I Hate Lotus Notes

Neverhatedsoftwaresobadly said on February 2nd, 2010 at 10:49 am

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****

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. 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.

SQL Dave said on February 1st, 2010 at 1:45 pm

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 retard-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.

John said on February 1st, 2010 at 12:08 pm

Lotus Notes mailman error. ‘Nuff said.

notesincams said on January 31st, 2010 at 2:45 pm

r65 error ….. thankyou.. that really norrows down the problem

Derek said on January 29th, 2010 at 2:52 pm

Starting a search in my Lotus Notes inbox kills my Lotus Notes inbox.

Ben said on January 29th, 2010 at 7:47 am

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

Shortguy said on January 29th, 2010 at 4:41 am

@Tallguy: Wow… You “upgraded” to a version released in 2008. Congratulations.

Jay K said on January 28th, 2010 at 1:05 pm

Lotus notes is pathetic.
Today’s most pathetic “feature” – can’t undo move of hundreds of search results to the wrong folder.
Onward.
Jay

Lotuns Notes Used said on January 28th, 2010 at 3:51 am

Lotus Notes is the only program that ever urged me to close other programs before gathering enough RAM to print of a simple email.

Forex Profit Launcher said on January 27th, 2010 at 3:13 pm

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?

Bob said on January 26th, 2010 at 9:34 am

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

Mike said on January 26th, 2010 at 1:42 am

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 !

dimitri said on January 25th, 2010 at 10:55 am

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.

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NOTES BOY said on January 22nd, 2010 at 8:27 am

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.

Bargearse said on January 22nd, 2010 at 2:53 am

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 shite 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.

Rich said on January 21st, 2010 at 5:05 pm

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! Fucking 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…

Drunk and Bitter Jesus said on January 20th, 2010 at 2:45 pm

PETETM: Sarcasm, perhaps you’ve heard of it.

BobbRobb said on January 20th, 2010 at 10:17 am

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…

Donniemarco said on January 19th, 2010 at 2:35 pm

Why would anyone – ANYONE EVER – choose this piece of crap 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)

lotushater said on January 19th, 2010 at 9:04 am

Would take way too long to bitch 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!!

Petetm said on January 19th, 2010 at 7:32 am

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.

Petetm said on January 19th, 2010 at 6:39 am

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 crap?
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!?!?!?!?!?!

noob1 said on January 18th, 2010 at 11:02 pm

@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?

colin said on January 16th, 2010 at 5:23 pm

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.

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 crap?

Reduced productivity by 90%

Chris said on January 14th, 2010 at 8:36 am

Here we are in 2010 and this piece of crap 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 crap…

AJ said on January 13th, 2010 at 4:42 am

Right in the middle of a chat with some VIP dude (forced to use the sametime embedded in Notes 8.5.1 ) a fucking crash… of course I can not restart notes without restarting my entire PC, VIP mad because he thought I left… AAAGH

Benjamin said on January 12th, 2010 at 11:42 am

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

An IBMer said on January 11th, 2010 at 10:11 am

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…

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 .

chas said on January 8th, 2010 at 5:51 am

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.

Bart said on January 7th, 2010 at 2:13 pm

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..

Mars said on January 7th, 2010 at 9:49 am

@ 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.

Mick said on January 6th, 2010 at 8:33 pm

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????

Moff said on January 3rd, 2010 at 2:29 pm

“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

Darin said on December 30th, 2009 at 3:43 pm

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…

Petetm said on December 29th, 2009 at 7:34 am

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.

Petetm said on December 29th, 2009 at 7:23 am

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.

Petetm said on December 29th, 2009 at 7:02 am

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.

Petetm said on December 28th, 2009 at 6:51 am

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.

Ozone said on December 27th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

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…

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. 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!

LaugingAtLotus said on December 23rd, 2009 at 1:09 pm

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.

Chas said on December 23rd, 2009 at 8:48 am

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.

YARRRRRRGHHH! said on December 22nd, 2009 at 8:39 am

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 FUCKING 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 FUCK doesn’t Notes support any open calendar formats?

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, 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…

Soren said on December 21st, 2009 at 10:55 am

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

Jassika said on December 19th, 2009 at 2:45 am

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@#$!

JarHarms said on December 17th, 2009 at 9:11 am

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.

chainsawmother said on December 16th, 2009 at 1:15 pm

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.

I hate notes said on December 16th, 2009 at 6:55 am

I hate notes, fucking piece of shit.

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 shit 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 shit – it just has to go.

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???? already passed three f*ck*n days !!!!!!! shouldn’t it refresh the information in mail server already???? f*c*in hate this piece of shit, and I’m stuck with it !!!!!!! aaagggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

From a small corner in east london said on December 14th, 2009 at 6:02 am

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 shite 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.

Mike Geary said on December 13th, 2009 at 2:26 pm

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.

Kam said on December 11th, 2009 at 9:24 am

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 crap.

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.
Snuffware

Runetune said on December 11th, 2009 at 5:21 am

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.

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?

Petetm said on December 10th, 2009 at 12:37 pm

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.

Petetm said on December 10th, 2009 at 11:48 am

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.

Petetm said on December 10th, 2009 at 11:38 am

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.

Nice Logo said on December 10th, 2009 at 8:02 am

nice logo

PB said on December 10th, 2009 at 7:14 am

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!).

Michael Daw said on December 9th, 2009 at 9:16 am

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.

Larry said on December 9th, 2009 at 5:19 am

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

Dave Trouble said on December 8th, 2009 at 12:06 pm

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 fucking 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.

Chris said on December 8th, 2009 at 6:25 am

In Windows 7 I can pin any application to my taskbar without issue, but, of course, Lotus Notes does not work!

The Truth said on December 7th, 2009 at 9:24 am

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.

Sal Strant said on December 6th, 2009 at 9:38 am

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.

FrankieAvocado said on December 4th, 2009 at 8:38 am

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.

TJ Notes Sucks said on December 2nd, 2009 at 10:30 am

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 ass, 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 crap… 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…

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.

Arlette Leigh said on December 1st, 2009 at 7:07 pm

As far as I’m concerned Lotus Notes is the most horrible piece of crap 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 shit 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 crap 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 crap Lotus Notes is just a testament to how useless they really are.

Joyce said on November 30th, 2009 at 3:12 pm

All I want to do is link to an Excel 2007 document from within a Lotus Note (6.5) email…

FRUSTRATED said on November 30th, 2009 at 12:30 am

1,157,524K of private virtual memory!!!!!!!!!!!!

ARE YOU F@#$%G KITTING ME????!!!!!!!!!!!!

What is this piece of shit doing? My OS does need so much RAM to run

BBGG said on November 26th, 2009 at 11:13 am

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?

TommyD said on November 26th, 2009 at 10:11 am

@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

Fred Astaire said on November 25th, 2009 at 10:38 pm

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.

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.

Wayne said on November 24th, 2009 at 11:34 pm

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG spelchecker what a piece of s#$%#t it doesnt work ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i hate lotus notes

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.

skippy said on November 20th, 2009 at 9:53 am

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 ass application but it seems some rather delete comments instead of learning..
Skip

S, Dowell said on November 20th, 2009 at 5:53 am

*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?

Stelios said on November 20th, 2009 at 2:46 am

I came here while I was googleing “Lotus Notes 8.5 on Ubuntu is fucking slow”.

Skippy said on November 19th, 2009 at 9:03 pm

@ 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!
@ 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 is called Lotusphere 2010!!!!!

Rik said on November 19th, 2009 at 6:52 am

this can’t be right! notes is the best written software ever.

Mojk said on November 18th, 2009 at 6:10 am

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!

Waleed said on November 18th, 2009 at 2:11 am

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.

Waleed said on November 18th, 2009 at 1:36 am

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!

Simon O'Doherty said on November 17th, 2009 at 4:08 am

@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.

Hannes said on November 16th, 2009 at 7:57 pm

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?

ollywally said on November 16th, 2009 at 9:25 am

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

Petetm said on November 16th, 2009 at 6:58 am

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.

Petetm said on November 16th, 2009 at 6:51 am

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?

Peter Griffin said on November 16th, 2009 at 2:39 am

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.

Kam said on November 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm

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.

Outlooker said on November 12th, 2009 at 4:30 pm

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!

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.

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.

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.

Dj Lien said on November 11th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

Written by geeks, for geeks.

Bud said on November 10th, 2009 at 1:55 pm

Is it too much to ask to print an email without cutting off the right freakin’ margin?????

Tortured Soul said on November 10th, 2009 at 7:50 am

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 crap to users, I’d be fired.

What a piece of junk….

Simon O'Doherty said on November 10th, 2009 at 1:06 am

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/

Nav said on November 9th, 2009 at 10:21 am

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”

Petem said on November 9th, 2009 at 9:26 am

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.

Petem said on November 9th, 2009 at 9:22 am

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?

Koticzka said on November 9th, 2009 at 5:46 am

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 crap 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.

Jordan said on November 6th, 2009 at 8:12 pm

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.

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…

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…

Matt Gorden said on November 5th, 2009 at 6:52 pm

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.

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 fucking VERB, is nestled under the “Tools” menu. Unfortunately indicative of the organizational system of this shitware. WOW.

rich said on November 5th, 2009 at 10:07 am

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!

Petem said on November 5th, 2009 at 9:09 am

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?

Petem said on November 5th, 2009 at 8:53 am

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?

DC said on November 5th, 2009 at 6:58 am

Also…why no ‘open with’ for attachments? WHY?

~~~~~~ said on November 5th, 2009 at 5:39 am

@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.

Bud said on November 4th, 2009 at 6:04 am

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.

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. 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 …..

GIMME-OUTLOOK-BACK said on November 3rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm

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 crap – any day.

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.

Chris said on October 30th, 2009 at 8:33 pm

Just look at this picture… thats all I have to say.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/366603/Lotus.png

snailmailzbetr said on October 30th, 2009 at 9:29 am

LN 8.5 = H1N1

Petem said on October 29th, 2009 at 11:32 am

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?

Kam said on October 29th, 2009 at 10:46 am

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.

Koticzka said on October 29th, 2009 at 5:55 am

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 CRAP.
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.

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.

Notes User said on October 27th, 2009 at 10:07 am

I see only stupid users posting on this site. You guys don’t know the first thing about common sens

FAN said on October 27th, 2009 at 7:10 am

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!

LN Sufferer said on October 23rd, 2009 at 5:57 am

Good lord, what a piece of crap. 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.

joe everyone said on October 22nd, 2009 at 12:36 pm

If Lotus Notes was an NFL team it would be the Detroit Lions

Mavin said on October 22nd, 2009 at 7:34 am

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/

Crap software said on October 22nd, 2009 at 1:07 am

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.

George said on October 21st, 2009 at 6:11 am

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.

Petetm said on October 20th, 2009 at 1:33 pm

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.

Petetm said on October 20th, 2009 at 1:17 pm

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.

imod said on October 20th, 2009 at 8:16 am

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

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 shit button anyway and wouldn’t it pop up asking if i was sure like it does when i delete stupid piece of shit email program go an jammit

M said on October 17th, 2009 at 10:52 am

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 shit 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

DC said on October 16th, 2009 at 2:25 am

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.

Greg said on October 14th, 2009 at 10:13 am

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.

Waleed said on October 14th, 2009 at 3:57 am

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 fuck 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!

LN Hater said on October 12th, 2009 at 9:29 pm

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 crap 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.

JoeBillyBob said on October 12th, 2009 at 5:54 am

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.

TheCueBallKid said on October 9th, 2009 at 8:06 am

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

Davo said on October 8th, 2009 at 3:36 pm

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.

NotesDeveloper said on October 7th, 2009 at 7:24 pm

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.

Matt said on October 7th, 2009 at 6:34 pm

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 ass 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!!!

Lotus Notes is Evil said on October 6th, 2009 at 9:40 am

Also, check out twitter.com/lotusnotessucks

Kam said on October 6th, 2009 at 6:45 am

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.

Jason said on October 5th, 2009 at 1:57 pm

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…

Mark said on October 2nd, 2009 at 3:28 am

@Sam log in offline and you should have no trouble access local nsfs

Shave My Poodle! said on October 1st, 2009 at 8:05 am

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.

James Collie said on September 30th, 2009 at 10:47 am

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.

David said on September 29th, 2009 at 3:37 pm

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.

mike adams said on September 28th, 2009 at 1:05 pm

Lotus notes gave me the clap

silly lilly said on September 28th, 2009 at 10:44 am

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.

llamaLord said on September 25th, 2009 at 8:41 am

Oh I hate hate hate hate this piece of shit software. Its so crap and affecting everyones productivity

joey lotus said on September 24th, 2009 at 9:06 am

Upgrade to the latest version, get training, grow up

Kam said on September 22nd, 2009 at 6:55 am

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.

Kam said on September 21st, 2009 at 1:08 pm

Not sure what happened to my post. It’s scrambled up and parts are missing. I’ll repost when I get a chance.

Joey Dreyfus said on September 18th, 2009 at 11:18 am

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.

Ice said on September 17th, 2009 at 10:40 pm

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.

Nathan said on September 16th, 2009 at 11:00 pm

My work is using LN v7. Was just told the other day we are upgrading to v8.5.

I want to fucking kill myself.

I’m also open to being murdered.

Sparky said on September 16th, 2009 at 9:32 am

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.

KRE said on September 15th, 2009 at 3:01 am

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.

/etc.init.d/lotusnotes stop said on September 14th, 2009 at 3:12 am

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?

Adam said on September 10th, 2009 at 3:15 pm

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?

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?

Ice said on September 8th, 2009 at 9:32 pm

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?

Soapyj said on September 8th, 2009 at 12:56 am

Why is it, for fucks 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?

jez said on September 7th, 2009 at 7:21 am

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).

P-E said on September 6th, 2009 at 11:42 am

Is there a license fee required for this product? You can’t possibly need to pay for it.

Notes user said on September 4th, 2009 at 11:31 am

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.

andreas said on September 4th, 2009 at 12:24 am

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!

notes hater said on September 3rd, 2009 at 8:40 am

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 ASS IBM!!!! NOTES SUCKS!!!!

Zach said on September 1st, 2009 at 4:40 pm

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!!!

Jay said on September 1st, 2009 at 1:59 pm

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.

Kam said on September 1st, 2009 at 7:31 am

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.

EAGLE said on September 1st, 2009 at 1:27 am

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!

CS said on August 28th, 2009 at 11:53 am

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

Bill said on August 26th, 2009 at 5:24 am

“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.

Corin said on August 26th, 2009 at 12:39 am

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 crap.

Started with Notes R3.1 said on August 25th, 2009 at 1:55 pm

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.

Harken said on August 25th, 2009 at 3:00 am

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.

Henk said on August 20th, 2009 at 10:16 pm

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.

Sue said on August 20th, 2009 at 7:09 am

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.

Sam Griffin said on August 20th, 2009 at 1:57 am

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?

Shiela said on August 19th, 2009 at 2:09 pm

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

Not a geek said on August 18th, 2009 at 9:54 am

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 crap. 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.

Mike said on August 17th, 2009 at 12:57 pm

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….

Andre said on August 17th, 2009 at 4:51 am

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

Dag Kvello said on August 15th, 2009 at 4:47 pm

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 ass 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 shit, 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/)

daGUY said on August 13th, 2009 at 4:57 pm

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?

Marty said on August 12th, 2009 at 3:49 pm

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.

KC said on August 11th, 2009 at 11:16 am

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, CRAP!

Bruce (emailing since 1980) said on August 10th, 2009 at 12:02 pm

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!

Gerry Mullin said on August 10th, 2009 at 6:50 am

I love Lotus Notes its the best bit of software since pacman

awol said on August 7th, 2009 at 7:33 am

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…

Tortured_IBM_Employee said on August 6th, 2009 at 6:37 pm

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.

William said on August 6th, 2009 at 12:17 am

CHRIS: Ensure you don’t have ‘Application Enhancer’ running. That stops it from starting up

Chris said on August 5th, 2009 at 8:47 am

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.

Alex said on August 3rd, 2009 at 10:19 pm

Why! Why can’t I sort by ‘Who’, ‘Date’, etc. on results from a search?
I really do hate Lotus Notes.

Hooked_on_Notes said on August 2nd, 2009 at 8:45 pm

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………..

I work on Wall Street said on August 2nd, 2009 at 7:30 am

“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.

Marc said on July 30th, 2009 at 7:24 am

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.

Tortured_IBM_Employee said on July 26th, 2009 at 9:31 pm

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.

Ben said on July 24th, 2009 at 7:32 am

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.

Brendan said on July 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 am

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?

Tom said on July 22nd, 2009 at 6:15 pm

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!

BRIAN said on July 22nd, 2009 at 3:02 pm

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.

Carlotta said on July 22nd, 2009 at 7:51 am

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!!

JACKASS said on July 21st, 2009 at 8:44 am

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.

Carl said on July 20th, 2009 at 4:53 am

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.

DA2 said on July 17th, 2009 at 9:11 am

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.

Jimmy said on July 15th, 2009 at 10:41 am

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.

Sam Griffin said on July 15th, 2009 at 8:10 am

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?!

ross said on July 15th, 2009 at 2:24 am

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.

chainsawmother said on July 13th, 2009 at 10:44 am

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.

SueSally said on July 12th, 2009 at 1:52 pm

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!

David said on July 10th, 2009 at 3:05 am

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.

Sake said on July 9th, 2009 at 10:29 pm

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

Mark Peter said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:46 pm

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.

Mark Peter said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:35 pm

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.

Mark Peter said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:31 pm

My out of office started working when i came back from leave

Mark Peter said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:24 pm

I was running my Symantec the other day and it quarantined notes.exe

Mark Peter said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:12 pm

Pray you never have to open a 9GB Lotus Notes db. It will say “opening” but never open.

Mark Peter said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:08 pm

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.

Mark Peter said on July 9th, 2009 at 3:04 pm

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.

Mark Peter said on July 9th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

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.

Sam Griffin said on July 9th, 2009 at 4:08 am

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!

John Zerbe said on July 7th, 2009 at 11:49 am

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!!!!!!!!

grougnafier said on July 6th, 2009 at 6:50 am

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 .

Davey said on July 3rd, 2009 at 1:38 am

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 shite.
Thanks for creating this site – I’ve taken my first step to feeling better.

Yonglip said on July 2nd, 2009 at 4:54 am

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 bitch like Lotus Notes as your second wife. There! I feel better (slightly, but better).

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

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

Keep on cheering for Outlook, hooray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No system works without decent admin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to stab Notes in the face

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t decide which is worse:

Lotus Notes or Statistica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes is crap. Crap, crappity crap crap crap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There you go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lotus Notes is garbage.

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

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

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

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

Thank you… I feel a little better now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@ Dave Delay

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

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

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

IBM should hang their heads in shame…

Matthew

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s look at some indisputable facts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i hate notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why DO companies choose Lamus Notus?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, Lotus Notes SUCKS!!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunset this piece of garbage for the sake of karma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I loathe Lotus Notes!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So keep talking …

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

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

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

Nice guy but he’s not computer savvy.

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

I hate Lotus notes.

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

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

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

I hate you Lotus Notes… so much it hurts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use the latest version and get an immediate reply.”

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

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

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

I want Outlook back!!

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

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

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

Have a great day!

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

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

For an em-dash, “—”, it’s ALT+ 0151.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Y es una grandísima MIERDA!!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what a fantastic product!!!!

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

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

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

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

anyone who thinks this software is function is delusional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

continue in other comment….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and on and on….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This software makes me sick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear friends,

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

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

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

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

Best Regards
Peter

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

Hi all,

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

Thank you
Jay

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

Dear Col,

Are u working for Lotus support team?

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

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

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

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

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

Hi All,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m at a loss.

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

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

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

I’m serious.

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

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

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

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

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

In conclusion…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use the latest version and get an immediate reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem with Notes is us.

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

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

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

We’re using Notes 8 and it really rocks!

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

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

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

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

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

Glad I’m not the only one….

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

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

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

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

NSD is running.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check this one out!

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

Duoh!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only there were more cliparts to make me happier…

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

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

A pox on your Domino server!!

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

Ahhhhhhggggg!! It hurts to look at it!