Lotus Notes 8.5 Will Support Ubuntu 7.0

E5Rebel sends in an article from Computerworld.uk article that reports: "IBM believes Linux on the enterprise desktop is finally ready for widespread adoption. To meet future demand it is preparing to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0... The Ubuntu support for Notes and Symphony were a direct response to demand from customers."

Ubuntu 7.0?

[Knuckles (8964)]

There is no Ubuntu 7.0. I'd expect them to support 8.04, Hardy.

Re:Ubuntu 7.0?

[Ed Avis (5917)]

I'm running Ubuntu 4+3i right now, the real part works pretty smoothly but the imaginary part has some strange interactions with virtualization. I think it's just too complex for most desktop users.

7.10

[quenda (644621)]

Amazing how many news outlets repeat the "7.0" typo.
Of course it should read "7.10" as in october 2007.
But et tu Slashdot!?

Good news

[Kjella (173770)]

I think every large company I've dealt with use either MS Outlook or Lotus Notes. Don't ask me to reason why, I guess it's just one of those things they do. Customer demand for this on Linux may mean serious traction in the enterprise market, they tend to move slow but when they do it's with force. I think it'll only get better from here as I'm running Ubuntu here, and right now it's only slightly less frustrating than XP. While XP is at a standstill they're fixing things in Ubuntu, and I tried Vista... it was more painful than switching to Ubuntu was.

Enterprise

[unforkable (956731)]

Despite the facts that Lotus is or isn't a good product... let's face it, Lotus Notes is a major player in the enterprise, and this can drive some important migrations to Linux.

We can only hope...

[Sulix (1154971)]

We can only hope that more companies follow suit.

Face it, if it will work on Ubuntu, it won't be too hard to coax it into working under [insert favorite distro here], and Linux is sorely missing out on commercial software.
Even though some people will surely say that we should only use the pure, open source software that no large corporation has so much glanced at, there are some jewels of the commercial software world that have no open source equivalent.

Video Editing software, for example; you'd be far better off using one of the many commercial programs than one of the few open source ones.

Having commercial software avaliable for Linux can only help the adoption of Linux on the desktop, and, really, unless you're Steve Ballmer, there is no possible downside to this.

So wait...

[TLLOTS (827806)]

When did IBM start hating Linux?

' can't tell exactly if this is good or bad news

[Qbertino (265505)]

From what I have allways heard and read - also in this thread - Lotus Notes is about the crappiest of Groupwares right behind Outlook/Exchange. A nighmare to maintain and operate, close to SAP in it's fatness and stuck in the early ninties in terms of usability.

Give the traction Linux and OSS in general has gained in professional businesses I doupt that this is needed. It's probably more that Notes needs Linux. If it helps Lotus Notes shops migrate easyer - all the better. But I'm recommending all my business customers to stear clear of any proprietary thick-client-server groupware. Given the state of rich internet applications and web-based solutions nowadays the concept strickes me as totally backwards.

Re:' can't tell exactly if this is good or bad new

[kbg (241421)]

Actually Lotus Notes is light years ahead of Outlook/Exchange, but of course that doesn't say much because Outlook isn't very good groupware to begin with. The thing that people don't realize is that Lotus Notes is a fantastic rapid application development product. I can make a groupware application in 30 minutes that would take 6 months to a year to do in Outlook/Exchange/.NET and it still would not have the features of the notes application, for example: Integrated search in every view, Integrated replication, Easy customization, Every application is also a web application, Integrated logging, Integrated access control down to a field level, Integrated Offline capabilites and so on.

I'll admit that the email client that comes with Lotus Notes is not very good, but that is not because Notes is not very good, it's just that the IBM developers that create the email client are not very good developers, it would be possible to have the email client look exactly like Outlook.

But since Notes comes with POP and IMAP support out of the box, you can always just use the email client of your choice.

The state of Notes today, not 5 years ago.

[CFD339 (795926)]

Facts first:

1. If your experience with Notes does not include significant time spent with version 6.5 or later, your experience is as invalid as talking about Apple with your experience limited to using a Mac SE. Move on.

2. 6.5 - 7.0x are largely incremental improvements from an end-user perspective with gains mainly in performance and manageability on both client and workstation. Sure, there are some better UI things in 7.x than 6.5.x but generally they're not earth shattering.

3. 8.0 is the first release built on the Eclipse framework (which IBM calls Expediter), and while it adds a few new features it doesn't really capitalize on that framework much. Its a lot more overhead and represents huge potential but for the most part end users aren't seeing it yet. It also isn't on that many desktops yet. Its too new, and its a .0 release.

4. 8.0.1 is where you start to see the benefit of running on the eclipse framework from an end user perspective and 8.5 will be a very long overdue blessing and relief for developers.

5. By moving to the Eclipse framework, IBM is now able to deliver full parity on the Macintosh operating systems this year (beta is out there now) as well as full parity on Linux desktops (they'll support Ubuntu, but it will RUN on many).

6. The BIGGEST benefit of moving to the Eclipse framework is that vendors of add-on products and high end developers can now do virtually anything in terms of both UI and FUNCTION up to and including a complete re-skinning of the client. With 8.5 the designer will also be that open. This removes a huge problem for ISV's since day 1. You can't sell a tool for the classic Notes client for real money because your stuck with the same UI available to the crappy code your I.T. department is putting out. No matter how good it is, it looks the same. That's over now. I've already seen amazingly graphical UI approaches from vendors that support graphical representations of data and gesture based controls.

---- now for an opinion or two:

There are only two real competitors in the ENTERPRISE mail and collaboration space. Microsoft (Exchange+outlook+vs.net+sharepoint+communications server+sql server+active directory+IIS) and IBM (Notes+Domino+Sametime). IBM has some variations on that theme as well (Portal - for connecting all that crap you have that doesn't natively talk to your other crap - Quicr, Connections, etc.). If you want enterprise class tools, those two choices represent more than 90% of the market. You can pick the Microsoft stack, in which case you must use all of it, all the time, and upgrade all at once when you upgrade any of it. Linux is totally unsupported, and Mac gets grade-b reluctant support. You can pick the IBM stack and run almost anyone's hardware, operating system, network, and tools or a mixture of all of them.

The IBM stack fully supports both Mac and Linux, and IBM has funded and continues to fund hundreds of full time positions doing all their work on fully open source projects (like Eclipse). What exactly, do you find wrong with that?

You don't like the way it looks? They've opened the UI now. Make it look like anything you want. You can use half a dozen languages to do it.

There are some things that the /. community just looks like a bunch of sheep being led around without thought on. This is one of those knee-jerk reaction topics. Bitching about Notes from years past is about as easy as declaring "First Post" -- and about as useful.

Re:The state of Notes today, not 5 years ago.

[Junta (36770)]

My problem with Notes 8 is not that it isn't 'pretty' enough. My complaint is that it is an *unbelievable* amount of overhead for fulfilling its core function, email and calendaring. Software developers seem to cream themselves over the fact it is an eclipse platform, but the rest of the world stuck using the damn thing for email, that's zero comfort. There's no effort to provide a streamlined core client for the core function, just effort to make it even slower because some IBM managers/developers see that as the only path to progress.

Notes and Sametime clients both suffer this. Notes consumes 256 MB of my memory (yes, resident memory). Evolution 28M (not light weight, but still). Notes takes a long time to start and do any little operation (this machine is an 8 core system with 16GB of RAM, should be plenty). I haven't run Sametime client in a while, but I remember it taking ~50 seconds to start, and sucking up 128M of ram on it's own. It admittedly didn't feel slow once up and running, at least, though it did a terrible job of managing the WM hints (it would keep blinking in the window list despite acknowledging the message). Meanwhile, pidgin does *everything* pretty much right with a modest footprint and instantaneous start.

Re:The state of Notes today, not 5 years ago.

[Belial6 (794905)]

"Notes takes a long time to start and do any little operation"

Your machine or network is severely broken. It takes less than 2 seconds to open my Notes client, connect to the server, and display a view containing 4100 documents that are stored on the server.

It is possible that you are lying, but I'll assume it is just that you have done something seriously wrong to your machine and just don't realize it.

Re:The state of Notes today, not 5 years ago.

[Blakey Rat (99501)]

Your machine or network is severely broken. It takes less than 2 seconds to open my Notes client, connect to the server, and display a view containing 4100 documents that are stored on the server.

The default install of Notes has never run that fast on any computer ever built and you know it. Don't bullshit us. It takes more than 2 seconds to show the splash screen. Hell, Outlook is craploads faster than Notes and it can't do that in anywhere close to 2 seconds.

1) You're running Notes 4 or something on modern hardware.
2) You've stripped down your Notes entirely so it does nothing but load this folder of 4100 documents.
3) You're running some kind of helper application that keeps Notes resident in memory, so it doesn't actually have to load anything.

Go grab your Notes CD, do a DEFAULT INSTALL on your hardware, set up a standard user account using the standard welcome screen, then tell me how long it takes to boot.

Re:

[Dogtanian (588974)]

The year of Linux Desktop!

This is bordering on a parody of itself now- any more and it'll become a Slashdot cliche like Natalie Portman, Soviet Russia and friends.

It's been said every year for almost ten years, so can we call it the decade of Linux on the desktop instead? ;-)

Re:Hmmm...

[Kyojin (672334)]

Lotus notes... this may spell the end of Ubuntu being considered "User Friendly" as Lotus Notes drags it kicking and screaming to the ground.

New tag - deathofubuntu?

Re:SmartSuite?

[ADRA (37398)]

Notes 8.0 already supports OpenOffice docs (built-in editors), so no big breakthrough there.

Re:As a regular user of Notes at Work.

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

At no point in your rambling, incoherent interface were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational program.

Overreact much?

Notes is a development platform and distributed database. It's not the fault of the program if your IT department makes you use it as an email tool without end-user customisations.

Re:As a regular user of Notes at Work.

[KlaymenDK (713149)]

IBM, what you've just developed is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever used. At no point in your rambling, incoherent interface were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational program.

Ah, but dear sir, Rational is a completely separate product. Would you like to see the catalogue?

Re:As a regular user of Notes at Work.

[IntlHarvester (11985)]

IBM has owned Notes for like 15 years now, they deserve all the blame.

Re:As a regular user of Notes at Work.

[forgotten_my_nick (802929)]

6.5 was made back in 2003. Of course it is better. Most of the FUD being spouted is from people using older versions of Notes, or having to use applications written by people not qualified to write them (mainly because it is as easy to write as VB). Or worse still they spend all that money and only use it for email.

R8 is pretty much sitting on top of Eclipse. You still have notes backend but you can work with composite applications either as an NSF or as plugins. 8.1 even allows you to link to Google widgets within the client.

R8 works in Linux already (Designer client is scheduled for 8.5). What IBM is doing is certifying the client under Ubuntu 7.

Re:As a regular user of Notes at Work.

[Otter (3800)]

6.5 was made back in 2003. Of course it is better. Most of the FUD being spouted is from people using older versions of Notes...

I use R7 at work. It's certainly less horrifically disastrous than previous versions but it's still godawful.

Incidentally, you talk about "made back in 2003" like it was designed to run on the ENIAC! There was no excuse for releasing such a piece of garbage in the era of OS X, KDE 2 and whatever Windows was current then.

... or having to use applications written by people not qualified to write them (mainly because it is as easy to write as VB). Or worse still they spend all that money and only use it for email.

Oh, yeah, this stuff. When you Notes fans convince IBM to market the product as a development environment that's unusable out of the box, not as a polished suite centered around email, we'll stop complaining.

Which begs the question... Eclipse?

[Rob Y. (110975)]

...what is it about Eclipse that makes it so slow? I gave the Lotus Symphony thing a try and thought - nice beginning, but if you can't make it faster, this isn't going to fly. (yes, fast dual-core processor - lots of memory - is 1GB still 'lots'?)

Is it Java? Is it the size of the toolkit? Or, in the case of Symphony, is it the fact that under all that bloat, you have the bloat of OpenOffice? OpenOffice (2.3, at least) is much snappier, though. I can forgive OpenOffice its long load times, since it's not noticeably sluggish once it's started. But Symphony takes forever to start and is then sluggish once its (admittedly pretty) interface is up and running. And it's compounded by their ambitious sidebar thing, which flips as you change context moving around your document, but doesn't keep up with your movements. Ends up being a distraction instead of a powerful interface paradigm (actually, I think it might even be distracting even if it did keep up).

I thought the point of Eclipse was, unlike Swing, to implement the toolkit natively on each platform. If so, it sounds like a great idea. Am I just seeing an interim step toward a toolkit that will eventually work like that?

I've even tried using the Eclipse IDE as a programmer's editor to work on unix source code from a Windows desktop via Samba. Admittedly overkill, but it was free, my company was slow in agreeing to pay for a commercial editor, and I was getting tired of vim (vim, unlike vi, is really slow for some reason on my old AIX box). Eclipse was better than I expected for this purpose (one of my programmers still uses and likes it), but no better than vim over telnet for my tastes. I'm actually hopeful at the prospect of using kate once KDE apps on Windows are stable.

Anyway, I digress. I applaud IBM for its support of Linux for its desktop applications. I'm just afraid that relying on Eclipse to do it might be a mistake. If only IBM would buy Trolltech, switch QT to the LGPL and open up another, perhaps more viable, option.

A final thought. Java, Eclipse (and .NET, for that matter) might make sense as a way to deliver binary portable apps in a vertial market where apps are very complex and constantly changing. Binary portability would be a huge boon to developers in such cases, assuming the vendor cares about portability in the first place. But for traditional productivity apps, I think the QT portability model probably works better. Those kinds of apps are more self-contained, typically more mature, and (let's face it) are competing with native apps (on the major platforms, at least).

Re:Why specifically Ubuntu?

[kripkenstein (913150)]

I'm unable to understand the logic here. Is the word Ubuntu replacing Linux for marketing use, or is there some compelling reason to support just one distribution? In "the old days" (last year was it?) everything was SUSE. In "the REAL old days" (2 years ago was it?) it was RedHat. Linux is Linux is Linux.

Ubuntu is fast becoming a powerful player in this area; as the article says, the reason for supporting it was sizable customer demand. That is the logic here. People wanted to run Ubuntu on their enterprise desktops, they wanted IBM to have Notes on that platform, IBM agreed. No mystery.

Of course 'support for Ubuntu' doesn't mean it won't run on random distro X. It might, but IBM won't recommend it/install it/support it for you. Which is fine if you want to do it all yourself. Most enterprises, however, are used to paying IBM (/Microsoft) a lot of money and not having to worry about support issues.

IBM, by the way, isn't supporting just one distro. They have various forms of support for various distros for their products. Their overall strategy seems quite simple; on the one hand, support the distros people ask for, on the other, keep that number a reasonable size. By which I mean, IBM doesn't want a single vendor (Microsoft sort of taught IBM a lesson there), but also IBM doesn't want too many vendors, which is hard to support and market. Simply put, that means we should expect IBM products to be supported on Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE. No surprises; these are the major distros these days (and for a few years now, too).

Re:Why specifically Ubuntu?

[Hymer (856453)]

AFAIK, being a Notes-user for many years and having a good relation with IBM, they already do support SuSE and Redhat... Ubuntu is just the next distro getting certified Notes support.
--
No, Notes doesn't suck... Notes is just different... but then, so is Linux. ;-)

Re:Full support -- actually, no

[bdeclerc (129522)]

Actually, they just announced at Lotussphere that for Notes 8.5, they are working on an Eclipse-based Designer, which then would be quite simple to also make available on other platforms than Windows... So it's very likely going to happen.

In the mean time, as far as I know, it's possible to run Designer under Wine.