Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
IBM

Lotus Notes server to come to linux 63

Posted by sengan from the not-da-client dept.
Lotus CEO Jeff Papows announced to an exuberant crowd at Lotusphere99 that the Lotus Notes server will be ported to Linux, albeit not as open source. It should be available later this year. This is a U-turn for Papows.
made clear it was the server.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Lotus Notes server to come to linux More

Lotus Notes server to come to linux

Comments Filter:

  • More FUD (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Gartner as the source of Microsoft FUD? These are the guys who warned the corporate world not to touch Win2000 until 2001, or maybe Service Pack 2. Gartner's anti-2000 warning was one of the most serious mainstream condmenations that we've heard of MSFT's flagship in a long time. And please, isn't the word FUD a bit played out on Slashdot? Let Linux stand on its on merits. A world where every journalist slammed Microsoft without thinking wouldn't be any better than the state we're in now. What people need is open dialog, honest commentary, and a free choice among several competing operating systems.
  • No they don't. Domino for AS/400 doesn't have a corresponding Notes for AS/400. And I believe with R5, Notes is a Win32-only application (no *nix clients at all).
  • Actually, Domino R5 has native support for LDAP and SMTP, in addition to HTTP, NNTP, Java, and JavaScript.
  • then the client can't be too far behind. I know of a few people at work who'd love to have a Notes client available in Linux.
  • Posted by Skip Franklin:

    Lotus is good at putting servers on platforms without bothering with clients. Cases in point: Novell, HPUX, Solaris (R5 version), AS/400. The clients for Windows are used to connect to the server, or a web-based admin tool is used. I know that isn't quite like having a client on the server itself, but it can get things done.
  • Posted by DocNo:

    Lotus/Iris/IBM has made it quite clear that the Mac and Windows are going to be the only two native client platforms and that their stated direction is going to be 100% Java/HTML/Web Browser for the future.

    I don't necessarily agree with there dropping of the clients in the R5 timeframe (frankly, the web stuff is still pretty immature - if it wasn't there wouldn't be this big desire for the proprietary client now, would there?)

    That being said, the WINE option is the best chance to get the Notes client under Linux.
    We need more stuff like:

    http://www.brooklinesw.com/linux/linuxnotes.html

    Hey, we got the server - take comfort that even the OS/2 guys (IBM's own OS!) are not getting the R5 client . . . .

    If Linux continues to get support and documented desktop usage, then we will be able to stand up and demand the client like the Mac folk did at the last Lotusphere - until then, the server is all we will probably get. In that scenario, our energy would be better spent working with Iris and the WINE team to make the client work as flawlessly as possible...

  • Bleh (Score:1)

    by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by DocNo:

    >Not to be too cynical, but there's is a big
    >difference between the words that flow forth
    >from the marketers, and the actual deeds that
    >come out of the software.

    Not to be a smart a$$ but have you actually installed the R5 Beta?

    The mail is fully native SMTP/MIME, the R5 client speaks MIME with no conversion. Conversion only happens if you have 4.x clients that don't understand MIME/HTML.

    So, that would make "truly" native IMAP and POP a no-brainer. And LDAP is a directory interface, so there is no "native" or "pure" LDAP regardless.

    And as soon as some standards for calandering ever emerges on the Internet front (and has some decent functionality) I am sure Notes/Domino will support it too.

    Please, I realize the Internet stuff for mailcan be quite good, but there isn't a cohesive set of standards that would allow Domino to be easily replaced by pure Internet standards or everyone would be doing it now! (After all, there is a heck of a lot more to Notes/Domino that just mail!)

    >(And, yes, I am *quite*
    >familiar with the 'capabilities' of
    >Notes/Domino).

    You sure aren't demonstrating any vast familiarity in this forum.

    Either appreciate the software for it's merits and use it or don't. But blithely stating it's crap and stupid serves no purpose other than to make yourself appear stupid and close minded.
  • --THAT particular learning curve was the nastiest part. Notes 3.2 was pretty awesome, intuitive menus, etc. V4.0 and 4.5 came out, and the menus were hopelessly different from what made SENSE in the last version!!

    --Now I hear that 5.0 will be COMPLETELY different from 4.x... Sucks to be me...
  • Yep. Gartner has been mostly wrong about Linux and everyone pretty much knows it. Why do you think Linux has really taken off desipte Gartner's advice concering it? Because nobody's really listening to them and the rest of these so-called computer experts. The whole Year 2000 thing is just another example of this. The world isn't *going* to come to a screeching halt because of it and these people have made themselves look rather silly over the whole issue over the last few years.
  • A point that has been raised before is that NT sales are being inflated by people taking exactly the advice you just offered - sysadmins are specializing their NT servers, using one for Exchange, another for fileserving, and so on, when the load is such that one server ought to do for multiple services.

    I'd like to see an estimate on how many extra copies of NT were sold because of the decision to split the serving tasks up.
  • I like their rack mounted systems.
  • I had to use Lotus Notes in my last job. Boy, it sucked. What's that you say? Slow, unstable, arbitrarily different, AND hard to use? Where do I sign up for that?

    Fortunately, my new office uses Unix e-mail only. Whee! (Well, some folks use Win95, but they use the standard POP3 interface, or telnet in to a Unix server.)

  • More FUD (Score:1)

    by MTO ( 2039 )
    I regularly set up small, cheap machines for a specific task, running linux. I don't do it because linux has problems multitasking, or at least keeping different servers on their respective sides of the couch (unlike NT), but because when there are problems, it makes debugging that much faster. You're less prone to cascade failures, and you know exactly what resources are used for what.


    For that reason, I think its kinda unfair for people to go on about the inflated NT sales. I doubt that Linux is much different, and if linux had licensing similar to NT, I'd be guilty of buying many copies of Linux where one could have sufficed.

  • For all the guys who have not noticed so far.
    Notes is very powerful Enterprise Groupware. Some of you now should look up the definition of *Groupware*, especially the difference to a simle Email client.
    The Notes-Server Concept enables you to build up very powerful, reliable and secure configurations. The databases enable you to implement nearly every funcionality you want. Admitted, Notes has performance problems, but there are ways to deal with this. Notes has a huge set of functionalities which are not always instantly intuitive. But the more you deal with the product, the more you get used it.
    If you take a look at the market you will find only 2 major groupware product. Notes and Exchange/Outlook. Anybody here who would prefer Exchange/Outlook??
    Regards Tobias

  • I agree (Score:1)

    by Candy ( 2257 )
    I got the impression that many people farting on Notes do not really know what they are talking about. Many people just seem to see it as a bloated emailclient.
  • As my predecessor replied, there are quite some things I dont understand.

    "Well, when your company requires you to fetch your mail using Notes and nothing but,you begin to regard it as just another bloated (and buggy, and crash-prone, and monkey-designed) email client."

    Sorry to say so. But using a multiple thousand dollar product as an email client is hard on the edge to idiocy and lets me draw quite some conclusions about education level of your IT-dep.

    "Fred's Notes is down... any email you may have sent him over the last day may not get read."

    Whats up with your IT-Support? Installing a configuring a client takes just up to 10 min.

    "For most of our employees, Notes has been far
    more hassle than it's worth, both in actual downtime and in employee resentment. You'll excuse me if I don't seem overjoyed about the product."

    This is necessarily a fault of the product. Notes implements modern clustering technics which offers you the possibilty of achieving nearly every degree of reliabilty and availability you want. It seems you have a setup and maintainance problem so my honest advise to get a consultant. (Wanna hire me? IBM Global Service will be right on the way :-))) ).
    The whole IBM is driven by Notes and I hope you dont dare to say that a quarter million employees worldwide runs on unuseable product.
  • "What is Notes actually good for? Its a mediocre e-mail client, a mediocre webbrowser, a useless database(basically just a flat file system), and some sort of colabrative thingy that no one has ever really explained to me. It fills up about 100 meg of my hard drive and takes about a minute to load and I can't for the life of me tell you what its purpose is."

    Notes certainly has its problems. Some of the descriptions on the User Interface Hall of Shame web site make me fall down laughing.

    However, Notes can also do things no other system can do, primarily based on the 'collaberative thingy'. In our case, we have ~1000 people who travel full-time to remote areas of the globe - places where you are lucky to get a 1200 baud phone connection. Yet they need access to product information, customer information, databases, as well as e-mail and discussions.

    Notes, with its distributed replication system specifically designed to work on slow and unreliable links, fills this need perfectly. Yes, it is the world's most expensive e-mail product. And yes, its 'everything is a document/database' view takes a while to understand. But it is an excellent tool for its intended purpose.

    I am also a little amused when people complain about Notes UI (which I personally don't think is so great). Either everyone is forced to use one UI standard (guess who's that would be?), or everyone is free to do what they think best. Arguing in favor of freedom of design choice, then bashing Lotus because you don't like the choices they made, seems a little silly.

    Oh well, have fun. I would encourage you to do some research on distributed, replicated databases though: they are a different animal from either POP-type systems or relational databases.

    sPh
  • Why is it hat whenever Linux and Notes are mentioned together that we have a whole bunch of people jump on how bad Notes sucks (I disagree but I'm willing to let other people think what they want)? I use Notes every day, I admin it, I develop "applications" in it and in general I find it to be a well behaved application. I would LOVE it if I could ditch my NT servers and run Notes on Linux. I just don't understand why when people see that something is being ported to Linux we have to have a 100 people saying how that software is crap and it's a waste of time to port it. Well people I've got news for you; Notes is a jack-of-all-trades. It doesn't do very many things great, but it does do a LOT of different things, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a SINGLE application that allows you the potential to do so much.
  • sounds cool :) then again if it doesn't (i.e if it doesn't actually run under FreeBSD's Linux emulation), don't forget that you can run it under Linux itself! Even the biggest FreeBSD big^H^H^Hadvocate would agree that it's a big step up from NT.

  • Notes was always a sure-fire way to make a PC crash (at least eventually) since it was such a memory pig. As I result, most of the people I worked with that were unfortunate enough to have to use it were rebooting a ton more times than I was.

    I got used to not using it so I can't say I'm looking forward to its arrival on Linux. Though, I guess it might actually be more stable when running on Linux and be able to rely on decent memory management...

    I have to agree with the post that said the Notes interface was ``ugly''. I'd go one step further and say it has the ``nicest'' user interface since All-In-One (heh heh heh).

  • have multiple machines.

    Besides, you said you buy small, cheap Linux boxes for a specific purpose. NT sites are frequently shocked to find that, although they already have a big, expensive server, they need to buy another in order to do X. I think they would be happy to have a number of small, cheap boxes.
  • linux has problems multitasking, or at least keeping different servers on their respective sides of the couch

    uhmmm let's see. i have two machines at home. of which one, and AMD k6, 64MB runs:

    a small news server (INN)
    an email server, sendmail.
    an SQL database, postgres.
    nfs serves /net/usr and /net/home to the second machine. (kernel nfsd)
    NIS server
    web server (apache)
    dial-up server. (diald)
    dns server for two small zones. (named)
    ftp server..
    more i can't think of out my head.
    3 X servers always running.

    and it runs rc5des at nice 20 all the time, as does the second machine.

    none of the servers are heavily loaded, but there are a lot of them, and from experience linux scales pretty well, as long as you have enough memory to avoid active apps being swapped out.

    performance is excellent even with 64MB, netscape and staroffice are my biggest performance problems (memory hogs)
  • Do you have any clue what your talking about?

    RPC calls should be implemented on the Network layer (3)? Name one system other than routers that does that!

    Mail encryption in Notes is only enabled if the user or the server admin turns it on. It's a Feee-ture.

    Save confilcts do happen, but they are usually the result of a poor database design. Notes is by no means a SQL replacement. If you've been using Notes for all these years, one might think you'd have more of a clue.
  • I find this report odd. In my experience a well designed Domino server can stay up for months without problems.

    (I'll admin that the client was a unstable piece of crap between 4.0 and about 4.5.2. But it's rock solid now (4.63) Try the latest patches - you'll be happier.)
  • A lot of people responding to this news are hopeful, yet pessimistic of a client port. I wonder what would be a good way of letting IBM know there is a demand for a Notes client on Linux.

    It's a shame petitioning doesn't work when talking to Software Companies.
  • When does the Lotus Notes client come to Linux, then I can start telling my boss to get ride of this crapy Win 95 machine that I am rebooting 3 or more times a day???????????????
  • Notes will still crash my nt machine without even having it up. And i love those lovely Dr.Watson errors all the time about notes causing this program and that program to crash.......
  • I'd like to see exchange do half the stuff that notes does. Thats why Notes is one of the last products to have a larger marketshare than MS. We should all support Lotus, whether you like it or not.
  • I'm getting ready to take flame bullets but....

    Exchange is not groupware. It can emulate it a bit, but is extreamly limited in its function.

    As for the UI. I can see how some of these linux people (geeks in the good sense) could misinterperate it's function. Notes is written for the Average user, and the last time I looked, the Average User has never even heard of Linux (until recently). Once a button has been clicked on on the desktop, the UI responsibility is up to the developer, not lotus.
  • Notes is NOT an E-mail client! That false impression is why so many people fall for MS's sales pitch for LookOut. Yes, Notes is ideosyncratic, but it's an extremeply powerful GroupWare product. If someone from IBM is bad-mouthing it, it's just that (s)he is still feeling the loss of that paragon of technical excellence, PROFS. Ask the people who use it every day - they just couldn't operate without Notes now.

    It's unfortunate that Notes uses the term Database for the document repository, since it's not at all what Codd & Date would have liked, but it's an extremely effective way to exchange information, hold discussions, etc. I run a project that spans three continents (and 24 hours) and I know for certain that it just couldn't be done without the collaborative features in Notes.

    For those of you who don't like the UI, you can, of course, use Netscape or (if you must) MSIE.

    For those of you who complain that it crashes all the time, I work in a company that has close to 10000 Notes seats, and the reliability is astounding (release 4.63).

    B=

Slashdot Top Deals

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

Close