It’s been about 9 years since I’ve used Lotus Notes but occasionally I still have vivid memories about what an extremely bad user experience that piece of software was. Is it still like this or did IBM revamp it to be something less horrible? I’m talking about the Windows version, I’m not sure if they support anything else or have a web version now. I used to get a kick out of the hieroglyphics on the login screen.
I have not interacted with it directly, but my understanding gleaned from talking to people who work at IBM (where its use is mandated), is no, not at all. It continues to be a piece of crap.
Are you asking specifically about Notes Mail and Calendar? Or just the app in general? I actively use 6 different mail clients/online mail tools, and Notes is higher on my list of favorites.
I don’t particularly like the Notes “desktop” UI, where Notes databases are listed as difficult to differentiate tiles among whatever tabs or categories you set up. That part is pretty horrible to me, as it’s difficult to find things. But on the dev side, a good Notes expert can quickly cook up Notes “database” forms/templates/workflows that are pretty foolproof and version to version compatible.
On the flip-side, I’m in Sharepoint hell.
I’m referring to the Notes Windows desktop UI - email, calendar, database, etc. It seemed to have been designed without using Windows standards. I remember not being able to copy/paste from certain windows which drove me crazy.
This is what I hear, too. Instead of standard Windows menus, it has ones that are “better” in the sense of making more abstract sense (why is “Exit” under the “File” menu anyway?), but totally discordant with what normal windows users have come to expect.
This one was annoying, considering how often it seemed to crash:
When Lotus Notes crashes, some processes may continue running and prevent the application from being restarted until they are killed.
We used it at work until 2-3 years ago, and it was horrid. Whatever drooling dunce thought that making “F5” be the exit key instead of refresh like every other Windows program ought to be mercilessly pummeled.
And there is a program out there called “killnotes” that will kill those screwy processes that don’t allow you to fire up the mail client again.
Yes. We had it at work until about 9 months ago, when we migrated to Outlook.
It is terrible.
There is something in the way Notes works that conflicts with Microsoft Office. Running Notes caused Office applications to crash even more than usual.
When we switched, crashing was noticeably reduced.
Killnotes was actually posted to our intranet and distributed by our IT department
“IBM describes the Notes software as “an easy-to-use, single point of access to everything you need to get your work done quickly, including business applications, email, calendars, feeds, and more”.[2]”
Thus proving one should never believe a word of anything said by IBM.
Ugh, it’s bad enough having to use this POS for database applications. I can’t imagine how bad it would be if we had to use it for email and calendar, too.
Ours too. IIRC, when I got my first PC at work, Killnotes was part of the standard build image.
We recently transitioned from Lotus’ iNotes to MS’ Outlook Web Application, and IMHO, it’s been a freakin’ disaster.
I don’t have anything better to compare iNotes to, but it did the basics quite well. I could see the date, sender, and subject of the ~30 most recent emails. I could open an email that I wanted to reply to later, and there would be a tab on top so I wouldn’t forget about it. The search function was reasonably good, and I could generally find what I needed by combining searching and sorting.
With OWA, I can see the most recent ~12 emails, which isn’t enough: stuff can drop below the horizon too fast. OK, I can switch to a view where I can see the most recent 30 of them, but when I do, I lose a lot of functionality if I try to operate out of that view. So I’ve got to bounce back and forth to replicate what iNotes had all in one place. And there’s really no good way to keep an email open, other than opening a whole new window, which vanishes under whatever I’m working on.
The only fast way to go through a lot of emails is to rely on the ‘preview pane’ which is a small part of the email window, so it’s easy to miss stuff if the writer didn’t get the gist of the email in the first paragraph or two. In iNotes, the ‘preview pane’ was the whole screen, since I could arrow to the previous or next email from inside each email.
In iNotes, the meeting reminders I’d pre-set would pop up on my screen whether I was using email or calendar or some other function. In OWA, the reminders only appear if the calendar is visible.
In iNotes, if you were using the Week or Work Week calendar view, you’d see the same thing at any time of day. OWA has decided that you don’t need to see anything much earlier in the day…and this is applied to the entire week. So once you’re past, say, 11am on Monday, the calendar only shows 10am on - for the entire week. So if you just glance over and don’t think to scroll up, tomorrow’s 9am meeting is invisible. You think you’ll have a free morning tomorrow, and get a surprise meeting when you first open your calendar.
OWA does have some good bells and whistles (e.g. its search function is much better than iNotes’) but it doesn’t do the basics half as well as iNotes did. OWA is a big enough impediment that I’d pay a thousand bucks to have iNotes back again.
Just yesterday I learned the reason my email Inbox view contains things that are missing from my All Documents view is that All Documents doesn’t show all the documents in my email. It excludes for example calendar invite emails.
Shouldn’t they have named it Some Documents?
I use it on a daily basis, and do not love it.
The calendar: cannot reliably handle invitations from external sources (some colleagues are external and use a Google-based approach). I mean, it usually works, but not always.
You view a mail, and delete it while viewing it (i.e. not by going back to the inbox). You’re taken to the next mail in your inbox instead of back to the inbox. This behavior is not configurable.
It used to give you the ability to link to external calendars (i.e. google calendars). This no longer works - it gives you an error message. Oh wait, there’s another way to do it. But that version doesn’t actually link to the live calendar, so if you update the external calendar, Notes never finds out about it.
It’s bloated as hell. The search function is awful (in fairness, using Outlook to search is even worse!). It takes forever to start up. It takes forever to shut down. I spent several weeks trying to get the Sametime (instant messenger) functionality working after an “upgrade” last fall.
Le sigh.
My latest fun with OWA: got a meeting invite, and forwarded it to my boss with a snarky comment. Ultimately, it turned out that yes, I’d successfully forwarded it, and to her and nobody else, but it showed up in my Sent box as having been sent to her AND the original distribution list for the meeting invite.
Happened again with a second message to her (fortunately devoid of snark) where I was being quite particular that I was clicking Forward, and not either Reply or Reply All, and making sure nobody else’s name had snuck into the recipients list.
In fact, it still shows up that way in certain views, and in other views, it actually changes from one to the other while you watch.
Mama Zappa, I’d kill to have the problems you describe being the worst of my email problems. Speaking of bloat, OWA allows icons/avatars/whatever the hell they are next to your name in your email. So if you’re sending a message to a bunch of people, you’ve got to twiddle your thumbs while all the pretty little pictures load.
And if you’re using the IE browser, every time you cut and paste - even from elsewhere in the very same email - a box pops up asking you if you really want to do that, and you’ve got to click ‘Allow’ in order to paste. I’m told that you can get around this by opening OWA in Firefox, except they’ve set things up here so that it doesn’t seem to want to open in Firefox.
I used MS Outlook for well over a decade at work, then switched jobs to a company that uses Notes. It sucks. Been using it now for 6 months and there are things I just can’t get used to. Outlook is fantastic, especially if you have MS Lync.
RTFirefly, it just occurred to me that OWA is the Web Application of Outlook. I have used that and I agree, it does suck donkey balls.
MS Outlook (the computer application), which I think most people are thinking of when they say “Outlook” is quite decent.
I use Notes for work and it is indeed terrible. But at least we’ve migrated our time sheets and project planning from Lotus Notes to Deltek Vision. Which has its own set of terrible UX issues, but is way better than using some weird Notes application.
Yep. Lotus still sucks. Where I work, we’re forced at gunpoint (well, OK, by dictate from the corporate HQ) to use Lotus Notes.
We have about a hundred people at this location, and seemingly everyone hates Lotus. I have literally never heard anyone defend it, even to the extent of saying, “Well, it’s not so bad.”