January 6th, 2006
Sim´ Hampel´s IBM eye: Lotus Notes sucks?
So there’s this site out there called “Lotus
Notes sucks“. I’ve
never linked to it before, I’ve read it, but it is so hard to get past
the closed-minded nature of the site’s author that the overall message
is lost.
My colleage Sim’
Hampel recently spent some time dissecting the site in detail, though,
and says
So let’s be perfectly clear. I absolutely love
Lotus Notes.Now that I’ve said that, I actually agree with a large part of what Lotus
Notes Hater has to say. I read through a large number of the bugs and issues
that he mentions on his site - and largely I agree that they are bad UI
design, or meaningless errors, or confusing behaviours, and so forth.
Sim’
evaluates some of what is discussed on the Notes sucks site. But
he brings the discussion up a level:
Concentrating on
the end-user client niceties from a novice’s point of view is not the whole
story, and this is why I still insist that, despite its shortcomings, Lotus
Notes is still the best choice out there as an enterprise messaging platform
and distributed application development platform. Don’t underestimate security,
reliability, managability, scalability, flexibility, and all the other
benefits that the platform provides the enterprise. Anybody who has experienced
this knows that there really isn’t anything available that can truely compete
with Notes and Domino in this arena. Don’t underestimate how much your
users will complain and be bitter if your messaging platform becomes unreliable
and stops them doing their jobs effectively - even with a pretty UI. It
doesn’t matter how nice the UI is if you still can’t access your email!
Sim’
and I have discussed his article, and I think it’s worthwhile reading.
I don’t entirely agree with it… I’ve watched usability videos of
Outlook users using Notes, Outlook users using Outlook, etc. … each product
has its plusses and minuses. I’m not going to turn this into a competitive
posting. My point is simply, Notes may have its quirks, but so do
many many software programs. Because people “live” in e-mail,
they are exposed to more of the e-mail application’s quirks than most of
the other software they use. Notes 6.x and 7 have made significant
improvements, and from what I’ve seen out of the labs in the last few weeks,
Notes “Hannover” is going to be a major “wow” at Lotusphere
2006.
Originally by Ed Brill from Ed Brill on January 5, 2006, 2:26pm
