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Linux Business IT

Lotus Notes 8.5 Will Support Ubuntu 7.0 297

Posted by kdawson from the desktop-in-the-enterprise dept.
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."
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Lotus Notes 8.5 Will Support Ubuntu 7.0 More

Lotus Notes 8.5 Will Support Ubuntu 7.0

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  • Ubuntu 7.0? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Knuckles ( 8964 ) <knuckles@@@dantian...org> on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:51AM (#22199046)
    There is no Ubuntu 7.0. I'd expect them to support 8.04, Hardy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by niceone ( 992278 ) *
      They say it's customer driven, so maybe those customers are running 7.04? I know I am.

  • Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by slapys ( 993739 )
    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?

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Kyojin ( 672334 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:24AM (#22199124)
      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?
    • Be glad you can't use it.

      My company uses it, and it SUCKS ASS. It's probably the second worst program I have to support, and the first is a custom web app written in VB.Net by someone who doesn't really know VB.Net, and using an Access(!) database.

      Here's one example... some updates that were released in January appear to require .NET Framework 3.5.

      But, does anything tell you this? No.

      It just assumes 3.5 is there, and updates.

      Then, the program just closes out without an error when you try to start it.

      I ended
  • 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. Everyone in this everywhere is now dumber for having used it. I award you no credit, and may God have mercy on your soul.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Knuckles ( 8964 )
      It must be better than 6.5, no? Please tell me it is.

      • Re:As a regular user of Notes at Work. (Score:5, Informative)

        by forgotten_my_nick ( 802929 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:34AM (#22199334)
        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: (Score:2)

          by Knuckles ( 8964 )
          Thanks.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          R8 is pretty much sitting on top of Eclipse.

          Speaking as a Notes user (a Linux Notes 8 user at that), that really didn't help Notes significantly from my perspective. In terms of applications, I don't see how Notes 8 increases the skill of developers, but then again, that's not my chief gripe.

          Notes always has been excruciatingly sluggish, bloated, and awkward. Putting it on top of eclipse made it that much worse. It feels like molasses on my system. This is working with local replicas of databases (eliminating the slow network) and on a ludicrous

          • Which begs the question... Eclipse? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Rob Y. ( 110975 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @12:19PM (#22200476)
            ...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:As a regular user of Notes at Work. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Otter ( 3800 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @10:21AM (#22199904) Journal
          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: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by runenfool ( 503 )
            Version 7 wasn't that much better than 6.5 in my opinion. I am currently running 7 and its still a lot of the things that people complain about (bloated, hard to use, slow, unintuitive). However I am very excited about the upcoming LN8 (upcoming in my company I mean - its already out from IBM) because of the completely revamped user interface.

            Here is a link with some "whats new" information from IBM - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes8-new/ [ibm.com]

          • 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.
            XP.

            Windows XP was released in 2002. Yes, it really is that old.

            A large number of people were probably still running '98 at home and 2000 at work too.
    • 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.

      • From IBM's own website on Lotus Notes:

        Business email software that can help people effectively share and manage information, make business decisions quickly, and streamline the way they work.


        Silly IT, using Lotus Notes for what IBM says it's supposed to be used for!

    • Re:As a regular user of Notes at Work. (Score:5, Funny)

      by KlaymenDK ( 713149 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:55AM (#22199416) Journal

      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: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by vampyre_eyes ( 847233 )
      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 Ubun

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chthon ( 580889 )

      As a new user of Microsoft Outlook, after using 7 years of Lotus Notes, I think that MO gave us already more problems in the month that it has been deployed, than Lotus Notes in the past 7 years.

    • Only on ./ can I get a +4 Insightful for a Billy Madison quote.

      Yes I use 7.0 at work and Sametime 6.5. Sametime can sometimes take up to 2 minutes to launch (M90, Dual core, 4 GB of RAM). When notes crashes I can't just kill notes. I have to find all the stupid background tasks associated with it.

      Thankfully my current company does actually use it more than just as an e-mail client. Vacation Time, Performance Reviews, Meeting room scheduling all handled through Notes. And the web interface for 7.0 is MUCH cl

  • 7.10 (Score:5, Informative)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:03AM (#22199086)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:14AM (#22199102) Homepage
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      IBM is in desperation mode to save the pitiful piece of shit that is notes. this is not good news for anyone, it just means IBM will now be flogging there dead horse on Ubuntu as well. Notes is one of those programs that has actually gotten slower and less intuitive as the years and versions have gone on, they make MS look like genius's and that is tough.

  • SmartSuite? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gheesh ( 191858 ) * on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:16AM (#22199110) Homepage Journal
    Getting that to run on Linux would be great. Being able to support the OpenDocument standard as well... priceless!

  • Ubuntu 7.0? (Score:2, Informative)

    by esmrg ( 869061 )
    You don't use Ubuntu do you?

    There is no 7.0.

    7.04 , 7.10, 8.04

    The format is year.month of release. Which is april and october, respectively.

  • Enterprise (Score:5, Interesting)

    by unforkable ( 956731 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:41AM (#22199174)
    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.
  • 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: (Score:2)

      by Knuckles ( 8964 )
      Linux is Linux is Linux.

      Actually it isn't evem in the strictest sense, when Linux = kernel. Different distros use different patches. And then there are different Java versions, etc. Notes may well run on more than just Ubuntu, but for IBM to support it, they have to limit it to some distros. The fact that these days Ubuntu seems to be a "supported distribution" more often probably mirrors its popularity.
    • What they basically mean is they are certifying it for that platform. It can work on most versions of Linux with some tweaking but if you came across any issues they would not be supported.

    • Re:Why specifically Ubuntu? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kripkenstein ( 913150 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:50AM (#22199396) Homepage

      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).

      • 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.

        I'd like to know where this is happening. I haven't seen or read anything that would support this statement apart from the relentless ubuntu PR. It's all RH and Novel/Suse in the enterprise; ubuntu is virtually nonexistent in this space.

        • 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.

          I'd like to know where this is happening. I haven't seen or read anything that would support this statement apart from the relentless ubuntu PR. It's all RH and Novel/Suse in the enterprise; ubuntu is virtually nonexistent in this space.

          Ignore the Ubuntu PR, all PR is suspect. TFA in fact is valid evidence: IBM has decided to support Ubuntu because of actual demand. TFA says, for example,

          "We're doing pilots with customers now," Satyadas said. "Some of the requests came from big companies" with as many as 100,000 users that are interested in moving to Ubuntu Linux on the desktop.

          [empasis mine] Yes, Red Hat has most of the enterprise market, but for servers. That is 99% of the current Linux market, and is the reason you feel Ubuntu is 'nonexistent'. Desktop Linux is starting to slowly appear in enterprises, while this may not be the 'year of the Linux desktop', it is making progress. When it does, Ubuntu is often the name mention

        • 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.

          I'd like to know where this is happening. I haven't seen or read anything that would support this statement apart from the relentless ubuntu PR. It's all RH and Novel/Suse in the enterprise; ubuntu is virtually nonexistent in this space.

          When you buy a Dell PC with Linux on it [dell.com], which Linux distribution do you get? Why is that?

          SuSE is a reasonable choice in the server space; so is RedHat. But neither of those are being deployed on the desktop. Whatever you may think of it, the Linux platform which has got traction on the desktop - in the enterprise as much as in the home - is Ubuntu.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by deragon ( 112986 )
            Sorry, but you are partially incorrect. Some big large enterprises use Linux on the desktops (not all desktops, just a very very small percentage, windows being on 99% of the desktops) and they choose SLED. The reason: ClearCase is supported on SuSE (and Red Hat) but not on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is therefore eliminated at the bat regardless all the advantages it might have.

            Many corporations only go with SuSE and/or Red Hat simply because some proprietary software are only supported on these distributions.
      • y which I mean, IBM doesn't want a single vendor (Microsoft sort of taught IBM a lesson there),

        Of course, IBM itself has taught that same lesson to a lot of other companies over the past few decades. It's the great appeal of open source operating systems and applications in general. No one entity can jack you around too much.

    • Re:Why specifically Ubuntu? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hymer ( 856453 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @08:00AM (#22199432)
      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: (Score:2, Informative)

      by old_kennyp ( 949607 )
      I read about this last week and they already have stated that they will be supporting on SUSE 10.3, Redahat( don;t know which version), and now Ubuntu 7.1. I take it that they will provide the packages for these distros and support Notes on all these three. Any other distro that uses these packages should also work but IBM will not support it

    • In "the old days" (last year was it?) everything was SUSE. In "the REAL old days" (2 years ago was it?) it was RedHat.

      Ah, yes, back in the days before the IP railroad came through the old west. When we had to send a horse and rider out with our packets. You think SUSE was last year, think back to Mandrake. And what a leap forward Xandros was when it rode into town. Those were the days.

      Now stay off my lawn...

      • You young 'uns... I kin remember when we wasn't coddled and we ran *Slackware*. And we liked it, by gum!

        • You young 'uns... I kin remember when we wasn't coddled and we ran *Slackware*. And we liked it, by gum!

          Slackware? Tha had Slackware? Eeee, tha were reet lucki. We had to mek do wi' SLS [ibiblio.org], wi' thirty-something floppy disks. Aye, an we loved it!

    • Linux is Linux is Linux.

      Except that it isn't. Linux per se is only a kernel. The OS built around that kernel involves adding a filesystem structure, binary libraries, and and a broad range of utility programs that can be, and *are*, assembled in very different ways. I can very easily see why you'd only want to support a complex program on only one distribution. Yes, it could theoretically be made to run on any distribution, but support a distribution means attempting to run it, doing the inevitable fixe

    • Linux is Linux is Linux

      While that is the case superficially, every release of every distro comes with different versions of the various shared libraries. That leaves the following possibilities:

      1. Ship software as source and expect customers to compile it
      2. Provide source and get popular enough so that the distros do the compilation for you
      3. Provide the software yourself, and pick some subset of all Linux distros/versions to support

      Note that for Windows you can provide a single setup.exe and it will run

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Britz ( 170620 )
      Actually Linux ist Linux, but this is only interesting to people that build computers or that need to solve hardware issues. What the enduser finally will see is either KDE, Gnome or Xfce. Ubuntu only uses Gnome (for KDE there is Kubuntu) with the Ubuntu theme. So for the user, or the majority of people, they will support Ubuntu/"the brownish Gnome thingy"/"the brown operating system"

      What is the difference between using anyBSD desktop and Linux desktop if you use default KDE? KDE4 even started to support Wi

  • We can only hope... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sulix ( 1154971 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:05AM (#22199254)
    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... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TLLOTS ( 827806 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:07AM (#22199262)
    When did IBM start hating Linux?

  • World domination proceeding as planned (Score:3, Funny)

    by 00_NOP ( 559413 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:08AM (#22199270) Homepage
    The battle is just to get to the point where the public authorities accept they can no longer post up websites that only work with MS's proprietary stuff - I think we'll start getting there this year. Not quite The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, but possibly the year where the rebel alliance win a few tactical victories on the long march to power.
  • However, are they going to open source Lotus Notes? It seems not.

    This leads me to ask when are they going to fix their crappy HTML renderer in their Notes mail client? It must have the most braindead, broken, bizarre HTML renderer in the business. Why, their are whole [build-reci...-links.com] cottage [evolt.org] industries [computergripes.com] around [blogs.com] on [emaillabs.com] how [e-consultancy.com] to [graphics.com] work [templatekit.com] on [sitepoint.com] it's [sitepoint.com] crudulousness [reachcustomersonline.com].
    • As I understand since R7 the HTML renderer is basically IE embedded.

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

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by bdeclerc ( 129522 )

          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...
          • If the "But please, don't let facts come in the way of decade old prejudices..." was targeted at myself, then you aim badly. I have no idea what the rendering engine is for Notes. Couldn't care less. Also, I was responding to someone who said that IE was the default renderer, I made the assumption that if this was right then it's pretty unhelpful for those who don't have access to Internet Explorer.

            The company I work for has a hell of a time trying to deal with old Notes clients that won't render reasonable
            • I'm sorry if I came of a bit too offensive, it's not specifically aimed at you, but every time Lotus Notes is mentioned on Slashdot, a lot of people start complaining about it, usually referring to problems in earlier versions of Notes (At least, by this time, the "Interface Hall of Shame" meme seems to be dying out...).
              Notes is far from a perfect piece of software, and has a considerable number of quirks, but it is by no means as bad as some make it out to be, and there is no other single application/platf
          • I'm not up on the latest and greatest Notes, but the older versions would only use (IE/Mozilla) for rendering web pages. HTML Email went through their internal "RTF" renderer and consequently were hacked to pieces (roughly Netscape 3 level rendering).
      • It's embedded Gecko. In fact, without Mozilla/Firefox installed, it won't render HTML internally.
  • Full support would have included the Designer. All that's being ported is the client-side application. As a Notes developer (woe is me and all that jazz), I'm stuck on the Windows platform because the just can't be bothered to work on the Designer, which has had nary an update and the same old bugs for years and years. Grumble.

    • Re:Full support -- actually, no (Score:5, Informative)

      by bdeclerc ( 129522 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @08:30AM (#22199504) Homepage
      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.
      • Would this Eclipse-based Designer support LotusScript? If so, I would be absolutely thrilled, seeing as how 99.5% of our soon-to-be "legacy" applications have zero Java content. Have you any links I can read up on?
        I have learned a good deal about "the future", but for LS-based solutions, so far it seems to me that we'll have to make do with what we have.

        Also, yes, one could run the Designer under Wine, but then you would have no real way to ensure the quality of the product. Notes is quirky enough as it is,

  • ' can't tell exactly if this is good or bad news (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Sunday January 27, 2008 @09:24AM (#22199672)
    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.

    • But I'm recommending all my business customers to stear clear of any proprietary thick-client-server groupware.

      I mostly agree, but would like to add using open, yet application specific protocols as available. Sure, have your ubiquitous webmail client, but it's so trivial to have both webmail and imap access. Webmail email clients more often are more awkward to use.

      I am surprised at companies willingness to go with a Domino/Notes. It would be one thing if the application suite were rich and nice to use, but it isn't and webapps have in the meantime improved to have less awkwardness than Notes. I don't like acce

    • Re:' can't tell exactly if this is good or bad new (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kbg ( 241421 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @11:38AM (#22200260)
      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.
    • 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.

      You forgot to mention it's more expensive than Outlook/Exchange per-seat. Almost twice as much, as of a couple years ago. Oh, and no portable PDAs or cellphones support it natively, meaning you have to buy more expensive licenses from IBM to sync you
  • A few months ago, Notes 7 on Linux took 3GB hard disk space and 1GB RAM. I wonder if this is still the case. If so, IBM won't have customers using Linux flocking to Notes, or vice versa.
  • I was forced to use Lotus Notes (6.x, followed by 7.x) for almost two years, while on a contract job with the big eye-bee-emm. I thought I disliked Microsoft Outlook, but man, Notes was God-awful!

    That said, I would trade in my Windows XP + MS Office OS on my work notebook, for Linux and Lotus Notes in a heartbeat. Even better if it had the whole Lotus SmartSuite installed.

    Not much chance of that though. My company uses a plethora of operating systems on its servers (micro, mid-range and mainframes), but
  • 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. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @11:31AM (#22200222)
      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. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Belial6 ( 794905 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @12:49PM (#22200650)
        "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: (Score:2)

          by CFD339 ( 795926 )
          It takes a long time to load, because its got all this java stuff in it. Sure. But 90% of people who use it live in it. Windows 3.0 took forever to load and if all you wanted to do was run excel and then close windows again it was a pain. Once people started living in it, it because the standard of its time.

        • Re:The state of Notes today, not 5 years ago. (Score:4, Informative)

          by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @02:18PM (#22201158)
          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: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Belial6 ( 794905 )
            "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."

            You are wrong. If it takes two seconds to show the splash screen, you are either running on a seriously underpowered machine, or something is broken on your machine. Heck, I just tested connecting to one of my clients' servers by runnin
    • 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.

      I've been using Notes since R3, and "The new version is really great!" is an oh so ancient refrain.

      Unless they completely dumped their windowing model and overhauled their form display, it's still crap.

  • Finally! Linux has achieved parity with OS/2! (Score:3, Funny)

    by smchris ( 464899 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @11:11AM (#22200138)
    You know that's what somebody at IBM is thinking.

    OK, I guess. But it's hardly Office for linux.

  • Will Symphony steal file associations on Linux too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:15PM (#22202318) Homepage
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by driftingwalrus ( 203255 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:53PM (#22203314) Homepage
    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.

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