IBM to Adopt ODF for Lotus Notes

Mike Barton writes to tell us InfoWorld is reporting IBM has announced that the upcoming version of Lotus Notes, due out this fall, will feature an "ODF-compatible version of OpenOffice embedded in the Notes e-mail application." IBM hopes that this large scale distribution of the ODF standard will help bolster their foothold in the marketplace since "standards live or die on how many people use them"

Editors!

[smooth wombat]

IBM to Adopts ODF for Lotus Notes

Come on folks. It's either:

IBM to Adopt ODF for Lotus Notes OR

IBM Adopts ODF for Lotus Notes

But not both. Please choose one.

Good Move IMHO

[gurutc]

I manage 2 Domino servers that back-end our school district HR system. There's a well-entrenched user base for this app in the school district market. Anything that helps us get stuff in and out cleanly is a huge leap forward. PDF generation and compatibility has been a bear for our technically challenged, but good at their HR specialties, HR dept staff.

Re:ARRGGHHH

[Anonymous Coward]

Without trying to start a Notes whinge forum, I totally agree, Notes should have died a death years ago. I'm with Jeff Atwood, "[Lotus Notes] is death by a thousand tiny annoyances--the digital equivalent of being kicked in the groin upon arrival at work every day."

More Info & Screen shot

[rhanoudi]

Check out this blog entry for Ed Brill (Business Unit Executive at IBM), scroll past the first section: Ed Brill's blog [edbrill.com].

Also, check out the Screen shot [edbrill.com]

I was a Lotes Admin

[Himring]

I administered email for a large corporation. I installed, setup, configured, made-route-to-one-another email across Lotes (lotus notes, or should I say "domino" -- wtf with the naming?), exchange & sendmail. Of all the email server/client platforms, lotes was the worst.

The client, alone, was the most horrible thing witnessed upon a tech. Let's see if I remember: turning on auto spell check and having a certain amount of hyphens in your sig would unquestionably crash the client each and every time. There was absolutely no knowledge on this error and I had to figure it out myself as several users had such a sig with spell check set to auto (maybe there's a knowledge-base doc on it now).

It was impossible to totally close the open relay in version 5.08 I think it was. I had an on-going argument with the orbs blacklist on this, begging them to cut me some slack as users on my network could not route email to certain servers running the blacklist. The issue was finally resolved by taking away lotes as the public mail gateway.

Back to the client: in certain versions of the client, if you edited the text-based config file, and didn't put in a hard return at the end of the final line, the thing would refuse to attach to the server. This was another one I had to figure out on my own.

Security: lotes was incredibly easy to crack as far as getting into a user's email. Simply grab their .id file, copy it to your local machine, and change the password on it. Viola! You can now read their mail database. Out-of-the-box, this was dumb. Exchange & sendmail were inherently much more secure (and lotes was written for the CIA?).

Interface: both the client and the server had the most incredibly stupid interfaces ever designed. What sort of crack were the developers on? I could have forgiven the server if the console came with all the commands, and more, than the GUI could offer, but it didn't. Most of the time, you had to use the GUI and it blew chunks hard. I remember taking an advanced lotes class and even the instructor got lost in the GUI and continued the lesson (in theory).

Yes, this is/was a rant, but some where there is a review of the client rating it the worst application ever designed. Mind you, I was all for lotes at one point, mostly because it's all I ever knew. Exchange and Sendmail are far more elegant to use -- Exchange mostly cuz it's ripped everything from Sendmail.

Of all the mail servers I've ever setup and ran, I prefer Squirrelmail. No, I am no email expert or know-it-all, and I've not done it in several years now. My entire time was about 2 to 3 years, and I had to figure out some pretty big routing between Lotes, Exchange & Sendmail (I used Sendmail to handle all routing between Lotes and Exchange as we migrated). I had Squirrel mail pulling users from Active Directory, but as an admin it was very sweet and to the point with the best documentation IMO. Unfortunately, I let management see the little squirrel graphic, and it never had a chance after that....

Shown at Linux Forums 2006

[zyche]

This was actually shown [linuxforum.dk] at Linux Forum 2006 [linuxforum.dk] in Copenhagen. Slashdot reported [slashdot.org] about it then. I saw it live, but too little to be able to say anything about it.

Re:ARRGGHHH

[as400tek]

Please go ahead and point out all the problems with Notes, other than the fact that you dont know how to use it? And you think Outlook would be better? Really? If you want to use Outlook there is a connector for Outlook to Domino. You can get it off the server and use Outlook and it works the same way as notes for all of you who hate to use Notes. I hate to use Outlook so I guess we are even. I know the hell that is Exchange and Outlook.

Re:I was a Lotes Admin

[hrvatska]

Security: lotes was incredibly easy to crack as far as getting into a user's email. Simply grab their .id file, copy it to your local machine, and change the password on it. Viola! You can now read their mail database. Out-of-the-box, this was dumb. Exchange & sendmail were inherently much more secure (and lotes was written for the CIA?).

I've been using Notes for 10 years. In the mid 90s I developed Notes apps for several years. In all that time, if a user forgot their password a Notes administrator had to generate a new id file for them and give them a new password. Just having the id file did not give you access to anything without the password. In all the time I've used Notes it's always given the user the ability to employ encryption using public and private keys. Which is perhaps the reason the CIA chose it. Notes has always had a lot of problems, but I have to wonder how accurate all of your recollections are if you got something this significant wrong.

Re:Maybe, just maybe...

[kary4th]

Sounds like you have lots of experience using Lotus Notes for your email... and no other experience with Notes. If that's the case, you don't even know what Lotus Notes is. You only know what the eMail database is.

Yack, yack, yack.

Re:oh boy

[WWWWolf]

It's like Realplayer suddenly supporting OGG or something.

Last I checked, Xiph.org and the Helix Community folks were working pretty close, and (at least the Linux) RealPlayer has played Vorbis files for quite a while now, and a while ago I heard some very encouraging news from the Theora front on RealProducer's ability to encode that, or something along those lines...

Be afraid. =)

Re:oh boy

[Eddie Mars]

It's not necessary to build a 3rd party mail client. As has been pointed out, you can use any mail client you like with Notes. The server supports: IMAP and POP as well as having a plug-in application for Outlook. So if your only complaint is about Notes as a mail client, there's no reason not to move onto a different client. Also, Notes has a full-featured webmail interface. That said, there is a group out there creating open-source apps for Notes: OpenNTF.org. They've created their own version of the mail template used by the Notes client. IBM has recently added some of their features back into the official mail client. Speaking of which, the mail template, and every other Notes template from IBM, is released along with the source code. I don't know of a Notes shop out there that hasn't made customizations to the default mail design.