A long while ago I linked to post by The Gline about how the existence of Lotus Notes was a symbol of the wrong sort corporate culture.
Today, The Guardian has an article on the survival of this horrid piece of software, linking to the Lotus Notes Sucks site.
Why do users hate Notes so much? And why, then, do they use it? The answers illuminate a typical process when companies buy “enterprise” software: the people who choose a product tend not to be the ones who use it.
It goes on to describe how the hostile user-interface seems to come from a parallel universe where neither Windows, Apple Macs or The Internet existed,
It quotes Ben Rose, leader of the Notes User Group, who makes an very lame attempt to defend the awful, crufty email interface.
“Email is quite inefficient. People like to ‘Reply To All’ and send copies of attachments to each other, instead of doing what Notes does, which is to have a single copy on the server that everyone sees.”
In other words, we deliberately made our email functionality crap, so that people wouldn’t use it unless they absolutely had to. Last time I used it, Lotus notes is especially hostile towards Internet mailing lists, because it refused to allow users to do anything *other* than top-post. And you thought Outlook sucked….
I worked for a company that used Lotus Notes as it’s corporate standard. We didn’t make much use of the allegedly wonderful collaberative stuff, only the cruddy email client. After it all went pear-shaped, the CEO ended up doing jail time for fraud. I’m not sure what that says about Lotus Notes.
Oh my Lord. We had Loathe-us Notes at my last job, and everyone who used it despised it with a passion. It’s as if they tried to make the program as unusable as possible so that people would break down and just meet each other face-to-face instead of going through the tedium of email.
And don’t diss on Outlook. Outlook 2003 is absolute heaven compared to Notes, and for a while we were even using various kludges that allowed us to keep using Outlook instead of Notes. Then upper management caught on and the fun ended.
I work for a company that has Notes as its corporate standard and I don’t have a problem with it, other than the way it consumes disc space. It burns space on indexes in a way that can, in the extreme, use four times as much space for the index as the mail. It also turns headers into bitmaps and after a while a short exchange can be a very long file.
I don’t understand the rant about “top-posting”. I frequently “Reply with History” and insert comments in that history, in a different colour and nicely indented so one can see how the conversastion has gone.
Mind you, I’m not in a postion to compare it with anything except Outlook Express under Win98 – though that does insist on sending my emails to the spellchecker – something ccMail used to do before it mutated into Notes.
I used Notus Lotes a few jobs back — I hated the bloody thing. It’s a programmer-angry/user-angry environment.
Sadly, I actually like Outlook 2003. Dang that Microsoft!
LOTUS NOTES – Acronym:
Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious – No Other Than Evil Sh1t
Lotus notes is just absolute pants- it has been designed by morons and you have to be a complete idiot to think it is better than outlook. If anyone buys this out of choice they should be taken away in a padded wagon. The only people using this are people who have to, because it is the coproate programme of choice of the pointy headed.
pat and 300 other disgruntled employees who are not likely to be re-gruntled any time soon.
Let me guess, Pat. Your pointy-haired boss just imposed Lotus Notes as the corporate standard?
Time to start scanning the job adverts for somewhere less Dilbertesque…