Lotus Notes

[Lichtgestalt]

My worst fears have come through.... my new employer is using Lotus Notes. Now it might have some benefits and a lot more functionality but coming from Outlook the usability is just crap... You can't even do simple things like synchronize it with your WM6 device. Does anyone know how to do that? Otherwise I'll simply run Outlook in parallel and manage my contacts, appointments, etc. there. Double work but at least I can synch

[Tas]

I just hated Lotus. I'm sure the functionality would have been great if it had been remotely intuitive or usable.....
Sorry, can't help, just wanted to sympathise that Lotus sux.

[Lichtgestalt]

Thanks. I'm seriously wondering what the benefit of Notes is? It's not more stable than Outlook as at least one colleague a day has it crashing or calling the IT support. The database are a benefit but similiar things can be achieved via intranet applications.

[baloo]

The benefit ? Simple. IT Mgmt that came from a UNIX/"I hate Microsoft and refuse to ever use their products if I can help it" background got their way.

The other possibility is that Exchange took a while to become solid enough for the enterprise. cc:Mail was a very popular enterprise email product for PCs that was bought by Lotus. Lotus then built on that user base and managed to keep quite a few companies enagaged.

Exchange also needed a Windows LAN setup and many companies at the time were still runing on Novell LANS so the cost of migrating to Exchange was quite large.

There ends the history lesson.

[Kooky]

We have Groupwise. Scheduling recurring appointments is a nightmare; amending them is impossible.

I long for Outlook.

edit: and as for synching with my HTC - the IT dept will be very interesting in learning from me, should I work out how to do it.

[Sardonicus]

At least you can - it's not permitted in our company, actually no device with storage can be connected to a PC, so all that technology and convenience goes wasted.

So if you don't have a Blackberry, and with the economy as such there are less and less of those people around, you have to double-enter appointments or not at all. A few figured tricky ways to rig a way to send appointments to their personal account it so it created appointments there.

as for synching with my HTC - the IT dept will be very interesting in learning from me, should I work out how to do it.

I was at a place that used Notes, after being at places that used Outlook. Notes has it's pluses, like data sharing across areas that Microsoft users before Sharepoint probably couldn't imagine, and I remember it taking time to get my head around it and never did fully. Plus there we a lot more issues with Notes not being up to date that the IT guys were always struggling with and sometimes became business problems. But Notes did have some nice features, just not as good an email client as Outlook. I can't imaging Notes surviving too long, but that's what they said about COBOL.

[neo]

You can download either a Lotus Notes connector for Outlook, which will allow you to read LN mail via Outlook.

Or there are ways to connect directly to LN from WM, you'll need some other IBM software to achieve it, but it's been done.

Google harder!

On an unrelated note, you should check out this video if you haven't seen it

[Lichtgestalt]

You can download either a Lotus Notes connector for Outlook, which will allow you to read LN mail via Outlook.

Or there are ways to connect directly to LN from WM, you'll need some other IBM software to achieve it, but it's been done.

Google harder!

I found the Outlook connector but I suspect that this will arouse the suspicion of the IT department. There are two sync softwares for LN and WM but they all cost money and at the moment my point is that if the company doesn't support productivity I won't spend my own money on it

[Sardonicus]

Thanks Neo that was brilliant. Makes you wonder if Ford has Clarkson in their pocket, but that car did more than I'd expect to have, guess it all depends on the spin one put on things.