I provide technical support for Lotus notes applications on a daily basis. I am not a notes admin, and I do not know all of the ins and outs of notes, but I still have a very strong opinion about it.

What I like:
Notes does provide a fairly good structure for managing discussion forums and the like. It is really very good at those type of applications.

Notes' mail client seems to be quite adequate. It does pretty much the same job that any email client would do.

What I do not like.
Too Centralized. Many companies build a ton of applications that run on the notes client. When the domino server is having problems, all of the applications that are running on it become unusable. I do not like so much functionallity being dependant on one point of failure.

Overused. It seems that many applications are running on notes that could be running elsewhere. Notes is good at managing shared documents. That doesn't mean that it can replace all of the databases in an organization. My observation is that the hierarchical databases that seem to be natural to notes are being used in many cases where more complex relational databases would perform the functions better. As a result, Notes applications are often difficult to navigate, and less powerful than other platforms could be.

Buggy. As a technical support person, I see all of the bugs in this application. It seems that I have to replace somebody's mail database design on a daily basis. The calendar app seems to have a lot of weird problems. ( I predominately support R4.6, but we are in the moving to R5)

Too Secure
It is very difficult to do simple task such as resetting a password. We usually do this by restoring the user's original ID files. I realize that security is usually considered a good thing, but if the user is unable to use the application that they need, I do not consider that application to be all that secure.

R5 compared to R 4.6: I have used both versions quite a bit, and I feel that R5 is quite an improvement over the old version. In the previous version, it was difficult to move between windows. R5 lists all of the open windows in a windows-like fashion on the top of the notes window. It is very easy to navigate. R5 is also quite customizable. You can customize your bookmarks, which are displayed, along the left edge of your notes window. Users are also able to create a custom welcome page that displays their mail, calendar, database subscriptions etc. Unfortunately, Notes only has a few options of how to lay these custom pages out. I would like for the user to have more power in this area.




Recommended: Yes