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Archive 1Archive 2

An experienced Lotus Notes developer comments on the marketing and deployment of Notes

If you are reading this Wiki, you must be interested in Notes. At this stage of the game, you have probably heard and seen many horror stories about it, or you have seen the "marketing gibberish" epitomized by most of what you saw in the main content pages here. In the interest of your quest, I want to provide some opinions from someone who was considered very good as a Notes Developer, Designer, Sales Support rep, and so on over the several years and releases I worked with it.

Let me say right up front that I was a "Notes Evangelist". I believed in the concept, and tried hard to make people understand what it was all about. That does not mean that I thought it was perfect, or the right tool for all potential customers. As far as I was concerned, it was the ultimate proof of the meaning inherent in the phrase "Different Horses For Different Courses". Or similarly, "You don't buy a Ferrari to haul freight. You buy a Mack". Notes was a Mack. Not only that, it was a "customized" Mack, intended to best-serve one specific purpose: Workflow.

In the many years I developed Notes applications and oversaw customer deployment of same, I regularly heard one question/comment from potential customers: "Why is it so complicated? Outlook is so much simpler to use". Or, similarly, "DB2 is a so much more advanced database system. Why use Notes, which is not even relational?"

I had a hard time explaining to people that Notes was not specifically an email system, nor was it a database system. It was a workflow system, which required the specialized ability to send messages as well as to store documents in a manner that allowed them to be related to each other in many different and unpredictable ways.

I explained that Notes was essentially a tool to describe the processes by which a proposal, engineering change, website change, customer request, or any other "document", was to be acted on within a company (or between coordinating companies), then forwarded for approval and, if necessary, further action, approval, action, approval, etc., etc.

These processes are quite often not well described, and as a result, the actions taken are sometimes incorrect, out of sequence, or even unapproved. Notes not only documented the processes in a consistent manner, but enforced the policies that governed the processes.

Inevitably, the response was something like "the sales guy never said anything about that. He just called it an email system".

Eventually, I had an opportunity to talk to a Lotus marketing guy about that. His response? "Executives don't know about the kind of problems they might have (in their processes). They're concerned about their products or services, not their internal processes. I sell them Notes as an email system, which they understand, to get in in the door, and then rely on you guys (Sales Support technicians) to show them how it can be otherwise used".

So, the customer ends up with an expensive email system, which requires specifically-trained people to support, and which is not really as good for that purpose as was Outlook (for instance). Then they discover that it has db capabilities, and so the company deploys an application of that sort. Then they hire a "real" DB Admin, who informs them that "Notes is not a very good general purpose database handler". Then they decide to use it to handle their website, and eventually discover that there are other tools that are simpler to use for that purpose--and for which it is much easier to find trained staff.

In the end, they never use Notes for the purpose for which it was designed, and for which it did an excellent job: Workflow Management. What they have ended up with is an expensive tool which is only just adequate for the uses for which they've deployed it.

The really unfortunate part of this is that the marketing guy was right. If he tried to explain to the execs what Notes really did really well, he'd never make the sale. Better to "get it in the door", and hope for the best.

And we wonder why it died in it's original form. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.199.229.175 (talk) 17:54, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Well said, and 100% true. I've been earning my crust on it since 1991, and am still doing so now. It's very misunderstood, and it's a crying shame IBM never bothered to find out how to market it properly. It's still buggy as hell, even now, which doesn't help matters, of course. Recidivist23 (talk)recidivist —Preceding undated comment added 14:17, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

The future is history

There is not a single piece of information in the Future section of the article that is actually still valid for the future. All that is mentioned is history. My suggestions would be to merge the History and Release history top level sections where the Future subsection becomes part of the History section together with the Release History section, and the Branding subsection becomes a new top level section.--Forage (talk) 10:16, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

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Include interim fixes (IF) in stable release info?

Hi, I wonder if the Interim Fixes(IF) should be listed as the latest stable release?

The idea behind this is that the recommended version to install is the latest Interim Fixes version.


Here is the list of IF as of Sept 7, 2018:


So, the latest stable release is from August 2018 and not from January 2018:

Too Positive

This article has the stink of advertisement. It lacks citations for many claims. The tiny piece of criticism that (obviously) IBM has allowed to remain is watered down with "in previous versions", etc. I suspect any negative or less than positive additions would quickly be removed by IBM. A wikipedia admin should mark this page as an advertisement. Martiniano (talk) 22:22, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Just want to support you in that statement. For me, it's quite hard to imagine that this article could ever become "negative enough". When that's said, I'm currently using IBM Lotus Notes, which is... well, I won't even try to critize it. I don't have words bad enough to do it justice... Tslupphaug (talk) 11:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
Please stop these conspiracy theories about IBM. I am a Notes user too, and find the article reasonably balanced. Yes, many people find Notes hard to work with, but all in all it does work. There's already a section "Reception" (which might be renamed "Criticism") - so it's not like criticism is absent right now. If you want to add information about problems, go ahead - I don't think objective and sourced criticism will be removed. Sebastian (talk) 07:38, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
I Agree with Sebastian, this is not a product review page and current criticism could be listed when it has an objective and reliable source --Oliversl (talk) 21:48, 7 September 2018 (UTC)
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