> solutions coming out of the Lotus group are very clear,

> crisp, and potentially compelling to organisations across

> the board

Well, my experience is limited to Lotus Notes, but I can assure you that it is still as totally crap today as it ever was.

The fact that the Ray Ozzie, who previous led the development of Notes, is now Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, gives me the best confidence for the future success of Open Source Software.

actually, the latest Notes platform due to come out is quite well done.

at my last gig, we ran Domino on the iSeries (used to be known as the AS/400) that we also used for operations. no downtime, no issues, no dedicated administrator required. it just worked, for 4 years.

most users are unwilling to learn another interface, so anything different than Outlook is regarded as inferior. since they have no idea what Notes/Domino does (groupware/collaboration, database, development platform, etc), when judging this platform, they are ignorant at best (lazy and stubborn at worst).

the company provides its employees with software to send email, and mantain calendars and address books. to moan about the different interface is just sentimental crap. if it works well, that is all the business cares about (or rather, a mature organization would work that way).

to those whiny users, i would like to say:

you're here to work, not to get a warm fuzzy.

As any Lotus users knows, moving to Exchange is rather like swapping a sports saloon for a secondhand tuk-tuk. If you disagree then frankly you don't know what you're boring everyone about. But Exchange is moderately easy to install and maintain so there's at least half the reason why it is popular for half-witted/lazy administrators. So it's a popular choice, no surprise.

While Exchange is perhaps the model example of how Microsoft can come to dominate a market without creating the best product, it is good that IBM have not given up on Notes, and with the evolution to UC maybe the second wind will see Notes or Websphere or whatever the heck they call it now grab some land back from Email 4 Beginners 2007.

I learned and used Domino for years, without much support. It was a great way to do rapid application development and later to put everything on the Web. I really miss it, but trying to explain what it does, WITHOUT mentioning the e-mail components, is difficult even when you actually know what can be done with it.

Even then, I never understood the Sametime etc things that kept being introduced. IBM keeps repackaging, further confusing me and probably everything else.

There should be a marketing effort to get just Domino as a secure development platform for Web. It can be as sophisticated an interface as you want it to be, and it had multilanguage development long before .Net.

Just the full text indexing with instant, delayed, or on-demand reindexing is worth the price of admission. Have you ever tried to find anything on the MS site?

I agree shubin, I don't understand the interface whiners. I grew up with Commodore in the 80s, worked on Macs in the early 90s in high school, Windows 95 came out in the middle of my post secondary training, and have played a bit with Linux, and had quite a chuckle when I first saw the Fischer-Price skin for XP, so it's a mystery to me why a unique interface would be a show stopper. Why is whatever Microsoft does *currently* considered The Standard? Sure they have huge market share, but that still shouldn't mean that if it's not just like Microsoft that it's bad, or else Lotus isn't the only brand with problems.

"there is no inherent reason why all of the aforementioned leading/bleeding-edge functionality should be a derivative of your email environment"

Email is just another database in Notes. There are a *lot* of places that use Notes without using it for email. Calling it basically an email system with some extras thrown in gets you off on the wrong foot, and makes it less likely you will ever understand its full usefullness. Sandra is right, it is an application development platform. One of the applications you can build with it is email, and a great one is included. It's always been ahead of it's time no matter if you are looking at the security model, the standards supported, the 2 way openness, or the fundamental architecture.

Now that the Notes 8 client is based on Eclipse (and the UI has had a total overhaul), 3rd parties should have a field day. Now that an OpenOffice variant is built in, bean counters should take a second look at license cost reduction. Now that Sametime is included, any privacy conscious business currently using a free consumer IM system should really give their heads a shake. Because it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, anyone considering a switch away from a total Microsoft shop should investigate it. With the upcoming Quickr, even if your desktop runs Windows, you may never even need to use the file system. In fact because any Notes application can be presented on the web with the flick of a switch, a browser is all that is really required.

You seem so drawn towards saying good things about Notes, it's sad that you can't shake the rumours and gossip and baseless *feelings* and just write a positive story. Anyone who does any serious investigation is not going to make their decision based on vague perceptions, they are going to choose the superior technology. Otherwise why bother looking into it? Or writing a story about it?