Do you think Lotus Notes sucks?

by Dennis Howlett on January 10, 2006

I know a number of practices standardised on Lotus Notes when it was touted as a great collaborative platform back in the late 1990s. I did my share of developing for this monster in the mid to late 1990s. I know a number of publishing houses that use Notes. But today, despite remaining a surprisingly strong seller for IBM, Notes has pretty well run its course.

Stowe Boyd puts limp pro and strident con arguments noting that:

"…building a big, fat, slow platform to build collaborative apps on is the wrong approach. Even building a small, not so slow platform is the wrong approach. The right thing to do is to build collaboration into the apps that people are using. Or build small, focused collaborative apps that do one thing right."

With 120 million licenses sold, I can only assume the IBM sales machine is humming along even better than normal.

Me? Notes sucks. Big time. I detested it way back when for its quirkiness and performance issues. Nothing I’ve seen since changes my opinion. I am far from alone. A site dedicated to ‘Lotus Notes Sucks ‘ lists no less than 79 issues with the platform. The author says:

"I think Jeff Atwater sums it up well:

[Lotus Notes] is death by a thousand tiny annoyances—the digital equivalent of being kicked in the groin upon arrival at work every day."

Ouch! But looking at some of the comments to Stowe’s post, I’m sure there’s plenty of folk out there that love it .

As an aside, building collaboration into the app is what SaaS developers do as standard, not as an afterthought.

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Tagged as: Innovation, SAAS

  • In which case Dick might I suggest you take a look at Rod Boothby's site? Rod has some interesting insights into how you might use alternative technology to make the switch. I don't agree with everything Rod says but it's certainly a good start.
  • Dick Plaus
    We continue with Notes only because of apps we've developed for the program. I've talked with our project leader about just scrapping notes and starting over. Better to do it like a bandaid... all at one time. In 5 years, Notes will be damn near obsolete, and that will be 5 more years of developing apps and putting us deeper in shit when we are forced to move. At least we could do it on our own terms now.
  • Andy K
    I fully agree with anyone who is of the opinion that Lotus Notes is awful. I both support Notes customers and have the unfortunate displeasure of developing within Notes.

    Notes is extremely user unfriendly, in fact it could be used as a teaching tool on how not to develop a GUI. It is incredibly slow when working remotely, lacks even the most basic of features such as the ability to save an email to a file and requires users to become familiar within the concepts such as user ID files, local encryption and replication.

    Also Notes just as an email client is pretty poor due to its slow and faulty HTML rendering engine, its inability to send properly formatted HTML mails when converted from native notes format (rich text) and lack of proper support for threaded emails.

    To answer some comments posted here, companies continue to use Notes as the cost of moving to a competitor product (Exchange for example), and the cost of redevelopment of business applications that they have most probably had developed by Notes code cowboys, far exceeds the perceived benefit. To summarise, Notes still exists because existing Notes users are heavily coupled to it.

    I agree with “End User”, MSFT should buy Lotus off IBM and kill it. I would even give them a few quid as well.
  • I too have the luxury of supporting bloatus notes. I wish Microsoft would buy Lotus Notes from IBM and bury it.

    End users are constantly pissed off all day at the random errors, red screens of death, slowness, etc....

    Anyone ever used "Notes Re-Loaded'...I use it about 10x a day. And the great thing is, when you use it and come back up, you get to sit through another 15-20 minutes of "consistency checks".

    An abortion of a piece of software......
  • I'm with you Dennis.  As an early user in the 90s I could see why the company I was in had bought it, because there weren't many other options for collaboration and knowledge management integrated with the mail system, but it was cumbersome and difficult then.  I can't see why you would consider it now, either with the collaboration alternatives available, or with the important SaaS trend you point out in your last paragraph.
  • B. Riley
    Well I have to support it.  And I can tell you it's the single worst piece of software I have ever had to support.  It's a bloated beast of a program with a mere subset of features that are available these days in competitve products.  And that's assuming you have the development resources to even access these features. 

    Also, it assumes that you have the resources to exhaustively train users to do something they could do in a competing product with a right click.Even the menu structure is not intuitive.  There are multiple menu items, under different menus, with the same name.  There are only two reasons companies still use this.  One is simply the sacrifice trap. 

    They've spent MILLIONS on this "superhuman software" that promised to deliver a collabutopia.  They've found out that it takes 15 times the staff as any competing product, but they already have all the people, and all the money in it now.  They've spent YEARS trying to get it to do what they thought it would do turnkey, and they simply cannot turn back now.The only other reason, like Brad said, is that it may be a bit more secure than competitors, simply because no one wants to hack it. 

    It's already a virus out of the box.  Except it doesn't impact your systems as much as it impacts the productivity of your users and support.
  • Ed, you are walking a thin line there, are you implying that Lotus notes has something to do with the downfall of CIA credibility over the past decade? (i.e. yellowcake fiasco?) LOL.. just kidding.

    Actually, I am just speaking from the standpoint of someone who has had to support it. It's about as flexible as a steel rod in a snowstorm. It isn't intuitive from a users perspective. Bugs and quirks make things like searching for an old email make it virtually unusable for some clients.

    But it is secure and I'll give them that.
  • @Brad - oh please.  The CIA was (and still is) one of the first Lotus Notes customers -- tell me that hackers aren't interested in finding exploits in a product used at the CIA?  And at 61,000 other companies?  Perhaps you could give credit where credit is due, to the engineers and architects who actually thought through a security model from version 1.0, as opposed to having to patch and react ex post facto.
  • alastair harris
    i've worked in a number of accountancy practices where notes was used primarily for email and as a datastore, and i've worked briefly in education funding, where outlook was used for email, but notes was introduced as a project management tool.  As an email client it is no better and no worse than outlook, and for the other stuff it is clearly past its sell by date, although the concept of remote replication is still relevant.
  • Lotus notes is pretty bad. Thankfully, I don't have to mess with Notes anymore. But why do companies keep going with them? My guess it has to do with built in virus protection. Lotus notes is so buggy and difficult to work with, hackers don't want to touch it.
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