IBM Lotus Notes to support OS X, Devil turns up thermostat

I think I agree both with those who say LN sucks and those who say it is great. The reason why, in my opinion LN is really a development environment, not a finished piece of software. Yes, you do have a mail client, but it is cumbersome and bloated. But what I remember from the brief time I frequented Notes users groups, the people who came to Notes users groups were predominately application developers. And someone said their company just uses the standard templates and mail client, and says users hate it (just like people in our organization).

But in the innards of Notes/Domino, it knows about security, and authorizations for individual users, so I can see it is a powerful tool.

Hi guys. I've been spending my weekend trying to archive some old emails and one of the email programs I used back in the day was Lotus Notes 4.5 for Mac. I had the foresight to make a backup of my Lotus Notes application and user data and actually have it running on my G5 in Classic mode. I can read my old emails, but am wondering if there is a way to export them into any OSX-native email program, like Apple's Mail, Eudora, Netscape, Entourage, anything!

Can newer versions of Notes export messages intact? My version 4.5 only seems to export one single long text document which is sort of difficult to read.

Please email me at: jimmyneu@gmail.com if possible! TIA!

If you guys truly think Notes apps can be easily replaced w/ trivial web apps, you've never done Notes development. The reason so much of Notes mail is done w/ agents is because it's just another Notes application...if you don't like how it does something, you can just reprogram it (something you can't do w/ Outlook).

The Notes infrastructure lets you do stuff like electronically signing documents, workflow, etc. so you don't need any paper documents in your company. The Notes client is also very programmable and you can talk to Java libraries, COM libraries, etc. to integrate with other applications, and you can do all this while being disconnected from the network.

While you can do this with web applications (I've done a few Notes to web ports), it's non-trivial to come up w/ a framework to do all of it...and it's pretty painful doing the development...

Here is the actual meaning of the index cards used in the late 80's to define apple's goals for the coming decade in the 90's. It was the red cards (R&D) not the blue cards (next release) was the set left "out of scope" in apple's development plans in the ninties.

Herewith a small reprise ...

* the blue cards were for ideas that would be immediately implemented in the next product (System 7). It was an impressive achiev ement in catchup. Blue back-filled the many of the features which had been dropped out of the orginal Lisa (which was down-sized to create a consumer-oriented platform, ie the Macintosh) and to try and recover some of the features left out of the Lisa from xerox STAR calibre of platforms.

(eg crucial system-level features like Publish & Subscribe, which extended the historical, modular unix process model of, inter alia piping ... the goal of this feature was to automate the manual drag n drop operation as the mechanism to connect parts of a task, by defining a general purpose representation that allowed data to move transparently (without user commands) from one state to another. Stationary was another important, forward looking technology - its goal was to allow the user to adapt pre-existing objects to his own use (without having to be invloved in the internal implementation details); this follwed along the general, core apple design philosophy of having the machine 'imitiate' the user rather than the other way around).

Its successor, known as Copland (System 8) was supposed to be a transition platform between great object-based abstraction of a procedural paradigm (Mac) to the next generation of a pure object-oriented system. The bridge technology between procedures and frameworks in Copland was the idea of interchangeable components (known as OpenDoc). But Copland was derailed because of internal management failures. The "classic" mac OS basically continued without any profound improvement for another decade until OS/X arrived.


* the pink cards were for those feature which could not be implemented in the immediate future in System 7 because they required a fundemental new engerring architecture. This team worked for a couple of years in-house (growing to nearly a couple of hundred staff) before the project became a joint venture with IBM, called Taligent (as in 'Talent' + 'Intelligence').

The pink project remained on course for another 3 years until politics inside IBM and finances inside Apple made it nearly commercially impossible for Taligent fight the sudden juggernaut of microsoft in the mid ninties. By the time Taligent did start shipping a deliverable (a nice runtime called CommonPoint), it had lost the support of its sponsors

(which now included HP, who had joined apple & ibm as equity partners in taligent ... ironically, in an attempt to cover its bets, HP had recently acquired a license to sell NextStep so it could sell whichever platform customers wanted. IBM has previously also acquired a license for NextStep for $10M, but it was never deployed because Steve Jobs resisted the kind of control that big blue wanted to excert in order to avoid a a repitition of its debacle with microsoft, in which a supplier hi-jacked a platform).

The fate of taligent was not a pretty one. Apple sold its stake (in its own crown jewels), leaving it high & dry for years afterwards - there was no transitional platform (copland) and no destination platform (taligent).

In despration, it looked at BE/OS as a replacement but ex-apple (and egoist supreme) de Gasse wanted too much money for a nice but immature object-oriented platform.

It was a chance conversation between mid-level managers at Next & Apple in late 1996 that led to the decision to purchase Next as a last-ditch replacement (there had been not super serious consideration of licensing a modern kernel from IBM (OS/2) or even microsoft (NT - 'new technology' which microsoft essentially had hi-jacked from their collaboration with IBM on OS/3 in the early ninties); and the mac runtime for unix even, er, sparced some consideration of a deal with SUN.

Of course as it turned out, the political 'failure' of taligent set the stage for brining steven jobs back to apple - which was about the only thing that could have any chance of saving apple from a decade of mismanagement by a sucession of bean-counters, marketeers and chip functionary CEO's. So sometimes bad things happen for a reason -;)

Little bits of Taligent did survice; an intellectual property licensing company was set up to moneterize stuff (eg SUN purchased unicode to be used for java; microsoft also purchased stuff). IBM's approach to retrieving something from a great investment that it had mind-numbingly run into the ground, was the same as the appraoch used for converting to java some of the techniques in i

i just left a job with lotus email (on a mac) and am using exchange-based mail via entourage for the first time (on a mac). evey day that i log in, i am happy to be free of lotus notes. every day that i go home and simply log onto my mail via browser i'm happy. i always hated using lotus, but never realized how much i hated it til i used something else. we used to always joke that the whole reason we were enduring this awful software was security--like anyone cares what we're emailing! we're not the fbi!

I use 6.5.4 at work and it has icons to show whether or not I have forwarded my mail etc. We've been using Notes since R5 and to be honest I quite like it. An added advantage is that most email borne virii don't know how to deal with your notes address book so what affects outlook users bypasses us.

ctrl-a in notes selects all documents.

I have to use Notes at work (5.0... I dream of 6.5!) and it is without doubt the worst piece of software I have ever used.

It is so bad it both sucks and blows!

The UI is truely awful - 'standards' such ast Ctrl-A don't work, it looks like shit, there is no indication on an email in your inbox as to whether you have replied or forwarded it, and on and on...

It is horrible!

"Such hard words for Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino is actually a very powerfull development platform that in certain areas can outperform any other platform out there."

The user interface is crap.

Its slow.

My company uses it for just about everything that would be better designed & implemented with simple HTML.

Not only that, but they also pay a LOT more for LN dev than they'd ever have paid for a faster, easier to use, and more portable web interface.

I'd like to see something done in LN that couldn't be done somewhere else.

Hell, I'd like to see something done with LN that doesn't suck.

Such hard words for Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino is actually a very powerfull development platform that in certain areas can outperform any other platform out there.

I am co-owner of a small Lotus Domino development house. We've been blowing the doors off of nearly every competitor we've been alowed to go up against and Notes just keep getting better despite IBM's bumbling of the product. (Lotus was a lean-mean company before IBM purchased them)

Sometimes we throw stones at things we don't understand.

Lotus notes still exists.

And it sucks

The only software I'm forced to use at work that I hate more than LN is SAP.