I guess one way to think of it is as a kind of Excel for processes and documents. That's an anecdote, but on the other two occasions I've seen Notes used for its real value (as a document DB with associated processes) it's ended up in a similar, sprawling and unmaintainable end state. The poor chap that owned the company ended up having a stroke and the company was wound down. Reporting runs that took a few minutes with a few hundred attributed documents in 1998 took over four hours by 2000 I helped put in a SQL Server instance to create a relationally structured copy of the unstructured attributed documents to reduce that time, but of course that was more money. The system got big, and Notes scales badly. Management got hooked on formalizing all their business processes inside Notes, seduced by the promise of total transparency and operational control. It's a very powerful tool, but a dangerous one too: I saw a telecoms company in the late 90s/early 2000s blow up partly because it relied too heavily on a custom Notes solution that became prohibitively expensive to change as the business evolved. I'd always thought it was a post-Lotus bolt on, but it was a day zero consideration.)īut far, far worse than that is the stuff you don't realize when you embark on the Notes path. (EDIT: given that, it's interesting to see the prominence that email receives in the design doc. On the other hand, it's the world's worst email & calendar client and much of its bad reputation stems from users having to put up with that when there's really no need for it ever to have been installed. As an expression of the promise of office automation, it's pretty compelling. On the plus side, its open-ended, fully customizable document database is a phenomenally powerful tool for creating information management systems that map very closely to the unique workflows and structures that arise in any business. It mostly obviated the need of backing up clients and several of the further flung servers Domino naturally does multi-way replication, so the backups at the best resourced sites are sufficient. It obviated the need for shared file systems anywhere, which would have been next to impossible anyhow given the degree of distribution and poor connectivity available. No drama, no glitches, no calls to the help desk. A client could dial in to any Domino server in the company, efficiently and quickly sync all of their databases with the global network and immediately and get to work using their fast local storage. Not surprised to hear the Eclipse based client isn't loved I imagine you'll see a 5x memory usage increase right off the bat, and every operation will take 1k more CPU cycles than it should.Īnyhow, mostly I limit my praise to the trouble free and robust replication and distribution of content through Domino, the server side of the platform, a name this thread reminded me of after 12 years. It was also stable if the host itself wasn't a mess. But it was also fairly efficient you got a lot of function out of it on a circa 2003 laptop. Someone pointed out that the old UI is a subject of the Interface Hall of Shame. Apparently the Eclipse based client appeared in 2007 with Notes 8, long after my last contact with any of this.
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