Earlier quoted context omitted.
M365 is proprietary and it is widely used by companies
It’s all that survived.
Yep... Movie maker, Clippy, MSN Music, Encarta, Office accounting, Money, Response Point, hell TECHNET.
LotusNotes
61–70 of 113 posts
Re: LotusNotes
#62I was a developer at Iris Associates--I worked on versions 2 through 4. For version 3 I stuck in an easter egg in the About box. A certain combination of keys would produce a Monty-Python-like cut-out of Ray Ozzie's head and the names of the developers would fly out of his mouth. [This was when the software world was young and innocent and developers were trusted far beyond what they probably should have been.] Lotus…
Cut my teeth in Lotus Notes development. The combination of forms, views, and agents with the Notes security model was really powerful. I look at products like Notion and Coda and see nothing but Notes forms and views and formulas everywhere. Ray Ozzie was way ahead of his time.
AirTable is a straight up Notes clone.
Re: LotusNotes
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
With everything as a note, how was it so performant? How did it scale so well?
Baffling to see this, in every place I've worked at that used Lotus Notes, it was an absolute dog on the system. Clunky, slow, and ground everything else to a halt. And this was the case even on a relatively modern laptop in 2019. Not what I'd call performant at all!
Notes was simple enough to allow folks with no computer science background or even sympathy for the machine to build teetering, badly-performing things.
However, even with a mind towards efficiency and minimalism, performance at roughly hundreds of thousands of documents was extremely elusive.
Re: LotusNotes
#64I had a not great experience with Notes. It was slow and cumbersome. I had become used to Outlook for e-mail, plain simple e-mail. It was fast, light and didn't treat everything as a note. Notes is this heavy app that was slow to load anything with an early 90's aesthetic.
I worked for a large financial (~80,000 employees) that decided to move to Notes from in-house exchange servers well after it was obvious Microsoft had won the productivity wars. Rumor mill suggested it was brought in at the direction of a board member who just so happened to have close interests with IBM.
It set overall productivity back by at least 5 years before executives were forced to make a very decisive and quick move to O365. The reason given were scalability issues, the overwhelming cost of purchasing P-Series hardware (6-digits for one server) by the rack to keep up with demand along with the cost of developers attempting to make something useful for all of the different business needs.
Last I checked they are still stuck with some small, but essential work being diverted through Notes despite the move back to Microsoft.
Re: LotusNotes
#65my favorite part of lotus notes is the password scrambler that prevents people snooping over your shoulder to steal password, I implemented this on my front-end at unsandbox dot com you can test it on teh console page even without an account, the portal itself does not have accounts.
Re: LotusNotes
#66I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT. Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all. Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
What platform did you run Domino on? If Domino was solid, I'd imagine Domino on AS/400 was near unstoppable.
As a user, we used two Domino servers. One was Windows NT, the other was Linux. The Linux one was incredibly performant compared to the Windows one. I think it was an example of good reimplementation using hindsight.
Re: LotusNotes
#67It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...
Here's a quote from the article. Hopefully this helps the people with rose tinted glasses get some perspective... >Lotus Notes is used by millions of people, but almost all of them seem to hate it. How can a program be so bad, yet thrive?
It's like the two types of languages: the ones everybody complains about, and the ones nobody uses.
Re: LotusNotes
#68It was bad. There was a dedicated site called lotusnotessucks.com or something like that. It does not exist anymore but here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/feb/09/guardianw...
Same. There was a running joke that there's exactly two people who love Lotus Notes: The boss, cos they signed off on it and can never be wrong and it shows commitment to productivity increases and nobody got fired for buying IBM and bla bla bla. The other person was the guy implementing it, cos money, money, money!
The boots on the ground cried "ugh, Lotus Notes!" in unison and just had to deal with byzantine key combos, nonstop client crashes/unresponsiveness, and moronic UI decisions some 3-person team made in like 1987.
I have opinions.
Re: LotusNotes
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the things that killed it is it suffered the same issue as Visual Basic in that time. Anyone could create an application. 99% of the time that anyone had 0 UX experience and created travesties that were horrible to use. So people associated the poorly designed database with the product.
Another major issue was that the first implementation most people saw of it was the email side, and it could be a truly clunky and unpleasant email client. This soured opinions before people delved into the document management and programmability features that email handling were just one use of. From a technical point of view one of the bonuses I saw was that it used PKI throughout for encryption and such, which ver…
Yes, I totally agree with this. Because Notes Email was just another app, it didn’t have some of the specific polish that even Outlook had.
Re: LotusNotes
#70I used to manage a Domino/Notes environment back in my early days in IT. Domino server was rock solid I never had to worry about it at all. Notes client was clunky and not super intuitive (4.* through to version 6.01 I think) but was still quite a decent client. groundbreaking stuff for the time. I have mostly fond memories of it.
What platform did you run Domino on? If Domino was solid, I'd imagine Domino on AS/400 was near unstoppable.
In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.