Nice to see a Lotus article on CIO. In these economic challenging times it still provides the best return on investments in time saved by your employees or money made by using applications which leverage the way you work.
It's what we do and have been doing for over 15years.

Well done Tom!

Lotus has gotten a bad name over the years and most of the people talking bad about it don't know the first thing about it.

Lotus Notes & Domino are truly very powerful tools for companies today. To think what the same thing would cost coming from Microsoft is staggering and far more expensive than anything Lotus is offering, plus the choice of platforms has always been the most refreshing part of the equation.

IT Managers and CIO if you are listening, Lotus will over time save you money and can in fact increase your users workflow, performance, and productivity.

If you are a CIO who does not consider all of your options you have to wonder how long you will be holding that job you have now!

I had always heard that Notes was a nightmare from many a customer. As someone who now has to use it, they were correct. Compared to Exchange, it's horrible.

Why they can't make some simple upgrades to the email client, is beyond me. For example, if I don't want to send my signature in ever reply, I have to delete it.

There's rumor that my company will ditch it, I really hope so and have heard no one who says otherwise.

My company has just switched to Exchange 2007 from Notes and is starting to switch to Sharepoint. Now, the bad.
The switch went so bad you could not even imagine. Now Outlook 2007 chuggles around 97MB RAM while Notes 6.5 (switched from) took around 30MB maximum. Opening an email is a nightmare with Outlook 2007 on the same PC. Connectivity with the server is severely hampened on the same network. People want Notes back, performance of the Exchange 2007 server is really horrible.
Sharepoint is another product with a nice interface, but requires double the hardware Notes does and does nothing more than Notes do. Let's wait and see how fast will customized applications development be with Sharepoint. My suspect is Notes will outperform and cost about 5x times less than Sharepoint. Who will pay the difference? Microsoft with their new wave managers?

JB, you can have your signature where and when you want it in Notes. Just sounds like you have the default to always attach it. You can go the flip side: change the default so it doesn't automatically attach the signature then when you need it in Notes 8, click More... Insert Signature.

As far as your company ditching it, hope they have big pockets in times like these, because changing email systems, REGARDLESS of the to and from, will always cost. And don't believe what any sales person tells you, it's never easy and there are TONS of hidden costs. And if you are thinking of going to Exchange 2007, LOL, all of your network administrators will have to be retrained and recertified in Exchange 2007, which will also require new high-end servers. Like I said, DEEP pockets. (we did an ROI and that convinced everbody; we just rolled out Notes 8 and the biggest complainers are now sitting between satisfied and happy)

Oh, and one more thing. If you haven't seen Outlook 2007, go take a good long look. Both Notes 8 Standard and Exchange/Outlook 2007 look and act VERY much alike.

@JB. User ignorance is probably the ONLY problem with Lotus Notes. Not really your fault. Just a lack of training, and lack of quality and communication in managing the deployment.

Your gripes are fixable and without much trouble either. The online help is also quite extensive and searchable.

Like anything new, sometimes we just gotta pull our heads out of the sand and give something a go.

Nice work Tom - an excellent summary of the Notes/Domino environment.

@JB, looks like you're a classic example of an Outlook user (you don't use Exchange to create replies, you use the Outlook client) who has not had any education on how to use Notes.

For a number of years comments such as yours are the norm for people who are familiar with the basic Outlook interface, and are unsure where to locate the options available in the powerful Notes client that would address your concerns.

The Notes client has 99.99% of the same functionality as the Outlook client and 250% of the features. And as Tom pointed out, Notes is a development environment as well, so if you don't have a feature - it's only ever a few clicks away to create that functionality.

If you need help on this, or any other concern with the Notes interface, I would suggest contacting a local Lotus Education centre to point you in the right direction.

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/training/

Fantastic to see a positive story on Lotus Notes on CIO. It truly is a great product but many companies do not utilise its full breath of capabilities, leading to these comparisons with Outlook, which after all only does email. To JB, Outlook has exactly the same way of dealing with signature blocks - it's either on or off for all emails but in Lotus Notes you can use personal stationery to create emails with differing signatures or no signature - look it up in the on-line help.

I would suggest that R8 of Notes is the best of breed collaboration client on the market today which, by the way, also does email & calendaring.

At least in our version you have to buy separate admin licenses which is completely ridiculous! Also server management is not easy, we spent 2 weeks posting in forums trying to get our web page back after an AD upgrade, if both the lotus admins are gone like both ours were last week due to sickness and vacation and something bad happens you are left calling one of them while they are out (IT needs real vacations too), hiring a lotus admin is cost prohibitive unless you use the whole suite, then what do you do again when they are gone?

@Sys Admin - once you learn how to manage the server, it pretty much runs itself. If an AD change screwed things up, something wasn't right in your initial setup. At our place, I'm 'the' Notes guy. I primarily do development (which includes everything from writing the specs to rolling out the apps and sometimes training) and do the admin. I spend about 1% of my time doing admin functions - the servers just run themselves.
Add in that remote management id dead easy so I'm able to do any off hours/emergency support from any place I can get a network connection.

I'd advise you buy a bit of help to get you over the initial learning hump and you'll be amazed at how much the server tools can do for you.