ramblings of a wandering nerdan aimless amble on a winding road

I read the Notes 8.5 reviewers guide on the train this morning and I found myself feeling somewhat angry. I I started my IT life with Notes. I used to have to check the replication logs for a couple of organisations we provided managed services for. I hated it. It was repetitive, boring and I didn’t know what any of the errors meant so I was forever asking for help. Then I got in trouble (long story) and was sentenced to a brand new Lotus Notes contract we’d just won with a huge customer (It seemed not many people wanted to work with Notes). As it turned out, it was the turning point in my ‘career’ and I’ve been with Notes ever since. I’ve loved it, I’ve hated it, I’ve laughed at the ridiculous technotes IBM have released and similarly laughed so hard I’ve almost cried at the worms that destroyed whole Exchange installations and left friends shaking their heads in dismay as they try to recover from the steaming pile of crap that was their Exchange deployment. 

But after about 5 years, the two senior engineers/architects whom I held in the highest esteem decided to make the switch to Exchange. I couldn’t understand it. I was baffled and annoyed. They felt Lotus had dropped the ball and to be honest at that time they had. There was practically nothing happening, nothing to look forward to and the Microsoft marketing machine was in full force. Of course, Exchange still doesn’t have an SQL back end but it’s come a long way and after reading the release notes for 8.5 I am starting to see where they were coming from. Now obviously Lotus are developing the Notes platform at record rate and good for them, but some of the things in the release notes are mind boggling. 

How can it be 2008 (2009 when it’s officially released) and they’ve only just added horizontal scroll bars for the calendar? That’s nothing to be proud of. The Domino Attachment and Object Service stinks of shared mail although they assure us it’s not. Assuming it’s not, why wasn’t this around earlier, Microsoft have been boasting single instance storage forever! Should we use it? As complex as Notes can be, the simplistic independence of the mail file (while costly on disk) is brilliant. Do we want a mail file riddled with links to an object store irrespective of how transparent it is? Importing and Exporting of contacts? Come on… Display the folder a document is in in the All Documents view? You gotta be kidding me? 8.5 and we’re only just seeing this natively? 

See why I was getting angry? I can keep going. Dynamic policies? Brilliant and why exactly wasn’t it introduced with policies in Notes 6? They’ve renamed the journal, quick someone call Washington! Auto-populated groups – Too little too late, I’d imagine every Notes shop on the planet of any size has written their own solution to this. Compress inline images, this has been a notes.ini option since 6 (or was it 7) and they’re only just adding it to the preferences? If you’re a Notes person I bet you’re a tad angry too.. admit it! 

Sure there is some great stuff in there (And once I get a gold copy to work with I’ll no doubt mention them here), but how much of it would you say is long overdue? 

Am I going to abandon ship and move to Exchange? Of course not, I still firmly believe it’s a superior product in the right environment but I hope that Lotus appreciate the customers they have, the ones that have stuck by them and have waited how many years for a scroll bar in their calendar?