[Lotus Notes Sucks: Example 44]

Interlude

Let's pause for a moment and discover what others are saying. Am I the only one who knows that Lotus Notes sucks? Apparently not. Just search for the phrase "Lotus Notes sucks", "Lotus Notes hate", "Lotus Notes gripes", etc. in Google, and you find such sagacious comments as these (with grammar and spelling corrected). I swear I am not making these up:

• "Rather than detail all of Notes' warts and running sores, let me say that Ziff has been a Notes shop for years. During all that time, out of the hundreds of people who use it, I've only heard three people tell me they dislike it. The rest hate it. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it." Source
• "An example of [poorly] designed software. [Lotus] Notes is an indefensibly poor piece of software. I have been using Notes for over four years. My company uses Notes for everything from email to an in-house software bug tracking system, and I have to say it's all bad. Not only is the user interface completely disorienting, but the slow performance, memory footprint, and lack of standards support with regards to email makes this one of the worst applications I have ever had the displeasure of using. I assume anyone defending it either
  1. works for Notes or
  2. enjoys painful experiences.

  If your company is considering bringing Notes in house, be very, very afraid." Source

• "Terrible OK. So you need to send an email to everyone in your company. Assuming the administrator has set up such a list, you better not have a large company, because Lotus Notes will expand out the list into the To box. Unfortunately, it only allows you to have 32kB of information in the To box. So if you have a big company, it will get about halfway through the send and then die, coming up with some vague message that takes you a few tries to figure out. Another problem. When it crashes, you can't restart it until you restart your computer. [Did] you know there is actually third-party software out there called NotesMedic from Cassetica that alleviates this problem? Now, when Notes crashes, I just click the NotesMedic icon on my desktop and it starts right up. I've started to use NotesMedic instead of the ordinary Notes icon for starting, regardless of whether it crashed last time. I could go on, but why? It's not worth my time."
• "Total junk. Lotus Notes is a completely baffling program. It's not even an e-mail system—it's a "non-relational object oriented database" interface that just happens to do mail. It doesn't properly implement Internet mail standards, is slow, and completely unintuitive. If you try to dig beneath the surface to find another option or something, you end up completely lost. Error messages don't tell you what you need to know, either."
• "Junk. ... I just can't see why anyone would voluntarily use Lotus Notes."
• "Steaming Pile. Horrid, unintuitive interface, too many useless features, not enough useful features, and increadibly un-user friendly."
• "Piece of garbage. Top-heavy bloatware, frustrating and much more trouble than it's worth."
• "We use Lotus Notes. Next to the word "sucks" in the dictionary is the Lotus Notes icon."
• "[F]or email, [Lotus Notes] plain sucks (note the highly technical term here). ... a much bigger issue is how badly [Lotus Notes] is designed. ... The interface communicates so much, and in Lotus Notes' case, does so so badly." Source
• "BOAT ANCHOR (for non-technical audience). [Lotus Notes is an example of] a costly tool purchased based purely on marketing hype which doesn't meet its intended purpose. Often requires more costly add-ons to be truly useful (sucking more money from the poor customer). It often leads to a vendor lock-in (dependency on a single vendor with no easy escape route)."
• "Notes sucks. It's badly outdated. It is a network and resource hog. You need a very fast network connection otherwise the program just crawls terribly. It's difficult to use from an end-user perspective. It does some workflow things OK, but it's nothing that can't be done with other software packages." Source
• "Some Notes problems are down to local implementation but a large number are down to fundamental design flaws in Notes itself." Source

• "There are not nearly enough hours in the day for me to write all the things about Lotus Notes that I hate.

  It is the bane of my existence.

  There is a special place in hell for the people who designed its interface.

  It's like they go out of their way to be inconsistent, both with standard Windows UI guidelines and, amazingly enough, even within their own application."

  I fail to understand how a product that is so flakey, with a user interface from the ark that has no consistancy with either itself, or other Windows applications can call itself a corporate product... I have seen better looking shareware... What a joy it would be if our IT department had chosen [Microsoft] Exchange/Outlook combo, but we are stuck with Notes/Domino." Source

• "As we were ravaged by another email virus again today at the office, [we] Notes users reveled in the fact that Notes is not succeptible to them. This is mostly because Notes is a completely insufficient email client." Source
• "Lotus Notes is the Anti-Christ of software." Source

These are the comments that don't contain profanity.

Conclusion

Lotus Notes sucks.

Last Updated: July 26, 2004