I want to go to Lotusphere because I worked on a large IBM account 2 years ago, and I want to meet the people I worked with 2 years ago.

To protect privacy I won’t list details here, but you can hit me up via email if you want them.

I also want to find out exactly what IBM did with their purchase of Nitix Blue, which they took of the hands of the BDC. I am almost 100% positive that was complete BS but got shoveled into Lotus to make the Canadian government happy by bailing their bad investment out.

I also want to find out what’s going on with Metronome and Domino right now.

Actually, since this is a contest, I may as well give some details to win.

I worked with IBM devs and IBM India devs through
Michael Campagna
IBM Global Services

On WSDL stuff and EDI data exchange on one of their largest pharmaceuticals account. I met one of the kernel devs at MIT in March of 2007 but would like to talk to them again. They’re pretty interesting.

Chris, Nitix became Lotus Foundations. http://www.lotusfoundations.com

When one does an unbiased comparison of Outlook and Notes, the first thing that jumps out is that Outlook is a closed client where you HAVE to work within a prescribed framework, but in the case of the Notes clients its a composite application with no boundries. Running on eclipse your possibilities are endless. Eg you can add a google gadget like a maps gadget into your notes client , but in the case of Outlook you cannot (btw u cant even add Microsoft Live Maps to Outlook)

So I really do not think its any comparison. What we are comparing is one single exe and a few dlls to a huge massive eclipse based composite application. Its like comparing a bicycle and a car. Both get you from place to place but look at the additional stuff that comes with the car.

Lets be fair. Outlook is just a mail client, a RSS reader and a New Groups reader.

Lotus Notes is a complete application platform. It can integrate to numerous other application and mash up infomation from them all into one place.

So to sum it up , if you want just an email client use Outlook (or even better try Thunderbird) but if you want a real composite application with endless boundries , try Lotus Notes.

I want to go because I have suffered long enough using Notes 7. If anyone deserves to go, it’s the ones who have suffered the longest. I want to see whats in the pipeline and see if things are getting better first hand.

I’m joining a company that is completely on Notes from one where we were the only department that used it. I want to learn how to use the newest features of the software to be able to contribute in my new environment. And it would be a bonus to continue to show Steve Gillmor that Notes is still not dead!

I’m aware of that. Nitix was funded almost entirely by the BDC and it’s partners.

Nitix was *not* selling very well as it was simply a Debian Linux distribution on generic hardware with a couple extra non-free packages.

I had downloaded and inspected the Nitix source code which was not in Debian at different points and times before it was purchased by IBM.

Nitix was going downhill fast and was gotten rid of by BDC and it’s partners. I question it’s validity as part of Lotus, as it must have been heavily modified for that repurposing. I saw how the government and business interacts in Canada because I was in the public sector of ITAC for a year.

This was a business deal with govt implications as far as what I think. I don’t think Nitix had any real value.

But with that said, I would like to attend the conference and not bring this up. I think I can get the day off of work since I have time off built up and TechCrunch has never awarded me anything. So let’s break that cycle and give me a freaking ticket please.

My email is in these posts, thanks.

Im not aware of many web2.0 solutions that has had “real” impact on the business world.

I want to go so I can figure out what this ‘Lotus’ thing is, and why people use it if it’s so bad.

PS I’ve suffered through it, too.

Ed,

Here is a link to a blog comment conversation I had with Marc Macleod, a Montreal Entrepreneur who is apparently affiliated with Nitix about Nitix.

http://techscreamer.com/2008/08/06/tungle-a-look-at-canadian-startups/

I had a conversation about Nitix with Sylvain Savaria of the BDC as well in January of 2007.

Sylvain had personally told me that Nitix was not doing well and that he was not ready to invest in another Linux based company, calling our company a conflict of interest with Nitix even though we made a widget toolkit based on X and XLib with Glitz and Cairo.

He could not understand the difference between a desktop GUI and a server. His colleges sat on the board of Nitix and other tech companies with this level of understanding.
BUT, the BDC is a crown corp mandated by the Queen of England, and that is why we in America fought a revolutionary war. So we could have qualified people rather than preferred servants managing the public trust.

And with that I stop posting hoping to get a ticket.

I want to go to Lotusphere because I’m one of those lost souls who actually likes the Lotus Product family and can see the potential power and flexibility of it.

Granted, it doesn’t come with a Web 2.0 user interface but then that would actually demean the powerful featureset that it provides. Simple, but quite clever.

I work at IBM and use Lotus Notes. I’m currently running the latest beta version and I have to say, it’s WAY better than the versions they’ve had out over the years, even the current stable version. That being said, I don’t really love Notes and would prefer a much more open platform. Nothing comes in or out of Notes easily. Therefore, my calendar for work and personal has to be separate since Notes won’t sync with Google Calendar. Tasks are stuck since it won’t integrate with any other task managers (I use RTM which sync with just about everything, but Notes). The power of Notes is HUGE if it is used properly, I’ve seen it. I just wish it would have more integration possibilities with other services.

Scott, if you are running the latest beta version, you should take a look at the calendar federation capabilities, including iCalendar subscriptions and overlays.

Chris, I would encourage you to look at Foundations and how it fits in our product family today. You say in that link that IBM already had Tivoli — Foundations isn’t about system management as the Tivoli brand is, but rather about an appliance-based acquisition, deployment, and management model for small businesses and departmental solutions. It’s sold as an all-in-one solution.

I’ve been stuck with POS Notes 6.5 at work for 3 years now. It’s the bane of my work day.
Now my 60.000 employees company is moving everyone to Gmail. I can die happy…

I want to go because I like free things. Also, I have never encountered notes in the workplace. I am a young I.T. director who has many years left in I.T., so who better to pitch Lotus Notes to than a young unadulterated D.o.I.T. who may or may not opt for Notes one day?

I would like to go to Lotusphere again in 2009. I went for the first time in 2008 (after working with Lotus products for 8+ years) and I left energized and ready to share what I had learned.

I was greatly humbled at Lotusphere 2008 by developers like Julian Robichaux and Viktor Krantz. I want to see what new ideas they bring to the “dead and dying” product family.

My company is actually looking at Lotus Web 2.0 products to help with a younger “subset” of employees that currently don’t get to use even email. I really hope we get to implement Connections to to these users.

I’ve been in the IBM Business Partner community for around 9 and a half years, most all of that working with Lotus products.

I found out the weekend before Thanksgiving that I was effected by some recent layoffs at my now previous employer.

While I have a few opportunities beginning to reveal themselves, needless to say, my LS 09 reg had to be canceled.

This will be the first one I’ve missed in quite a while and obviously is disappointing.

As someone who worked for IBM for a little over 2 years (due to company acquisition) and had to use Notes day in and day out, I can tell you that not having to use Notes in and of itself is a good reason to leave IBM. I have never, ever worked with a piece of software that was so counter-intuitive and had such a horrible user interface. Changing configuration settings is done in at least 3 different places, you need to “replicate” in order to receive your email because setting the client to work in real time slows your machine to a crawl, the group calendaring is so buggy that employees have to turn to tricks like setting meeting times for one minute past the hour in order to ensure that updates are received by all recipients…I can go on and on. A few years back Lotus came out with a new web-based messaging system based on WebSphere Portal, but it lacked any sort of interoperability with Notes. Needless to say, it didn’t sell. Who the heck came up with that brilliant idea?

Despite what they are saying I find it hard to believe that Lotus is experiencing revenue growth, although it is very typical for IBM to inflate numbers within one of their software pillars by including revenue from some acquisitions and/or moving products between pillars in order to look good.

You must have skipped the part where I said I reviewed the 5-7 extremely small source packages that were in addition to the generic Debian distro labeled Nitix Blue when they were provided as mandatory GPL downloads in the Nitix download section before IBM “took Nitix off Canada’s hands”.

I’m sure IBM has reworked Nitix into something else today than it was(something usable I hope), but that is something I will review when I actually need the product as a solution. Right now I work for a firm which I do not buy software for. I am currently a senior developer in the LA area.

Let’s just say I’m happy to be back in America where the grease doesn’t flow as freely.

Good luck with the Lotus product, and I hope to see you at Lotusphere if I get the free ticket.

Notes 8 front end is still crappy, slooow and unusable, starting with preventing users from going straight to their mailbox. Which usability expert came up with that “feature”?

It’s probably much better from the IT perspective or whatever, but the end users surely don’t see it.

Who cares about this endless boundaries crap?? 99% of the people just want to work with their mail fast, but get shoved this unusable monster down their throat.

I am a R5 Principal Certified Lotus Professionnel (PCLP) gone astray. Hell they don’t even call the certification the same anymore. Will need to get back in touch because of a new job. Pick me because it’s christmas in a one hour

Lotus does have a much better architecture for large enterprises than Microsoft. More open, standards-compliant and extensible by far.

One reason why all the Gmail-loving Techcrunchies do not like it, however, is that it is not simple. It is overcomplicated both for users and IT staff, because IBM wants to throw in too much flexibility and too many features — which works at the expense of simplicity for users. Gmail was made for consumers, which makes it simple, but no good for large enterprises.

We designed Unison for SMBs, not consumers or enterprises, because one size does not fit all. Unison does unified communications on a single server and desktop without being over-simplistic like Gmail or over-complicated like Lotus:

http://www.unison.com

I would love to go as I missed last year and want to update myself and clients on Quickr, Notes, Portal, etc.

“…out of the approximately 10,000 companies using the Notes/Domino platform…”

Strange. I’ve seen Ed Brill publicly place the number of Notes/Domino customers at about 44,000 companies worldwide. And I listened to an interview just this morning in which Bob Picciano, the General Manager of Lotus Software, claimed that there were 12,000 NEW customers of Notes/Domino in 2008 alone.

So clearly someone is pulling numbers our of their nether regions.

Lessons learned as Notes/Domino Developer (R5 PCLP):
The issue with Lotus/Domino is not that it is not good enough, the issue is that it is TOO GOOD.
Where else can you get the following in one:
1). Rapid Application Development Platform
2). Email/Communication/Calendaring/Groupware 3). Web Server
4). Database Engine
5). File / Document Security
Quite frankly, for non transactional apps, I can’t think of a way to quickly develop and deploy apps like you can with Notes/Domino. This is based on experience up to 2001. It must be better now, right? I miss Lotus/Domino.

Please send me to Lotusphere! I’ve been certified in Lotus Notes since version 3 in both application development and system administration. I used to work for a training company where I was one of their award-winning instructors. The economy hit this company, so I ended up out of work.

While laid off, I had an opportunity to switch careers, but I stuck with Lotus Notes and Domino because I know what the product can do, and I knew that the UI would catch up… and turn heads! In my blog, The Pridelands ( http://bilykspride.servehttp.com ), I mentioned how I wanted and needed to stay with the winning team of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino… http://bilykspride.servehttp.com/domblog.nsf/d6plinks/RBIK-7BH5YR

The good news is that I now get to work for a great company that uses Lotus Notes/Domino, a product I love. (Really! Just ask my wife!) The bad news is that my organization is running release 6.5. My goal for 2009 is to bring the entire organization (over 10,000 seats of Lotus Notes) kicking and screaming to release 8.5 (which will be out very, very soon, right Ed?). I will not be able to do this alone, and I won’t be able to do it unless I have ammunition… which I will get by going to Lotusphere 2009. Once I have the tools and skillsets I need, I know that I can persuade minds and win hearts.

My organization has been hit very hard by the economy, so much so that they’ve eliminated all funding for conferences in 2009. I will pay for my own way for travel, food and lodging, but I need a ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory… Lotusphere 2009! TechCrunchIT, you have a Golden Ticket, and I pray that you’ll give it to me. (Don’t believe me? Do a search on Twitter for my handle, TheLionKing… I’ve been ‘praying’ and begging about it for a while!!!)

I’m even willing to provide TechCrunchIT with an article, a report, a podcast, whatever… I have a blog and I’ve been a podcaster, so I’m familiar with what to do. It would be a win-win for both of us! Because of my background as an IBM Certified Instructor, a blogger and a podcaster, I also know quite a few people that are already there, so it would not be hard to get interviews and comments from attendees.

Lotusphere 2009 is the best way to see the vision that IBM has for the Lotus brand. Kevin and Ed are great representatives for IBM/Lotus. Please select me so I can be that great representative for you! I very much look forward to hearing from you.

I worked for this company for a year where they used Notes. Everyday I wished they would switch to Outlook. I quit and my current company uses Outlook.

I want to go to this event to give hope to all those stuck with this piece of crap. I want them to know that someday they will use Outlook.

Wow, evidently people who use Notes are prone to writing long winded and boring comments.

I don’t want the lame tickets. This post may have been interesting if you were actually familial with R8. This post read like a high school news article. Weak effort.

Great, but how to get them?

It’s obvious some people don’t know what they are talking about because I go right to my mailbox when i open Lotus Notes 8.

Strong bad: You can set your starting screen in Lotus Notes to be your inbox and have been able to do this since the 6xx releases. Right click on the bookmark icon and choose set bookmark as home page.

I want to go bescause Lotusphere is an incredible event. My first Lotusphere was 2006. It’s very important to see the software evolution and meet several interesting people from around the world

Bob, in July, we issued a press release specifically around Notes/Domino product revenue and wins. SEC disclosure etc. require us to be accurate, especially when talking about the financials of a particular product.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Ibm-NYSE-IBM-884845.html

I want to go because I am the marketing director and in charge of our development strategy at Global Web Security Systems- we built encryption solutions for SaaS services (like google apps and MSN Live admin and many more – lots of Chinese services actually).

Going to see Lotus would influence our product development plans one way or the other, and if things looked really promising, we could help bring strong encryption to lotus’s web services as well as figure out ways to help lotus reach deeper into the Chinese market — by connecting them with our (serious, large, and numerous) Chinese contacts in the small, medium and large enterprise, SaaS, hosting and ISP spaces.

[...] in this 6-minute interview conducted at the Web 2.0 Summit. For those who don’t know Xeni Two free tickets to Lotusphere–is IBM’s Lotus Notes Out of Touch With Web 2.0 World? – techcrunchit.com 12/25/2008 Few pieces of software are as polarizing as Lotus Notes … s [...]

Lotus Notes is okay, but I was hoping to score some Groupwise tickets.

This is the first time in a long time that my company wont be sending me to Lotusphere. I would love to get tickets! Why you might ask?

Sometime in the November months, near Thanksgiving time, I got this strange feeling in my stomach when I realized I wouldn’t be going this year. It is the feeling of community that I will miss most. While there are tons of worthwhile things to see, learn and do….the really special part of speaking and meeting with people and conversations about the things you really are quite frankly addicted to. It’s Notes! It’s like that feeling when you discover for the first time that you didn’t respond to a meeting invite and notes 8.5 put it in your calendar to remind you and you think “thats cool!”. I love being a part of that! It’s social networking LIVE and in real realtime! I’m unfortunately resigned to the fact that I wont be there and I wont see and do all of those things, perhaps next year…

I am very interested in hearing Eric Mack and David Allen. I have been using eProductivity and hearing from the horse’s mouth would improve that experience.

We are a Notes shop and I am trying to get the IT department to adopt eProductivity. This would give more ammuntion.

The other sessions would help improve my productivty as well.

Ed, Kevin,
I work with an early stage startup. We are looking for collaboration solutions and evaluating middle ware technology.
A friend of mine, who works in the IBM software for small business, recommended looking at websphere portal and foundations.

Having used Notes in the past, I was skeptical. Still your interview prompted me to take a look.

http://www.lotusfoundations.com did not disappoint the skeptic in in me.

The landing page has this big button “Contact a business partner”. Really? Why can I not buy the product with my credit card or paypal? Why do I have to call a sales guy, who will try to sell me the world? Can I try the software? Can I log in to a demo appliance? No. and No.

I wanted to look at the demo to see improvements. I saw a link to videos. Turns out they are video stories (how Lotus saved the world), no product demos. No screen shots.

How do I decide if I even want to call the sales guy?

Compare that to all new so called web 2.0 product websites (Google for enterprise, zimbra, basecamphq, pbwiki etc.).

All these websites, highlight the product before talking about sales, with plenty of demos, screen shots. They have options to try the software or buy the software with a credit card. They make it easy for making a decision. No need to call sales.

This site has demos, but requires registration.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/smb/products.html#foundations
Seriously, I just want to see the product work. I don’t want to give my email to one more company. They will call me, bug me.

The new Lotus software may be web 2.0, but IBM is still pre-web 1.0.

Merry Christmas to all and Happy Holidays!

Thanks for information

__________________________
http://tinyurl.com/4rdhmc

Talk about a booby prize !

I’d love to go. Just to hear the lastest news and discuss the roadmap with the people. I think it’s of great value, trying to get the Notes news out here in The Netherlands.

@Chris – Maybe you should read the license agreements and do your homework.
http://kb.nitix.com/2607

Hi All,

One simple reason, we are big MS Shop, and I have worked on Louts Notes Domino for a while. I want to proove that our managment picked the wrong technology for workflow profcessing.

Thanks,
rharan

My apologies–Ed also e-mailed me to point out that it’s currently around 46,000.

Either that 10,000 referred to US companies, or I got the number totally wrong in my notes from the interview.

I’ve updated it in the post.

[...] Two free tickets to Lotusphere–is IBM’s Lotus Notes Out of Touch … Next month is the annual Lotusphere conference. IBM is giving two free tickets to TC readers–leave a comment saying why you’d like to … [...]

I like to go because I want to learn more about it.

What am I supposed to see here. I see a broken hyperlink to open.nit.ca where I am supposed to download the GPL source code.

That website NEVER fulfilled the GPL requirements of having the ENTIRE Debian distribution available to download.

They were always in violation of the GPL v2 license for that.

Now the page is mislabeled, as they didn’t even bother to change the top left graphic to Lotus foundations nor did they change anything in the database,

AND

there is no source code download for the GPL modified components or Debian OS available.

You know who you are “a reader” ???

You are a somebody affiliated with this project who is trying to confuse Joe, I’m not sure if this is violating the Debian license or not.

Joe reader, Canadians can not defend themselves with logic, so they throw out confusing statements in order to throw you off.

IBM, I want a link to download the sources, or I will take action.

Hello Jeff,

I’ve just read through all the comments up to this date/time and am appalled at the bias / ignorance / intolerance / and sheer stupidity displayed therein. Are you sure Microsoft hasn’t seeded your reader population with propagandists intent on trying to make Lotus look bad?

As an IT Consultant who was “into computers” before ‘windows” came to be, and as someone who has seen and used all versions of Windows and probably all versions of Lotus Notes, I can say with some certainty, Outlook plays to the “lowest common denominator”. Notes, on the other hand, doesn’t reach quite that far down the competence chain.

I was particularly “peeved” (lets not be profane) at most of the comments about Nitix. Know your facts, guys, before you show us how stupid you can be!

The last twelve years of my career have been in the BI/DW consulting arena as a Project Management Professional. As I forced myself into semi-retirement, I looked for – and found – the perfect place for me to ‘give back’ to SMBs the wisdom I have accumulated over a lifetime of learning. I have just last month become a reseller of IBM’s Lotus Foundations Start. I’ve done my due diligence. It’s too early for Open Source to be an IT solution. I almost became a Microsoft partner because I wanted to work with SMBs; but IBM bought Net Integration Technologies and morphed Nitix into Lotus Foundations Start (LFS). That was the decision-making point for me. For a synopsis of the impact of the IBM purchase, read this article at: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/server/ibm_to_microsoft_its_small_biz_server_war.html
.

I’m rebuilding a web site I really didn’t need in the past (better look quickly before its gone) to showcase the superior value of LFS when compared to other IT Solutions. I would like to have free tickets to Lotusphere in order to add first-hand knowledge to the information I am preparing for the web site.

Boyd Carter

You can’t explain to someone why Notes is better than Outlook, it really is a show them why deal.
If selected I will take one of teh notes haters and introduce them to everyone and let them get 1st hand usage of everything from the ground up.
And blog about it.

While it is true Outlook is just email, the pieces needed to build that whole infrastructure, from an IT and cost perspective is astoundingly high, especially once you want it to talk to anything else in your data center.
Besides, how often does someone provide something for free?

I would like to go to Lotusphere, because this event makes me full of energy, during this week, I can meet people who also work with this technology.
I have deployed Domino 8 in my company and now I do one enterprise company upgrade to Domino 8.

For me it is satori time I generate a lot of ideas, may be because Lotusphere is not only conference but FUN it is like a small vocation )))

Boyd–re: commentors, my rather blunt opinion is that the TechCrunch crowd seems polarized toward insightful comments with thoughtful discussion, or digital vagabonds distracting themselves from actual work by leaving trashy comments.

It hurts the community, and certainly frustrates me to no end.

However, since writing for TCIT is only one quarter of my job responsibilities on the TC team, I try to focus on writing new content rather than curating comments.

If anything is crudely inappropriate, I delete it. (See the comment above complaining about another comment I deleted.)

Down the road, Steve and I may discuss comment policy–I know I always enjoyed Lifehacker posts not so much for their content as for the discussion in the comments.

I know everyone in the TCIT community would benefit from the knowledge/wisdom of the more experienced TCIT readers.

Well it’s obvoius why i would wanna go to lotussphere !!! I mean for a product whats declared dead formany years now by lots of criticasters lotusphere is still one of the big conferences out there. So this can only mean 2 things 1 the criticasters aren’t on the right track or 2 Lotus is still a very innovative software developer with many great spinn off’s. If you look at lotus notes its still holding strong and a lot has changed in the product the last couple of years but still the base is standing strong. Also products like sanetime is evolving but also quickplace/quickr is still following the market with tge same base which is already being set many years ago. But also the new products like connections, foundations and symphony are being received good by the market and these products will most probarly be the new and extended base for lotus to help the market further than where they stand now!!! So all these arguments makes it clear why i want to be at lotusphere so the next question is why aren’t i there then. Well thats quite simple to answer my emploeyer sends every year 3 employee’s and I was not one of those 3. So maybe i will be now thanks to this comment

I would like to go to LotusSphere but since I work for IBM, I won’t even suggest I take away a place from a customer or potential customer!

I am a big advocate of Notes, it is by far the superior tool for managing e-mail, with features like SwiftFile, selecting which folder to file in just by typing part of the folder name, the follow up feature, etc. I’d like to see that calendar feature improved with the ability to change repeating meetings and create indefinite recurrence for meetings. I also like the feature of Outlook where I can move an appointment just by selecing “find next available slot”. With these features in Notes, it would be untouchable. And it’s not just because I work for IBM – I was not a fan when I first joined IBM, but patience and famiarity convinced me it was the better interface.

I work at IBM too and will freely admit that when our company was bought by them, I dreaded having to use Notes. Those first few years on pre-8.x Notes were awful, but now we have version 8.0 and up I’m much more satisfied.

p.s. I never replicate, I point Lotus directly to the server.

I’m 19 and live in Orlando, FL and i what to go because i am looking at careers in this field and plan to join the air force for the same field. O and i love TechCrunch.

Hello. I also would like to attend Lotusphere 2009. I’m domino system admin in some company of korea. In these days i try to do effort that my customer continuously are using domino. Because when i read a lot of documents about comparing with other groupware system, Domino is much better. So i am strongly recommending to my customers. As you know in KOREA so many company is considering in MS exchange. I hope IBM have to focus on our country also. when i read good article about Domino’s power , policy, and good function on and on, I always try to share with my customer. Anyway thanks for your effort and l love Domino.

I would like to attend Lotusphere, since I purchased Lotus Notes in 1989 or 1990 and used it at Lincoln Life Insurance Co. ( Lincoln Financial Group ) in the early 1990′s. I have not used the product since 1993 when I left Lincoln Life. I have used Lotus products since 1983 and I’m curious about the Lotusphere products and conference has to offer.

I’m a Microsoft Business Partner, Sage MAS90/200 Consultant, I have been working with SAP to become a SAP business partner since August 2008 and it will be complete by early January 2009.

Best Regards,

Jim Leazier
Owner
Global Tech US, Inc.
Indianapolis, IN 46526
jleazier81@hotmail.com
317-370-5223 cell

I am a system administrator for Lotus Domino/Notes for last six years in a US company. I heard about Lotussphere and so I want to understand more on this new system Lotus came with. It would be beneficial for me to attend the forthcoming Lotusphere 2009.

Regarding: “You are reselling Debian Linux free software friend.”

Lotus Foundations Start is not Nitix; nor is it Debian. It may be appropriate to know the facts before expressing opinions about them. The quoted comment is an example of what I was appalled about.

Boyd Carter

I want to go to LotuSphere, but my company is running short of cash. LotuSphere is a high-end show charging a min of $2,000 per person per company. Over 6,500 vendors and IBM is still charging these amounts just to attend.

So Meetrix needs these 2 tickets to show off our Browser Only version Unified Communications systems that sits on top of Lotus Domino 8.5 and Same Time Server 8.0, where we protect the transport layer of the IP packet with a Session Based VPN. Then we layer on top of IBM’s solution providing (a) presence and (b) group and private IM. Our solution provides some highly advanced network architecture that allows us to power a (c) voice portal, (d) group audio video (up to 20+ participants and (e) web based rich media meetings — all in full duplex.

To top it all off, we drop it all as a widget enabling all of these activities inside of the “customers” own website. To summarize, we are taking general Skype like activities and dropping them into each customer’s own website in a private label (web 3.0) manner.

I have seen some of IBM’s wonderful solutions, but some of the exciting next generation soutions offered by vendors like Meetrix will make LotuSphere relevant again. That’s why I need these tickets to Orlando.

To make Meetrix successful and help in a small way to make LotuSphere relevant again, I am not too proud to beg if that’s what it takes. I have been told by leadership at IBM that we need to be there, but LotuSphere and Orlando are a long way to go and it will still be an expensive show after hotel and transportation even with the free tix. But with the free tix, I’ll be there with bells on.

Jebb Dykstra, CEO
Meetrix

It looks that IBM new SPRUCE – WebAPPS/Browser APPs Plaform will address many of the problems pointed out by Lotus users…
IBM’s VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, Rod Smith, which heads the BLUE SPRUCE project recently was interviewed at the WEB2.0 summit and talked about how IBM is embracing WebAPPs/Browser Platforms and Mashups.
-E

Chris–please take this discussion off the TechCrunchIT site. It doesn’t add value to the rest of the community. Sorry.

I removed several of your comments–contact IBM directly if you want to talk with them.

Thanks!

Jeff

My org is the retail imaging business. The transformation in my industry has been breathtaking. I recall 10 years ago creating a graph with my former boss predicting the exact year when film camera unit sales would be overtaken by digital cameras. We got the year right, but just because you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the major trends and “crystal-balled” certain milestones with reasonable accuracy, doesn’t mean you are prepared on all fronts for change when it comes. Throw in a world-wide recession and in the frenzy of cost-cutting, one of the first things to face the budget chopping block are conferences and training. Yet at the same time, Lotus has released the most phenomenal changes in both Notes 8 and now the paradigm-shifting change in RAD web-development in version 8.5. It would be a shame to have the training to keep on the cutting edge to leverage this technology now, at a time when my company could really use the benefits of how we could leverage Notes to re-energize our collaborative abilities both within and outside our intranet. Simply put, I want to go to Lotusphere to help my org maintain its competitiveness in these tough times. I’d pay my own way if that were even a possibility.

Thank you for your consideration.

Typo above correction:

It would be a shame *NOT* to have the training to keep on the cutting edge for leverage this technology now, at a time when my company could really use the benefits of how we could leverage Notes to re-energize our collaborative abilities both within and outside our intranet.

I am using Notes/Designer/Domino 8.5 & i am liking it.

Notes 8.0 was having lot of performance & crash related issues but believe me 8.5 is more stable, performance is decent & new features are awesome.

With-in Notes/Designer context you can do it all.
No need for context switch – Highly customization – thanks to eclipse

I want to attend my first Lotusphere to learn more about new upcoming exciting things in Lotus.

I am Eager to be part of OGS…

List of new upcoming things in Lotus goes on & on & on ..

Lotus Connections
Lotus Atlantic
Lotus Bluehouse
Lotus Foundations
Lotus Notes 8.5 …
Lotus Sametime
Lotus Quickr
Lotus Symphony
Lotus Domino
Lotus Domino Designer
Lotus Mashups
Lotus Expeditor
Lotus Forms
……
…….

This is the future my friend, the inevitable future.
Enterprise world won’t be able to ignore the power of simplicity and usability brought by Gmail and (to a certain extend) Apple stuffs any longer.

I’m a 10 years Lotus Domino Architect, running my business on Google Cloud, and I don’t want to go to Lotusphere…

Hi Tom,

If you need my help convincing your organization to deploy Lotus Connections, let me know!

I’m a Notes/Domino Designer that has been using Notes since version 3. I have seen a lot of changes but nothing compares to the new version. I also work in an area that has very little Notes/Domino resources and I would like to be equipped with the necessary information to help Notes take back over customers it has lost. Notes has the perception of an out-of-touch application that has no identity and I would like to change that.

Abhi, thanks for your feedback. We do have a place for you to try out many of our products — http://greenhouse.lotus.com . Registration is free and you get more than demos and screen shots.

Foundations is available to buy via credit card – we will be selling it that way at Lotusphere itself. However, it is really designed to go through channel value-add providers and thus the button you see.

You might also check out our online collaboration site “bluehouse” which is in beta now…http://bluehouse.lotus.com . There are also sites in the community where you can try out some of the IBM solutions, including bleedyellow.com or checking in with the blogging community via planetlotus.org.

I would love to go to Lotusphere to get to know more about the new capabilities of Notes & Domino 8 & 8.5. The last two times was an absolute blast aside from the limits my then employer imposed. It’s great to get up at 5:30 in the morning and then enjoy a full day of tech greatness! It is a very inspiring event!

@Strongbad – “Which usability expert came up with that “feature”?”
Talk to your Notes Admins – sounds like a policy has been put in place to use Local Mail replicas. The default is to use Server based mail . . . . .

I’ve been around Notes/Domino since ’93, and have focused on it for work as I believe it to be the best enterprise collaborative solution set available, as it has been for several years.
I recently joined a company and rolled out R8 to over 2,000 users (migrating from Exchange as we went) and in order that I can prepare myself for the next project – upgrading 9k users to R8 and re-architecting the environment by utilizing newer hardware and OS options, and to leanr more about how to sell Lotus internally to my bosses who are unaware of the potential that Quickr, Activities, and Unified Communication can bring to our organization. Budget crunches mean I have had to forego the attendance, but the opportunity to grow my role within my organization comes with the knowledge I can gain from being in Orlando next month.

I’m not all that interested in lotusohere.

I would like to answer “Why do end users hate Lotus notes?”
I have experience with IBM’s LotusNote’s Domino through my college and Microsoft Outlook’s Web Access through my work.
Microsoft’s product isn’t pretty, it’s functional and it works. I have never had trouble with reading my mail on it. The only trouble I have ever had in 5 years was a few months I wasn’t able to send mail through it and that was later fixed. I don’t recieve countless error messages, the interface is straight forward, and I can find things.
Lotus on the other hand has been a nightmare the last 4 years. Fist off I am going to point out that I can’t even access my email right now. Now the interface looks great but that doesn’t help me if I can’t even use it. Mostly I have gotten away with requesting my professors send the information I need to other email accounts. However, that has been a hassle because a lot of emails that aren’t university ones go to quarantine, a folder that is near impossible to locate let alone deal with. When I do bother to use it (and can), pop up messages come up asking to run add ons. Plus lately I have been having to contact tech department about some type of syntax error that blocks me from reading and sending emails. They don’t even understand it completely. You also can’t hightlight and delete/move several emails at once, they have to be dealt with one at a time which is annoying. Things are not easy to find in it nor is it easy to understand.

I guess that I will also shamelessly ask for a lotusphere ticket.

I have been selected to speak at a BOF this year, which is an honor, since peers vote on the BOF selections. Unfortunately, I was not selected for a breakout session, which provides a free ticket. I am now trying to get my employeer to furnish a ticket but that does not seem to be working out. In the meantime, I am trying to figure out how to get the conference ticket cost covered.

It would be great if I were one of your selections!

I live in florida, so the travel will not be a problem.

Jeff – I owe you an apology. I made a comment to Ed on Twitter that TC commenting was just one step above /. on the evolutionary ladder. Since you moderate and try to keep things constructive, my comment was not accurate. sorry about that.

But some of this stuff does feel like folks who just need a hobby. Comments without any background just are trolling.

You cannot mark severall emails? {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/ptnRPqgXhb_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”You cannot mark severall emails? ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/QD1hARxc8X”}}}

@cole i, it sounds like your IT Team needs to configure their DWA solution a bit better…that, or you are using an unsupported browser. For example, I know that if you use FF3 on a Domino version 7 server, you will have issues using DWA (Domino Web Access). Also, due to an ‘enhancement’ in the current Exchange server’s HTML encapsulation process, the message body is not viewable via DWA, whereas it is visible on a Lotus Notes client. So, if an Outlook 2007 user sends an HTML message to you, you might not be able to read it in DWA–by no fault of Lotus. Version 8 does resolve this by coding around that enhancement, if that helps.

So, although I feel your frustration, sometimes (and I know that may not be completely relevant here), other matters come into play that may give one the perception that their e-mail client is the problem, when in fact, it’s not.

Been using Lotus Notes and DWA since the beginning…the issues you describe will occur with an unsupported browser, lack of training, customized mail template, or poor implementation. None of which are the fault of Lotus, IMHO.

Best of luck to you…

I have been to Lotusphere every other year or so since the first one held in 1993. I have found the event to very motivating and helps to re-energize myself and the consulting staff of our Lotus Notes centric consulting group. We have been a business partner since 1994 in the New York area. Prior to 1994 I worked for Lotus’ consulting group. Over the last 3-5 years we have built industry specializations in academics (both college and K-12) as well as in the SMB market. We remain excited about the product and the direction it is going. However, we need to be re-energized for 2009. A free ticket would be especially appreciated given the current economy. We would use this ticket and the experience at the event to re-energize and motivate our client base to do more with the Lotus product family. Thanks for making this offer available.

While my favorite e-mail client remains Gnus for Emacs (yes, I’m a geek), Lotus Notes 8 is pretty cool too. I’m really liking the ability to drag-and-drop e-mails (with attachments!) to the Activity sidebar, which makes it easier for me to work with other people AND GET STUFF OUT OF MY INBOX. =) I don’t use the built-in feed reader much because I prefer two pretty slick Web-based readers (Google Reader and another internal one). I’m glad this is the Lotus Notes version I get to use every day. =)

(Disclaimer: I have a lot of fun doing Web 2.0 evangelism with IBM. I’m not part of Lotus, though. I’m in the consulting/application development division.)

If you are using Lotus Notes just for email, you’re doing it wrong. That would be like trying to use the Starship Enterprise to cross the street. Or more accurately, an erector set capable of building the Starship Enterprise to cross the street.

That’s why so many users have a foul taste in their mouth over Domino- it’s being deployed in places it probably shouldn’t. The ideal Notes shop should be a place that needs the ability to rapidly create and deploy business applications. If you just want email, geeze- go open source on the server and use something like thunderbird for the client.

And from an infrastructure standpoint, show many another off the shelf product that allows me to deploy business apps across Windows, Mac, and Linux clients, with every app automatically web enabled for clientless connections, able to seamlessly replicate data and applications to those local clients back to server back ends that can be anything from a single Windows or Linux machine to a cluster of Windows, Linux, and i5 machines running on things from commodity grade x86 servers to Z series mainframes.

Full disclosure- I am an the Director of IT at an international technology manufacturing company and we use Domino in ways that have surprised some of the Lotus Developers we’ve run into at Lotusphere.

My husband and I met at Lotus…we both worked for technical support…and from then on our careers as Lotus Notes Developers took off! That was years ago during R4 and 5. More recently we have moved onward and upward and unfortunately away from Lotus Notes. We’ve always missed it and wondered how it has taken off in recent years. There is just no other product that can do so much and can solve so many business problems!

We attended several Lotusphere’s back in the late ‘90s. I would love to attend this year and get reacquainted with Lotus Notes. R8 is intriguing…it was definitely overdue for a facelift!

Hope to see you there!

My two cents:

Background: I am the IT guru at my ad agency’s company in SF.

Working in advertising, I notice the tell-tale symptoms of a marketing strategy that evades any questions concerning a product’s flaws and redirects focus instead on the product’s “usability.” Sad to say, the folks at IBM came off as eager to quote numbers than to acknowledge and address the still persistent issues of the software’s UI.

From an IT standpoint, I find Notes and Domino frustrating at best and limiting at worst. From an end-user’s standpoint, I find Notes to be cumbersome, a memory hog, volatile, and generally unstable. My email experience is usually dampened, if not rendered miserable instead of being uplifted and painless.

Why should I go? So the Notes team can prove me wrong and teach me a thing or two to improve the usability of their email client. That way I can return to my office and be the saving grace for everyone to bow down to.

“the still persistent issues of the software’s UI”.

First, I would ask what your experience with Notes 8 has been like, or if you have checked out the beta of Notes 8.5.

Second, I would direct you to our Design team’s blog. http://www.notesdesignblog.com/ This team started the Notes 8 project as new kids on the block – we had never had more than one person focus on usability/design for Notes before Notes 8 (the engineers did the usability work, too). Now the team that made Notes 8 a great UI has been expanded and is working on even greater things, some of which are in 8.5 and more of which will come in 2009-2010.

I want to go to lotusphere to kick someone in the head, R8 and 8.5 are horrible, horrible tools, regardless of David Allens overly complicated set of rules and tools, Notes is slow and clunky and yeah it’s 95′esq instead its 2000′esq, 8 years or so behind the rest of the world. I’m a Unix Engineer and from the frontend to to backend Notes and Domino is a joke, I don’t like MS one bit but give me Exchange over notes, this client the worst kind of trite and trash I’ve ever seen. I don’t want a super cool ultra functional sledge hammer to read my email and do my calendar, I want simplicity and speed, two things Notes has yet to have a clue about. I’ve moved to user my Blackberry for all Calendar, it’s painful but better than Notes, and soon they’ll open IMAP access and I can kiss the client good by for the most part. Seriously let me go so I can tell someone off, all Notes admins and apparently IBM seem to be in denial about how crappy it really is and they need people to let them know.

I’d be interested to know how you inspected the source code of Nitix, since it only ships binaries and the source code it posted was only a reflection of the open source code modified in the process of creating Nitix, and wasn’t Nitix itself which was a proprietary set of code.

In many cases SMBs are using Domino/Notes for just mail. This is missing the boat. I’ve found that the companies that use Domino for apps have a faster development cycle, greater roi and superior workflow. It really depends on the company.

Now that I’m no longer in consulting and have settled in a large company using Domino for apps and web i can say I am very happy. I’d be happier going to Lotusphere though ; )

me and the rest of the boys in the design department were curious if the lotus mail app has ever figured out how to render an html email correctly yet?

I’d like to go to Lotusphere because I’d like to see what features and new products IBM has in the works to compete with the myriad of freely available, “outside” the firewall tools like Google docs, facebook, and other such products.

Dogear and Connections are impressive in their own right, but Symphony left me needing more – so I’m interested to see how big blue will answer these challenges.

Additionally, I’ve worked on both small scale and large IBM WebSphere projects, but lately have been more involved with open source products – like JBoss Portal. I’ll be interested to see how IBM’s innovations can set them apart from these products, which are constantly gaining confidence and market share.

- My $.02

I’ve heard a great deal about Dave Allens E-productivity suite. I may be a little slow, but how does one actually get it? We use Notes 6.5 at work and it is awful.

This is the going to be the 14th Lotusphere I will miss since I started working with the IBM Lotus products in 1996. I’ve never been to one and although I know this is the best training available my employers have not either been able to understand that or could not afford to send me.

This year I decided I was going to pay for it myself and take vacation time to be able to attend, unfortunately there were some wealth issues in my household that made my plan unaffordable right now. Not having to pay for the conference fee would make all the difference.

LS09 is also more relevant to me than in previous years as I definitely need to get trained on Release 8/8.5 and all the features coming with it.

I’m a true believer of the products and IBMs vision for the future. Please do consider my application for one of these tickets, I really need to keep up with IBMs plans and get trained on the current offerings.

I look forward to hearing from you.

That should read *health* not wealth.

I can’t believe anyone would waste their time on this software, or this conference. Yuck!

I’d like to go to Lotusphere so I can give you some real reporting on what people are doing w/ Notes.

The problem as others have mentioned is Notes is not just email. It’s a full app dev platform w/ built-in security, private/public key encryption, electronic signatures, web development, replication, disconnected application clients, APIs in multiple languages, etc. Email is just an application on top of all this plumbing you don’t get w/ Exchange (you can cobble up something w/ Exchange, SQL server, etc., but it’ll take you a lot longer). The Notes mail web experience is what most users expect to get when they use “email”…everything else can be used to make your business run more efficiently while doing it securely (something you can’t expect out of MS solutions

But seriously, send me and I’ll give daily reporting from Lotusphere about announcements and interviews w/ customers who actually use Notes, and even wear a silly TechCrunch hat while doing it…LOL.

I’ve used Notes now for over 12 years- and I still can’t get over the clunky interface. We now use Notes 8- and while it’s prettier, it is even more clunky and has more bugs. They tested this interface? I found 10 bugs the first day, just in email. And when will the folks at IBM figure out how to write a multi-threaded application? I spend too much time watching databases load- unable to access other open views. I’m a Notes user and a Notes hater. But my company is so deep in the Notes program we can’t afford to move out of it. That seems to be the only value Notes offers my company.

I worked as a developer at Lotus (the company, not the brand) before and after IBM bought it. I worked on lots of apps like Domino.Merchant, K-Station, etc. Before being a developer, I worked in the Notes Support group, handling web and client dev issues.
I can say that some folks really ‘got’ Notes and all the power it afforded. Those were the folks who attended Lotusphere with groupie-like fanaticism. At the end of Lotusphere, they’d come up to you and offer to buy the yellow and black Lotus shirt right off your back. Other folks just thought of it as email no matter how much you tried to explain the possibilities.

Notes/Domino is a RAD environment for integrating web, email, calendaring, DB, search, replication, security and **WORKFLOW**. Outlook/Exchange is bascially email/calandaring.
So you need to know when to use a hammer and when to use a knife. Both are very different, but both work well if used appropriately.
In about an hour, you could have a website that has form submission to a DB (including the forms to easily search/view records), full-text search, role based security and encryption, custom scripts for email integration, etc. Try to do that with a JEE setup in an hour. The problem, however was scalability; Domino just doesn’t scale as well as a JEE environment (maybe that’s changed since the Domino 6.5 days). And Notes/Domino is not free.

Domino is entrenched in thousands of enterprises which do not upgrade to every point release at the drop of a hat. It’s a lot easier for Google to slap on a “beta” tag, update their server code, and thusly update the app for millions of users. It would be impossible for Domino to iterate like Gmail or some other Web X.X hosted solution. Not to mention the red tape that comes with being a 300K+ employee giant.

Notes/Domino is not as easy to use? That’s partly because it gives you enough rope to hang yourself – you just need to learn how to tie the knots correctly, or pay someone to show you.

Engineers are usually not good UI folks, so judging from previous comments, getting UX designers involved will hopefully bring the Notes UI up to date. (I’m glad unread email is now black instead of red).

Notes/Domino is a great tool if it fits your need and you invest the time/money to get the most out of it.

Eric Mack should be able to help you out… check him out here:
http://www.eproductivity.com/
http://www.notesonproductivity.com/

I work for a small 200 employee company that is run off of a bunch of Notes applications. We are still using Notes 6.5 but we are looking to upgrade to Notes 8.x in Q1. I would like to go to Lotusphere to learn about all the features of 8 and learn about the upgrade best practices. Most of our applications are web based and we would love to get a head start learning all about the new x-page technology. With the IT department having layoffs a few months ago, no one thought they would be able to attend Lotusphere this year.

This was a pretty bogus interview, imho, in which Widman once again spouts both his ignorance and his incredibly hostile audacity.

Notes is a client component that uses the Domino database – one of several that Lotus provides. Yet Widman treats Notes 8 as an albatross without bothering to review its features. He’s caught in a confusion that is based upon his experience three years ago with Notes 6.5. His most in-depth question is simply “Why do people hate Notes?”

It’s the equivalent of asking people why they hate the Internet because of a bad experience some people had with IE 5.0.

Notes 8, as a client, has made great strides towards addressing the problems that arose out of an older client architecture. But, as always, Lotus erred on the side of functionality: There has been more function added to the overall Domino/Notes collaborative suite with each release – far and beyond the simple UI corrections that have locked Widman in the past.

There is no question that the domino/notes architecture was designed for the IT environment first and foremost. That is why it continues to grow in popularity with corporations that need trusted, secure, expansible, collaborative platforms. But what Widman has missed – as so many before him have missed – is what the true value of the Lotus Notes/Domino architecture provides:

1. A cross-platform messaging and collaboration environment that permits IT to move forward in a controlled, secure, audit-able environment.
2. An architecture that permits applications and messaging environments to be seamlessly upgraded without loss of function, protecting past investments in applications while adding functionality.
3. A complete application development environment that embraces new technology as it is proven – standards-based, fully expansible, and secure.
4. Open APIs to other applications, fully documented, and fully realized.

As usual, the developers of the Notes client were faced with a problem: Should they continue to expand the system’s functionality, or should they dumb it down to meet GUI-centric masses who demand everything (except gmail) to look and function exactly like MS Exchange.

Lotus took the middle road, and their increased numbers of installs represents that it was a wise course.

The next time Widman (and unfortunately, this is not the first time he’s ragged on Lotus. Who can forget his most inane comment “Why would a Lotus Notes Person Want to Own an iPhone”?) writes about Lotus Domino/Notes, it would be nice to actually download and test out the suite. Then, instead of being stuck asking stupid questions like “Why do people hate Notes?”, he might actually ask something intelligent, like “What does the future of collaboration look like from Lotus’ perspective?”

I have been a Notes Consultant, designer, and occasional Notes Admin since 1994. My company was a Lotus then IBM business partner early on and we enjoyed the “fat” years in the mid to late ’90s. I was able to attend Lotusphere in ’98 but have not had the opportunity to be back since. Things have changed to the point where I am now the lone Notes developer on staff and most of my clients are still at 6.5x. I would love to attend Lotusphere and have a chance to become better acquainted with 8.

I don’t think there’s any reason to attack Jeff here. He gave us a great opportunity to tell TechCrunch readers about the current state of Notes/Domino, and address some false or older perceptions head-on.

If he is like many who have that perception, this is one of many, many approaches we need to take to address it. We have invited TechCrunch to attend Lotusphere as well, in addition to the two readers who will be selected.

As for Jeff specifically, I never talked with him before last week but I find him to be very engaged and willing to challenge his own perceptions. The headline and some of the writing is provocative, but it got a lot of people to read. I hope it has also enhanced Jeff’s view of Notes today, but whether or not it has, the audience here can follow all the links he provided to find out more for themselves.

FYI: this is the first time I’ve written or commented about an IBM product–ever.

I don’t know much about Notes; that’s why I interviewed the experts.

[...] Source:http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/12/24/two-free-tickets-to-lotusphere-is-ibms-lotus-notes-out-of-tou… [...]

Long live Lotus Notes! I’ll be going on my 11th year working with this platform. I’m as excited about it as I was when I started. Seems the battle rages on and it’s fun to be a part of it. It would be boring somewhere else. My dream would be to have the opportunity to be at Lotusphere this year especially. I too have been impacted by economy and sure could use some good news/fortune. Company has suspended conferences and probably some more jobs. My goal for the coming year is to get version 8 certified and up to speed on the new 8.5. Going to Lotusphere would sure help me achieve that goal. I’ve paid my own way once and companies have sent me 6 previous times. It a dream come true and an honor to attend.
Keep up the good fight, all!

I’ve been in the Notes space since the tail end of version 2. I really got started on 3.0, which ran on OS/2 and came on a stack of 3.5″ diskettes. I’ve been around the love/hate Notes arguments and, from my experience it usually comes down to whether or not people have a clear understanding of a) what they are trying to accomplish (most important – Notes is much more than Mail) and b) if they have been trained/taken the time to learn how to use Notes effectively. That said, there are some things that I wanted to see in Notes. Using the power of the Notes development environment, I created the features I wanted. Some of these made it into the software product that was mentioned above: eProductivity (http://www.eProductivity.com). When I start Notes the first thing I do is open eProductivity, which becomes my workspace and dashboard for the day. For me, it really does not matter what version of Notes I use as long as it is 6.53 or greater. If you would like to see what’s possible I encourage you to visit the site and have a look.

Eric

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32522147@N04/3039848888/

Replying to you since I can’t reply to “The” below for some reason.

The fact that it’s a “composite application with no boundaries” is among the reasons why you still have companies running R5 and hating Notes/Domino. 2/5/10 years ago someone drank the cool-aid and said “Notes for everything!” and converted mail to Notes and started rolling out apps to replace all sorts of business processes being handled in spreadsheets or by some other process.

The problem comes about when it’s time to upgrade and they don’t have developers on staff or the original developers are gone and didn’t document things well. Notes apps (fat client apps at least) are super easy to build, somewhat hard to build well, and a huge spaghetti nightmare to maintain. It’s often cheaper to move to Exchange for mail (and leave 4.6 or R5 or 6.5 in place for the apps) than to hire devs to pour through hundreds of apps to insure they’ll survive an upgrade, or to clean up after an upgrade.

That’s not to say that those companies aren’t at fault for not adequately caring and feeding for their environments, however knowing how painful it can be to deal with that, I’ve learned (as have many others) to try to encourage alternatives when someone suggests “let’s use a Notes app” as a solution.

As to Outlook being just an e-mail client, that’s both ridiculous and it misses the point. Outlook is both the groupware client that Notes is supposed to be AND the user experience keeps improving noticeably and positively with each release (at least since I’ve been using it, 2000 or XP.) I run Linux on my laptop and even dealing with running Outlook through WINE, I’d still rather use that than Notes for mail, calendaring and contacts. I remember when the Notes 7 roadshow came around and after the presentation I asked about whether they would be addressing some of the basic UI things that drive users crazy and the speaker pointed me back to the circles in the new template that tell you if you were on the To: line or CC: line and spoke a bunch of gibberish about “empowering knowledge workers” or the like and it was clear that they just didn’t get it.

Thunderbird (and Lightning for calendar) is a great IMAP client but it hardly qualifies as an Outlook equivalent. Even with something like Zimbra as the back-end (and using the Zindus plugin to sync contacts) It’s no where near as polished or supportable.

I’ve been working with Notes/Domino for 10 years and it will always be a system I love and hate. At this point however I don’t see how it’s even in the running when it comes to collaborative software, at least for environments that aren’t horribly tied to their legacy Notes/Domino infrastructure. Heaven help Lotus if Microsoft ever figures out how to make Sharepoint easy to deal with.

@Eric,
I’ve come across so many issues for users that have been resolved with just a little knowledge.
My perspective of Notes may be different than most people because I came into Notes(4.5) from a developer’s point of view. We didn’t use Notes mail at the time and we were using Notes for a Sales contact management project and to build a better Intranet. This, of course, expanded to some very rapid development of a Help Desk app, Job Posting app and several others. We did this with one experienced contractor and one beginner(me).
Recently, I’ve seen applications quoted for hundreds of thousands of dollars(Millions even) for what we can build in Notes for a fraction(thousands). I’m supporting a couple apps now that are simply power houses for our users and business and you’d have to pry them away from their dead hands.
I still don’t pay a whole bunch of attention to mail/calendar. I send/receive whatever. Although, since reading GTD, I’ve improved my mail habits. Another big reason I’d like to be at Lotusphere this year would be to see Eric Mack and David Allen present their productivity session. Actually, I got the book at last year’s conference. Beyond software, applying their techniques will improve your productivity. Good Luck!

I’d like to go to LotuSphere this year because:

My friend and I were selected to moderate a BoF and he is having a problem obtaining the funds to get a ticket. If chosen, I’m going to send him the ticket as I am already slated to go.

In my opinion Lotusphere is very good App of web2.0 : converge and share. Though i dont know any more about it. Hope success and advantage

I only have only one simple reason: Never been there, heard a lot about it, and just want to go there…

4th week of January in Orlando is center of the universe in the collaboration space.

Would like to be there to learn all the new stuff in order to help our customers and partners becoming even more productive and profitable with Lotus software. Looking forward for news about Sametime telephony and Unified Communication. What is happening around Lotus Connections and Social Software in general. And SMB offering Lotus Foundations and new addons for it.

Lotusphere is great conference and ability to meet the people in Lotus community makes it amazing experience.

… and Jan 18 is my birthday. Would be an awesome birthday present.

I havent been to Lotusphere since 2000 and would like to feel the atomosfere agin and i think this would be the best Lotusphere ever becuase the release of 8.5 /Widda

I have been doing Lotus Notes Administration since 1998 and still haven’t been to LotusSphere!(not that I didn’t want to – I was too busy!) This year will be different.
Basically, I would not have stuck with it all these years if I did not believe that the product is sound and makes the company that I work for productive. We are moving to Version 8 this year and I need to know more about this version and how to make the most of it in our environment, which includes as400, Windows, and Linux platforms.
Thanks!

I think I should be selected because I read edbrill.com everyday.

Oh, and techcrunchit.com too.

Also, I have been developing Notes/Domino applications since 1997 and would really, really, love to go to lotusphere. Really.

Yes, this is my second Post. But, as they say, “Vote Early and Vote Often”.

Send me I am new to Lotus development/support and it will help me a lot plus Florida this time of year is real nice

I’ve been working with Notes since v3.1 on OS/2 many years ago. I built and managed a large network of email and applications and defended it against the Outlook fanboys by demonstrating that it would cost us over $11M to reproduce the functionality that we had in our applications on a single Notes platform using multitudes of MS products (Exchange, SQL, Commerce server, etc).

It was a great ride, but unfortunately my position was eliminated in October and I’m now seeking new employment. I would love to have an opportunity to learn more about the new R8 product at Lotusphere to make myself more marketable, and I’ll gladly find a room with a friend if I have admission!

my 2 cents..

I used to be a Lotus Notes developer but now doing SharePoint development and hence, I do not need to attend LotuSphere. Currently am converting LN(6.5) apps to SP, and these are all workflow apps as you would expect when using LN.

These are some of the issues I face when building apps in SP which makes me realize how cool LN is. We mostly had all the LN apps converted to web and only used LN client for mail and discussion dbs and some apps that needed highly secured.

(NOTE: I am working with SP for more than a year and still going thru a learning curve i.e. ASP.NEt w/C#, XML, CAML, webservices/SOAP, SQL, third party worflow SDK, SharePoint, etc and anything I forgot to mention)

-Replication. (NOTE: I use SP and we have content db. to work on)
-Building security into my apps. (Simple Authors, Readers field) how beautiful is that.
-Figuring out users rights (What role/what groups). All this with simple Formula Language.
-Editable sections or Hide/Whens.
-Simple subform computations (1 subform on different forms)
-Even adding values not in list for drop downs.
-Parent/Child (or Response to reponse docs). How cool was this.
-Having doc links.
-Encrypted fields.
-Deployment of apps to different environments was breeze with design replacemnent and signing the database. Better yet if even deploying to new servers or when companies merge and want to start using the apps.
-Freaking views, where users are so used to getting a drill down by categories that they do not use search.
-Columns were easy to manipulate with HTML/JS code to do pop ups and multi selections over the web. Even just if you had to show aging on documents was so easy or even column totals.
-What about show multiple values as seperate entries or Showing entries from different forms into one view. I am having a nightmare with that.
-Keeping up with SOX was easy since we had $updated $revisions fields to get the values, plus our history.
-Scheduled agents was awesome.
-Richtext fields.
-Create simple ability to copy documents to expand on versioning.
-How about reducing maintainance and troubleshooting as I use to request a copy of the production db. without docs, with complete ACL intact.

As far as LN mail is concerned.
-We loved the “All documents” view.
-Heck we used to mail documents/forms.
-And the best was embedding Formula into the mailed document/form so users could just click and execute actions.
-Easy to maintain the mail templates.
-Loved the mailin database repositories, because developer could get the field values from the doc so easily.

One of the issues with LN was if dbs bloated (or had deletion stubs) then we could see the lag, but I think that should not matter now with LN8 and being relational.

I feel many companies may have not migrated to LN8 is because if, they are using Domino to just serve workflow apps then they have all they need with 6.5. Also, when talking to LN community many felt Java w/WebSphere was being pushed big time and it was time to move on from LN. Thus, companies might had to decide if they wanted to go Java or .Net.

I have attended 2 LotuSpheres and also couple of DevCons.

I am annoyed at those who still think that LN is used for Spread sheets and Mail, and many of them are in IT. Reminds me of Seinfeld and the tip calculator episode, “It does other things!”.

Cheers!

toolkit

@toolkit
Your post is one of the most interesting posts I’ve read on a blog in a long time. We’ve been hearing about SharePoint and how great it is and this shows reality.
Thanks. I believe I’d like to point some folks to your response here.

I don’t know if you’ve already picked a winner–but we’d definitely like to go to Lotusphere and bring people who can bring back enthusiasm for Notes 8.5.

I manage IBM relatioship and actively helping Lotus group in Collaboration initiatives.

I also have a smart plug-in to demonstrate at Lotusphere, which my team has developed to tremendously enhance value of “sametime client” to users.

@toolkit — I’m in the same boat — Notes developer since 1993, now I do SharePoint.

Learn InfoPath. Your list will be much smaller. Not gone, but smaller.

Either you are totally making this up, or something is seriously wrong with your installation. I have no problems selecting hundreds or even thousands of email and deleteing them with one click/keypress.
That you can’t access your mail can hardly be because of Notes, but something your IT department must handle. What error message are you getting?
I simply select the documents, press delete and (if soft deletion is not turned on), F9 to refresh and actually delete the documents.
I am obviously talking about the Notes client, since you say that you are using Notes, not DWA (Domino Web Access, a.k.a. iNotes).

I e-mailed the two winners. Not going to post names until they confirm they’re able to attend (there is a runner up if they can’t attend.)

Thanks to all who commented.

Great post by toolkit

I’m a Lotus Notes developer ( 10 years) working on a Lotus Notes (applications) to Sharepoint migration.

Regarding comparing the two products – don’t.

Lotus Notes is not Sharepoint and why would it want to be.

I’m get conflicting sources regarding Sharepoint’s capabilities. Everythings possible I’m told but it will either take you an age to code it rather than just check a property (allow values not in list, refresh keywords) or you could do it but wouldn’t want to do it (item level security).

I love the big selling point of self service of Sharepoint sites – pushing IT roles on to the business!

My other frustration thing is the number of products used to replace Lotus Notes. If you cannot do it Sharepoint why not do it in another MS product, say InfoPath. If that does not fit your needs then why not do it from scratch in .Net. Now instead of the business knowing what I.T. solutions can be offered using one product they have to think about multiple products that esentailly all compete with each other.

Thanks for the opportunity…

[...] been catching up with my reading and came across this item on Lotus Notes at TechCrunch.  It really was a fair treatment of Lotus [...]

[...] Two free tickets to Lotusphere–is IBM’s Lotus Notes Out of Touch With Web 2.0 World? [...]

Have the winners confirmed yet? If not, I’d be willing to take a ticket as a gift for my birthday (which is today)…

I will simply say, that for one reason or another I have not been able to go since 1999 and 2001. I would LOVE the opportunity to go again.

I can also say than whoever wins a ticket should have a great opportunity to see Lotus products, take certification tests w/discount, talk to the actual IBM developers who make the product, and attend fuzzy brochure type sessions or hardcore productivity sessions whether on the development side, the administrator side, or a company’s management. It’s also a great location for those who want to blow off their company’s investment and just do some partying…

Although set within a strict tabbed methodology Lotus Notes is it is way past “web 2.0″ from the Notes Client-side. The wheels of “web 2.0″ that are finally “maturing” (related to what we’ve had to date on port 80) have been in Lotus a really long time. Moreover, as the web technologies have improved, overall, IBM Lotus has done a great job of adding them to Lotus Notes/Domino, as well. Lotus Domino web applications and can consume and deliver web services, dynamical HTML (it has native support for JavaScript), has native support for JAVA on the server-side for agents, has ability for inherited libraries (yours, or others) to do many different web programming techniques including things like REST. It includes POP3, IMAP, SSL, S-MIME, and LDAP services. It has native support for its own internal security Notes-based CA and x-509 certificates. With the Standard 8 client we added widgets, feeds, and other great plug-ins. With the new 8.5 version, it has a very cool new development feature called “XPages” – that little feature by itself would qualify.

In fact, if IBM would rework the old workspace icons have a black background, with rounded edges, and smaller icons, you’d might confuse it with the brand new cutting edge GUI of the Apple iTunes software. The difference is that Lotus Notes has lasted so long, its once again cutting edge with just a little tweaking. All they had to do was keep those workspace “chicklets” until “fashion” circled back again.

__________________

As for all the other off-topic rants, I guess I can play too…
Lotus Notes is NOT like MS products. As someone who was a MS developer and Outlook user, I hated Notes, too. But it’s same kind of hate that is more principal ate that is blind out of principal rather than actually look at the product. It’s not a relational database, it’s a collaboration product — it’s people and document workflow, it’s people interaction and data integration.

Lotus Notes is a product that is proprietary but open-source/standards friendly. Yes, it doesn’t do a .Net, but it does VB and Java. Not many products support version 1 or 2 applications (databases) running in the current version of the software with no or very little design updates.

Right before Christmas, I had yet another company that wondered why Notes sucks to only find out it’s because of what they made it do. They had several complaints, all were fixed by simply changing how they used the software.
For example:
They said during the meeting that “Searching sucks and they hoped that 8.02 would fix it.” The fix – Allow and create full-text indexes on their mail files so the Notes client can search reliably. It was as simply as selecting the lucky people in the admin client, and clicking the option to create the indexes.

I also hear things like:
Performance sucks. This is usually either a very busy network, poor implementation of the Domino server’s “admin” side, or hacked mail templates with “improvements” that significantly restrict the user to a very limited mail environment. The user usually says something like, you’d think that they could improve the mail file in “x” years. IBM does, the users are still using a 4.x mail hack when their servers are 8.x.

One of the great things about Lotus Notes is that departments can really quickly get up an internal app really quickly and with little experience. The bad thing is these applications often suffer usability issues. The largest $100,000+(dev and setup costs conversion) I got to participate on from Lotus Notes was for the data conversion part of a Notes to Websphere, SharePoint, and Outlook conversion (yes, no savings there, 4 Lotus e-mail and app servers became 8-exchange boxes to do same e-mail load. They made SharePoint basically do simple public folders/workspaces with checkin/checkout. Websphere was needed for the core functionality as SharePoint could scale.) The apps that made Lotus “so bad” were valid complaints. They were VERY bad – they could have been a really bad PHP and mySQL or .NET implementation. It would have been much smarter to simply fix the existing applications – there were three of these “core” applications. I know for a fraction of that conversion budget, I would have happily recreated those applications from scratch to run on a replicated set of Domino app servers that would have done very nicely. There was nothing “transactional” which required specific relational roll-back. I could also have done it just as fast as the .NET guys were doing the SharePoint part, and the Websphere and database groups creating theirs. It was so wrong on so many levels. It was right on only one way, it paid my families bills for a period.

Sorry to say Ed, but this is entirely indicative of how IBM/Lotus just doesn’t “get it”. It’s so frustrating because I love the Lotus product line. The rest of the world seems to have adopted the new business model of how to sell on the web, but IBM/Lotus still sits there in denial, fighting the good fight, but doing it all wrong. It should be EASY to buy something from IBM/Lotus… throw down a credit card and make your purchase. Have that “Button” there for IF and only IF you want to speak to a rep or a BP.

As usual Lotus brings a knife to a gunfight.

Sorry Ray–winners already confirmed.

Curt Stone and Roland Reddekop.

I am already going to Lotusphere. I wouldn’t miss it. Why? Because Notes Floats My Boat. You can’t rationalize love. It just is.

[...] 3年と少し前にRay Ozzieがその後有名になったメモを発表、Microsoftが軸足をソフトウェアからサービスに移すことが宣言された。われわれが昨年10月に目撃したWindows Azureの発表はその成果のひとつである。SaaSへの注力は、Microsoftのメインストリームの製品、Exchangeにも及んでいる。今朝（米国時間1/13）、Steve Gillmorと私はMicrosoftの開発担当副社長で、Exchangeの責任者であるRajesh Jhaから新バージョン、Exchange 14について話を聞くことができた。Jhaは出荷の日程について具体的な話をするのは避けたが、MicrosoftではExchange 14の開発にすでに18ヶ月かけていることを明言した。現在、Exchange14には、大学を中心に350万のテストユーザーがいるという。JhaはExchange 2007の場合、開発の同一段階でテストユーザーが5000しかいなかったことを指摘した。JhaはまたMicrosoftが開発の当初からSaaSにコミットしていることを強調した。Exchange 2007は、まず第一サーバで、われわれはその上にサービス機能を追加しました。サービス機能を実装するときにはすでにサーバのデザインは確定していたので、サービス機能についてのユーザー・フィードバックを十分に生かすことができませんでした。現在、Exchange 2007上のSaaSのユーザー・アカウントは50万前後しかいないのに、Exchange 14のテストユーザーが〔350万と〕膨大です。つまりExchange14はまだリリースされていないにもかかわらず現在、Microsoftが提供する最大のマルチ・テネットのExchange製品ということになる。Exchange14では開発の当初からサーバ機能とその上で動作するサービスを同時に考慮してます。その結果、ストレス・テストでの性能も格段に強化されています。SaaSテクノロジーの重視は、Notesに不満を持つ一部ユーザーも引きつけている。Jhaによると、Notes ServersあるいはNotes Onlineから510万のアカウントがExchangeに乗り換えたという。この350万のテスターから得られた成果をさらに詳しく説明してくれた。ITの管理という側面からすると、大学というのは驚くほど大企業に環境が似ています。ユーザーはソフトウェアの使い方で苦労し、管理者は問題の発見と規則の遵守のためにメールを調査しなければならないので、研究の効率化とプライバシーの間のバランスを取るのに苦労しています。Exchange14のアーキテクチャーは、これらの点がスムーズに運用できるよう考慮されています。今回の開発で大いに勉強したのはスケールの問題です。テストユーザーが350万と、前回の5000とは比較にならないくらいの数です。Exchange 14はわれわれにとって最初の、一からSaaSを前提にしたバージョンです。これだけの数のテスターを得たことによって、インストールの最適化や、I/O サーバーの物理的サイズのような基本的問題から、ヘルプセンターへの問い合わせを最小化するためにUIを改良し、ウェブから必要な情報がえられるようにしなければならないなど、実にさまざまことを学ぶことができました。こうしたことから考えると、Exchangeの次のバージョンは十分にテストされた製品になりそうだ。（バグだらけの過去のバージョンでずっと積み重ねられてきた不満はどうなるのか注目）。CrunchBase InformationRajesh JhaMicrosoftInformation provided by CrunchBase [...]

[...] emphasis on SaaS technology has also attracted a few frustrated Notes users. According to Rajesh, about 5.1 million Notes seats have switched from Notes Servers or Notes [...]

I don’t know if you’ve already picked a winner–but we’d definitely like to go to Lotusphere and bring people who can bring back enthusiasm for Notes 8.5.

[...] the new Lotus Live–IBM’s latest SaaS effort. Quite timely, given my controversial post on Lotus Notes and the Web 2.0 [...]

[...] the new Lotus Live–IBM’s latest SaaS effort. Quite timely, given my controversial post on Lotus Notes and the Web 2.0 [...]

Send me I am new to Lotus development/support and it will help me a lot plus Florida this time of year is real nice.

[...] はっきりと焦点が当てられていたのは、IBM最新のSaaSへの取り組みであるLotus Liveをはじめとするソーシャルコンピューティングと協業だ。私のLotus NotesとWeb 2.0に関するかなり議論を呼ぶ書き込みを考えると実にタイムリーだ。 [...]

My major beef with Lotus Notes is its half-arsed attitude to people who wish to integrate with it.

1. They give us a Java interface, except:
a. You have to do everything on a special Notes thread, and it leaks memory every time you have a new thread which wants to use Notes.
b. Despite it being a Java API, they make you recycle() every tiny object, even DateTime!
c. If you ask for the same document (whether via a view or via its note ID) twice, recycling one of these will fuck over your reference to the other one, regardless of whether you still need it or now.

2. When the system runs out of memory, the OS returns 0 for calls to memory allocation functions. Notes doesn’t care — it will try to use the space it has been returned, and promptly die screaming, taking down the entire application which has had the misfortune of loading their badly-coded DLL.

3. 64-bit? What is 64-bit? Someone was talking about 8.0.1 having 64-bit and then that turned out to be a big fat lie, didn’t it?

Thanks a lot, guys.

Here’s how to fix the problem:

1. Fix the Java API. Wrap Notes resources in proper wrapper objects which don’t get directly returned to user code, and don’t *require* user code to recycle() in order to not crash. Another pro-tip, close() is a much more standard name. Don’t require cleanup *at all* for objects like dates which should be simple types!

2. Check the return value for every memory allocation!

3. Give us a 64-bit port already.

For extra points:

4. Give us a native Java API so that we don’t even need to worry about shoddy DLLs being loaded.

If all these things were finally fixed, Notes would actually be a very good platform. But at the moment it’s just a joke.

[...] the new Lotus Live–IBM’s latest SaaS effort. Quite timely, given my controversial post on Lotus Notes and the Web 2.0 [...]

Bob,
Clearly your frustrations lies in your lack of knowledge about the product (Notes) not Notes itself. Yes, there are many different ways you CAN
change config setting but you don’t have to do it
in all 3. Please be clear in your assesment.

I want to go so I can figure out what this ‘Lotus’ thing is, and why people use it if it’s so bad.

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