Eclipse is a terrible client platform. It's buggy with any kind of modified UI, and the performance is terrible. Sure, it buys developers cross-platform support at no extra cost, but it's not meant to do what Lotus wants it to.

Lotus's webmail clients (that I've seen so far) pale in comparison to even OWA.

Lotus needs to accept the fact that it's products are dinosaurs, and choose to address UX.

Chris, one part of the solution that you left out is to find ways to make Notes personal. People love to complain about technology. They do not often complain about tools that are personal.

I recently blogged about this over at the Notes On Productivity Blog.

http://www.notesonproductivity.com/ICA/NOP.nsf/dx/make-a-notes-user-happy-make-notes-personal

Eric

Reason 11. I sucked as a Notes consultant, so I went to a platform that there are no SME's (other than Google, and they are trying to sell the crap out of this, so they are not going to call me out) to make me look ignorant.

Personally, I liked Quincy, good old Coroner TV show. What's not to like about that ;)

Well, they require registration to comment, and THEN they moderate comments, so in case my reply doesn't get approved, here it is for posterity...

Google has some great apps, and there are lots reasons to want to choose them over any competing platform — but your list of 10 shows a profound lack of awareness of recent efforts by Lotus.

1. No more emails with the red “X” replacing the actual image. — As of Notes 8.0, HTML mail is rendered by your OS’s native HTML rendering environment. The only time you see images withheld is if you’re not displaying them for security reasons. Google Mail has this EXACT same behavior. Instead of a red X, you get a tag that says [info] in blue.

2. No more weekends spent upgrading Lotus Notes servers. — They’re Lotus DOMINO servers and have been since R5.0. And yes, it’s true that they require care & feeding when you run in-house infrastructure, just like any other in-house infrastructure. Of course, if it takes you an entire weekend to upgrade your servers, you’re doing it wrong. But if you’d like the convenience of not having to worry about it, there are plenty of hosting vendors that will keep your infrastructure up to date for you. After all, it’s not like Google’s servers don’t get upgraded; it’s simply that you as a customer aren’t informed or involved when it’s happening.

3. No more waiting for the AdminP guy/gal to do his/her work. — Really? You still don’t have to wait for an administrator to manage new accounts, add & remove people from directory groups, and process name change requests? Who’s the gatekeeper on such changes, then? Google? How would they know your business process rules for, say, who should be allowed to read your quarterly sales report spreadsheets?

4. Way too many fixes on Lotus Fix List databases. — They’ve fixed too many bugs!? Would you prefer they don’t fix them? Or do you just not like the fact that they TELL you what they fixed? Do you seriously think that Google magically never has to fix bugs? Of course, a product that’s been deployed in global enterprises for over 20 years is probably going to have fixed a few more bugs than a product that just came out of beta two weeks ago.

5. Killnotes.exe should be more of an attitude than a program. — Cute pun. Also hasn’t been necessary since R7. More on that later…

6. I never made the switch to Java, and neither did Lotus. — I obviously can’t argue with whether you ever made the switch to Java, but the claim that Lotus hasn’t is absolutely ludicrous. The entire Notes 8 client is packaged INSIDE Eclipse. A Notes client has HUNDREDS of Java packages bundled with it. The Domino server has steadily marched forward in it’s embracing of Java as well, most recently culminating in the delivery of Xpages, which is a complete, integrated JSF framework built on top of the security, workflow and data-store engine of Domino. Just because you don’t know what a java.util.HashMap is doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t.

7. I never was and never will be a fan of Quincy. — Good, because Quincy hasn’t been used as the debugger since release 6, which shipped in 2002. If you want to complain about the debugger now, you have to talk about NSD.EXE.

8. A smart upgrade isn’t as smart as a no upgrade. — You alliteration gets in the way of a valid point: the overhead of maintaining a browser is much less than the overhead of maintaining a rich client platform. SmartUpgrade makes maintaining the RCP substantially easier, but it still involves more effort than maintaining a browser. Then again, Google doesn’t provide a rollout infrastructure for a single, consistent browser version to all your users. So you may have users on IE 6, 7 or 8, Firefox 3 or 3.5, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Konqueror; and every one of these is going to mean a different path on your help desk call. And all that means higher TCO.

9. Google’s 25GB inbox opens in less than 5 seconds. — So does my 25GB Domino inbox. Plus it does so when I’m at 30,000 feet flying across the Atlantic. Did you have a point?

10. Google’s email search function actually works. — This has to be the most absurd claim in the list. Notes has had full-text searching capabilities in email since VERSION 2, when Sergey Brin was still in high school! Since Notes 8, it ships with integration with Google Desktop; so if you don’t like the search capabilities, you can choose to use Google’s.

The previous commenter, pac, has at least offered some reasons to dislike Notes that show some recent experience. However maybe prior Lotus certifications you might have, clearly you didn’t keep them up to date.

I’m reminded of P.J. O’rourke’s response when CBS ran the fake story about George Bush’s service in the ANG. “Why would anybody make up bad stories about this guy? There are so many bad stories that are true — you don’t need to make them up!”

There are lots of things to not like about the Notes platform, some of which are being addressed by Lotus, some of which are not. But you haven’t listed a single one of them here.

PS: I hate how your comments work. :-P

I am not going to claim guru status on anything Notes/Domino, but as someone who has been using/running/admining/developing on it since it ran under OS/2 on the server side, I'm failing to comprehend the most of the points. I've moved from server hardware to server hardware, version to version without any weekend work causing issues, deployed smart upgrades that work just fine in country's that I haven't stepped foot in.

I've got a question of Google Apps, which the name annoys me - sure mail is application, but what about the vacation manager? You got an app for that Google Apps? How about a bug tracking application? Customer service/call tracking app? maybe they do have an app for that, but when the support manager asks for a report with a new column, are you going to get that in to the app in under 5 minutes?

Also, why you would have a 25GB inbox is well beyond me, but mine opens just fine. I can hear Chris Blatnick and David Allen just screaming at them. Oh, and speaking of that, what if you want to completely re-do the design of that Inbox to that eProductivity template?

Paul - "Lotus's webmail clients (that I've seen so far) pale in comparison to even OWA.".

Everyone has their opinion on "best" and mine is Lotus iNotes 8.5+ is head and shoulders above anything else. So its fine to disagree on that - but to describe it "pale in comparison" is obviously not the case - go look and see. I'm hard to please believe me - and I think it rocks.

I do think, the day when the headline reads something about someone hacking Google and getting some clients full information is imminent.

If one extends his logic rationally, they should be offering the same tools for any premise based mail system, because in the end the comments he's making here, while specific to Notes/Domino can be applied (with apppropriate verbiage changes)to any on-premise solution.

It's another "expert" analysis that's really a sales pitch in disguise, and sadly far too many supposed tech news outlets and IT professionals are fooled by this tactic.

Posted to the CloudSherpa comment blog.

Top Ten Reasons to Not Believe the Pundants from Cloud Sherpas.

1. They're not well informed. Based on this article it is clear they are not aware of Lotus Notes/Domino as it exists today.

2. Lotus Notes/Domino is a lot more than just and email app.

3. Lotus Notes has customer support. Google doesn't really offer it.

4. There is lots of third party support for Lotus Notes. Perhaps that's what Colud Sherpas are offering for Google Apps. That might help level the playing field for Google Apps, but I think they need about another ten years to mature the software.

5. With Lotus Notes/Domino I can build a working web-enabled application with workfllow control and a highly granular security model in short order. I've done it in one hour. Try that with Google Apps.

6. I can add enhancements to an existing Lotus Notes/Domino application while the customer is on the phone and never interupt the existing users.

7. I can move an entire web application by copying one file to a new Lotus Notes/Domino hosting service. Who's your second source for Google Apps hosting?

8. Okay ... I ran out of ideas here. But I can tell you that I've look seriously at replacing Lotus Notes/Domino and reevaluate it all the time agains the current technology. The closest thing I've found is Plone. Google Apps can't touch the security model that Lotus Notes has had since before Google started!

So I hope you guys do well but keep in mind that the way to win new customers is not to post inacurate and out-of-date info about the competition. If all you're going after is the Notes email users then say so.

If you're seriously going to migrate custome Notes apps to Google Apps then your customers are definatly in for a shock if you give them an accurate estimate. It will cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to replicate the basic features that make Lotus Notes/Domino such an easy platform to create simple to complext applications.

I started developing software in assembly language thirty years ago and have been looking for a Golden Platform on which to build. I've tried many but Lotus Notes/Domino, for the last 14 years, has bee the best so far. Now with XPages, which I've just started using, I think it's good for the rest of my carrier.

Peace,

Rob:-]

On a related note, I just noticed something interesting about Google's much ballyhooed "Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes" tool, and wondered if anyone else had seen the same thing. The tool (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/pdf/migration_tool.pdf) is supposedly Google's killer app for moving Notes mail and PIM data to the Google cloud. (Even though it says "apps" it doesn't touch your actual Notes apps.)

Reading through the PDF, I noticed in Figure 2 that it uses a navigator image ripped from IBM's standard contacts template. Is that how you spell "copyright infringement"? Should we use this as an indication of the quality of the conversion routines in this tool?

Rupert Clayton

Steve - Everyone has their opinion on "best" and mine is Lotus iNotes 8.5+ is head and shoulders above anything else. So its fine to disagree on that - but to describe it "pale in comparison" is obviously not the case - go look and see. I'm hard to please believe me - and I think it rocks.

Agreed, it's about preference.

However, having switched between platforms and landing on Domino/Notes recently, and being a regular Gmail user, I have to say that Notes web access, for me anyway, comes in last.

I will say this in defense of Notes:

1. Yes, bad implementations are to blame. For example. My Notes e-Mail and password, are different than my user/pass for Sametime. For web access (including the joke of an iPhone version), my email address is accepted but I have to use my Sametime password. This can't be undone because our current admin didn't set it up, and has no idea how to fix it without scrapping our environment.
2. A good number of organizations use Notes just for email, contacts and calendaring. You don't need Notes just for that, it's overkill. Notes does internal apps very well. However, if I have that kind of infrastructure, I'm more likely to publish those as web apps on an intranet, unless my users REALLY need offline storage / access. But Notes also has a legacy customer base they must support.

Honestly, I think Notes became redundant once web apps grew up. At one point and time, it offered the ability to easily do something that you couldn't do online. But let's face it, times have changed.

The fact is, Google is going after Lotus's market share, because they think they can. And they're not going to stop. And frankly, they have a good product. The question is, how is Lotus going to react? Is it going to spur innovation, or are they going to try to advertise their way out of the problem, like Microsoft did with Vista when Apple smelled blood in the water.

I posted this earlier today on Ben Poole's blog as well, but thought it appropriate for here too.

While I am a long time Note admin/developer, I can honestly say that large enterprise organizations likely will not move the Google apps. But lets take a look at why organizations do.

First off many people have said that if Domino were properly implemented they would understand that Domino does things better/or the same as Google apps.

Well to this, you are right. But given the economic state of things, all Notes admins are doing 20 times what they did 10 years ago. In fact I remember my first tasks every morning were to review the logs for errors from the night before. Who still has time to do this? I used to work in an environment where I was the admin for 1,200 people. Not too bad. Well we went from 8 administrators managing their individual business units to 2 people supporting 65 servers 10 Internet Domains, and 3,500 users. It is impossible to properly maintain the environment when users are given priority over servers, which was our case. We are all now doing a lot more with a lot less than what we used to. Something has to give to make room for the new tasks.

I've spent the last five years doing Domain consolidations, divestitures and seen a lot of "admins" who frankly don't know Domino. It is these organizations that stand to benefit from a move to something like Google apps. In one case I was given an ID to use on my laptop where my client said it was an expired ID. I reviewed the certificates and they were not valid until the next year. I reviewed the OS with the Admin and his date was a year in advance on his server.

So lets qualify that in an environment where Notes is not properly configured it may be indicative to ignorance of management of what Notes can or cannot do. As a result, without proper staffing, poor implementations will be expected. Secondly for small to medium sized businesses, these staffing levels seldom entail dedicated Domino admins. Without dedicated individuals again proper maintenance and management of the Domino infrastructure cannot be properly attained.

I am and always will be a supporter of Lotus Notes and Domino applications. I would never stipulate to any of my customer which platform to use for their individual organizations. I can however see why it is beneficial for some organizations to move to Google apps. In terms of management perception is reality. If it is expensive and it isn't doing what it is "supposed" to do, make the move.

That being said, organizations are going to make their own business decisions on moving to any messaging platform based upon their specific business needs, objectives and reasoning.

We can all say that this does that or that does that... but when push comes to shove lets discuss the reasons organizations leave rather than the capabilities of either platform. They see a business case to do so. The root cause may not be the platform but the fact that the organization is not willing to put the right people in the position who know what they are doing. This is also the case when organizations move from any messaging platform to another including moving to Notes.

I'd like to add here too, that when organizations which make the move to other platforms, it is for obvious reasons to them. The rest of us, with complex environments may not see their logic, and can comment that it will cost significant amounts to create what was in Notes, if they were not using it Notes, why recreate it?.

@Perry,

Maybe I don't fully understand exactly what you're getting at, but it seems like you're suggesting that an enterprise in your situation with 2 admins, 65 server, 10 Internet Domains and 3,500 users might be better served by moving to Google Apps.

What is gained by moving to Google Apps? Is the cost really lower? Well, Google is going to maintain the servers and update the software, but how will they support the users? (I'm not familiar with how much support Google Apps Enterprise provides but their free apps have almost no direct support.)

If you want your services in the "cloud" can't you use a hosted Notes/Domino service such as offered by Prominic.net? They will handle the server admin for you.

Maybe it's all about cost. Is Google going to be that much cheaper? It seems like you still need enough support to do the adds-moves-changes and user hand-holding required to keep the enterprise working smoothly.

Peace,

Rob:-]