In my opinion, the reason our agency continue to run Notes is that in the short term it costs less to keep upgrading and stick with it than it would to switch over, as long as you don’t consider the time wasted because pretty much no that we work with outside of our agency uses Notes.

If ability and power were more important than ease of use then we would all be working on on Linux boxes.

If anyone is as interested as me in LinkeIn for business, the networking expert Jan Vermeiren has written a new book called ‘How to REALLY use LinkedIn, and there is a free light version at [how-to-really-use-linkedin.com]

Check it out!

Yes. 100 million+ users globally

You are so missing the value proposition that Notes provides. Last year I was involved with a number of Exchange -> Domino migrations, 5 of those were companies with less than 100 employees (I’m sure you would concur that 100 employees is not a large corporation).

One of those companies was looking at purchasing licensing for it’s financial application so all employees could SEE sales and order history for their customers – licensing cost $50,000.

Lotus Notes licensing $10,000. Financial package licensing for the 4 Finance/Admin users + 1 for Domino access $4,500. 4 hours development to create a Notes Application that talked to the finance package to get the required information AND link it to the CRM system for LIVE data review of customers (now THAT’S Rapid Application Development!) $1,000.

6 Hours to migrate from Exchange to Domino (Including ALL Email/Calendar and Contact Data) AND migrate existing web-site to a Domino Application – $1500.

Total cost $17,000. Saving for this project $34,000.

Now consider that this project was costed purely from the perspective of access to the financial application, you’ve saved your company $34,000 (not an insignificant amount for a small business) and in the process, you’ve also gained an email client, CRM system and a web maintenance tool, getting rid of the licensing for Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL and Dynamics (MORE Savings) in the process. You OWN all of the data, none of it is sitting in the “cloud” on other peoples infrastructure, so you’re not reliant on either an Internet connection or someone else maintaining their systems so that you can access YOUR information.

BTW, “Bloatware” – Lotus Notes install in each users PC is 625mb, the “Financial Client” by itself is 480mb. So for an Extra 145mb you get Email, Calendar, Tasks, CRM, Web Browser, Instant Messaging, VOIP and Online Meetings, and a myriad of plug-ins to review practically any other data you require instant access to.

That’s such a SIMPLE business scenario with REAL cost savings for a small business. Surely you would have to agree that purely from a cost/benefit analysis this SMALL company made the right decision moving to Notes.

Keep telling yourself that businesses need BloatWare like Notes to “share information”. For large Notes shops, I’m sure the cost of switching is still prohibitive but getting lower every day. For anyone considering a new sharing/collaboration tool needed to run their enterprise, no one is going to consider Notes. This is the Obama generation of users…not the Carter administration.

Glad to see that some are still making a living off trying to install/configure/justify Notes to large corporations. Good luck with that – maybe CA will come along and buy out Notes from IBM and keep them alive for another 20 years.

Why does a Gmail reply start with the thread and not with the content?
Why is there an Archive button, but a Compose Message LINK, hidden away in the left margin (Seriously, couldn’t find it the first time).
Why is that reply field so small?
Why do they continue to call it BETA.
What is Bin?
Why is my mail so unsecured if somebody else uses my laptop?

Maybe because it also runs on MacOS and Ubuntu?

@Scott – I created the above link (through my notes browser) by dragging the tab into this comment box – don’t know how hard that is!!!

@Microface – Free and Cheap – yep, that’s what your grandma uses to distribute (read:email, also referred to as outlook) photo’s of her grand-kids, rather than “Sharing” or “Collaborating” which is what businesses want to do with information.

@CBASS – Yep, that’s why all the cross patform applications “work like a standard windwows app” – Not!

@Nick – Ever used ENTER, BACKSPACE, TAB, INSERT, CTRL+M or ESCAPE, they really are better short cuts than CTRL+>, CTRL+<, (no equivaent), (no equivalent), CTRL+SHIFT+M, Escape used in Outlook, nice to see MS adopting Escape in Outlook 2003 to close a window…

@CBASS & @Nick, who said MS got the GUI right – maybe you just fallen into the trap of becoming familiar with MS designed software, please don’t tell anyone at Apple or Adobe that their interfaces are “Bad”, or anyone who uses Word that you go to the “Insert” menu to insert something – unless it’s a table, you go to the “Table” menu to choose “Insert Table”. Grin!

Or how about F9 in Word refreshes fields, F9 in Excel refreshes formulas, F9 in Outlook receives email (refreshes the inbox) but F5 is used in Explorer to Refresh the screen!

C’Mon guys if you want to get into Notes bashing, at least come up with something more original than “it looks bad” – so does a Combine Harvester, but it does a better job than a Ferrari towing a reaper (which still looks kinda silly).