Can't agree more, as an experienced consultant application developer I constantly find it difficult to sell to potential customers what notes can do for them because they have no clue what its capable of. Its great to see now though that IBM is finally getting behind independant consultants who are trying to promote the software to smaller enterprises. We now just need the equivalent of the apple iStore for notes applications.

Never used Notes before, and only have one employee that uses it for e-mail on our parent company's system, but am now interested in talking with them about the possibilities of us trying it out for some other employees here with the potential to license under their umbrella...

As a Mac user, I've been frustrated by Exchange's lack of certain key features on the Mac client. We're using some of Google's apps now, but they haven't gone far enough yet in integrating them. Will check out Notes to see what they can offer for our environment. Thanks.

Very informative.

Great Article!

Definitely some food for thought there, 99.5% of the customers for the company I work for here in New Zealand run MS Exchange and to be honest we are finding 2007 less than impressive. I haven't used Lotus Notes for years so I'm thinking its definitely time to review the current product.
Rock on.

This article has greatly increased my knowledge on the ways of Lotus Notes. I was thoroughly enlightened by this unexpectedly compelling information, and I plan to use Notes in the future. Thank you so much for posting this, Kevin; it is challenging to find this type of guidance and information at this impeccable quality, and many people should read this.

Van, Great write up, I have been using Lotus Notes and designing (basic) data bases for many years now. Current and previous companies that I work for use these data bases to drive process, work assignments and trigger reminders and events for many parts of the company. The ability to have all information in a central location and, if implemented properly, various levels of authority and roles by user is very powerful to control process. Reporting and real time updates in flexible views makes our business, business partners and clients run smoothly to allow each user a cut of the data they need for the task or event at the right time. The flexibility of adding new fields and layouts allow us to respond quickly to our changing process and needs. We have also found increase productivity in designing a roll up database that takes all open assignments from all individual and unique customer databases to allow internal users one stop to seeing everything assigned to them without having to go to multiple places to find their work. Van, Thanks for the article... keep passing the word on!

As a long time user of Lotus products and Notes since version 2 a key highlight for me is that the data, from over 15 years ago on R3 still is useful and works on R8.
No other solution can say this, especially about email.

The Notes on a Stick, NOMAD as it is called, is very helpful and I am currently running a ubuntu installation on a usb while loading everything else on it from Notes to Sametime to Symphony and beyond to see if this will be a truly mobile, thin client for a customer.

Don't forget Lotus Notes Traveler which handles data smoothly, my contacts are in the 5,000 range and it just synchs perfectly.

Kevin, for those folks who have questions on how to do things in Notes, feel free to steer them toward www.TipsInTwo.com. We are doing 2 minute long screencasts of user training - might help answer some of the questions appearing in the comments.

Good read, it is nice to see that people are excited about Lotus Notes. Recently, my company upgraded from 6 to 8.5 which is nice, however, as a graphics professional, it doesn't seem to contain some of the features I've been looking for in supporting HTML emails. Greater support for CSS features such as background-image: and margin: would make my life a lot simpler.

I have to be honest and say that I'm not a huge fan of Lotus Notes. Yes I'm aware that the infastructure underneath allows for some wonderful thing--unsurpassed blackberry support, security up the wazoo, etc. But having only been using Lotus Notes at my current company for the past year and a half, I find it frustrating and difficult to use. Granted I use e-mail and calendar and the most base subset of those features, but even so, a Software Developer such as myself shouldn't have such trouble performing difficult tasks. And to add to that, search is painful. It makes it very difficult to use such a robust architecture when the UI layer is so confusing and difficult.

Our wiki actually has a "Lotus Notes Grievances" page that we all contribute to, and has actually been the impetus for our February 2010 change to another e-mail client. It includes golden gems such as these:

- 4 clicks to "flag" a message in Notes: a) Click on message. b) Click on "Follow Up". c) Click "add or edit flag". d) click on "OK".
1 click to "flag" a message in every other program: a) click the flag button.
- Select two or more attachments in a mail message. Drag the attachments onto your Desktop. Notice that only one attachment is actually dropped onto the Desktop.
- Looking at a meeting invitation, if you click 'Request Information', a new table in notes is brought up. If you decide that you don't want to send that request, and click the close button in the tab, it asks if you want to send the notice. It then offers you 3 choices: (1) Yes, send as is, (2) No, send without comments, or (3) Cancel to continue editing. There is no option to not send the info request. You committed to sending it.
- Open Excel, 2. Make nice table, 3. Select & Copy from Excel, 4. Paste into Notes email, 5. Argh! It becomes an image
- With Preview Pane enabled, click in your INBOX. Then click on the preview pane in your inbox. Now click the SEARCH button. You'll receive the message "Cannot execute the specified command". No, to search your inbox, you'll have to click on a message in the top pane first before clicking on SEARCH.

Great read Kevin, lots of sold, good info I've already talked to some of the IT people at my work and told them about your wright up

Very good article about a once limitless and highly regarded product. I had been using Notes for the last 5 years or so as a Sales CRM as well as a search-able knowledge base of support issues within our global software company. It has since been sunset in the wake of a recent acquisition.
One of the features of those notes tools I found most helpful and miss, however,was an ability to see, in real time, when a note was updated or touched in a global list of all synchronized notes. This may seem small and easy but it is not replicated as well in many other solutions in the market I have found. Add it was a daily need and great for providing an at-a-glance update of my issues I had to address that day. You can see all notes sorted by date and then highlighted in a different color when they have been updated by someone. This was huge for collaboration and something I could not find easy to setup in products like SugarCRM or Salesforce.
I could imagine many other uses on top of what I utilized the tool for, but it just seems this product is not getting the kind of "love" from IBM is has sorely needed for a few years now, both in product and marketing.
Great article and good food for thought.

I knew nothing about Lotus Notes, but after reading your article, I must say, it sounds very useful. I love the Notes on a Stick idea! Our office needs to employ that.

We use Lotus Notes in our company, a multi-state retail operation. Since I arrived in 2000, we have used it not only not e-mail, but also for calendaring and call tracking. In addition to using the full blown Notes at corporate, some of our satellites use iNotes. After working with an outside firm for the last year or two, our CIO is looking for another option for our day to day call tracking. That said, I imagine that we will continue to use Notes for e-mail, and other in-house items such as room scheduling.

Nice article, Kevin. I've had no personal experience with Notes/Domino. However, working in a technology company that is literally run off spreadsheets, I see the need for the ability to take legacy data, put into a system that has hooks to that data, but an interface that can be used on any platform. I've recently had the opportunity to finally get a Mac, but because we are tied to a large number of macros and other things in these spreadsheets, and we live in Outlook, I have to live in Parallels to work. Just in the examples you gave, I could see a Notes/Domino platform offering my organization a way to do what we need to do on any platform and significantly improve our productivity.

Side note, there is a company called Logic Key based in Indianapolis that has developed an incredibly successful student management system called Harmony for K-12 schools in Indiana, and they do it on the Lotus platform. I don't know the technical details, but do know that the Lotus platform has allowed them to do a lot of things other student management systems cannot accomplish.

Thanks again for the article, and rock on!

Brian in Kokomo, IN

Lotus Notes continues to impress me. We have been running it for about 10 years and are now on version 8.5.1. With DAOS in 8.5 we saved about 40% on disk space, about 200gb or so. We also have seen a lot of value from the free Sametime / Presense capabilities built in the new client.

I also love you can have a full client installed outside the network and connect to Domino server securely with no VPN required. Users can access all their PIM data and apps easily.

We have a new project where we are using Lotus Foundations Start. It is a great all in one solution for a small business. It was so easy to setup.

Kevin!

Thanks for article!

What's your thoughts on the future of Lotus Notes? With so many companies that have #gonegoogle and the popularity of thin clients (even you referring to a Notes on a Stick) . . . how will Notes far against the google apps evolution in the coming years?

Good stuff.

Rich