and why do they like it. I have put Domino into places with an Outlook front end and other than the client they would have had no idea of any differences. If you have specific questions e.g. not rants or complaints I don’t work for IBM or Microsoft then I would be happy to try and answer them.
FYI – My stats
Largest Domino environment supported – 150,000 Seats
Largest Exchange environment supported – 74,000 Seats
Largest iMail environment supported – 50 seats
Largest Group wise environment supported – 12,000 Seats
Largest Banyan environment supported – 350,000 Seats (yes I am old)
Also specialize in BlackBerry, Sametime, Sharepoint, Quickr and others.
Oh, and here’s a new one — I was composing an email in one window and had my Notes Inbox open in a window in the background. During typing I decided to remove some words so I highlighted them and hit the delete button. Instead of deleting the text it deleted an email from the Inbox. WTF? The inbox was not the active window but was still in the background. Luckily I noticed it and retrieved the message from the trash can.
continuation…
11c. When Notes first opens the folders are collapsed and even after expanding them they will collapse again after a while. This is EXTREMELY AGGRAVATING, especially when it does it while you are in the middle of dragging and dropping an email to a subfolder or in the process of expanding a folder and subfolders. Also, if you don’t click exactly on the left side of the folder, clicking will cause you to go to the folder when you only wanted to collapse/expand since there is no separated +/- sign to click on.
11a. Supposedly there may be a solution to the first problem by changing a setting through a separate Developer piece of software that we as users don’t have access to. The only “solution” is to work with fewer subfolders so you don’t have to keep expanding as many. How well organized do you want to be anyway? Or maybe managers should give fewer projects to work on.
12c. The Expand All and Collapse All options are grayed out. You must manually expand all of the folders.
12a. No solution at this time. At least with all this extra clicking your index finger will be sporting some nice muscles.
13c. You cannot determine the length of time before an email is removed from the Trash folder. It is set at 48 hours.
13a. THIS IS A CORPORATE SETTING.
14c. When replying or forwarding an email, Notes puts in section title bars making editing difficult.
14a. Right click on the bar and select Remove Section. This gets rid of the bar without removing the previous text.
15c. If you select multiple emails from top to bottom and hit delete Notes will jump down according to the number of emails you deleted instead of selecting the next one.
15a. None.
16c. After deleting an email Notes jumps to the last one read instead of the next one.
16a. This seems to be related to having the inbox sorted from newest to oldest. Notes does not do this if the inbox is sorted with the newest on the bottom.
17c. There is no option to mark an email as read or unread when right clicking on an email.
17a. Use the insert key to mark emails as read and unread.
18c. You can’t click on a blank area of the inbox to create a new message. You have to click on the New icon.
18a. Annoying for those used to Outlook. As an alternative, Ctrl+M will open a new message.
19c. You can’t change the size of the Subject field when viewing the list of emails.
19a. You can adjust the width of other fields and Notes makes the subject field use up what space is left.
20c. Lack of flag choices to help organize and prioritize.
20a. Outlook 2000 and older did not have many options either. Perhaps Notes will catch up to Outlook 2003 someday and add the extra flag colors.
For one week I could not send emails with notes.
When I try “new memo”, notes was frozen.
After 5 hours of support, they finally found that I could not write email because my print driver was not ok.
Email print (I am software engineer), I do not understand the obvious f***ing link, I do not want to print all my mails and specially those I send.
Why must Lotus Notes be so frickin’ slow?! There must be a way to implement this, sometimes good, functionality without it taking a whole coffeebreak to finish its task! I would really like the IBM guys to redo most of its network communications coding… Thx for being able to vent this – have a nice Lotus Notes-free day!
WHY, WHY, WHY doesn’t Lotus Notes allow for you to undo more than once? I can’t stand when I type an e-mail and then I accidentally delete part of it (because of my crazy mouse pad but that’s another issue) and then I can’t get ALL of my hard work back because I can only undo once. In the year 2009 why can IBM (a once visionary company) get functionality to at least allow undo five or more times. It’s like the government is in a plot with IBM to drive up depression and heart disease with the stress that Lotus Notes causes society. (And I wonder if they hired the KGB to hold the IT teams hostage to this terrible program – what else could explain it but fear of death by Russian bullies?)
Notes does allow multiple undo’s. But your org needs to upgrade to Notes 8.5.1 (the latest version).
Why is Notes so hard to get working? I have 4 computers and none of them will work. They all give different technical errors (null pointers etc), which the IBM KB doesn’t give any explaination for.
ARGH
Lotus notes sucks.
“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.”
But NONE of that is the fault of the people who are complaining is it?
If the end-users find a piece of software unusable, then IT departments should take notice and change to software that actually works for the people using it.
Marty – thanks for that advice, that all I need to do is update my version of Lotus Notes. ‘Cos of course, I’m in charge of the IT department.
Oh, wait a minute. No, I’m not. In fact I can’t actually download any updates or any other software, because the IT deptartment have blocked it all.
And we’ve asked them to update it (if there is an update after the 2004 version) but they’re not interested in what the end-users want.
I am forced to use Lotus for over a year now and I still haven’t discovered how to save an email on my harddrive. I hate it, hate it, hate it!!!!! A good application should have intuitive menus and options. Notes is far away from this. I still don’t understand why my company switched from outlook to lotus notes. Is Lotus Notes cheaper? It sure looks and works like cheap ****.
Sheila, interesting you point out “it’s usually a problem between the keyboard and the chair”… I guess those 100% of users are dead annoying for IBM. It would be so much easier for IBM if we could just do away with the users totally.. just have company management buying and IBM selling… It would also cut the current $10-a-year budget that IBM has for GUI research and development.
I went to work for a company in ’04 where management said that Lotus Notes was the worst system they had, bar none. After two years of hardware, policy, and configuration upgrades they now say it is the best system they have, bar none. The differance between loving and hating Lotus Notes is the Domino Administrator at the console.
My company is migrating from Outlook 2003 to Notes 8.0.2. My area was switched two months ago and although we are getting used to Notes we cannot escape the realization that Notes sucks. As many on this site have noted, it is an unintuitive and buggy piece of crapware. At first we were wondering how a program in it’s 8th version can be so bad. After researching some of our issues we now realize previous versions were so much worse (all of you on older versions have our sympathies). As end users we don’t care whether or not Notes is better on the tech side of things and we don’t care about Notes having capabilities beyond email. That’s all fine and dandy but doesn’t excuse it from being a poor email program and calendar app. Email is very important to us and using Notes decreases our productivity and morale.
But enough about that and to the real reason I am writing this. A complaint spreadsheet has been floating around here and I am going to share what’s on it to help others benefit from the solutions we found as well as hope others can help us out with the ones we haven’t solved.
***According to some posts below many of the problems are with the users and not Notes so maybe those individuals can provide solutions to improve our interaction with their beloved Notes.***
As mentioned, we converted from Outlook 2003 so naturally there will be Notes vs. Outlook items and as newbies some of this is basic. Also, to keep the list from being much longer, I have excluded some problems others have already posted here and this list does not include every bug and annoyance we’ve come across (stupid Notes stuff like toolbars disappearing for periods of time, scroll bars not moving properly, etc).
I will post in batches of 10 as I get a chance.
1Complaint. The view of the inbox and folders looks terrible and fewer emails fit on the screen due to the spacing of the emails. This is especially bad for those using 17″ & 19″ CRTs and 19″ widescreen LCDs.
1Answer. You can change the settings by selecting View – Customize This View… This allows you to change the width of some of the fields. You will also notice an option for Row spacing and Lines per row (the defaults are a crappy 1 1/4 & 3). Selecting 1 & 1 will make it more readible like Outlook and allows for more emails shown per screen. It’s much easier to look at then to have a bunch of partial lines due to text wrapping. Note that this only applies to the folder you are currently in and will not automatically apply to all of the folders so each folder must be adjusted individually (why can’t there be a global option under Preferences??). Also, Notes doesn’t appreciate you changing these settings and sometimes goes back to the default when it wants to aggrevate you causing you to adjust them again (same thing with sorting emails in your folders from new to old instead of the default of old at the top). See also #5 & 6.
2c. Emails open in tabs instead of their own window.
2a. At first having tabs sounded like a good idea but during actual use many of us found using windows is much better. You can change this setting by going to File – Preferences – Windows and Themes and change the selection.
3c. In Outlook you can dictate the size of the window emails open up with. When you open an email or create a new one you can adjust the size of the window and Outlook will remember that setting. Notes does not.
3a. None. Notes will not help you out with such newfangled things like windows.
4c. When you are composing a reply, Notes displays the title on the tab or window as “New Message – IBM L…” instead of showing the subject of the email. If you have multiple replies open at once you don’t know which is which.
4a. Supposedly this should not be happening but no solution has been given.
5c. The colors of the program.
5a. Some users with CRT monitors may not find the default color selection to be very appealing. Go to File – Preferences – Windows and Themes (last on the list) and change the theme selection to Operating System Theme to get a different set of colors. Note that this change also affects the colors in the Calendar. On LCD monitors the default color scheme seems to be preferable.
6c. The thick interface takes up too much screen real estate. This is problematic with smaller monitors.
6a. In Preferences – Windows and Themes select the Operating System theme for a slight improvement (note this will also change the color scheme). Also see item #1.
7c. In Outlook you could save copies of an email into multiple folders. In Notes you can also place an email into multiple folders by doing the same thing but there is one important difference. You are not actually making a copy. If you delete the email from one folder it will also delete it from all the other folders.
7a. This is mostly true, although Notes handles certain folders differently. To delete an email from only the folder you are currently in, click on the drop-down arrow next to the folder icon and select Remove from Folder.
8C. Notes is slow, at least enough to be annoying, and the cursor flips out everytime Notes does something — even after hitting cancel to not apply a change there can be a considerable delay while the cursor breakdances.
8a. Perhaps getting new computers will solve this problem. Putting more memory in the older computers (Pentium 4 and above) was just a band-aid solution for this memory hog.
9c. Notes doesn’t like to do multiple actions at once. For example if you hit delete while the cursor is flipping out due to something like Notes loading a message into the preview pane, nothing happens and you have to hit delete again. Also, sometimes Notes starts freaking out for no apparent reason and the only solution is to kill the program (and sometimes Windows) and restart.
9a. None. See also 8a.
10c. The Undo function is not available for most actions. For example, if you accidentally delete a message or move it to the wrong folder you must go find it to move it back.
10a. None so far. Notes is retraining you to not make mistakes.
This is something I put on my forum at work:
Rubbish.
Oh you’ve been using it for 10 years and never had a problem? Well that’s great news. I’ll be happy to ignore my struggles with it if as long as you’re ok!
It DOESN’T work as well as other server based email clients — this is just nonsense. What about Outlook? If you’re claiming Lotus works better than Outlook then we really do have a problem.
In response to the people who say 65 posts on a forum doesn’t mean Lotus is a big problem — this argument really doesn’t work either, when you consider the number of people who don’t go on Aviva World, and also the number of people who won’t be aware of this thread.
Stop defending Lotus Notes — you are PROVABLY wrong.
“Notes” is a swear word.
In the ACL (currently using R7), the “Replicate or copy documents” should be split into 2 options. One to allow replication, and one to allow copy of documents. Really, this is a no-brainer. At the least you should be able to copy text from a document, even if you don’t want someone to make a local replica of a database.
THEMILKMAN – They all delete because they all have check marks next to them. Careful!
ALEX C – What version of Notes are you using? There’s no reason to copy a URL from a browser. You can just type in the link, as you would anywhere else. Also, you can enable Sametime to log in automatically, you just have to click the check box underneath where you enter your password every time you log in.
DAGUY – If you choose “send email through the internet”, you need a proxy server to connect to the internet, rather that just using the Lotus Notes (Domino) Server.
Here’s a new fun thing: You can set Lotus Notes 8 to remember your last view. When you open Lotus up, it will have all the tabs you had open before ready to go. I almost thought this was a good feature… until after the normal prolonged start-up, I discovered that my inbox and all the other tabs weren’t loaded or ready to go at all. Clicking on any of the tantalising tabs turns out to be just as slow as opening up your inbox from the front page. Wow. Another thoroughly useless feature. How do they do it?
Lotus Notes is a big ‘swiss army knife’ of an application platform. Absolutely love it. In the wrong hands it can be a disaster. But really enjoying reading the frustrations of all these little bitty frustrated people!!!
I’ve read through a good few of these comments and some of them are hilarious. I’ve had a lot of experience administering Domino/Notes. a good lot of the issues that people are complaining about is down to either bad configuration of server/client or using an ancient version of the software. I really liked the comment “it’s usually a problem between the keyboard and the chair”. so true!!!! i’ve had people do some really ridiculous things
I hated Outlook when I began to use Apple Mail.
I think I’ll embrace Outlook now with make sweet love to it. Lotus Notes has ruined my productivity.
*Mail sent didn’t appear in Sent Mail. Resent it. CEO sarcastically asks me if I’ve taken to spamming.*
Please explain:
- if Notes is not “standard”, what is then that standard? (if “standard” = “Microsoft” then I pity you)
- how can one hate software? (I can hate people, but software I can only dislike)
- if you have a car, what’s more important: the number and colours of the buttons, or the way it drives?
- for the same car, when you’re driving through a busy city: how important is speed compared to safety?
—
Sure here you go:
- there are standards out there that all software apps delivered this century adhere to. For example, right-clicking on something to get options like save, cut, copy, etc. Alt-tab between e-mails. Etc. Etc. These aren’t Microsoft standards, these are USABILITY standards.
- http://www.dictionary.com
- Notes drives like ****. Perhaps you are only “looking” at Notes and not actually using it. If you think Notes is a nice drive, you are the obviously the minority in the world that is a techie or a Notes admin.
- Speed and safety are not mutually exclusive, unlike in the Notes world where background blah blah is seemingly mutually exclusive to a friendly, usable interface.
I’ve been using notes in one form or another for close to 15 years. When it was created, it was during a time when GUI standards were not quite solidified, so I think what happened is that notes management decided to put a stake in the ground and hope that their model caught on. Microsoft’s GUI paradigm became the “standard” and people became accustomed to interacting with Windows applications using familiar intuitive objects. Unfortunately, notes hung on stubbornly to their unintuitive model, and this has become a major usability issue for their users.
As far as usability, there are a lot of horrible issues, and here is a brief subset I encounter almost daily:
Why do I have to enable scrollbars? Why is table creation in an email so darned complex? Email sorting sucks completely. Finding preferences and options is a headache. Searching never works as you expect. Email folder management is kludgy. The menus are not in any way easy to use, and have items that I have no idea about (what is Enable Folderref?). If I find an email, how can I tell what folder it is in? The help facility is a joke. Why can’t some operations be undone? What good are bookmarks unless someone tells you the exact server/folder/file…should be able to search for files to bookmark. Flat files are considered to be databases? The spam filtering interface and behavior is baffling. Calendaring is better, but still not intuitive for most users. If I change my password or bookmarks locally, I have to manually copy my id file to my laptop at home to see the changes there?
No doubt, someone will say how great the security is on Notes. I’m sure some admins get all giddy configuring users and security, and I’ve known a few who vigorously defend Notes. But I think IBM lost focus on the actual end users. In their defense, it is probably way too expensive now to redesign notes to use a standard GUI and have sensible and intuitive behavior…they’d have to retrain all the notes admins and they might end up looking foolish changing their whole product after so many years in what would look like admitting stubbornly hanging onto a mistake for 15+ years (think of Fidel Castro admitting fault on his death bed).
There are many vastly superior email applications out there. And now that there are dozens of free web-based technologies that can easily enable “groupware” (e.g., WAMP, LAMP, AJAX) and tie into existing authentication infrastructure, you’d have to be a fool to buy and try to support Notes. It had its time 10 years ago.
Beyond the tedious and cumbersome email, the main complaint is the resource hogging. We run a local client on our laptops, and although our admittedly low RAM (1G), Notes absolutely brings this machine to its knees. A close second is the GUI. About as intuitive as IRS tax forms. And finally, not to be overlooked, replication over VPN. Good God, someone please kill me when it runs..ugh….
F*ck I hate this piece of slow, counter-intuitive crapware.
Hey there, I read through the posts (used search function
) and realized that some of you have the same issue. I have a repeating reminder set on every friday 4 pm. I realize though that it won’t repeat itself. I can’t really understand the behaviour and I was wondering if anybody knows a workaround for that or somehow make the reminders work. Please help…
Andre
Hi Jeff, here are some answers to your questions:
>> if Notes is not “standard”, what is then that standard?
Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla, small software vendors. Basically notes is a mish-mash of interfaces since the DOS days and therein lies the problem.
>> how can one hate software?
hmmm. I have to use notes everyday and I can categorically say that I hate it. My job would be far easier if I did not have to use it. My job would be far easier even if notes was replaced by gmail or yahoo mail.
>> if you have a car, what’s more important: the number and colours of the buttons, or the way it drives?
The way it drives. Which is the issue most people have with notes. It has the same number of buttons, flashing lights and things that do “something” as a spaceship, but it drives like a beaten up lawn mower. From an admin perspective notes probably runs beautifully, but I think you’ll find 100% of the people complaining about notes are end-users.
>> for the same car, when you’re driving through a busy city: how important is speed compared to safety?
Safety is important, granted. But if I can walk fast through that city than drive then I probably need to ask myself what am I wasting my time with this car for.
>> Apparently, all haters here are just egoists who assume that they are alone in a company. Wake up guys!!
No, we are long-suffering end-users. The only people that like notes are people that work for IBM, managers of companies who are blinded by glossy advertising and admins. Show me a department of end-users who like it and I’ll show you my latest flying pig.
Well, from reading plenty of comments here it seems that a lot of people fall in one or both of these categories:
a) hate their jobs (they’d rather be shopping/golfing/having a day off etc.)
b) are lazy *** slackers
Because of this they conker up all kinds of wild problems they have with Lotus Notes so that the wont have to do their real job.
And since they’ve pestered their boss so often about how “Lotus Notes SUCKS!!!” he/she has started to accept this as an excuse (considering management don’t know ****, they’ll fall for that).
I’ve yet to read anything here that is remotely factual (except this comment of course).
So to all the haters: Go see a shrink, a healer, a bottle of cheap liquor or even better a TFT Doctor.
(Dr Roger Callahan Thought Field Therapy-TFT Tapping http://tftrx.com/)
Please explain:
- if Notes is not “standard”, what is then that standard? (if “standard” = “Microsoft” then I pity you)
- how can one hate software? (I can hate people, but software I can only dislike)
- if you have a car, what’s more important: the number and colours of the buttons, or the way it drives?
- for the same car, when you’re driving through a busy city: how important is speed compared to safety?
Apparently, all haters here are just egoists who assume that they are alone in a company. Wake up guys!!
My wife discovered an option in Notes 8 to “send email through the Internet.” What happens if you uncheck this box? It sends your email by boat?
Is it so fecking hard to automatically render a URL as a link? Why should I copy and paste http://www.bleh.com into my browser from notes?
Why does sametime not login automatically when you log into notes?
Sametime client on OS X: command-C doesn’t work in the chat box and the chat fonts are HUGE despite changing countless settings in the confusing, nonhierarchical options.
You guys think that outlook will solve all your problems? Ha! Think again..it’s usually a problem between the keyboard and the chair or maybe your IT department is still using ancient software, upgrade to the latest and be happy. Many of your problems are fixed in later versions.
LOTUS NOTES IS THE BEST TOOL WE HAVE GOT………… THINK !!!!!!!
WHY do you have to go through painful upgrade steps to use a new mail client!! Install new software, done, replicate mail, done, spend another four hours trying to work out how to apply a design template and why you even need to, ****!
WTF! I have sort of not liked Lotus, and could work around a few of the weirdness’s. But today, I used the search option to find an email. The search as a little broad “Test” and returned a ton of emails. I did find the email I needed, but also found one I didn’t need any more. Oh guess what!!! IF YOU DELETE ONE EMAIL IN A SEARCH IT DELETES EVERY EMAIL IN THE SEARCH! Now I have to go through the deleted items and “restore” each email I need to keep. And the search doesn’t work for the Trash folder. thanks for letting me vent. TMM
OK Lousy Notes does have mail groups, but you can not mix To: with Cc: or Bcc:, WTF?
Any company with more than ten people will have project teams that report to multiple supervisors. Of course you want a team list with team members but the bosses should be Cc’ed, right?
Lotus Notes can not do this. Great!
>> Once you are in the limited use of a web browser what difference does it make what language you wrote the application in.
If the Notes web UI didn’t suck too, then you might have a point there. For example, when I try just replying to an email that happens to have an attachment in it (or an embedded image if I remember correctly), I get some goofy, vague error message about how Notes is unable to process the request. It says to try again, and if it fails again then come back later (or something like that). But the thing is that the REAL problem is that it’s not letting me reply because the original message happened to have an attachment in it (probably because of some Domino setting – just guessing there, I don’t really know for sure why). But what kind of an error message is that?!! Do you know how long it will take most users to figure out the real reason they can’t reply? Many will NEVER figure that out. They’ll just create a new memo instead of replying to the original message, so there will not be any history on the email thread. Of course that’s just one example. Others have been pointed out here.
>> Clearly the Notes team created a bottom up database with the GUI as a complete afterthought never intended for actual live human email users.
This comment is absolutely dead on! That’s exactly what they did. And IBM sells this piece of garbage to the non-techie managers who don’t have a clue what they’re handcuffing their users to, and to the behind-the-scenes, VB-like 4GL DB programmers. Users be damned!! Who cares about them?
I love Lotus Notes its the best bit of software since pacman
“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.
Notes 8.5… how do I hate thee. Let me count the ways. Actually our company has so many I don’t have the energy to enter all of them here. I’m a system admin for a multi-national company and we have just embarked on an exchange migration, much to the disdain of our worldwide partners ( in bed with IBM ) To Note’s credit 5 years ago it was a better system than exchange, but times have moved on and with every new version it seems that they deliberately inserted bugs and tried to hide the menus and options in the most obscure places possible. We spent hours every day trying to fix problems with clients and dealing with crashes ( windows / OSX whatever ) and for every fire we extinguish another pops up. Replication? ha ha… my so-called replica wont open offline because it HAS to talk to the server. HELLO! That’s why I chose offline you stupid !@#$ app. ALL of our hundreds of users hate it, without exception – but then I guess the client’s opinions dont count do they. We’re getting corruption on multiple users’ archives with no hope of a recovery. The solution? They tell us to creat multiple copies of the archives on the network. Ok let’s just say that aside from the massive load on disk / network / resource usage we do so, but wait – lotus notes is corrupting every copy that it touches, so now all your archives are gone. Sorry for you…
This freezes all the time! All I can deduce from this is that Lotus Notes suck!
Carl, who cares if Notes is built on rock solid DBs? And how does Notes fill the needs of real business situations? Fact is that pretty much every company using Notes will also use Notes as a mail client. And, as a mail client, it just sucks. No other mail application I’ve used is as slow, as un-intuitive and as buggy as Lotus Notes. I’m on V8 and it crashes pretty much once a week. It takes about 5-7 minutes to start up. It doesn’t provide the features I need to manage my mail productively.
By the way, anyone working with Maximo? Another piece of junk developed by big blue. I was surprised to find that http://www.ihatemaximo.com doesn’t exist yet.
CHRIS: Ensure you don’t have ‘Application Enhancer’ running. That stops it from starting up
Some more frustrations to add:
- I tried to set up a rule to forward all email sent by a particular person to my home email address. I couldn’t do it – “forward to” is not an option as of Notes 6.5.
- If you have your email sorted automatically into folders (as in, “if sender is X, move message to folder Y), and you receive an email that fits these rules, double-clicking on the notification icon in the tray brings you to the main inbox view – not the folder where the email is.
- If Notes crashes, it won’t restart unless you either log out or reboot.
- Notes treats attachments and inline images as two different things. You can save an image from a message if it’s attached, but not if it’s placed inline (as far as I know – if it does have the ability, I can’t find it).
- I was tasked at work with converting an online survey into a form that could be sent through email within the company. I had to recreate the design in HTML 3 (because Notes doesn’t support HTML 4), and I had to do it all with tables because it has NO support for CSS. I felt like it was the late 90′s.
“- I tried to set up a rule to forward all email sent by a particular person to my home email address. I couldn’t do it – “forward to” is not an option as of Notes 6.5.”
or maybe your company policy does not allow…?
“- If you have your email sorted automatically into folders (as in, “if sender is X, move message to folder Y), and you receive an email that fits these rules, double-clicking on the notification icon in the tray brings you to the main inbox view – not the folder where the email is.”
it is because the icon in the tray points to the view Inbox (a folder is just a folder, a view is a folder submitted to restrictions)
first, the ln perceived the new email in the Inbox view, and the fact that you set a rule is another question
“- If Notes crashes, it won’t restart unless you either log out or reboot.”
in the meanwhile, it logs a diagnostic file, recording what applications were opened TOTALLY on your pc while the ln crashed
an administrator, provided with a good tool, can discover what actually made your client crash (malware, viruses, etc.)
“- Notes treats attachments and inline images as two different things. You can save an image from a message if it’s attached, but not if it’s placed inline (as far as I know – if it does have the ability, I can’t find it).”
edit a mail > right click > copy the attachment…
“- I was tasked at work with converting an online survey into a form that could be sent through email within the company. I had to recreate the design in HTML 3 (because Notes doesn’t support HTML 4), and I had to do it all with tables because it has NO support for CSS. I felt like it was the late 90’s.”
I would suggest a good old ln Survey database then… ^^
I am so sick of dealing with Lotus Notes. I use Mac and I had to have my company install it to be “up to par with territorial standards.” Not only does it freeze on me daily, it’s the most slow, bogged down, glitchy software I have ever used.
Today it decided to stop working completely! It will start then shut down immediately. Restarting my computer, resetting my PRAM, and clearing caches does nothing. I am at my wits end with this junk program!
I cannot wait for the day where I get to remove this virus of an application from my computer and be done with it.
IBM needs to discontinue this failure of a project they call Lotus Notes.
Hello Brendon,
I am one of those pathetic clingers I guess. I am wondering what is so outdated about producing applications that fill the needs of real business situations. If you don’t like the notes GUI than I can give you your appliaction in a web page. Once you are in the limited use of a web browser what differene does it make what language you wrote the application in. That is as long as it works. I can use most any language on the web page that you would want to use. I have no need to use MySQL or similar program because my Db is built in. I can use CSS, JAVA, JavScript, Flash, HTML or just about anything else. I can do this and still gain the benefit of Lotus Notes security model. Sure I can use other platforms, but it would take me a lot longer just to impliment the field level security that I get with Notes. We have DB’s that run the entire company, from HR, Service to Sales and it is rock solid. I know I am getting old and I do not jump as well as I used to, but I think with IBM’s investment in version 8 and 25 million users I am in good company already.
Why! Why can’t I sort by ‘Who’, ‘Date’, etc. on results from a search?
I really do hate Lotus Notes.
lol i love lotus notes
Just had another great interactive experience here with Notes:
Decided to close a New Memo tab (click the x on the tab) and got the following options:
Send & Save/Send Only/Save Only/Discard/Cancel
If I clicked on x on purpose then these options (except Discard) are all stupid.
OK, maybe I clicked on the x on the tab by accident and actually wanted to keep the mail? OK in this case Cancel is sort of OK, but why would I want any options other than Save As Draft (which Outlook would do automatically) OR ‘I accidently clicked x so go back to the email’?
Instead of option upon option why not cater for the most likely options with highest priority to make the thing straight forward to use?
Clearly the Notes team created a bottom up database with the GUI as a complete afterthought never intended for actual live human email users.
Although, maybe the following option sequence could be useful:
Send & Save/Send Only/Save Only/Discard/Cancel/Install Outlook Instead And Get The Guy Who Recommended Notes And………..
Where to start? Well maybe at the TO field in the New Memo tab:
I find it’s such a groovy way to meet new people. The interactive search facility is so helpful – as I type in names of people I’d like to email I assume that Notes is quietly searching for the people I’ve emailed before (let’s use the name Dave as an example) but no in deedy not, Notes selects a new guy I’ve never met before called Dave – nice guy, wrong guy, bad Notes. We have version 6.5 here and from what I’m hearing about 8.0 maybe it just doesn’t get any better than this.
“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.”
Wow, that’s just a great feature, because I don’t spend 99% of my time actually connected to the network do I?
And for all the Notes geeks, how is training going to resolve:
- crashes that need ZapNotes or KillNotes or a logoff to get me back on?
- having to kill the app when the network connection drops for a second?
- getting an e-mail be be marked as read after I’ve used the preview pane
- sorting ascending and descending?
- Opening two or more e-mails and alt-tabbing between them?
- Actualling putting a table or such like into an e-mail without it turning into an image?
This software is more useless than a chocolate fireguard or tits on a boar.
We know it was developed by crack-smoking retarded hippies:
- the non-standard password logon: what’s with the stupid XXXs and the changing image? That’s just retarded.
- why can I sort my e-mails ascending and descending by each field, this has only been standard on apps since 1995?
- why does it say I have a new e-mail when I don’t?
- why does it use so much memory and CPU?
- why when it loses network connection or crashes, I have to log off to get back in?
- why can’t I drag and drop like any other windows app since 1995?
- sorting by first name?? hahahahaha
- why does the goddamn workspace randomly disappear?
- what app this side of 1990 still uses ini files?
- wanna back up your e-mail? Use a “replica”. Wow, this is where Notes is really the biggest joke on the planet. I just want an Outlook PST equivalent so I can drag and drop between the two.
- Why are there always unread e-mails in folders that I cannot find?
- What’s with reply, reply to all, reply with attachments, reply to all with attachments, etc. ROFL!!
I am so glad that my organisation has moved off Lotus Notes. Its only a matter of time now for the rest of you. The developers and admins that are telling us how good it is should stop being so lazy and retrain into something that has a future. this is a moronic app for geeky tech people only and should have died out with high-button shoes and flares.
I read a few of these comments and had a good laugh. I’m a Notes admin and I’ll admit that Notes does have a fair share of issues but some of the ones described here are more incompetence on the user side or are totally irrelevant to Notes. Ex: “Notes takes 6 minutes to startup”…hey buddy Notes ain’t the problem, get your pc checked out cause it’s most likely a Windows or hardware issue.
The reason I remain a Notes admin, simple, good money. I’m not pro Notes or anything else but I can tell you for sure that Exchange isn’t the answer to all the worlds problems.
The question is this…? Would anyone still use Notes if it wasn’t for the supposedly vastly superior security associated with it. Possibly, but if Exchange’s security could be made comparable out of the box, I reckon that would wipe out 30-50% of sites in one fell swoop.
So, there you go, M$. 15 million Notes seats left, and I’ve just gifted you a way to increase your poaching margins considerably. I’m still not paying for Windows 7 though…
Bummer. I was included in an updated meeting request to a meeting I’ve not previously received. No chance to put this meeting into my calendar now, at least not automatically.
And what about if you want to invite others to a meeting where you’re not the organizer? No way, that doesn’t work, because then the word might spread that there’s free nibbles at the meeting, and suddenly 200 people show up, all with a valid Lotus Notes invitation.
I hope that the fact that Notes takes 10 minutes to load is only a problem on my PC and is not a standard feature to support coffee consumption.
Just upgraded to “I 8 Bloatus”. Revolutionary new features, like email threads – all other email clients have had them for years now. Now, if you choose to display an email thread all other mails are grayed out and inaccessible… wow… maybe in 10 years they’ll get this feature right?
Hello, my name is Ben and I hate Lotus Notes. I have been a Lotus Notes hater for over 10 years. For years I hid my hatred of Notes from my friends and family but once I opened up and joined support groups like this one I began to embrace my hatred. I struggle daily with my hatred of Notes and hope for the day we can all be cured of this dreadful plight. My therapy has taught me to be more compassionate. Now when I schedule a recurring meeting and have to choose an end date I think of the poor programmers and the life they used to live before they were pried out from under a rock.
Our company just installed Lotus Notes system and now we are forced to use it every day. Emails, meeting schedules, reservations, job orders between departments, documentation system and so on. It was fast that I discovered this web page. If I ever have my own company Notes will not be my choice for sure. When using it, I kind of get a feeling that it is a software for Windows 95. Speed, interface, weird structure, preference menus etc… Nothing is intuitive there. IBM guys come from another planet probably. Will order some gear from your web page.
What about those people who still choose to base their careers around Notes administration / development? Why would anyone choose to cling to an irrelevant platform? Is it because they really believe that Notes has a future? Or is it because they’ve waited too long to make the jump and have become irrelevant themselves?
Argh! I think Lotus Notes is spying on me. I’ve surfed this site and the next thing Notes did was to quit unexpectedly. Now, 20 minutes later, it’s still loading. Maybe I’ll have lunch inbetween, it might be up afterwards.
Folders are great, but not when Lotus Notes is telling you that a folder by a specific name already exists… well, it’s kinda true, it did exist but ended up inside another folder all-by-itself. After deleting the folder and trying to create it again in the parent ‘Folders’ directory I get this message “a folder or view with this name already exists”. HALP!
I *knew* this website had to exist! Lotus Notes is the worst plague that humankind has to endure (well, at least the office workers). My Lotus Notes (8.x) takes about 6 minutes to start up. I still haven’t figured out how to search specific folders (the button is missing in the taskbar). In the “all documents” view, I can’t see in which folder a document is located. Notes doesn’t display HTML mails correctly. Notes mails are displayed horribly in other e-mail clients. Whenever an alarm window is displayed, the focus returns to Lotus Notes when I click the window away. I can’t use Sametime or manage other mails while a notification window is displayed. Did I mention Notes is slow? Unstable? Doesn’t render correctly now and then? If there’s a rumour that Notes was created by the Nazis in WWII as a revenge to the lost war, I support this rumour.
What the F?! I sorted by subject to see if anyone else in my group responded to an email. I saw no response, and replied. Turns out, Lotus notes doesn’t exactly sort by subject. Outlook ignored RE: and FWD: when sorting by subject line. Apparently Lotus doesn’t. So now everyone responds 6 times to the same question. Shoot me.
This is not really a vent but rather an offer of help for those who are venting. Here is a heads-up if you are contemplating a migration from Notes to Exchange – the 10MB limit on email attachments in Exchange may cramp your style. Accellion has helped many organization handle this migration by providing a secure file transfer solution that offloads files from email and lets you transfer up to 20GB files and folders. You get to have your cake and eat it too – no Notes, no file attachment limits.
I love Lotus Notes/Domino. I have been a certified developer for 12 yrs and an off and on certified admin in there as well. Without you bitter, unhappy people complaining and needing something new, something better or something fixed, my job wouldn’t be as fun. And we certainly wouldn’t have you all to talk about..
It pays my mortgage. It really is a great product that has so many uses and 8.5 is great!!
my lotus notes won’t keep any of my prefs. it wont keep my internet browser choice (I choose it every time I launch it), won’t print emails (I copy and paste into a text program) and it wont keep the choices I make as far as reminders on meeting and such. TM is not a lot of help because we are on macs and ‘they dont support mac’ ie, they dont know how to fix it.
First post, Notes 8 client. We are supposed to thank our lucky stars that we now have a wonderful “new and innovative” interface. 90% of my CPU and memory consumed 30 minutes and 50 Java processes later it still sucks.
Best feature – not being a notes guy I use help to find out how to create a simple mail filtering rule. Simple enough it says just go to the tools menu and select “rules”. OK I hit the tools menu and there is no “rules” selection. Hmm, that’s rather odd, so I click it again just to make sure my eyes are not playing tricks on me. Sure enough it’s not a selection on the tools menu. I’m baffled, so I ask a guy here who knows the notes client pretty well. Sure enough his answer to me, no silly not THAT tools menu, few clicks later shows me you need to use this OTHER tools menu. Oh gee my bad…creating multiple tools menus priceless.
We do alot of design work for a (large) client that uses Lotus Notes internally. It causes us untold grief when dealing with HTML styling in emails. It’s aweful!
And Carl – you need to put your head back in the sand.
Hello,
DA2 points to an interesting talk from Micorosoft. Of they think Lotus Notes was such a bad product why did they hire one of its creators – Ray Ozzie. If I was Microsoft I would want to eliminate all of the products that are far better than the ones they produce. Exchange is a big heavy expensive pig that can’t do half of what Notes does.
Right, so my work decided to go down the Lotus Notes + Sametime path because it’s multi-platform.
Well as it turns out, this multi-platform is somewhat less that entirely useful.
While Lotus Notes will work on Mac (desktop client) and on Ubuntu (desktop client), the web client will only work on Windows.
Hang on a second, shouldn’t the web client be the easiest to have working multi-platform?
It appears not.
Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner makes a presentation. Go to http://tinyurl.com/np9azk and scroll to about 2:53:45 in the video to hear his remarks about Lotus Notes. It gave me a warm feeling.
I have Notes 8 and it works great. I am not sure what version or on what pc’s others are using, but it is rock solid. I use the quick flag for follow-up every day and it works great with no delay. The replication is just a different name for transfering your mail from the server to your pc. Every mail program has to do it. Outlook is no faster. I think the time sheet comment from one ot the other posts was interesting. The time sheet requirement was created by your own company and its policies. It is not a Notes thing. You are confused. Lotus Notes allows companies to enforce its own workflow and business rules. It is a good thing that Outlook cannot do. The Address book comment was pretty good too. I looked in my address book, just to check and it is sorted by last name. Notes sorts by any column you want. You can even click on a column to sort. I think the waiting and lock up problems are mostly caused by hardware issues and not meeting minimum requirements. I get my mail, I read my mail, no problems. Thanks
As I was standing out in the parking out side, talking to my co-worker we noticed that a guy who got down graded to Lotus Notes was swinging a Lousiville Slugger at his computer. We cheered him on cause we could feel his pain on how bad this product sucks. We then were taking bets on if he would throw his chair and break the window and jump out to save himself.
Lotus Notes 8 came with an exciting new feature: ‘follow up’. Of of curiosity, I clicked on the ‘urgent’ flag. Five minutes later, Lotus unfroze and I had the graphic of a tiny, little red flag next to the email. Wow! How do they do it?
It if is such an amazing database/collaboration system, why does Lotus read ahead by surname in the ‘to’ field of emails, yet list names in the directory in first name order?
Why do you have to open up someone’s name details and then click over to the second tab just to get a phone number? Surely, this is not such a crazy or abstract detail to want?!
I love coming in to work in the morning and opening Notes. The first thing to happen is for the computer to tell me that I have new mail. Then, when I try to “open inbox” it crashes because Notes decided that it wanted to “replicate a database”. What the hell is this activity and why is it necessary every day when I want to check my e-mail. Also what the hell is the point in telling me that I have new mail if I don’t? I get lied to at least twice a day by Notes. If I lied to my colleagues like that I’d get fired. If I stopped my colleagues reading their e-mail for no good reason I’d get fired. I’m trying to give up smoking for Christ’s sake; how am I going to do that when I have to use Lotus-bloody-*******-Notes to do my job?
So – I’m guessing that this gripe has been, um, gripped (?) on many an occasion, but I’m not here to parade originality.
I’m here to vent.
So, thanks to this little application I get locked out of my WORK email because I don’t do my WORK timesheets. Let’s just analyze the logic behind this. What, work email is a privilege? It’s my deserved dessert after eating my timesheet veggies? Luck me gets to do my job only on condition of doing my timesheets?
Call me a cantankerous, miserable, uncooperative little gimp, but that aint much of a carrot for me. Especially when my personal email is so much easier to use.
Perhaps there should be some kind of beer-credit system put in place? Now we’re getting somewhere. By Friday i’d have every day up to date – perhaps even with accurate hours and jobs recorded.
Perhaps.
Why do you try to debug my programs for me when I try to use your API Lotus? And when I say “debug” I mean inform me that my program has crashed, and somehow keep visual studio from helping me find out why.
Notes SUX a Fatty. Why make a portal type system that only a handful of people can code well on. And those people are 99% of the time not good with “Curb Appeal”. ACL Suck. Archiving anything Sux. The GUI sux. Training people on how to use it SUX. Listening to others complain about it SUX. Adding, moveing, resoring, deleteing a user profile SUX. IBM please thrown in the towel! It SUX!!! Or sell it to LENOVO so they can put a fork in it.
So the password box contains the non-standard “password field” X’s and those stupid changing images to confuse onlookers. Firstly, stupid idea, secondly why didn’t they carry this across to the Messaging login box as well (this is a standard Windows-style password box). All I can deduce from this is that Lotus Notes sucks.
Let’s start with printing employees that are listed with last name first in random order, or that it sorts by first name! Who does that? Lotus notes sucks! The most stupid friggin’ program on the planet!
the terminator was sent back in time from the future with one task…
its mission..
to hunt down and kill Mitch Kapor’s & Jonathan Sach’s mother’s preventing their birth and stopping the development of lotus 1-2-3, saving the world from the catastrophy that would otherwise be inflicted upon it many administrators and thier users called the day .. judgementday..
billions of hours of sleep was lost … The surviviours, would emerge to fight a new war…. the war of the notes database, complete frustration awaited them…
The notes gurus, developers and admins just don’t get it. Okay, so it’s easy to be a Notes admin and everything works great under the covers… BUT WHY OH WHY does the interface have to suck so much? Compare it to the interface of any other app on the market, Microsoft or other, and it is by far THE WORST! I’ve been using it for ten years and just hate it more and more everyday.
get me one .9mm pistol and two ammos,
i’ll put one bullet in my laptop, and one bullet in the IT’s skull.
1. Lotus Notes\Domino does have a recall function. 2. Lotus Note is not an email client but a collaboration tool. I am a messaging and collaboration administrator and administering Exchange is a nightmare. I have done many migrations from Domino to Exchange and Exchange to Domino. I have found that no one is ever happy. Most users complain about their current email program and want to change to the other and yet when they finally get their way they then complain about the one they said was more advanced once they have been migrated. Seems that everyone thinks the grass is greener on the other side until they get there. Can i also point out that most people who complain about Lotus Notes are using an old version that is 1 or 2 versions behind and are comparing it with the new version of outlook
i like your workspace, lotus. Reminds me of majong
Lotus, your features are so intuitive, like Archive last modified and expired… can you make an archive feature, like archive all the e-mails with the letter z in the body text or archive all the e-mails in my box containing bold characters, something really of use to me. Even better archive e-mails that were SECOND last modified and 2 days to expire — this would benefit me the most, Lotus. Thanks.
Lotus Notes is so secure that prevent copying can be changed by a simple agent. You’re so secure Lotus, keep up the good work!
Thanks to Lotus, I lost 12 good weekends this year so far.My Lotus Dumbino server kept crashing and I had to come to the office to try and fix it.
one user noticed that when he was sending mail that sometimes it did not save in his sent folder, so he was smart and just cc’ed himself whenever he sent out a Lotus Notes e-mail. You the man, Lotus!
My out of office started working when i came back from leave
I read all my e-mails today and my box still says that i have two unread e-mails. Where are they Lotus? Where are these two unread e-mails? Is my mailbox hiding them because they fall under the censorship act?
I was running my Symantec the other day and it quarantined notes.exe
The best program ever made is KillNotes.exe
Pray you never have to open a 9GB Lotus Notes db. It will say “opening” but never open.
I think all the companies out there should boycot Notes and not make any thirdparty products supporting Notes.
What about that compact feature in Notes? Kinda old skool, isn’t it? My mailbox was at one time 1GB with 2 e-mails in it.
Hey what about that new version of Notes, called version 8. It takes longer to open/load and greater amount of time is wasted opening your mailbox. Thanks again Lotus. You guys always deliver…
And what about that Lotus support in Boston. What a bunch of… They are more concerned about closing a ticket than solving it. You don’t deserve to work in the U.S.
And what about that replicate read/unread feature… What a shame. One time, our CEO went on vacation and was using his webmail and when he came back he got a surprise and saw all the mail he read unread. We replicated his webmail replica with his LAN mailbox and guess what? His LAN mailbox took precedent and lost the read/unread count of his webmail replica. We managed to restore his original read/unread count by restoring his mailbox from a backup job the night before. We spent hours and hours manually matching the count with the one we restored from backup. Thanks Lotus Notes. We love you. Continue this horrible software.
I once had a girlfriend. She was hot, tall, blonde, blue eyed and had the greatest bod… One day we were talking and she said that she loved Lotus Notes… That’s when I dumped her on the spot.
that is a good example on how to celebrate differences between people ^^
mes félicitations ^^
Die Lotus Notes, DIE!
Maybe it is be easy to support and configure, even great if you want to manage data bases. But I don’t! I just need to sent emails and have a working calendar. Lotus is exceptionally slow and I waste lots of my day just waiting. The interface is poor and counter intuitive. The menus are pants. The help file is laughable. The address book is slow and rubbish, with an incredible lack of ability to find names you know it contains. It randomly hangs up but luckily I have now discovered KillNotes.exe.
I have had to manually set up an agent to cope with MIME file attachments, as our IT department has no idea. My organisation has also disabled most of the database features and archiving, so we’re dealing with a cripples Lotus Notes at best!
I hate it!
Mark Conway – Notes 8.5 does have message recall function!
I was just going to subscribe to the rss feed, but my notes client feed reader cannot be configured with a proxy server to get out of our corporate network!!!!!!!!
it could be, but maybe your corporation does not allow ^^
Vista + Lotus Notes (with high security & DB’s) = Shoot yourself in the face.. LN is turning into Symantec AV. Check the manual uninstall for LN and compare it to the uninstall of Norton and you will begin to see the B.S. i put up with as an ADMIN.
Bonjour, je viens de commencer sur Lotus, j’hallucine comme c’est bizarre , et mal foutu ! Je vais plutot m’orienter sur exchange .
Il y a pleins d’icones qui ne veulent rien dire (nonsense) , il faut rentrer dans des sous menus totalement aberrants pour configurer un truc tout simple. vraiment Lotus , c’est NUL.
hello I’m french, I want to say too that I just started with Lotus , and it is really bad, and really difficult to use !
lots of bizar icons, tons of menus that serve to misterious things .
Create a directory is so freaking difficult.
I really think IBM has to restart from zero their client. this is bad and i HATE IT and also their programmers .
ok maybe peoples jobs are **** and vent it out on the lotus. what versions are they all using and computer specs? If its crashin it could be a lack of memory. What version are they using? I looked at the 8.5 , I’m about to test it for myself….
Just got a job with a French company, but working remotely at home in Sweden. Laptop delivered in post with Notes 7 installed. As texters say: WTF? Is this 2009 or what? No toggling between mails (like windows), typing mails is about as smooth as a half-brick, importing and creating contacts would be easier as a printed list, and – worst of all – I can’t make meetings last overnight.
Some corporate IT contract apparently has tied us into using this abomination, but working from home I seldom have the opportunity to vent my technological bile. Just complete *****.
Thanks for creating this site – I’ve taken my first step to feeling better.
why replicate ?
why archive ?
why pop-up in the middle of the screen when new mail arrives ?
why reply and reply to all ?
I didn’t know that a hatred for an inaminate thing can be so passionate!! That is until I am forced to use Lotus Notes as part of my job. It is slow, counter-intuitive, mind-bogglingly cumbersome and the only reason for keeping the stupid thing? DATABASES… and I cannot find the damn things.. not even the workflow forms… where the !$@&!* are they?? Hate is not even a strong enough word!!! Never thought I’d be jealous of someone using Outlook but the last time I saw someone using it, I cried in dispair! I want it back sooooo bad. It’s sad. It’s like a long lost lover that you fought with until you end up with a bad ***** like Lotus Notes as your second wife. There! I feel better (slightly, but better).
Yep, hate it with a passion. Not a big fan of Microsoft products either (closet linux fan), but have to confess that Outlook is vastly superior to Lotus notes, in terms of the desktop email client anyway. Would love to know if anybody has had success with connecting another client (eg. Thuderbird etc.) to the domino server, without using POP3. I have heard that there is a plugin for Outlook that will connect, but need to be able to use a free (preferably open source) email client.
Oh, did I say that I hate Lotus Notes …
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$ ****. 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
Does notes have recall functionallity…. OH THATS RIGHT IT DOESNT!
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…..
Why it takes too much time to archive in lotus notes 7??
If you have a solution please let me know
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….)
Someone should have told me about this site, or the **** bloatware called Lotus Notes a few months back.
I joined **M and didn’t really like the job. Nah, actually hate it. But Lotus Notes is seriously one gigantic pile of dung that drives me nuts on a daily basis.
When I quit and if my boss asks me why, I’ll tell him Lotus Notes made me do it. Oh BTW, we even have to use LN to submit get our resignations so that it gets processed by HR. Goddamn its ironic!
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.
hey anoter one, I just look for all those who try to defend this ****… but I could not find a site
http://www.ilovelotusnotes.com
http://www.google.com.ar/search?q=I+love+lotus+notes&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:es-ES:official&client=firefox-a
So….. I belive this soft gives more frustrations than assistance in our day to day work
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
I will keep posting!! it is fun!
I work in IT since Notes 4,5 and I had worked or supported evry version of this soft and it only gets crappier.
I can recall several sad histories related to it.
Many says, that is a complete database, yes, but as a good database it get corrupted every time it can! so If you are an end user, wy you must know how to administer a database? aren´t for that the administrators???
Wy we can just get a calendar notice? or realistic count of inbound mails? O simply send the fricking e-mail when I ask to?
So, many people, had developed free software that works, 100 times better than this…
I would feel a lot of shame if I was the notes creator or developer.
NOTES SUCKS!
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!!!!!
Once upon a time (before Outlook was placed on earth) there was Lotus Notes. Behold, Lotus Notes had F9 to refresh, and F5 to “lock” the app.
Then along came M$ who changed the standard.
It’s quite clear isn’t it, Lotus Notes is just the best program, ever, full stop. The developers/admins posting on this site are right, how could they be wrong, after all, they’re developers and admins, they know everything. It’s quite clear that a program as good as Lotus Notes wouldn’t drive ANYONE AT ALL to post their ramblings of hatred towards this piece of ****. Nor would anyone start up a website after so much fury, nor would they even PAY FOR A ******* DOMAIN!?!?! Would they you retarded developers and admins pushing this product. GO HANG YOURSELVES, IT’S EASIER THAN FINDING A SOLUTION IN NOTES!
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.
OMG, what a bunch of crybabies. Do you all do the same thing when you go into a public bathroom and the automatic paper towel dispenser doesn’t work for you. wa wa wa wa wa, and the majority of you haven’t a clue. Yes, maybe the interface isn’t the best but it is, in fact a true Groupware product. The best way to explain is it’s what Exchange wants to be when it grows up. Take it from someone who has experience and certifications in both. Stop crying and do your jobs.
Why is F9 refresh instead of F5 like every other app in the world?
Why do i only get new email notification some of the time?
Why do some of my user’s have random email that sometimes disappear from their database?
I don’t know how I did it, but I will stop trying to created nested form events, Notes.
The errors are so non-descriptive. Horseshite.
And what’s with Notes admin people – why are they all so strange?
It must be cheaper than Outlook…..my company merged with another, one used Notes the other Outlook and the merged company picked Notes!!!
some fun points, I can’t remember everything in one sitting..
1) Reply to all always includes yourself!! Great programming
2) Recurring meetings can only go 10 times!!
3) Try searching by subject line! At least the newer version sort of works sometimes.
4) Ever try to check your calendar before you accept a meeting invite? How about a warning that you have overlapped meetings? Nope!
5) Ahh remember in Outlook when someone e-mails you, you could just right-click and add them to your address book….done! Don’t the morons at IBM even get a copy of Outlook for ideas????
Much more, but that’s all I feel like typing at the moment…..
It’s pretty bad when your product is outclassed by a Microsoft product.
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….
I have to use lotus due to corporate choice… they are stupid or what, lotus notes eats all my ram, and is a email program!!, the calendar sucks, but I have to use it.
WHY the executives are so blind and stupid to chose such and ugly slow, crashy, ram consuming product.
@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/
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
I install Lotus Notes daily on computers here at work, love me. I’m spreading hate!!
So, there are some good things you can say. At least in version 8 they have added support for frequent crashes by automatically re-opening all of the emails that you had open when it crashed. I can only see this feature being required by an application that realized that it was incapable of staying up & running for any prolonged period of time.
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.
I done a switch on a Blackberry today and I was shimmying around like susan boyle. Well chuffed with myself, so I was. – Not that it’s got anything to do with lotus notes, which by the way, I love.
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.
OMG I HATE LOTUS NOTES! Now my company has Lotus Notes 6.5, it’s the best that 1996 technology can offer. But here is what happened. On Monday I see I had appointment set up for 9am Tuesday w/ my Vice President. Then in Monday afternoon the appointment was changed to Wednesday 9:30. I thought cool no problem. Well I come in today and I go to the meeting to see no one there. I go back to my computer and click on the meeting and then a notice comes up “Information on the event has changed, do you wish to update?” WTF DO YOU THINK LOTUS NOTES! The meeting was at 8:30am, so I missed a meeting and now my VP is somewhat embarrassed w/ our over seas counterparts because his Team wasn’t there. So my VP isn’t happy with me… that is why I hate lotus notes… I do feel better, but I still want exchange.
old company bought out, I exported 800+ Outlook contacts to excel spreadsheeet and now cannot import them to lotus notes….any suggestions?
OK, admittiedly fairly new to Notes 6.5…hate it! Maybe 6 months is not enough time, but…I still hate it.
Can anyone recommend a way the meeting requests can be selected from the calendar like in Outlook rather then from the mail view? I get 200+ emails a day with multiple meeting requests. If I miss one meeting request I don’t know I have until some ******* calls me and asks why I am not in their “most important” meeting. I would like all meeting to go directly to my calendar and sort it out there.
FYI – Before you Notes butt kissers spout off, I enabled Automatic Responses in the Calendar and though it is checked, I get a note saying that I am “not authorized to perform that fuction”. And yes I talked to our Notes IT admin and they had no idea…big shock there..
Any ideas??
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;-))
Can some one help me? On two occassions I have opened and read a block of emails. They turned from red to black. I left for lunch and when I came back, they turned back to red and all the emails that I sent were colored red as well. Does anyone know why this would happen?
you entered another (local or server) replica?
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?
It just responded… pretty good, huh?
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…
I’m a particular fan of the fact that it takes Lotus several hours sometimes to finally decide that they way I entered an e-mail address or contact name is unacceptable, that it can’t deliver the message, and that I have to re-send the stupid thing. Just when you thought it was safe to shut down for the day.. e-mails from 9am come flying back at you. Horrendous, awful piece of software with no redeeming features.
Erin M, do you take the addresses from your personal address book or from the address book on server?
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.
“death to notes”
I just got a taste of Exchange 2007 about 1½ years ago and let me tell you it wasn’t easy to get into either, but as time goes by you learn how the software works and (in some cases though not mine – I still love Notes) you end up liking it.
I want to stab Notes in the face
Ok, so we just went live with Notes last night. I know it hasn’t been in production long here in our environment, but as a support person that has to support this load of ****, I cant ******* stand it. We switched from Novell Groupwise to Lotus Notes, Groupwise was total ****, but I would love to go back to it over Notes any day.
It is the most unorganized and cluttered piece of **** I have ever worked with. I cant get over how confusing it is to try and navigate through all the option and settings in the client. There are 17 different ways to get to everything and I think thats a lot of the problem, especially when someone is new to the program, you get confused and cant ever find ****, or at least spend 45 minutes looking for it.
The user.id thing has got to be the biggest piece of **** concept in almost the entire program. I mean come the **** on. It is a support ******* nightmare. Why even use a ******* user name and password if it doesnt matter, it wont work unless you have that ******* file anyway, and not to mention that half the time Notes doesnt recognize it WHEN ITS SITTING THE THE DAMN DATA DIRECTORY. So we have to go clear the data out of the notes.ini, reinitialize the client and start all over, there goes another 20 minutes of it trying to reconfigure itself. Oh, and getting an ID file to someone who’s doesnt pull, thats fun, we have to navigate to their computer and give it to them because we sure cant email it to them. Sure they could use iNotes, but who wants to try and explain that bullshit to them.
I dont know if its a setting or what, but when I get new emails, it notifies me, sure, but I still have to refresh my view to see the ******* email…bullshit! And the replication bullshit? How about I hit send and you ******* send it, dont queue it for a scheduled replication, if I wanted to wait a couple of minutes, I would have played with myself under the desk before I typed the ******* thing out.
Really though, I could go on for hours, but I will stop with that…for now…
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!
I suspect most people who hate Outlook have simply never administered nor used Notes. It’s one thing to say an application is bad, it’s another to say it’s the worst when it’s the only one you know. Lotus Notes is a reference for bad software. One may criticize Outlook, it’s far from perfect, but nothing even comes close to the Notes failboat. It has the stench of failure wrapped in the cloak of corporate idiosyncrasies.
JOHN D – I know Notes is a development tool. Knowing that doesn’t relieve my stress in having to endure the crappy “mailfile” ***** 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.
Hey all. I’m coding a web-app, which works in just about every browser known to humankind, except, of course, in the builti-in Lotus Notes browser.
Is there anyone out there who can tell me anything about the built in browser in Lotus Notes 6.5? IBM has been virtually useless in this respect… I need to know things like what version of Javascript it can support, what level(s) of CSS it can render, etc. If someone could even just tell me what engine it’s built off (mozilla, netscape, etc), that would be somewhat useful. Can it support the Flash plugin?
Any and all help would be appreciated.
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!
You really should upgrade! You are using software that is 15 years old and is not supported by IBM.
I am so incredibly frustrated with 6.5 I could cry. In fact, I just might. I cant believe this application. OMG it is the absolute worst, I have ever seen.
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.
RE:WTF said on May 16th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I’m not sure how things are set up at your company, but there’s no reason you should be having issues like the ones you describe. It shouldn’t take 3 hours to restore files from the trash to the inbox – it’s a simple move from one view to another by changing a status field. The documents don’t actually move from one location to another, except when you replicate (or copy) the file itself. Hidden fields on the message form control what views/folder a document will display in, this is the way Notes applications work.
One thing most people don’t know is that Notes was designed as a RAD (Rapid Application Development) platform – not as an email system. Your Notes mailfile is nothing more than a specialized Notes app. Notes existed before email became such a key part of business. The email functionality has been added to Notes/Domino to keep it up to date. Outlook was created from the ground up just for email and scheduling – so it stands to reason it’s better than Notes in these areas. Notes has a ton of baggage that Outlook doesn’t have, which is why there tend to be problems with Notes. Lotus has always tried to maintain backward compatibility with it’s applications – R4 apps should run with minimal changes on a R8 server/client. Microsoft can not claim this level of application support for it’s own products.
None of what I’ve written will make your problems disappear, but it’s possible that a little deeper understanding of how Notes works might help reduce your stress level. It would be nice if Notes “just worked” like Outlook/Thunderbird/etc. but it can’t – it’s foundations are completely different. It would be nice if my car would just run on electricity – it can’t because it’s got a gasoline engine in it.
Notes languished for a long time because not enough money was spent on it – this has changed in recent years. There are a ton of changes between R7 and R8.5, and more are coming. IBM/Lotus have finally started to listen to clients and they are working towards fixing the warts. It won’t happen overnight, but it is happening.
One thing I’ve found while working with Notes is that there is a good support community out there, you can find people who are willing to help you through issues or find workarounds.
1 more tidbit in closing – Microsoft has made a habit of patenting and/or copyrighting it’s UI and associated functionality. This is why companies are forced to do things differently than Outlook. If they try to copy straight from MS products – they will probably find themselves hit with a lawsuit.
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 **** 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 ***.
lotus notes is a big soggy pile of runny **** with visible corn. The developers and/or admins who come on here and say “all we need is training” are missing the point, which is not surprising since many uber nerd faggoty developers and/or admins have their head up their ***. The GUI sucks. It cannot be fixed. The program is an unstable, memory devouring monstrosity. It is the epitomy of piss poor programming and afterthought that is the source of endless misery world over. The program does not adhere to common, established conventions within Windows. It does not use Windows GUI gadgets, drag and drop or shortcuts. It doesn’t even save window positions. It is the polar opposite of an intuititve, well designed and well executed seamless piece of software which makes the life of the end user easier and more productive. Among other things, it crashes, it works inconsistently, it is not at all reliable and it is agonizingly slow. It will make your shiny new quad core ferrari pc run like a P2 from 1985. It doesn’t even use ******* fonts correctly! Yes, now all your email can look like ****, just use lotus notes! The developers who programmed this vile piece of **** should be lined up against a wall and shot, no mercy! IBM should be burned. The IT personnel of my company who adopted this worthless pile of ****, migrating away from an excellent, in place, outlook/exchange setup should be castrated, then burned. This stinking wad of absolute evil should be avoided at all costs. If you’re about to get a job at a company that uses notes, don’t take it! You’re better off letting your family starve than have to use this miserable ball of nasty disgusting vomit every day. In conclusion, **** the developers and others that defend this worm infested rotting carcas. Say no to notes!
I work for IBM so I have no choice but to use this piece of **** 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 ******* nuts and stomp on its throat.
Hey guys – I think that most of you are probably just Notes certified and have no real understanding of Notes. We look after thousands of users, machines never crash, mail works, Notes Traveller works, our Java works, our MQ integration works, our web stuff works. How come it works for us and not for you. Oh and we use it on Windows 2000, 2003, 2008 and Linex. We also integrate into Oracle, DB2, SQL server, yet it still works. We never crash. I think that most of you just don’t know how it works – maybe you should go an a few courses or if you studied, ask for your fees back, because you were not taught correctly.
Mike,
I think most of all that people that were transported from one software (I mean: a messaging client) to another, find very difficult to break out from the routine and try to think a bit of their own
the other thing is that everyone of those who yell that ln sux very very rarely use it as a database access and managing and designing tool for which it was basically created, but a simple messaging client
and as a simple messaging client, it is too advanced for a lambda user
****!!!!!!!!
Why is it that ANY problem in Lotus Notes can ONLY BE SOLVED BY A ******* 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 ******* PROGRAM.
WHY THE HELL IS OUT OF OFFICE NOT ACCESSIBLE THROUGH PREFERENCES!!!!!
Why the hell is every problem with lotus solved by writing a ******* Script.
AAAGGGHHHHH!!! ****!!!!!
So crappy slow and his spyware processs eat the cpu up….
I HATE LOTUS NOTES!!!!!!!!!!! PIECE OF COW DUNG
Just started a new job. Everything looking great. Good company, progressive work environment, high tech gear. Then they introduce me to this ‘Lotus Notes’. It’s like being back the in 1980s, but slower. The Welcome page is nice. But when I customise it, they seem to have neglected drag and drop. I believe Google allows you to do that, like, everywhere to, like, everything. But it did let me choose one of the fixed layouts and add links to one of the boxes. Although it only let me put in five links. Why five? Why not six, or eight, or as many as I might need? I can only assume that IBM, being such a big and distinguished company, had done research that says I don’t need more than five. And with the web access version, that useful little bar with buttons that floats over the other useful bit with links is not so useful. Oh, it does allow me to move it to the other side of the screen, where it covers up other useful links. I wonder who programmed that? And whether they still have a job. I suppose they’re probably lead developer on Notes by now. And this is just day one of the job. Tomorrow I have to actually start using it. But I’m sure it can only get better. Right?
All I bloody wanted to do was paste a URL into a mail – white screen and a 5 minute wait – this **** drives me nuts !
Short and simple. IBM sucks. Stop working on information technologies, IBM. IBM can be part of Fast food market maybe. Sounds good, like IBM Mega Mac or IBM Chicken Fries. IBM is a dying grandpa on IT sector.
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.
After reading most of your comments, I have discovered that you simply don’t know what you are doing.
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!
Running a relatively large IT department I was looking for an alternative to Outlook and Exchange due to the TCO for the Microsoft product set. Unfortunately we have implemented Sharepoint now which must be one of Microsoft’s best ever marketing campaigns as I have never dealt with such a poorly put together application using technolgy that came out of the ark (iis and sql). I was toying with the idea of switching to lotus notes as I could get my mail, applications, instant messaging and team sites all under 1 license (saving a considerable amount of money circa 75% of what we are currently spending. I am however conscious of what my customers need and looking at some of the comments on this website it may not go down too well (although I could always continue to use the Outlook client). As there is no way I am going to continue to use the inadequate and costly Microsoft product set has anyone a viable alternative to Lotus notes?
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.
DavyGravy is the real numb-nuts for his last comment. What a moron.
The point is that the notes email client is just so un-intuitive. Doing some of the simple things that most email clients do is just made difficult in notes. Yes yes I know notes is not just an email platform, but that is what most people use use it for, and it is just poor in comparison to its rivals.
I generally don’t like microsoft, but I would choose outlook over notes any day.
We migrated to notes from outlook to notes a few months back and it has been like going back in time tech wise. I haven’t heard a good word said about notes from anyone since they were migrated.
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 ****. ****, crappity **** **** ****.
I love this site, biggest collection of numpties ever gathered together in one place.
I can’t do this, I can’t do that — Yes you can numb-nuts, the bit you can’t do is THINK!
Keep ‘em coming, give me loads of laughs
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….
Sigh….You all have it made….We just migrate from Outlook to Lotus (Please don’t ask why, it was a corporate decision…Above my pay grade) First, that was a nightmare in itself…But if you ever feel the urge to throw your PC out the window because of Lotus…Remember this, ” All you have to do it use it….I have to support it.”
Cheers.
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.
Anyone here have the privilege of using Lotus SameTime Connect?
I tells ya….that is one beaut of a chat client…..
We recently got version 7.5 in here and all I can say is, My lord this thing is terrible!!!
It takes forever to start…
Eats up more memory than Lotus Notes itself..
Loses its connection to the server all the time…
And the server itself is always down…
Leave it to IBM to ruin an IM chat client…..these programs have been around for what?….only 15 years or more…
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.
Our company switched to lotus notes and I love it! I mean, I love the early 90′s, so why not use technology from the era?!?
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.
Outlook used to make me cringe about once a day. Stupid PST limitations on older clients. The tedious nature of finding and mapping a Public folder. Having Offline mode right up front, not behind an option or two… However, I have since switched companies and am now stuck with Notes. There is not enough space in this comment field to describe how much, and specifically why Notes suck. But how about we just say that Notes makes Outlook like a gleaming beacon of hope in the Email world.
Sincerely,
Seriously
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………………..
Would it kill them to let you be able to add a Folder name to the recipients list so you file-as-you-go? I mean, really. It’s just not that hard, the CC Mail application in use 17 bagucking years ago managed to have the function, but can Lotus *narrows eyes* No. No it can’t. Why? Because Lotus Notes is a stinking pile of poo.
Outlook, Outlook, where for art thou Outlook?
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.
Let’s talk about some amazing Notes features:
1) Randomly and often, bookmark.nsf will become corrupt, and you will have to delete it and start all over by readding all 40 bookmarks you have on the left toolbar. Keep in mind you only have those bookmarks there because the databases you have to access are not searchable in any reasonable form, so you most likely had a coworker show you the deep, dark cavern where that database lies – and thus created a shortcut for it so you didn’t have to ever travel into that horrid cavern again! So, bookmarks? Never rely on them. Useless feature. Force yourself to memorize endless file paths to access what you need to work on.
2) Instant messaging features! Wow! I can talk with my coworkers via the IM client within Notes! Too bad I am unable to: sort the names in any sort of order OTHER than alphabetical; rename the contacts to include any sort of USEFUL information on them, like what office they’re in, or what position they hold – you know, things that would be helpful if you ever needed to contact them; oh, and if we do a certifier change on your name, forget anybody being able to see you on THEIR IM lists! You’d better contact all 347 people you have on your list and let them know that you’re Jane Doe/UnitedStates/Company instead of Jane Doe/City/Company, even though NOTHING else about your name has changed, your email address is still the same, and your SHORT name is still the same! IM Client my @$$.
3) Don’t expect to export your emails more than about two or three times. After that it freezes up and you have to go into your notescache folder and delete everything in there, then restart Notes, and export 3 more. Then by this time, Notes has probably become such an intense resource hog that it’s locked up and you will need to use the ever infamous Killnotes to continue! Hello, I am IBM. My monstrosity of a “program” is so absolutely rancid that I had to create another “program” just to get it to work properly after it locks up!
4) The neverending river of irrelevant error messages that aren’t even close to coherent thought never ceases to amaze me. “The encrypted data was modified or the wrong key was used to decrypt it.” Oh, you’re telling me that you forgot how to store the password for the gargantuan helping of HELL that you call your IM client? WOW, that was so easy to figure out! Thanks, IBM!
5) I adore how when you create a new user in Notes, you aren’t able to add the local Notes administrators to the ACL until you have gone into their email account and edited the ACL, acting as the user. Yes, because heaven forbid, those local Notes admins all read through your email, because they have SO much time do that while they’re sitting their twiddling their thumbs not doing anything!
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.
Lotus Notes is great! It is so great that I have to use killnotes.exe at least twice a day! I’m so happy that a program was created to shut down all of the processes that Notes leaves running when it crashes.
The best part is that killnotes is actually supported by IBM! Awesome!
Did I mention how much I love it when Lotus Notes crashes! It provides me with extra time to think about the email I was previously typing.
Perhaps I should learn how to program so that I can create a stable Lotus Notes.
P.S. – I love sarcasm.
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.
Why is it that when I search for how to do something in Lotus Notes, all I ever find is how DEVELOPERS can do things?
Are there any NON-developers that use Lotus Notes?
We’re deploying this product to 20,000 staff, most of who don’t know how to wipe their own *** without a helpdesk. How am I going to tell them they have to write a script if they want to find out where an email is being stored????
Are IBM absolutely f**king crazy?
All they should be required to do is “right-click and go to properties” but no, they have to create a f**king script, don’t they.
Why does EVERYTHING have to be so F**KING GOD DAMN F**KING HARD IN LOTUS NOTES!!!!
I cannot swear enough at the moment.
Why do IBM have 40 years of computing on record when you search their site?
Do they actually think that anyone living in today’s society cares how to fix a problem in Lotus Quickplace 3? We’re up to version 8! [edit] WHO CARES ABOUT YOUR CRAPPY OLD VERSION.
Why I go searching on Microsoft site about something Windows, I don’t get results coming up on how I should defrag my hard drive in Win 3.1.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
DIE IBM, DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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…
Jock said on April 22nd, 2009 at 3:28 am
About the workspace:
1. View ==> Dock the Open list
2. find the “Applications” icon on the left side. Left click.
3. there you can see “Workspace” as the first option. Right click.
4. there you see a local menu. Choose the one before last option “Set bookmark as homepage”
@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 ***.
For those who say NL is a brilliant platform…. its supposed to be an email client for the end user….. That being said it truly is the worst end user experience I have ever had.
Oh god just tried to schedule a meeting! oh no I made a room change… oh god don’t crash on me now…. nooooo!
Another one I forgot – randomly I have to press F9 for my inbox to refresh. Not always though. After a few months of emails appearing when they’re supposed to, I am lulled into a false sense of security. Then I’ll have a quiet day with not much happening in the inbox, think ‘that was strange, maybe I’ll press F9 to be sure’ and 20 email appear that I should have seen HOURS AGO! Why F9? Why not F5, the universally understood key for refresh? BECAUSE NOTES IS A COUNTERINTUITIVE PILE OF ****!
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 **** ‘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!!!
Where do I start? Having used various email clients for years I joined a company using Notes. Notes 6 or 7 looks like it was written in the 80′s, Notes 8 looks like it came from the 90′s but is just so flaky. It doesn’t follow any Microsoft GUI standards, crashes, doesn’t start, corrupts it’s own files, fails to work offline no matter what replication you setup, corrupts all your sync’ed data with a BlackBerry, RSS feeds have packed up, search just doesn’t work, the dictionary doesn’t include many common terms, emails take ages to turn up in the inbox list even though it’s placed an icon in the taskbar yada yada yada….
Please give me Outlook!!
“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.
The worst mail system ever…. (is that a mail system????) It’s the worst system ever!
Imagine the meeting :
- What do we do next?
- What be the worst thing we could do for the end user?
- Yeah… let’s do it… they will hate us! Great!!!
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.
“We have feature called as “Replication” where we can work offline as well.”
Allow me to reiterate: “Complete and utter stupidity. It’s just a useless feature that only serves to make things needlessly annoying and complicated. It’s nonsensical work within the illusion that you are online. Just wait until you are actually online to work with your email. Was there an email that you need to read? If it’s so important, you would have saved it somewhere safe and accessible. An email you need to send? Replication or not, lotus notes or not, an email will only be sent if one has connectivity.” Also, one can use any productivity app to create the message and anything else that can be attached. Once back online, it literally takes under a minute to put the email together before clicking send. copy, paste, attach, send. Voila, email created. Replication is a useless feature.
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.
I LOVE Lotus Notes. Nothing else provides such a rich environment where EVERY application can be customized. In Outlook, you’re stuck with what you get. In Lotus Notes, if I don’t like the way a view sorts, or something looks, I go change it. If I don’t like that a return receipt is sent all the time, I modify the code to turn off return receipt.
You poor, poor, dumb, poor Outlook user. You have no idea how rich of an application platform Lotus Notes really is. You think it is ONLY email. Lotus is Outlook/Exchange plus SQL, Sharepoint, IIS and Messenger all together in one nice neat package. I take pitty on the poor user that is so dumb that they can’t see how great of a system this is.
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!!!
Very poor API condition and undocumented everything….I hate Lotus notes…especially PROGRAMMING!!!
Very poor API condition and undocumented everything….I hate Lotus notes…
To AC,
I am not arguing that Notes is hard to learn to use basic send and recieve. The point that you are missing is that Notes is sluggish un-versitile compared to Outlook. Notes has an un-intuitive and un-thoughtout UI and i struggle to understnad why large organisations are adopting it. You’ve been supporting this product for 15 years… well of course your the wrong person to argue with because you are clearly commited and loyal to this product. But in short, I strongly feel that a higher productivity and better overall piece of mind within a company can be achieved with Outlook. It is a product with a simple and friendly UI, it is extremely interoperable and out performs notes. Seriously, why are you defending it?
I hate Outlook….. there I said it….. am I better now doctor?
“Afshin said on April 6th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
This is a funny site, not that I enjoy seeing people suffer but most of these problems are user related or from ignorance. I have made a good living selling, supporting, programming in Lotus Notes platform for the past 15 years and have seen it all. I work for a company with 5000 users on Lotus Notes without a hitch or any meaningful complaints. I’d start looking for something else to blame, since people that know and understand will make you use it.”
No one should require training to check and recieve their email.
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).
One real suggestion… just start over. If somebody wants legacy, then tell them to bend over and use this crappy piece of poo. Make a new version that is an OFFICE EMAIL client. Not a database program with an email feature.
Dear developers of Lotus Notes. This is the largest piece of **** 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.
Hi Guys,
Better ask Ray ozzie who developed this product. As many of you are seems to be not have properly trained on lotus notes.
We have feature called as “Replication” where we can work offline as well.
80 of the fortune 500 companies using lotus notes.
for more features visit this site
http://www.edbrill.com
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.
When i changed jobs and joined a company that uses LN I was in total despair. Been using Outlook all my life and to face all the counter -intuitiveness of LN is painful. What sort of muppets will force its hundreds of thousands workforce to use this utter piece of sh*t!?!?!? One of the funnier reasons i’ve heard is “it’s b/c it is so ****, no one bothers to write virus for it”. !
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 ****..just my emails but it gives you **** loads of ****. 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.
“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”
Since mail is treated as just another db, he user needs to look at email with a simple and intuitive gui. See Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc…
In the end, the user does not care what a developer makes or how it is made, as long as it is not difficult to use, so that the person can get on with their actual work rather than attempt to learn how to send an email in ln.
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.
I can run through 100s of examples of things that I have run into with Notes that have frustrated me. From the replicating user who only receives emails in their “All Documents” folder, to the latest “ActivityMonitor” error that generates a dialog box every 5 seconds…..Notes has huge capabilities to do numbers of things….however, I think they might have bitten off more than they can chew.
I have been with notes since R5 and am currently running 8.5. It makes me so sad.
/wrists
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.
I would say that Lotus notes has to be the singular worst invention since the damn of time. Why anyone would choose to adopt a piece of software which relies on the joys of replication i do not know.
The cavemen invented the wheel and everyone rejoiced, IBM developed notes and everyone cried.
desktop.ndk to be copied across… joys……… nsf files to be copied across… joys……… do everyone a favour and move to exchange and outlook…. not perfect but 10000000000000000 times better than (how its known amongst a large amount of peoplei know) “Scrotes”
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…
This is a funny site, not that I enjoy seeing people suffer but most of these problems are user related or from ignorance. I have made a good living selling, supporting, programming in Lotus Notes platform for the past 15 years and have seen it all. I work for a company with 5000 users on Lotus Notes without a hitch or any meaningful complaints. I’d start looking for something else to blame, since people that know and understand will make you use it.
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…
How to implement a custom letterhead in Notes
Technote (FAQ)
“Customized logos will not appear for recipients if they do not have a mail database which contains the same customizations…”
With love,
IBM
“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.
“If a Domino server goes down, common sense will simply say to have a spare. even then, lotus notes doesn’t switch automatically.”
it does, if you have a good administrator who cares about good server docs settings
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.
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-*******-ray!
Hello world, I was pointed to this site by a potential customer in London who wasn’t a Notes fan (thanks Anthony !) and I said to him “looks like fun, watch out for my posting :->”. I have a certain sympathy for him as he was running an 8 client with a version 7 Domino server so he was unable to get the extra features and his upgrade had been done the wrong way round.
I’m expecting this entry to generate a load of abuse so in the name of fun I thought it would be good to stir up some comment. What’s very apparent is that the posting on this site has slowed down and a vast majority are during work time so come on lets get it going again. Most of the comments lacked substance so I want more….
As a huge fan of Notes and Domino I feel it my duty to highlight a few things that have not been mentioned so far…….
OK the pre version 8 user experience was harsh but then version 8 arrived and some would say it was a catch-up with the Exchange world. But it didn’t stop there, IBM did what they always do and released the Windows, Linux and Mac client versions. They released the Windows, Linux, AIX and AS400 Domino versions. Oh and whilst on that subject they released 32Bit and 64bit releases. So spare some thought for the IT guys who would have to put more servers in and replace hardware to move to an e-mail only platform you guys crave.
The biggest mistake Microsoft made was enforcing 64Bit hardware requirements on Exchange 2007. Take a look at the Experts Exchange site, its full of pain. IT departments are struggling to keep up with the endless patches that plug security holes and are hacked off with having to upgrade the server hardware because some developer has written poor quality code.
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.
In the name of fun go to google.com and search for “Microsoft Exchange Crash”
and compare the results against “Lotus Domino Crash” …….nearly 4 times as many Exchange postings which says a lot.
Happy posting I’m looking forward to you reply.
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 ****, 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
I’ve been working as a professional Application Developer for about 5-6 years now. Notes is downright the lamest application I have ever seen. I have written some pretty bad ones myself. I don’t even know what it’s for. I think they just tagged on the phrase “email client” to boost sales. I am crying right now because I have to extract data from it, which is a task in itself. Please help me get through this.
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!
“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.”
complete and utter stupidity. it’s just a useless feature that only serves to make things needlessly annoying and complicated. it’s nonsensical work within the illusion that you are online. just wait until you are actually online to work with your email. was there an email that you need to read? if it’s so important, you would have saved it somewhere safe and accessible. an email you need to send? replication or not, lotus notes or not, an email will only be sent if one has connectivity.
say what you will about the core product, what you fail to understand, or what you just plain ignore, is that most people are not only forced to use ln (most cases a very old version), but they simply do not need the core product. at all. what they need is email access. period. which ln fails at miserably. most companies bought it under the impression that it does email “and all this other stuff too!” without actually knowing what the other stuff is. not necessarily ibm’s fault, but that’s the way things are. nobody needs a $60/license app solely to check email.
@ 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?
I know… I know… it’s like going to Fry’s electronics 3 times in one night with a defective motherboard when you are trying to put a few machines together for a friend who isn’t paying you anything but some free Tommy Boy video rentals or worse…
worse… it is like going to Kinko’s and trying to get online when the electric blows at your house because some stooge renter has 5 air conditioners running due to an african shingle virus from where? You have no clue. So, you go to Kinkos and get on a computer really fast cause your girlfriend has a lover who isn’t into hacking this or dat over and you realllyyy can’t stop by. Anyway, you get on a machine and it’s not loading whatever so you just Print it… the proverbial “it” and slam it down on the copier, am I right? Yeah, and then the damn copier is color only and you’re like F_ __ _ _ man!!! I just wanted B&W. Uh, and so your like, “screw this, I’m going to get on a plane right now and fly to mexico to the giggling marlin or something cause atleast there will be people who UNDERSTANDand you suddenly Do not care anymore but not like the Phil collins song and more like a defeatest, am i right? so you go for a stapler to keep together what is left of your NOTES and low and behold there aren’t any staples. the stapler is empty. You think of how if you were in IT school that summer how you wouldn’t of missed the opportunity to invest in Staples and you’d have a little more doe than you do. you snap. you go for the phone. man, you left it at home in the sink when you were brushing your hair before you took off… Please deposit 25 cents for the next 5 minutes. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Just been migrated to Lotus notes after years of Outlook, and it’s doing my nut in. What a ****. What an un-intuitive, resource hungry, ugly piece of **** to be foisted on people. I hope you’re happy, IBM, this is not winning you any friends you know.
Please, I want to end it all…. after 5 years with a GOOD company that had migrates to ourlook, I’ve joined a company that still lives in the dark ages, and uses lotus ******* notes.
I mean really, 20 year old ‘technology’ in one of the most prestigious companies on earth… it’s ridiculous.
It’s like doing powerpoint slides with crayons.
Help me, someone!
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?
“When it was introduced in 1989, Notes pioneered the concept of groupware … 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.”
Notes Mail sucks, Notes Calendar sucks, Notes database suck, Notes Core sucks, everything about Notes is ****. Nobody needs this Goldberg machine for anything and this is not 1989. There are vastly superior options available today for developing collaborative applications (have you ever checked out the wider Internet, outside of your Lotus Notes databases?) Any software developer who willingly makes the decision to use Lotus Notes to build new applications is incompetent and should be terminated. Considering how incredibly better alternative development platforms are, the only reason I can think of that an administrator or programmer would ever select Lotus Notes is because they want to continue to get paid for their IT work but are too lazy and stupid to learn about the new technologies that emerged after 1989.
I feel like ending it all sometimes… The depression hits me hard when it takes over a minute to paste something (aaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!) and it f**ks up all the formatting… I cant believe someone in my compnay thought “How can I make everyone work less efficient and get them frustrated at doing the simplist tasks.. hmm.. LOTUS NOTES!”… This program has really made my life hell.. Im praying this credit cruch causes lotus notes to go bankrupt, so my company will have to change to an alternative,,, (it would be quicker and more efficient if i carved clay tablets and used pigeons to deliver them)… It is EVIL… Thank you for setting this website up… Its nice to know that im not the only one thinking of ending it all…
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.
Ahhhgggg!!! I’d like to punch Lotus Notes in the FACE!!!
Lotus No 7.0.1
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.
Our company has forced upon us “lotus notes”. It is a portal to hell.
I gaze into its fiery depths, and I know that there is no hope.
The flesh melts from my bones, as my eyes dribble down my cheeks…
I would curse the day of my birth, but I have no tongue.
All that remains is pain
I long for death’s sweet embrace, but oblivion eludes me
When will my suffering end?
Not today; I have new mail.
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.
Congratulations IBM!!! You’ve somehow managed to take the most basic, simple activity that is performed on computers today (reading and sending emails), and out of that simple little concept you have successfully created the most bloated, kludgy, completely unintuitive, useless piece of **** software of all time!!! AND you’ve managed to convince certain non-techies in Fortune 500 companies (like mine unfortunately) to actually pay you for the privilege of reducing the productivity of their employees, both users and administrators. It’s a freakin’ miracle of modern science! How in world did you do it?!! The world would like to know!
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.
how much microsoft paid you guys to attack lotus notes
i hate notes
Every time I launch that stinking **** of an application called Lotus Notes 7.0.1 on my Vista notebook, it asks to be my default e-mail client. I’ve repeatedly said “No” and “Don’t ask me again,” but it still comes back. Every single time. It’s like the undead of software applications. I’ve combed the IBM forums, looked in the Registry, and nobody seems to have a clue how to turn it off. I’m desperate. Any ideas?
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, ******** 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.
Lotus Notes is THE WORST PIECE OF GARBAGE SOFTWARE I HAVE EVER USED IN MY LIFE. I seriously entertain the notion of tracking down the IDIOTS at IBM, sitting in the their moron “JAD SESSION”, who created this most hideous, awful piece of GARBAGE. It is obviously a piece of software created by “a committee”, only in this case, it is a committee of GOD-FORSAKEN IDIOTS.
If you are a company that is considering buying Lotus Notes: DON’t!!!!!! You will DEEPLY REGRET ever going down the rat hole sewer that this application will lead you.
Here are a few of my hundreds of gripes with this WORTHLESS PIECE OF TRASH CALLED LOTUS NOTES:
1) upwards of 30 SECONDS TO OPEN A GODAMNED EMAIL AND DRAW IT ON MY SCREEN. That is so much fun when you are on a deadline, and have to send an urgent communique to someone. Why is this piece of GARBAGE so slow to open a FREAKING EMAIL???????????
2) “notes is more than just an email client” – yes unfortunately, it is. Notes ‘team rooms’ are the MOST WORTHLESS PILE OF GARBAGE NEXT TO NOTES’ EMAIL FUNCTIONALITY. Want to spend huge amounts of time trying to find and get authorization to look at a freaking document? THEN GO BUY THE WORTHLESS PIECE OF OUTDATED TRASH CALLED LOTUS NOTES.
3) If you have the misfortune to work for a company that uses this piece of pig dung called LOTUS NOTES for their website content – GOOD LUCK AND MAY GOD HELP YOU. Nothing so much fun as MAKING ALL YOUR PAGE ALIGNMENTS LOOK WRONG IN THE EDITOR, SO THAT THEY WILL APPEAR RIGHT ON THE WEB PAGE.
4) Try editing a document in this piece of ****, and watch as all your paragraph tags are corrupted, and the fonts and page alignments all go to hell after you spent A FREAKING HOUR MISALIGNING THEM IN THE EDITOR SO THEY WILL LOOK RIGHT IN THE FINAL RESULT.
One poster mentioned judging a company on whether they were STUPID ENOUGH to use Notes or not as a criteria for whether he would want to work for them. I agree with this completely. I WILL NEVER AGAIN take a job at a company who had employed someone stupid enough to purchase this BLOATED PIECE OF UTTERLY FRUSTRATING WORTHLESS TRASH. I seriously want to PHYSICALLY ASSAULT the IDIOT DINGBAT MORON MEMBERS OF THE “JAD SESSION” WHO CREATE THIS VILE PIECE OF SICKENING WORTHLESS TRASH.
BTW, IBM was the company that produced the punch card machines for HITLER that processed the TATOOED NUMBERS ON CONCENTRATION CAMP PRISONERS. If that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about this obsolete, bloated ****-bag company, than I don’t know what to tell you.
I want to reiterate: LOTUS NOTES IS ***THE*** SINGLE WORST PIECE OF GARBAGE SOFTWARE THAT I HAVE EVER USED IN MY LIFE. Think about all the worst pieces of software you have ever used, how frustrating, filled with bugs, counterintuitive, redundant, bloated and annoying they were, AND TIMES IT BY 10, AND YOU WILL HAVE SOME IDEA OF WHAT A TOTAL PIECE OF GARBAGE LOTUS NOTES IS.
ANyone defending this dismal piece of TRASH either works for nazi-helpers at IBM, or has some other financial interest in maintaining this criminal fraud called LOTUS NOTES.
DO NOT EVER BUY THIS PIECE OF GARBAGE – YOU WILL DEEPLY REGRET IT.
Lotus Notes is the best email client I’ve ever used in my life, especially since release of version 8.0.2
Argh! Double Argh! Triple Argh!
I don’t think I sinned that much in any of my previous lives to deserve such an hellish pain as Lotus Notes…
“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 **** 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.
so you both had a low security options (ACL)chosen in your mailboxes… it looks you need to edit it
Yep….It sucks
As well as everything mentioned here the few things that REALLY annoy me are:
Address books- Why the heck cant I sort by FIRST NAME? How many times do you know someones surname before you know their first name? Hardly ever (unless you refer to people in your own company as Mr Jones etc?!) Welcome to 1935.
I need to send a email to John in accounts…..erm….No idea what his last name is but no worries, I should be able to just sort the address book by first name and then I should recall his last name…..nope?….can’t do that?….WHY? Ok..well perhaps I can search for ‘john’ someway? Nope. Right well I guess ill have to spend the next 5 minutes trying to find his full name somewhere else. Lotus notes = Fail
I want to paste some cells from Excel- Copy and paste…….wait……wait……wait. I get a IMAGE of the cells….I cant edit them, reformat them etc. Lotus notes = fail.
Oh great, Dave has sent me those attachments after our long email discussion……scroll…..scroll…..scroll……scroll…..there they are RIGHT AT THE BOTTOM? Without any context to the email just sent. Lotus notes = fail.
Lotus Notes spell checker = Fail. Things have moved on since windows 3.1.
Tim, it is all defined in your Location settings
(“Stop at first match”)
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.
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.
Have a look at the contents of the book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. It seems that whining about your e-mail client isn’t one of them.
Then look at David Allen’s ground-breaking productivity book ‘Getting Things Done’. Mr Allen has worked Lotus Notes to create a system of productivity which adheres to the notions in his book. He even publicly speaks about Notes as a productivity tool.
By the way, don’t whine about the Notes user interface until you’ve seen Notes 8. And if your company doesn’t let you upgrade to Notes 8… too bad, but that’s still no excuse to continue to base your opinions on an older version.
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!!!!
Notes is ****. The developers that are claiming how wonderful it is have no idea how to create a decent UI.
- can’t alt-tab between e-mails
- can’t copy and paste formatted text without notes hanging for 5 minutes
- have to click refresh or F9 to see a new e-mail
- task tray icon sometimes shows a new e-mail and there isn’t one
- when it crashes, you need to reboot or use Kill Notes app to restart – what kind of $hite ships a Kill My app function with it? LOL
- items that appear in inbox are not necessarily in all docs
- sorting by column only works ascending or descending for some fields
- annyoing splash screen
-out of office replies seem to come out at random
- replicas/replication is just so technical (yeah yeah, go on about user error/training, but you can set up an outlook PST in 5 seconds and its obvious what is in there – I don’t want a training course to use simple software – this isn’t 1960 anymore)
- even the database app (to so-called great feature of this “product) are a POS in terms of UI
- Outlook has never crashed out on me in 5 years and works as a Windows product should
Thankfully we are moving to Outlook and so productivity for 100,000+ employees should got through the roof. I personally would rather use command-line e-mail than this POS.
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.
You all are dummies. Lotus is for intelligent people!
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.
What a bunch of idiots, if you think that the Microsoft **** rules you must be from another planet! How can anyone praise a product that crashes all the time…. Microsoft exchange/outlook sucks the big ones. Wake up people…..
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 *** 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.
Lotus Notes killed my wife and raped my dog.
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.
I’m working with lotus designer, and I can’t PASTE TEXT into the form without it “automatically” formatting it for me. And the best part is there is NO way to tell the automatically formatted part from the part that is going to be parsed as HTML in the browser. This is like, 1998 ****, even though its the release from 2004, when FONT tags were already deprecated, but it insists on using them anyway.
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.
such a horrible product, yet everyone on this board works for a company that uses it. there is a reason for that.
get real…….
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.
to quote notes_dude: “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.”
really now. i want to send and receive email how complicated does it need to be? tell me. sure, it can do many wonderful things, but the vast majority of people that this is given to, only really need it for email, nothing more. yes, the workplace carries much of the blame as the business should be giving out proper software according the the workers’ needs. however some of the blame should go to the lotus notes dev team. if you say that your software should be doing something, then it should do it right. not like lotus notes. i say the email bit should be cut out entirely and just leave the bits that it does well.
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.
I guess the thing wrong about Lotus Notes is that it’s not fool-proof. That’s why i read all the dumb posts here. Most of the post are from people without training and people who use it in the wrong way. So they hate Lotus cause they don’t understand it, that’s so smart….
Russell – sounds like you need some training – you sound like a dumbass with all your questions – you clearly don’t understand the product.
Though I’ve never repeatedly stabbed myself in the eye with a rusty, dull knife, I think that would be more pleasant than using Lotus Notes. I think the people who make the decision to use Lotus Notes should be forced to sit around and watch a Rob Schneider Film Festival with my Jewish Mother who is craving grandchildren until they apologize for their mistake.
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.
One commentor noted that notes is an development for applications.
Maybe it is.
But few people if any know how to use this convoluted application.
Even the coroporate IT gurus hate this bloated software.
Example: A response from our IT help desk, “You have to select this feature this way. Any other way will not work.”
Who would provide a tool, with multiple ways to select the tool, when only one will work!?
A ridiculously complicated piece of software, that makes it easy for naturally lazy, (clever?), people to make this mistake, is the true source of this kind of failure.
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!!!
This thread is ridiculous – you people need to learn some computer skills and stop complaining. Lotus Notes is not better or worse than any other email client. If you base your productivity on your email client alone, then you and the company you work for are in big trouble.
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 ****.
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 **** with it.
Oh well, if there’s a version that now works everything’s alright. The last 3 years of misery, disappointment, lost emails, missed conference calls / meetings and frustration so intense that I thought I might actually kill someone, can be forgotten…
Maybe I should invoice IBM for all the lost hours since I started using the worlds most useless email system.
Lotus Notes once kicked Chuck Norris’ *** in an email showdown. Chuck slinked away licking his smtp wounds while Notes merrily compacted its databases.
I think you people dont have right idea about Lotus notes software. People who wants to use use it as only email client then can install Basic lotus notes software which takes less space. Also i suggest to use version 8 and later and definitely you will chill. If you are using older version then thats sad thing because all software older versions sucks.
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.
Notes once stole my wallet. True story.
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 …
I hate Lotus Notes so much it’s making me ill – in fact I’m seriously considering claiming for an industrial injury.
I inherited a job from another team – run a spreadsheet, save it to the intranet and send out an email with a link to the intranet location.
The old team couldn’t send the stationery to the new team mailbox, so I set up stationery from a draft. I made the url into a link hotspot and sent out the mail.
I got loads of replies back bemoaning the lack of link..
I can look at the stationery in the preview window and click on the link successfully, but as soon as I open the mail, clicking the link just leads to a few characters being selected. Right click on the text and it’s happy to tell me all about the hotspot properties, so it knows what it’s supposed to do.
You’ve no idea how mad my boss is that I can’t fix this.
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.
I hate Lotus Notes. I left one company that used Lotus Notes and after I was gone for year they upgraded to Outlook. One of my reasons for leaving was to get into a better functional world with better production capabilities. Lotus Notes makes it impossible to archive and find documents without long unnecessary search times in multiple folders.
The company that I went to was Outlook users with Same Time capability. That was fine. I could work functionally with Outlook.
Then I left that company and went to a multibillion dollar company and again forced to use Lotus Notes. What a backwards slide. With Lotus Notes and multi functional copy machines you cannot email a hard copy document outside the company. Not compatible for the outside world. I see all the old **** that I used to deal with and now I am back in that **** again. Lotus Notes is a POS. There is a reason why in today’s times IBM is not on the top of the market for communication. Really folks how many IBM computers do you really even see in the work place or for personal use anymore. Should that not tell us something that IBM is not with the times? I have been on the phone now in my second week with this company five times over Lotus Notes. Even the IT support there does not like it but what can they do if you are the worker bee you have to put up with the decisions of the top dogs. The top dogs that make more money and deal less the headaches of the poor designed software come on folks. I choose Outlook! Why have MS Office for word processing applications and cut out the communication part of the MS Office Suite? I have my inbox that just disappears. My calendar will just disappear. WTF is that all about. Communications come to me 4 hours after they are sent. How efficient is that? To think I have only just started what will it be like when I have been working here for a year. I so see my production rate to be compromised with this software application that I am working with.
I am so glad that I found this website. I was searching the web trying to find updated instructions for Lotus Notes to see if I was missing something. But guess what there are no helpful tools or sites out there for Lotus You Suck Notes.
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?
OMG, Im so pissed. One week ago we shfited from Exchange to LN Domino 8 and man it was a giant leap backwards. If it werent for the financial crisis I would have quit on the spot.
This is the worst thing ever
I hate you Lotus Notes… so much it hurts.
Nice site!! It makes me feel better to know I am not alone in my misery. A few comments:
1. I love the people on this site that try and defend Notes. Most blame the user or older versions, ha. So typical. We just switched from Exchange to Notes 8.x. The migration took close to 2 months with IBM itself directly involved. For 2 full weeks we had no email with the outside world. I realized that most of this is not ‘Notes’ fault but poor planning of the switch-over. Anyway the ‘consultant’ who sold us the product is just like the fanboys on this site. When I asked him why, at times when I would try to load my more resource intense applications like CADD, 3D modeling, graphics programs, They just would not start up until I closed Notes. Here was his reply. “All the applications you named are memory and processor intense.. Notes keeps itself to the top because it is a priority application.. Increase you system processor and memory to adjust for the applications you are running.. You can change the priority to appliactions via the task manager.” WTF??? All the Notes applications run at normal priority, my machine is a higher end workstation with 3GB of ram. There are times when I can’t open programs if Notes is running, I close Notes and they will then open.
2. Not withstanding the email switch over downtime, my productivity due to using Notes has dropped an estimate 15-20%. That is not a lie, I have given it a good effort for close to 1.5 months and it is not getting better. I thought at first it was just me, and that I had to get over the learning curve. I am not a slouch when it comes to learning a piece of software, I picked up and taught myself 3D modeling in a weekend. Notes is very counter-intuitive and difficult to use. I have missed meetings (default for calendar events is to not set a reminder – WTF?). I like to read my email in the preview pane, but Notes will not make that as read, so I must double click on every email to open it and then close it – WTF? There are two search windows in the mail tab, they don’t both work the same and one doesn’t really work at all (yes fanboys, the index is complete) – WTF. I could go on with itemized complaints for a long time, but you people know all this, I am just preaching to the choir.
3. Cost was the reason for our switch. No way is this cheaper then alternatives even including Exchange. If any fanboy would like to debate this one, all I can say is bring hard facts and numbers because I have them and it was not cheap and our actual cost as compared to the estimated cost is not even in the same city, yet the same ballpark.
4. WTF (just a general WTF because I am actually thinking about how much I hate lotus notes as I type this)
5. I have the choice to go back to Outlook and use the Domino server as a SMTP server. I have already made the choice and as soon as I have time here at work I will make the switch back. For all you fanboys; rejoice you know have one less person bitching about Notes. For all you stuck with it; best of luck.
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!!
Thank God you people are out here! This lousy POS (commonly referred to as “Loser Notes” at my company), makes me at least 20% less productive. I work in a project based environment where projects can last up to three years. I need to archive all of the project relevant emails into folders so now I can have emails and documents in 3 or 4 separate archive files. Imagine how easy that is to find something. Especially now that Loser Notes has decided it only wants to replicate certail fiolders so it just archives emails into the ether!
However, I have to say my favorite is when you accept an invite from an Outlook user and it goes into your calendar. If that meeting is changed in some way and you accept the change IT GETS REMOVED FROM YOUR CALENDAR ENTIRELY and there is no trace of it anywhere (including trash). Our IT department’s solutution (which is staffed by people too stupid to get Microsoft certified) was to type all my calendar invites by hand!
I HATE LOSER NOTES!
“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 ****??
I want Outlook back!!
Many many years until 2006 i belonged to those preferred human beeings, who are allowed to work with MS Outlook & MS Exchange.
After a corporate merge i was forced to work with Lotus Notes. It was cruel! But it was LN 6.5 – so it wasn’t as cruel as it is today, after a update from LN 6.5.2 to LN8.0.2. Never before i had to work with an application, that is nearly same buggy and lame as this nightmare, called Lotus Notes.
And this, although i have a Intel Dual Core PC, 4 Gigs of Memory and 100s of Gigs free HDD-space.
God bless MS Outlook !!!
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!
Does ANYTHING, really, anything, SUCK more than Notes!?!?!?!?
DIE Lotus Notes DIE!
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!
Lotus Notes is one of the worst pieces of software ever. It is utterly user-unfriendly; the designers’ remit must have been ‘annoy as many office workers as possible’.
But if there’s one thing more annoying than Notes, it’s people saying “Ah, well, Lotus Notes was never meant to be just an email program! If you use for what it was designed for – syncing a back-end client-side multiplex dynamo server with an MS Sharepoint flexi-platform database (whatever the hell that means) – you’ll see how great it is!”
Because they are perfectly illustrating the problem. It’s great for the people behind the scenes, who aren’t the ones who have to use it for email ONLY 8 hours a day.
And we don’t decide to use it for email. It’s not up to us! It’s got nothing to do with us, the users! If it was, we’d decide to use Outlook.
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.
Ahh..i never realised that there’s such website..I can now share my pain too.
My company was forced to migrate from Outllook to Notes ………
Y es una grandísima MIERDA!!!!
Simply …….. What a huge **** !!!!!!!!!!
ps. to the earlier user who wrote:
“Anyone know why Notes gets into a mode where, when composing a “memo”, the up/down arrow keys do nothing and the left/right arrow keys shift the text left and right on the screen? With the right arrow, you can even shift it over so that the first 8 or 10 columns are hidden! Nice feature!”
This is because you have the scroll lock key on. Unclick it and you’ll be back to normal.
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!!
If you want email only, NEVER implement Lotus notes. if you want “collaboration software” which doesn’t supply built in version control, NEVER implement Lotus Notes. If you want bloated software that crashes all the time, spontaneously commits suicide for no apparent reason, takes longer than a day to set up your options and even then you cant’ find out stuff because it’s completely unintuitive, then LN8 is for you.
On the other hand if you enjoy ugly icons, endless toolbars, slow email and other useless features, hey then have i got something for you…
Lotus Notes is built on pile of garbage and can’t be fixed. For the sake of humanity IBM should stop developing this ****.
OK, have to release some more anger.
I’m trying to work out why the Lotus Quickr Connector isn’t working in Lotus Notes. I have installed, uninstalled, reinstalled, uninstalled, reinstalled, uninstalled and again reinstalled the plugin.
It still is not appearing in my sidebar of notes 8.0.1.
You would think that the forums on IBM would be of some help, wouldn’t you (no, no you wouldn’t, cos you’re not as naive as me).
Someone has the bright idea that Hot Fix 5 pack will fix this, do you think I could find Hot Fix 5? Do you think the person saying Hot Fix 5 fixes the problem, would post a LINK to Hot Fix 5? Do you think that IBM would easily, clearly label their upgrade patches? Do you think that when I search their downloads for “hot fix 5″ I would get less than 38,000 results? Do you think that first of all, IBM might actually get a plugin THEY MAKE to install properly and WORK with some other software WHICH THEY ALSO MAKE?
If you have answered yes to ANY of these questions, please die or resign from IBM.
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!?!?!?
Surely, all it needs is someone who’s worked in an office to have some input to the interface design to make it more intuitive. Example: I’m looking for an email from Fred Smith that isn’t in the correct folder. My seach in All Documents for Fred Smith reveals 37 emails from him. I scan through and find the email I’m looking for; great … but Lotus Notes cannot tell me which folder it’s in. Never mind, I’ve found it so I can drag it across into the correct folder – one OH-NO-SECOND later realise i’ve dragged ALL the Fred Smith emails into that folder – they were all ticked from the search, weren’t they? Now ALL of Fred Smith’s emails are in this folder, and I’ve no way of telling where they came from! This is NOT intuitive!! This is not good software design; it’s not even modern software design, and I expect something better from an application used all over the world. It’s all these ‘little’ things isn’t it? Why is it in some views I can use the mousewheel to scroll through, others i can’t? If I filter a list, it shows the ticked items. I may want to do several operations with that list, but if I un-tick an item, it disappears! WHY???!?!?!? Here’s one I found yesteday: I want to make some copies of emails for a specific task. Right click give me copy and paste options – great. I’ll put the copies in a new folder – fine! I find the first email I want a copy of, right click copy – wonderful!! I open the new folder – right click (to paste) …. excuse me, right click… there are no memos in the new folder yet so I don’t get the right-click menu!!!! I go through the drop downs to copy and paste. I find my second email, right click copy, into the new folder – theres a memo there now so I have the right click (paste) again!! THIS IS N O T INTUITIVE!!!
Tim, you actually CAN find in what folder an email is, it is enough to find it in “All documents” view and use Insert” key (= mark as unread)
you will see by the changing number of unread mails on the folders structure part…
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 ******** 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.
Very sorry to hear you think so bad about Lotus Notes – I guess there are some people that hate Notes, and then there are people like me, that agressively hate MS Outlook – I have had the unfortunate experience of using this piece of **** for almost 1 year now – my god I definitely thought Outlook would be better or at least just as good as Notes but I was sadly mistaken, thank you god for my boss have agreed to migrate away from exchange/outlook to notes/domino I cant wait !!
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.
I’ve been managing Lotus Notes for the last 3 years and can honestly say it really is a piece of junk. Don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about; I’ve been in IT for 20 years. I run MS networks, IBM System i (AS400), Linux, Program RPG, Delphi, Web Development, develop Notes databases and use Notes as email client. I don’t understand how any project manager could let any Notes CDs into production….it’s like working with a perpetual beta version.
I know some of you guys are probably excellent Notes developers and for that I hope I cause no offence….but, honestly, you’ve got to agree, that irrespective of its good points (and there are some), and even after accounting for poor administrators and developers of Notes applications, it is a veritable midden of software.
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|
Lotus Notes…. what a sweet rollercoaster ride it is…
Roll out, roll back, roll out, roll back…
Anyone for a ritual pyre outside IBM HQ?
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…
Buying anything American doesn’t make much sense.
Hardly anyone has bought an american car since the 60′s.
No-one in their right mind would buy american consumer electronics. Not since the 60′s. So why buy their crappy computers?
Sit back and wait until the ***’s move in; then we’ll see a decent “windows”. Until then, american computer technology remains a lot more expensive and painful, and harmful to one’s country’s national accounts, than simply banging your head against a wall. I’m out of the industry. Be a darl, and let me know when the ***’s have taken over. It may be worth re-visiting.
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 ****-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?
I have an old nsf file that contains old emails etc that I need to access. For all the people who hate Lotus Notes is there anyone out there with a licenced copy of Lotus Notes Client R5 or later who would like nothing better than to off-load it? My intention is to extract the files and put them into a slightly less painful package (MS Outlook). Any assistance would be appreciated.
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.
the last 2 jobs ive had both use lotus notes.
god.
i cannot even begin to explain how much i hate this stupid application.
its ugly, cumbersomb, lame, and generally retarded.
I hate it i hate it i hate it.
AND
I’m pretty sure i know why they use it.
because it is able to do lots of **** functions from the same sh1tty idiotic database, which has been moronicly set up.
why the hell cant these idiots understand the concept of intranet and storing docs / forms on there.
next job i’m going to actively seek out a non lotus notes using company.
you may think I’m being petty, but i hate this application so much,
its too retarded for words.
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 ****. IBM isn’t leading with anything anymore. Do I switch jobs now? What do I do . . .
I am not a huge fan of Lotus; I frankly prefer yahoo or gmail. I found this site because I use the reminder function of Lotus Notes a lot, then suddenly they will stop working. They still appear on my calendar, but they don’t remind…very frustrating. However, I use Outlook at home, it is an old version because it is for my home business, and I’m cheap (I’m a bookkeeper, and I don’t need anything fancy).
I get very frustrated with OutLook too. I file my emails in a logical fashion, but 1) I discovered it was “auto” archiving all my old sent stuff, but that I have to have a special piece of software installed to “unarchive” it again! When a client wanted to know when I’d sent something, I found NOTHING there!! It seems annoying that it wouldn’t warn you what would happen!
When I try to search my emails, the search function will only search in a specific file…not everything. I don’t have a “view all” function (my favorite thing in Notes and Gmail).
In Lotus I have to use the calendar function to set up emails to send at some point in the future (and they all arrive saying “Alarm” in the subject line), half the time these stop working. In OutLook I can set up the emails with a future date, but half the time they aren’t sent unless I go back into them (for some goofy reason). I end up with the same problem in both systems, so even the “interface” to help me use OutLook with my LotusNotes is no help.
I am an Accounting Information Systems student, and I have worked with SAP, Great Plains, PeopleSoft and QuickBooks. Most pieces of software have their stupid issues (most accounting software doesn’t seem to understand many accounting rules…in Great Plains I can void a check that has been cashed….but I cannot change a document number that has been entered incorrectly).
So be grateful for the things that work, maybe someday they will pool all the right things about every piece software and make it work!
My company is even cheaper than I am, so I know all our versions are old. In fact, oddly enough, because I’ve been here seven years, when I look at email files that I’ve had from older versions…they still look like the old version…My menu bars suddenly change colors, it was disconcerting the first time it happened!
In addition, the “Help” function in Lotus is pointless. I needed to set up multiple signatures because I send emails as two different companies, and even our technical guys had no idea what I was trying to do….thank goodness for Google! However, I did figure it out, something I haven’t been able to figure out in OutLook (although I haven’t tried as hard either).
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.
There’s nothing worse than f…king notes!
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.
you have forgotten about the security level and access rights managing in lotus
totally agree, btw
Lotus Notes sucks. Purely, Simply, it is way behind its competition.
“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, web conferences, 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 work tool. 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!”
Sure Lotus Notes tries to do a whole slew of things. It just sucks at most of them. It can’t handle single instancing anyway near as well as Exchange can, this means more money for disk storage. The user interface for the new version is much better than it has been; it is almost as good as Outlook 98….
I totally understand what Notes is about. Its about spending a ton of money with IBM because you don’t want to change, can’t change, are too stupid to change or just plain want to run a piece of **** because you are a *********.
This is why several companies are making tons of money replacing Lotus Notes and IBM is loosing market share. So keep digging in a defending the platform. It is going to die eventually and you will be left with a skill set that is useless. You need to start learning other platforms and then, maybe, just maybe, you will begin to see why the rest of the world has realized that Notes sucks.
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
Anyone know why Notes gets into a mode where, when composing a “memo”, the up/down arrow keys do nothing and the left/right arrow keys shift the text left and right on the screen? With the right arrow, you can even shift it over so that the first 8 or 10 columns are hidden! Nice feature!
scroll lock on… ?
just a suggestion ^^
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.
“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.”
Like it is our choice. Why don’t we give ourselves raises and Fridays off.
Notes may be much more than just email and that’s great, but it shouldn’t be used for email ’cause it sucks as an email client.
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!
i like lotus notes very much. powerful enough!
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!!!!
MihaIL – nonsense, just try running several projects over a few years filing / archiving in the same folder structure.. LN vaporises email from the archive folder structure and puts it wherever it wants to. If you archive all your mails in a given project, thereby leaving the folder structure intact to use for the next project, then rename the top folder to the new project name; forget about archiving after that… bye-bye mails – LN just gets confused. Furthermore, once you’ve archived a mail, it is not possible to return that mail to the inbox…
Other whinges – geeky messages that no-one bar scriptwriters understand; trying to save an attachment via a shortcut just confuses the hell out of LN, the absoulutely idiotic reply function.. why on earth do I want to reply to myself…?; the crazy sent folder structure that loses mails if you don’t resalise that when you move a mail, you’re not actually moving it…!!! And so on and so on..
At least with Outlook, I could keep a sensible archive of specific project communication & ALWAYS find that old email that saves me M$ of contractors sudden late additions to invoices… I HATE lotus notes!
it seems like the archiving profile was corrupted in your mailfile…
when you modify the structure of the folders in your mailfile, with the archive profile working correctly, they will be rebuilt in the archive with no problems (with the first come archiving)
search for some “delete archive profile” button in the internet…
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.
Please give Notes 8 a try and then re-review Notes.
Notes 8 has great features besides the Microsoft tax that all people are eager to pay.
Nice site graphics btw, regards,
Oliver
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 **** 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.
I just moved to a new big corporation on secondment and to put it in perspective the agency who placed me made a joke of not telling me the company used Lotus notes just in case I turned the job down.
I have worked with Lotus Notes before and didn’t like it then. And now again I am experiencing high frustration levels. I think Lotus didn’t evolve with the times and we have been spoilt with Outlook which has made us develop instinctive methods of operation – which we expect from Lotus notes – or any email client for that matter.
The debate goes on and I can’t tell you exactly why I dislike Lotus Notes – all I can say it is I just don’t like using it. For me it’s like trying to do break dance in high heals!
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.
@ Jonathan
Copy the table from XL > click in the body of the Memo > Edit > Paste Special > Rich Text > OK
Indeed, Notes is kryptonite to productivity and happy work. One problem not yet mentioned stems from IBM selling the idea that Notes is an easy to use development platform. This has produced thousands of quasi-technical “programmers” who really don’t have the intellectual bent for application development. And don’t get me started on Domino admins. UGH.
I have used and supported Notes 5-8 and with each successive release have been increasingly awed by IBM’s overblown, quixotic **** polishing.
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!
I have the pleasure of using Lotus Notes 6.5 at work. Without a doubt, it is the ugliest, slowest, most bloated and unintuitive piece of software I’ve ever used. I don’t even know where to start.
Some things I’ve discovered:
- When you get new mail, an icon shows up in the system tray, but it doesn’t disappear unless you double-click on it to switch to Notes. In other words, if I switch to Notes on my own (i.e., with alt-tab) and then mark the new mail as read, the icon doesn’t disappear
- Occasionally, I’ll get the new mail icon for no reason. I double-click it, it switches to my inbox, and I have no new mail. WTF?
- Sending and receiving emails from outside the company is amazingly unreliable. Half the time, an email that I send out (or an outside email that gets sent to me) never gets delivered (WTF?). The other half of the time, it gets delivered hours and hours later, and the timestamp won’t even match. For example, I can send an email out at 11:00 AM, the person on the other end won’t receive it until 4:30 PM, and in their inbox, it’ll be timestamped as 2:30 PM. ???
- Half the time when I quit it, it hangs. If it happens to NOT hang, it actually takes longer to quit than Photoshop (yes, Photoshop!). During the course of the day, I might have 10 – 15 different programs open, and I can actually quit ALL of the others before JUST Notes quits!
I could go on and on…
Lotus Notes does indeed suck……enought said…..all for Exchange
I can’t to add to any of the comments already made except that they’re not alone in their suffering. Today I noticed that in our office, which is blessed with Lotus Notes, we use ‘Lotus’ toiltet rolls. I can only imagine that when the manufacturers were brainstroming for a name of their product, someone must have asked what word office workers most likely associate with taking a **** and suggested Lotus Notes. I assume they only dropped the ‘Notes’ affix to avoid a lawsuit.
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…
The Bloats client no longer opens on my Mac and a recent “upgrade” made IMAP unreliable. I guess I need to start using a printer and inter-office mail.
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.
Continue….
Sometimes I feel why most of the Lotus Notes consumers think Notes is just a mail system , they never tried to understand what else IBM provideds with just mail system. In Notes, You can build a powerful application which includes the mailing feature , but do you think will it be that easy if you do in dotnet/outlook ?
In few months I have evaluated outlook and sharepoint both thoroughly and can conclude Lotus Notes is a gem.
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….
The self proclaimed “Notes Gurus” need to to make the windows close [X] at the upper right corner of the desktop “go away”. If I had a buck for each time I hit THAT instead of a close tab, which then forces me to restart notes, I would be able to afford the IBM course “making lotus notes popular”… But then again, WHO WANTS TO !!!!!
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.
So we’re a British company.
1) during British Summer Time, Notes doesn’t allow for that fact when creating appointments – so when I import them to iCal (I just won’t use Notes for email or anything else) the time is off by an hour.
2) dates are shown on webmail in American mm/dd/yy format, which to Brits used to dd/mm/yy is stupid indeed.
Yeah, yeah, I know Notes v X+2 fixes all this, we’re stupid for using the old one etc etc. Whatever. It doesn’t work right. And that’s before the email, which has been well lashed above.
Last year I joined a company who used LN, having used Outlook for a number of years in my previous employer. We recently took over another company who uses Outlook, and they are fighting the good fight not to lose Outlook. I also recently had a laptop issued to me, and it has taken 4 days and 1.5 md lost time to get it to work offline and I needed IT support to do it for me. It took me minutes to configure my last version of Outlook for the same task. I have to say I hate LN with a vengence and will certainly consider it as an employer selection criteria in the future. We are currently using LN 6, and if the LN enthustiasts get their way we will be going to LN 8, which they say looks just like Outlook. Unfortunately it won’t be!!! OK, LN is more than an email client, but it really does not do email well so why persist with it. I have a huge mail file which I daren’t archive as I have been told it will vapourise my archived email. In Outlook it was a simple case of a personal folder that was stored with all my other project stuff. I can go on, but I think you have got the point by now.
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.
Gee why the hell would I WANT to save an email address to remember and make it easy for you later?
Nah, I’d rather make you remember if from your brain or save every email address to contacts …
F___ THIS PRODUCT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
enter the email > tools > add sender to the personal address book…
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.
Notes is the best software ever written… for me to poop on!
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.
Sorry or the swearing but…Notes is a ******* PIECE A ****** SOFTWARE…I HATE IT!!!!
Lotus Notes is the most Counterproductive piece of **** 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.
I absolutely hate the #$%# piece of software and its even bad for me cause i am stuck with lotus notes 5.0 !!!!!!!
I hate Lotus Notes. I never thought I would hate any piece of software as much as I hate this ****.
Why can’t I just copy to my machine the emails? Why do I have to select between “server/machne/****/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 **** 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 **** 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!!!!
today i discovered that a loop can easily happen when two irresponsible mail servers try to communicate. yes, qmail responds with an error 5.1.1 from mailer-daemon@domain that the mailbox mailer-daemon is non-existent. a lotus auto-responder then dutifully responds to the 5.1.1 with the auto-response. lather, rinse, repeat, exponentially waste storage, pray to the email gods for sendmail.
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.
most recently, when i click the calendar button, i get mail instead.
i wouldn’t use this bloated piece of ****, but my company uses the non-standard encryption feature. give me an email client that isn’t trying to be my web browser, my spreadsheet editor, my document editor, my collaboration tool, or my chat client. i want this thing to do one thing well, not a thousand things poorly.
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
I worked with Lotus Notes at my former employer, it was lot’s of fun as you can imagine. My current employer was using Outlook but switched to Lotus Notes (Notes came from a company they bought and just sold off after it never made a profit) so (they say) we could communicate internationally with all divisions. I thought that’s what email is for?? So we had a program that was included at no cost in our operating system, worked well, no complaints. Now we have an expensive, non-intuitive, unreliable, P.O.S. The cost to convert? I don’t even want to know. The disruption, loss of productivity, frustration? Unmeasurable. The best part? Were going to convert back to Outlook in 2 years!!!
Get this; if you want to change default fonts there is a provision to do that, but Notes does not change the name of the font so in your font window it is still the name they set up origonally. Better yet, if you want to change the font size you have to put a line of instruction in the .ini file with a multiplier which has no relationship to actual font sizes everyone else uses. So you guess, shut down, launch and see if you like it. If not, repeat until satisfied! A tech weenie dream, a normal persons nightmare!
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
Working at a place that uses Lotus Notes for Intranet Mail and Outlook Web for Internet Mail…
I am trying to figure out how to make Lotus Notes look and feel like Outlook, instead of it’s current state of looking and working more like IE7 or Firefox.
Outlook is the standard for email… Why do people try and reinvent the wheel. Juts gimme’ a preview pane and get rid of these stupid tabs.
Todd DJ Website Designer
Dear Col,
Are u working for Lotus support team?
I gave lotus notes my baby to kiss – and it bit him – on the head……….
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…
We were forced to change from Outlook to Notes and halt of the company is swearing.
I can’t stand it. It seems like nothing is working anymore….
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.
These comments:
>>“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.<<<<
How do you do that (Release 7); how does one turn on the caching to autofill email addresses? Someone please please tell me.
I worked for one firm (company A) for 8 years, went to a different firm (company B) for 15 months, and am now back at company A. I was miserable at B, but there was one thing I preferred; A – Notes, B – Outlook.
Those who say “….its more than email, it is a ‘database’ or an ‘application’….” do not realize that trying to apply it to non-email things isn’t very good either.
One last thing, how come I can’t send a file directly from Excel or Word, i.e., the “send-to mail receipient” command is greyed out in Word, and doesn’t appear in Excel. Why does Notes take away helpful conveniences?
Developers with the comment along the lines of “It is an application development platform” sort of miss the point. The average user (even a user in IT with a bit of development experience) doesn’t want all of that; he/she wants email. Furthermore, if it really is “an application development platform” it isn’t a good one. In my 8 years with Company A I encountered example after example of trying to do a simple task in Notes (example: distribution of financial statements) which wasn’t very good, yet was very very hard to manage/administer.
Finally; I am a bit old-fashioned – I still have a Tungsten Palm Pilot (too cheap to buy a BlackBerry). I like having a handheld calendar and address book. Notes (rel 7) can’t sync with my Palm – Outlook could. Again, another convenience taken away.
To conclude; this rant isn’t to worship Microsoft (I could type just as much on Office 2007 – ****); but Microsoft productions look outstanding compared to Notes.
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
I upgraded from Lotus Notes 7 to 8.0.1
guess what… Lotus Notes still sucks!!!
I’m ready for the noose.
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 *** 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
http://www.ihatems.com/ – EOM
They who does not know please dont 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 **** 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
Hah.
You little whiners. If you loose so much time using LN instead of some other software, you should complain to your superiors not here. Or perhaps you don’t dare….
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!
My company got bought by another and we had to switch from Outlook to LN. Oh the horror. However I’ve been successfully using the Outlook Connector for Domino for two years; so I am able to use Outlook for Mail, Calendar, Tasks, etc and it synchs with my company’s Domino server. It can be a little buggy with the email formatting, but I’ll take that anyday to keep using Outlook. Highly recommended.
Lotus Notes 8.0.1 is shining, brightly. Give a try, guys.
omg, having used MS Outlook for so long – I didn’t know how good I had it…
I think I might have to end it all
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 ****!
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.
got latest notes at work and it is ****. it crashes for no reason. takes hours to send out out of office replies and just looks so so wank – like a kid won a competition on art attack to design the layout.
anyway i wish they’d get something better.
oh and it never saves my default browser which is so **** as well…
…and crashes every time i try to exit it
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 …….
I just started a new job for a rather large company and they use Lotus Notes. Everywhere else that I have worked we always used Outlook which is what I am used to and what I use on my personal laptop pc at home.
Not only am I forced to use this archaic system which the programs of the software made for other programmers but they use Notes 6.5. I have seen screen shots of Notes 8 and it actually looks tolerable. Notes is probably the worst email system/client I have ever had the displeasure of using. I wish IBM would discontinue it and support for it making everyone that currently uses it have to switch to something more useful like the post office.
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 **** 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.
Where I work, most people have a small program installed called KillNotes. It shuts down Notes, since it normally is impossible to shut it down the normal way for the majority of the users.
I have never heard of any other software for which there is great need for such an application.
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.
Re: Cols criticism of a previous poster:
Ridiculing someone after-the-fact for not knowing beforehand how to do something, like attach … er, no maybe its insert … er, no, its File -> Import … a GIF file is unfair.
What? Slit .. clip .. cut .. sew and for THAT you spent twelve years in med school?!
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.
Latest discovery:
Monthly calendar shows each week as runing from Sunday – Saturday.
Weekly calendar shows each week as running from Monday – Sunday.
So, when I click on Sunday, 06 Apr 08 on the monthly calendar in the left pane, it highlights 06-12 April .. and in the right pane shows the week of 31 Mar – 06 Apr.
I like Notes … I’ve had many hours of laughter from it!
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!
I’ve moved from a company that used Notes to one that has Outlook. Generally Outlook is great – but I just can’t find anything. Notes has a powerful search engine built right in, I could find anything pretty much instantly. Outlook chugs for several minutes, then doesn’t find the mail I’m looking for. I’ve tried Google desktop, Microsoft desktop search etc – they help, but still nowhere near as good as Notes.
“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.
I used Lotus Notes since 1996 and I must have been lucky to have great Administrators. For me it was the best e-mail Client. Seriously I do not understand the fuss. I have worked in 6 companies (I am neither a developer nor an Administrator) and it seems I have been really lucky to be able to work with Notes. 1 huge organisation I worked for used Siebel for their CRM and used a mix of different applications because they did not understand the power of Notes as an Application System. The other companies understood and had a mix of well developed applications. Ranging from CRM to Teamrooms to time recording. One (!!!!) Notes Developer in the bank I used to work developed a Loan system in Notes which was sold to other banks for a lot of money. It worked great. If you are a senior Manager in an organisation your employees complain about Lotus Notes please get new Administrators!!
“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.
@ Ash
“Why, it was only the other day that i spent 2 mind numbing hours reading through the 2000 page manual to find out how to attach a flippen animated GIF file!”
Chose File -> Import from the menu.
2 hours? – you should be worried, your boss might read this and realize he’s made a big mistake.
“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.
“the biggest single downfall of Notes was its lack of a real database backend”
Not all applications fit with relational database methodology but you can use DB2 as a back end if you wish.
“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.
I like Notes? Most of these problems are cause by you, the user, and some of them are in fact Notes Design but if you don’t like Notes then please don’t use it. Find another company that uses something else. The best part is when I read this and all of you are complaining about Lotus issues and the same issues exist in other products a well and the bulk of them problems on this page are Windows Related not Lotus Notes. I do however like this point of view. It’s good to know this many people are using the product. Viva Lotus Notes!
My employer just switched from Microsoft Webmail to Lotus Notes and it SUCKS. Outlook is the best.
Dear Sam who wrote…
“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.”
This is the excuse of every single Notes administrator under the sun… I strongly suggest you get trained in something other than this pish!
The whole issue is that the majority of the corporate users who use Notes never use the rest of the functioanality, all they want is a decent mail client! Which you have to agree this is the absolute worst there is!
Also, one of my big issues is having no recent mail address caching to autofill email addresses!
That’s my rant over… Bye!
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.
Most of you who’ve posted are the lucky ones who only use Notes for email – In our laboratory we use version 5 for our entire (business critical) quality system database! It’s so abysmal I’m actually finding it difficult to express in words.
I’m lucky in that I don’t have to use it as much as some, but when I do, It literally makes we weep for the sake of humanity. Even simple tasks like formatting text into paragraphs and bullet points is beset by random font changes, random tab insert lengths, random word wrap etc. etc. ad nauseum Something that would only take 20min in any other program I care to think of takes 4 times as long in Notes. And to really top it off, things that I’ve saved usually loose their formatting by the time I next open them…
May several sizeable biblical plagues beset all those who had a hand in the creation of this foul smelling beast.
We’re using Notes 8 and it really rocks!
Interesting set of complaints.. most of which could be remedied with some training, which it seems most people didn’t get.
It would be nice if people listed the *version* of notes they are using as well as the type of computer they are using – someone reading might actually be able to help you get your work done…
But it really seems to be (a) old, no longer supported software, (b) mis-configured software or (c) inadequate hardware
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 …
Has no one heard of the outlook domino connector that allows you to use Outlook instead? My company uses notes and I’ve been using outlook since I’ve been here cos Notes is a peice of poo.
Download the outlook domino connector from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/genuineValidation.aspx?familyid=8ebbba59-5f17-4e52-8980-c4f0dfa92d65&displaylang=en
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….
I’m a lowly Lotus Notes user and I can’t stand it anymore. This program/package whatever you want to call it may be the ultimate IT geek wet dream but as a guy who just needs email and calendaring features, this thing does not work well. Interface, non standard commands, weird things happening when saving new records, a stupid searching function… this is ****.
The IT guys love it because they say it can do so much more than Outlook ’cause you see, it’s a db. Ooohhh… but in order to get any new application built in Notes you need an army of programmers.
Lotus Notes is a conspiracy to make IT guys indispensable and buy them a lifelong job supporting it
Thanks for reading.
My handy maxim is that if you only remember one thing about Lotus Notes then remember it’s ****.
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.
As soon as I sat down at my new job and turned the computer on, I knew I would hate Lotus Notes. I was given a short induction and all time I could only wonder why it couldn’t just be easy to use like Outlook. I didn’t want to access data bases and such, I just wanted to check emails when I first got into the office in a morning
I felt like I was composing emails in an old version of Microsoft Publisher what with all the dark green speckly colours and such. Then there were the pictures one could attach to a signature to make one feel like an individual. Hmm, shall I go for the space rocket or the basketball this week? It just looks tacky. As do the little hands with pointing fingers used in some applaications in place of a traditional arrow pointer. These looked like directions to toilets in Victorian British pubs.
Absolutely hated it and I’m glad it was only a temporary contract as I am now back with Outlook.
NSD is running.
LN is the most un-user friendly piece of software in the world…nay, the UNIVERSE. What the heck is a hotspot?! It is such a resource hog that I can’t have it open with any other programs!
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.
Rachelm920 wrote at 11.14.07: “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. Ive tried to disable it, but unlike every other software you cannot!” – I agree. But web is wonderful place, all the things you can find from there!!! Like advise that if you are using Notes on Windows, you can disable the splash screen by changing the starting link from pointing to “notes.exe” to “nlnotes.exe” (in properties window). Voil! Worked at least on my Notes 6.5.
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.
I am a contract developer and some of my clients use Lotus Notes. I try to do as little as possible in Notes/Domino because I don’t want the piece of **** to stain my good reputation. You think the client interface and email is bad? You should try explaining to a client why they can’t see data that was just added to a database. The answer is “when Notes gets around to updating the index… until then, the app won’t work.” Oh yes, you can force the refresh, but I thought databases got past that somewhere in the 60′s. It can also be embarassingly slow with a relatively trivial amount of data.
At least I sometimes have the power to recommend software and my mantra is “Just say NO to Notes”.
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.
Lotus notes is the bain of all soceity issues! I am just about to extracate it from the organisation I work for and wanted to get this off me chest!
Down with Lotes…………….. (lotus notes!)
How did they sell so much of this lame software?
They used to say “nobody every got fired for picking IBM”…that should change.
Oh the wonders of Lotus Notes…..er yeh wotever!
I work for a cheapskate company, who threw away Outlook for Lotus Notes due to its ‘cheap’ license. Cheap? I wonder why it is so cheap for….oh yeh i forgot, its a crud program!
A usual 10 minute job now turns into a 2 hour job, because this sodding program drains all your system resources and stops you from typing in the good ol’ SIMPLE programs like Word and Excel.
Why, it was only the other day that i spent 2 mind numbing hours reading through the 2000 page manual to find out how to attach a flippen animated GIF file! And when it did apply the other user couldnt access it because it wasn’t attached, grrrrr!
Out of Office message? I know already that the other person is out of the office else why would I be sending the freakin email! I can SEE they are out of the office, i just saw the boss walk out!
One of the annoying key moments is that you are happily typing away on another program, suddenly you get an email and the entire Lotus Notes window pops open! After waiting 2-3 minutes for the window to change from white to visual text, you then have to minimize it cause the mail was junk and you can then get on with your work. Oh fun!
At least our company has a special ‘System Downtime’ timesheet. My name is written all over it!!!!!!
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!
Have to join the LOTUS NOTES HATERS’ CLUB! This company (rockwell collins) doesn’t seem to use the NOTES part of it (which was useful in a past job), so we have to live with the bunged up Calendar, Tasks, Email & Slowest-Contacts-List-To-Search-In-The-World. IBM must have used a 6th graders search algorithm? What is that? All the preceding applications are so non-functional it’s pathetic; rules set up stop working. Repeating calendar events? Good luck when modifying them for a group of people – half will disappear. Tasks? Fuhgedaboudit.. When we do a File->Exit, Notes won’t even quit half the time, it hangs the PC at 100% duty cycle so has to be aborted to kick it off! YUCK! WHAT IS THAT?? I CAN”T TAKE THIS MUCH LONGER!!!
I’VE CUT UP MY MICROSOFT HATER’S CLUB CARD!! GIVE ME BACK MY OUTLOOK, PLEASE!!
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.
*sigh* Just so many poor design decisions. (Maybe the product name should be “Lotus ‘What were they thinking?!’ Notes”.)
Miscellany:
1) I’m a fairly bright guy, but the changing displays/toolbars/menus/menu items, varying with views has me unsure of where to find any preferences or options anytime I want to view or change them.
2) Right now I’m working withToolbar Preferences. I see five toolbars, but the “Available Toolbars” shows four toolbars as “Visible”.
3) Looking for help: The help topic “Toolbars : Hiding and Displaying” has an entry for “To make additional toolbars visible”. You might expect a correspoinding entry like “To hide toolbars” … but yuo’d be wrong.
Shouldn’t they test this on animals or something before inflicting it on the workplace?
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!!!!
aaaaaargh! Its just crashed again with a garbage error message about lookup handles. The address book is a nightmare to keep up to date, so most people seem to give up on it. Email cannot read or send HTML. It does not use your hard disk for email storage so it eats up server space so IBM can sell you a larger one. Nothing is intuitive and i end up using my blackberry while notes takes 5 minutes to open. Agree with everything said above!
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 **** 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!!!
i also agrees with you all guys..
its the slowest piece of code and taks large ammount of processor share..
Ctrl + Break – is the help when the **** freezes time after time
One of many reasons why I HATE LOTUS NOTES:
You receive an email from someone you trust, which is copied to a third party, which you know by reference only, and you know that the sender of the email trusts (for example, this third party works in a remote location of your company). You want to reply with additional, confidential information, but Lotus can’t figure out what the email address of the third party is, not because it doesn’t have it in the email it self, but because there are similar names in your companies address book! That’s about as brain dead as you can get. Obviously, you have to omit the third party because you 1) aren’t really sure where he works, and 2) you’re not really sure of his name as reported in the Lotus email directory.
Way to go Lotus. Make’n it easy for the user to do his work.
“It’s a lotus product. I can’t tell you for sure if it worked or not.”
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.
Thanks to Notes i have a meeting at -1 o’clock tomorrow. Also, why do url’s have to blink!
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!!!!
Notes is utter garbage. It took them until release 6.5.4 to add a simple Icon to see if you have replied to a users message. There is no rhyme or reason to which fields you can copy and paste from, they have left in a notes browser that no body uses. The calendaring option is just horrible and almost useless. The notes application is one of the most non-intuitive software packages ever developed. The fact that you have to have a developer on-site to build in functionality is joke. I HATE THIS APPLICATION!
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…
You know why the wind blows through IBM Corporate HQ?
Because Lotus Notes SUCKS so much!
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.
Do you think e-mail is a kind of chat or instant messaging?
Are you correct?
It took you 3 years to reply to that one? You must be using Notes, bwahahaha.
I received an AUTO REPLY this morning – July 1, 2010…to an email I sent on the 10th of February 2010.
“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!!
I’m so relieved to find I don’t suffer alone!
Lotus notes is a lot like Nascar… It’s really lame, and it’s fans are a bunch of drooling idiots.
Thanks!
Well said.
Ahhhhhhggggg!! It hurts to look at it!