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."

Hmmm...

[slapys]

I went to a walkthrough of the Intuit campus in San Diego yesterday. They had a raffle in the beginning and I won a copy of QuickBooks Premier 2008. Even though I am a Computer Science major about to graduate, I felt like I had won nothing; the software felt valueless to me because it would not run on my Ubuntu machine at home. Perhaps shrink-wrap software that runs on Linux may start to catch on soon?

Good news

[Kjella]

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]

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.

Why specifically Ubuntu?

[bshellenberg]

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.

Re:Why specifically Ubuntu?

[kripkenstein]

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:Hmm... I suppose that's OK

[bdeclerc]

Well that is hardly helpful to those who wish to use a Lotus Notes client on a non-Microsoft platform.

Where Lotus Notes actually uses the Mozilla rendering engine, as anyone who knows something about the more recent Notes-versions knows. But please, don't let facts come in the way of decade old prejudices...

Re:As a regular user of Notes at Work.

[vampyre_eyes]

I have been a user of Lotus Notes for 6.5 years. It is not that bad. I am currently working at IBM and running Ubuntu 7.10 Thinkpads (T61 and T42). IBM official standard Linux workstation client is Red Hat based. But IBM has a few projects to enable users to run Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. These Standard clients contain almost all the required software to do your work at IBM. some including Lotus Notes 8. Anything else can be covered by running VMware with Windows XP. I have been running a Ubuntu client since September last year. and I can say that the support is getting better with every release To all those who do not like Lotus notes. This announcement by IBM is a very good thing. There are many companies who run Lotus notes and this gives all those users another choice of a Linux based desktop with official support. I hope i see many more of these types of stories and that more companies may go down the Linux path.

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

[Qbertino]

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:As a regular user of Notes at Work.

[Otter]

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.

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

[Junta]

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

[kbg]

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.

Which begs the question... Eclipse?

[Rob Y.]

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

[Belial6]

"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.

Will Symphony steal file associations on Linux too

[Jason Levine]

Everyone seems to be focusing on Notes, but I have some big gripes with Symphony. I loaded it thinking that it would be a good way of going with an "OpenOffice.org" application that supported Lotus WordPro imports (as my company currently is standardized on WordPro). I quickly found out that Symphony takes over the file extensions for OpenDocument and OpenOffice files. There's no setting to turn this off either. Every time you start the application, it changes your file associations. This behavior was a show stopper for me. Even in an beta, file association changes should be optional, not forced onto the user at each application start.

Notes on Ubuntu

[driftingwalrus]

I have, in the past, worked at IBM. They've had Notes 8 running on Ubuntu internally for quite some time now. It wasn't ready for release, but it works very well.