Campaigning against Lotus Notes



  • First time posting in this forum, but I could use some advice.

    Our company recently got acquired by a much larger, significantly more Enterprisey and WTF company, and we're currently in a death-struggle against having Lotus Notes installed on all our desktops. (We seem to have dodged the bullet of Windows XP and IE6-- yes they were going to DOWNGRADE our beautiful Vista and Windows 7 machines to "standardize" on the shittiest browser imaginable!)

    I know we have executives arguing against the change, but I'd like to show some support from the actual employees, but I'd like to do it in such a way that I'm not... you know... risking my own position or making too many waves. I was thinking about sending around a simple petition, but haven't because there's no way to do that without attaching my name to it. My second idea is to start a blog at a site like "NotesAtCompanyname.com" and seed the link to a few friends to pass along. Of course, our IT could trace the blog to me probably but it would be significantly harder. I'm hoping to keep it positive, not only talking about how much Notes sucks shit, but also providing advice on how to cope with its various bugs and mis-features.

    So the advice part:
    1) Has anybody done or seen anything like this before? Is it a terrible idea?
    2) If so, how did it work out? Was it possible to remain anonymous, or at least anonymous enough that you never got called into your manager's office?

    Also, if anybody currently is subjected to Lotus Notes, could you provide examples of how it hurts your productivity, or any links you find helpful? My Notes knowledge is unfortunately out-of-date (circa version 6.0.1), and so I'm not sure what quirks and bugs have been fixed and what haven't.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    First time posting in this forum, but I could use some advice.

    Our company recently got acquired by a much larger, significantly more Enterprisey and WTF company, and we're currently in a death-struggle against having Lotus Notes installed on all our desktops. (We seem to have dodged the bullet of Windows XP and IE6-- yes they were going to DOWNGRADE our beautiful Vista and Windows 7 machines to "standardize" on the shittiest browser imaginable!)

    I know we have executives arguing against the change, but I'd like to show some support from the actual employees, but I'd like to do it in such a way that I'm not... you know... risking my own position or making too many waves. I was thinking about sending around a simple petition, but haven't because there's no way to do that without attaching my name to it. My second idea is to start a blog at a site like "NotesAtCompanyname.com" and seed the link to a few friends to pass along. Of course, our IT could trace the blog to me probably but it would be significantly harder. I'm hoping to keep it positive, not only talking about how much Notes sucks shit, but also providing advice on how to cope with its various bugs and mis-features.

    So the advice part:
    1) Has anybody done or seen anything like this before? Is it a terrible idea?
    2) If so, how did it work out? Was it possible to remain anonymous, or at least anonymous enough that you never got called into your manager's office?

    Also, if anybody currently is subjected to Lotus Notes, could you provide examples of how it hurts your productivity, or any links you find helpful? My Notes knowledge is unfortunately out-of-date (circa version 6.0.1), and so I'm not sure what quirks and bugs have been fixed and what haven't.

    Save your breath.  There are two reasons to have Lotus Notes:

    1. The company is married to IBM
    2. There are a ton of custom Lotus Notes applications in the company

    If either of these is true, then there is way too much momentum to fight.  People only do email on Notes because they already have Notes installed for another purpose, so it's essentially free.  You are going to have to show that your solution is better than the current free solution.  That would require showing negative value in Notes and a no cost alternative.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    My second idea is to start a blog at a site like "NotesAtCompanyname.com" and seed the link to a few friends to pass along. Of course, our IT could trace the blog to me probably but it would be significantly harder.
    1. Purchase a Wi-Fi card for cash from what ever your local equivalent of a shady flea market is.
    2. Purchase a cheap laptop for cash from a different location.
    3. Drive around a neighborhood distant from where you live until you find an open W-Fi connection
    4. Set up a free email account somewhere - Yahoo, hotmail, gmail .. whatever your choice is
    5. Spam messages to various Lotus Notes forums about how bad Notes is()
    6. Email links to the forums to various people in your company

    pro tip - Don't included your current pic in the forum profiles

    Or you could just suck it up and deal with it. Its not your problem if productivity drops because of the merger

    () Be sure you do your research on a current version of Notes so that you have actual, real and genuine figures as to how Notes has hurt your productivity as opposed to some touchy feely idea based off an old version.



  • Make sure you stay behind at least 7 proxies.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Is it a terrible idea?
     

    To be honest, yes, I think so.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I know we have executives arguing against the change, but I'd like to show some support from the actual employees

    This is the point. If you start your own initiative, the executives against Notes (ie the ones with a brain) could be embarrassed by your action, and it might even work counterproductive.If you know one of the good guys, approach him and ask him what you can do. If you don't, find an intermediary you can put pressure on.

    Also, I'm pretty sure that a blog or email action won't help (because this isn't how executives think); what might help is something in the form of a report or whitepaper. "Notes Suxks Because I Sez So" will probably make less of an impression than "Notes 7.0 hampers productivity in 7 out of 10 Enterprise companies" or sth.

    Having said that, the fact that they're even willing to consider this, is a really, really bad sign. And you have given some more signs of being unhappy of the direction the company is moving in. I guess it wouldn't hurt to have an exit strategy. 

     Edit: some quotes from wikipedia:

    @http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Notes said:

    Like other popular commercial software packages, Lotus Notes has had its detractors[6][7] as well as supporters[8]. Critics at a variety of web sites, many titled with disparagements of Lotus Notes products, assert that there are dedicated email clients that are simpler, more intuitive and have a lower purchase price. Proponents argue that richer capabilities and advanced programming are available, and that purchase price is a small fraction of total cost of ownership. Also that its security against viruses and Trojans is not matched in any other email system[9]. Many of the differences mentioned above are seen by some as weaknesses in the product, especially when the user interface is compared with more specialized applications.

    @http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Notes said:

    Criticisms

    Publications such as The Guardian in 2006 have criticized Lotus Notes for having an "unintuitive [user] interface" and cite widespread dissatisfaction with the usability of the client software. The Guardian indicates that Notes has not necessarily suffered as a result of this dissatisfaction due to the fact that "the people who choose [enterprise software] tend not to be the ones who use it."[11] Lotus violates an important usability law that dictates that a consistent UI is often better than a new and improved alternative. Since Microsoft is perceived to set the standard for Windows applications, Lotus's differences (F9 versus F5, New Memo versus New Mail, etc.) are perceived to be 'wrong' by some users.

    Since Notes release 8, F5 is now used to refresh the mail inbox (and other views as well) and the "New Memo" button text has also changed to "New Message".




  • @b-redeker said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is it a terrible idea?
     

    To be honest, yes, I think so.

    Bleh. Yah I think people in this thread are right.

    @b-redeker said:

    Also, I'm pretty sure that a blog or email action won't help (because this isn't how executives think); what might help is something in the form of a report or whitepaper. "Notes Suxks Because I Sez So" will probably make less of an impression than "Notes 7.0 hampers productivity in 7 out of 10 Enterprise companies" or sth.

    Yah, but the problem is I don't really have the capability to make such a whitepaper, since I don't have access to the newest Notes version. If one exists, I'd love to hear about it. The Wikipedia stuff is weasel-worded, and not based on actual usability studies anyway. (Unsurprising, since IBM doesn't even do user studies.) Companies interested in employee productivity would never have installed Notes in the first place, and thus wouldn't have bothered to do the study either.

    Frankly, the best argument is the one our execs are already using: Microsoft is a huge client of ours, and it would be extremely embarrassing (at minimum!) for our employees to communicate with them via Notes. They're making the case that we'll lose our MS business as a result, which might be a stretch, but if it keeps Notes away, then stretch man, stretch!

    @b-redeker said:

    Having said that, the fact that they're even willing to consider this, is a really, really bad sign. And you have given some more signs of being unhappy of the direction the company is moving in. I guess it wouldn't hurt to have an exit strategy. 

    The problem is I love working here, but yes, I'd rather quit than have to deal with Lotus Notes on a day-to-day basis. We already have to deal with OracleApps, that's bad enough.

    Well, thanks for your help.



  • Just buy T-Shirts and mugs for everyone: http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/

    I noticed them around our office when we had to switch (same situation, and Notes is only used for email here) didn't help. But at least we had some fun.
    We are going to switch back to outlook... someday, just because we keep reporting every little shitty thing Lotus Notes does to us. And we had very little problems with outlook + exchange.



  • @Daid said:

    Just buy T-Shirts and mugs for everyone: http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/

    I noticed them around our office when we had to switch (same situation, and Notes is only used for email here) didn't help. But at least we had some fun.
    We are going to switch back to outlook... someday, just because we keep reporting every little shitty thing Lotus Notes does to us. And we had very little problems with outlook + exchange.

    Last time I used Notes was 6.0.1... do you have a newer version? Is it still impossible to drag an email icon to the desktop and make a file of it? Or to attach an email inside another email?

    Not having those two features is going to utterly destroy my workflow.

    Thanks for the input.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Is it still impossible to drag an email icon to the desktop and make a file of it?
     

    Whatsoever would you use this for? I mean, why would you want an email "file" outside your email database?



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is it still impossible to drag an email icon to the desktop and make a file of it?
     

    Whatsoever would you use this for? I mean, why would you want an email "file" outside your email database?

    Let me come at your question from many angles:

    1) Why the fuck SHOULDN'T I be able to? Emails are just tarted-up text files, and every other program that deals with text files allows me to save them to the desktop, or attached them to emails, or whatever. Why would an email client special-case like that? Other than Lotus Notes, I've never, ever seen an email client (well, perhaps PINE) that doesn't let you save emails to a file, then attach emails to other emails. I've used dozens of emails clients over 20 years, Notes is the *only* one with this misfeature.

    2) I work with a lot of (seemingly) amnesiac co-workers. This means I pretty regularly have to prove to them that they actually told me something. "Where is that report? I said it was due on the 20th." "You said it was due on the 27th." "No I didn't!" "Here's your original email." Me: 1. Amnesiac: 0!

    3) When I get emails relevant to a specific project, a project a half-dozen people might work on through its lifetime, I just drag&drop them into the project's folder on the network drive. Sure, we'd be better off using something like Basecamp or a Wiki, but this is how we do our work at the moment.

    4) "You don't need [missing feature]! Nobody uses that!" is a well-worn defense of shitty software. I've heard it for years by people defending shit software... most recently, I heard it when I asked if there was a Gantt chart program for Linux. The funny thing is, from my experience, that as soon as the shit software gets the feature "nobody uses", everybody says "about time!"



  •  @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is it still impossible to drag an email icon to the desktop and make a file of it?
     

    Whatsoever would you use this for? I mean, why would you want an email "file" outside your email database?

    Let me come at your question from many angles:

    snip

    4) "You don't need [missing feature]! Nobody uses that!" is a well-worn defense of shitty software. I've heard it for years by people defending shit software... most recently, I heard it when I asked if there was a Gantt chart program for Linux. The funny thing is, from my experience, that as soon as the shit software gets the feature "nobody uses", everybody says "about time!"

     

     I will only say that for #4, I have found that Gantt Project seems reasonable.



  • @sinistral said:

    I will only say that for #4, I have found that Gantt Project seems reasonable.

    Thanks, but I gave up my Linux experiment and now I don't need it anymore.

    Besides, your reply kind of misses the point. It isn't relevant whether or not the feature actually exists, it's just one of those stock answers people give when you request a feature they don't know about. "Oh well we don't have that but you really don't need it!"



  • @blakeyrat said:

    1) Why the fuck SHOULDN'T I be able to?

    This does not even slightly answer my question and I'll ignore it.

    @blakeyrat said:

    4) "You don't need [missing feature]! Nobody uses that!" is a well-worn defense of shitty software.

    Regardless of shitty software, "Nobody uses it" can be a valid response to a feature request and I reject your general dismissal, regardless of your experience with idiot developers.

    1 and 4 really aren't very good starting points from which to build good software. At some point you have to say, Fuck I'm not implementing that. It's not always a good decision to leave out feature X or Y, sure, but the point is that you have to decide on a case-by-case basis, and "Why the fuck SHOULDN'T I be able to?" isn't really convincing to anyone.

    @blakeyrat said:
    2) I work with a lot of (seemingly) amnesiac co-workers. This means I pretty regularly have to prove to them that they actually told me something. "Where is that report? I said it was due on the 20th." "You said it was due on the 27th." "No I didn't!" "Here's your original email." Me: 1. Amnesiac: 0!

    Agreed that this is eminently necessary sometimes, but what does saving the email file have to do with this? You could have just hit up Search in your email client (though I expect Lotus' search to be broken). I assume it's related to:

    @blakeyrat said:

    3) When I get emails relevant to a specific project, a project a half-dozen people might work on through its lifetime, I just drag&drop them into the project's folder on the network drive. Sure, we'd be better off using something like Basecamp or a Wiki, but this is how we do our work at the moment.

    Consolidation instead of spreading shit around. I can totally get behind that. +1.



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    1) Why the fuck SHOULDN'T I be able to?

    This does not even slightly answer my question and I'll ignore it.

    Sure it does. Software shouldn't piss all over the user's expectations. I'm not saying that Notes needs to have every single feature Outlook does, but it should at least match the features every other email client software ever in history has.

    @dhromed said:

    1 and 4 really aren't very good starting points from which to build good software. At some point you have to say, Fuck I'm not implementing that. It's not always a good decision to leave out feature X or Y, sure, but the point is that you have to decide on a case-by-case basis, and "Why the fuck SHOULDN'T I be able to?" isn't really convincing to anyone.

    When every single fucking other fucking email client on Earth fucking does it, yes it's convincing. Jesus Christ, why the fuck are you defending Lotus Notes? This is crazy.

    @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    2) I work with a lot of (seemingly) amnesiac co-workers. This means I pretty regularly have to prove to them that they actually told me something. "Where is that report? I said it was due on the 20th." "You said it was due on the 27th." "No I didn't!" "Here's your original email." Me: 1. Amnesiac: 0!

    Agreed that this is eminently necessary sometimes, but what does saving the email file have to do with this? You could have just hit up Search in your email client (though I expect Lotus' search to be broken). I assume it's related to:

    Because I like to prove they said that. It's not nearly as strong if I just said, "no I searched for the email and you said the 27th." Especially since the type of people I'm talking about are also the type who delete emails after reading/sending them, and they probably won't have their own copy anymore. (And even if they did, they wouldn't look it up because it would just make them look stupid.) Without being able to send the previous email to them, I'm just playing a "nuh-uh! you did!" kindergarten game. That's just stupid, and doesn't belong in an office.

    And that's assuming Search works, and I haven't accidentally deleted the email in Notes' shitty UI.

    @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    3) When I get emails relevant to a specific project, a project a half-dozen people might work on through its lifetime, I just drag&drop them into the project's folder on the network drive. Sure, we'd be better off using something like Basecamp or a Wiki, but this is how we do our work at the moment.

    Consolidation instead of spreading shit around. I can totally get behind that. +1.

    Woo I get a point. What's my total?



  • I work for a company that got sold to another company.  The other company was aLotus Notes house.  We were an Outlook/Exchange house.  The other company, after being shown the differences between Lotus Notes and Outlook/Exchange switched over to Outlook/Exchange.  I would tell you who I worked and now work for, but I'm not allowed.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Software shouldn't piss all over the user's expectations. I'm not saying that Notes needs to have every single feature Outlook does, but it should at least match the features every other email client software ever in history has.
     

    I don't agree with this immediately, but I don't disagree with it either.

    I'll have to think about it, but I can't guarantee I will. So, well.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Jesus Christ, why the fuck are you defending Lotus Notes?

    I'm not defending Note; I'm actually totally agnostic about because I've never seen it or worked with it. What I am doing, or trying to do anyway, is busting your balls about making blanket statements on things that generally need case-by-case evaluation. That's all.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Because I like to *prove* they said that. It's not nearly as strong if I just said, "no I searched for the email and you said the 27th."

    You have the email, you can just reply/forward it back to them, can't you?

    @blakeyrat said:

    a "nuh-uh! you did!" kindergarten game. That's just stupid, and doesn't belong in an office.

    Obviously agreed.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Woo I get a point. What's my total?

    Like, 2, I think.

    Maybe 2.5.

    Go you!

     

     



  • @Medezark said:

    We were an Outlook/Exchange house.  The other company, after being shown the differences between Lotus Notes and Outlook/Exchange switched over to Outlook/Exchange.
     

    Also unicorns.



  • @Medezark said:

    I work for a company that got sold to another company.  The other company was aLotus Notes house.  We were an Outlook/Exchange house.  The other company, after being shown the differences between Lotus Notes and Outlook/Exchange switched over to Outlook/Exchange.  I would tell you who I worked and now work for, but I'm not allowed.

     

    That would be great, but since they're in France, they:

    1) are probably Apple bigots with a knee-jerk against anything Microsoft (am I getting my widely-drawn stereotypes right here?)

    2) won't ever really have the chance to see what working with Outlook is like, since they never visit

    3) are running for their lives from crazed "youths" protesting austerity measures because they are actually employed

    @dhromed said:

    I'm not defending Note; I'm actually totally agnostic about because I've never seen it or worked with it. What I am doing, or trying to do anyway, is busting your balls about making blanket statements on things that generally need case-by-case evaluation. That's all.

    But without blanket statements, how would I mouth-off on issues I'm completely ignorant of!

    @dhromed said:

    You have the email, you can just reply/forward it back to them, can't you?

    Well, yah, but it loses the headers (thus could appear to just be me making up an email to justify my lateness.) I mean that's taking it to a kind of ridiculous degree.

    You seriously work in an office where nobody attaches emails to other emails? I find that kind of weird... this never comes up? Even if I didn't personally make use of that "feature" (feature in quotes because it's really that basic) about a dozen co-workers do.

    @dhromed said:

    Go you!

    Go me!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @sinistral said:
    I will only say that for #4, I have found that Gantt Project seems reasonable.

    Thanks, but I gave up my Linux experiment and now I don't need it anymore.

    Besides, your reply kind of misses the point. It isn't relevant whether or not the feature actually exists, it's just one of those stock answers people give when you request a feature they don't know about. "Oh well we don't have that but you really don't need it!"

    You're right, I didn't directly address your specific point ("You don't need X, we do Z,A,B,C"). I have no arguments for it, because it's so commonly uttered by vendors. That being said, I used to work for a software company, we often heard requirements that seemed straight from the land of the bizarre. Sometimes it was possible to talk to the requesting customer / potential client and figure out how a requirement fit into their normal work flows. Sometimes the only thing you had was a bullet point from a list of hundreds of requirements (and those often filtered by the sales reps), which is where those "Why would you do that?" responses often arise.

    In other words, I have seen both sides of the fence, and offer no good solution to the problem, other than stressing that quick dismissal of customer requests is often a stupid thing.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    "Oh well we don't have that but you really don't need it!"
     

    As an aside...

    My wife once asked for ice for her Coke in Egypt and was told she couldn't have any because her drink was cold enough.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    ut without blanket statements, how would I mouth-off on issues I'm completely ignorant of!
     

    A convincing point! +1

    @blakeyrat said:

    Well, yah, but it loses the headers (thus could appear to just be me making up an email to justify my lateness.) I mean that's taking it to a kind of ridiculous degree.

    Okay.

    @blakeyrat said:

    You seriously work in an office where nobody attaches emails to other emails?

    Oh that happens, yes, just the saving of emails on a hard drive as separate files is not something I see any use for.

    @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:
    Go you!

    Go me!

    Goooo planet!

     

     

     



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is it still impossible to drag an email icon to the desktop and make a file of it?
     

    Whatsoever would you use this for? I mean, why would you want an email "file" outside your email database?

    I'd agree that it isn't a feature a lot of people would or should use, but there are times where it can be useful.  For example, I develop a custom application which manages our new product development process - most of our products are unique to a specific customer.  So we normally get signoffs on drawings, specifications, etc via email.  It makes sense to keep that correspondence attached to the project along with the drawings, renderings, test run data, etc.  Dragging and dropping the email from Outlook into the application makes it easy to keep the history of the project.


  • @lpope187 said:

    @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is it still impossible to drag an email icon to the desktop and make a file of it?
     

    Whatsoever would you use this for? I mean, why would you want an email "file" outside your email database?

    I'd agree that it isn't a feature a lot of people would or should use, but there are times where it can be useful.  For example, I develop a custom application which manages our new product development process - most of our products are unique to a specific customer.  So we normally get signoffs on drawings, specifications, etc via email.  It makes sense to keep that correspondence attached to the project along with the drawings, renderings, test run data, etc.  Dragging and dropping the email from Outlook into the application makes it easy to keep the history of the project.
    When I was at CCP I wished the CTO would've done this. He used his email client as a personal documentation repository. Well, that didn't work so well since after giving him 5 emails explaining how to stop alerts from coming to me I still get them, and even when I was still working there it took him days to find the documents he needed.



  • @Lingerance said:

    @lpope187 said:

    @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Is it still impossible to drag an email icon to the desktop and make a file of it?
     

    Whatsoever would you use this for? I mean, why would you want an email "file" outside your email database?

    I'd agree that it isn't a feature a lot of people would or should use, but there are times where it can be useful.  For example, I develop a custom application which manages our new product development process - most of our products are unique to a specific customer.  So we normally get signoffs on drawings, specifications, etc via email.  It makes sense to keep that correspondence attached to the project along with the drawings, renderings, test run data, etc.  Dragging and dropping the email from Outlook into the application makes it easy to keep the history of the project.
    When I was at CCP I wished the CTO would've done this. He used his email client as a personal documentation repository. Well, that didn't work so well since after giving him 5 emails explaining how to stop alerts from coming to me I still get them, and even when I was still working there it took him days to find the documents he needed.

    CCP the company that makes EVE Online?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    CCP the company that makes EVE Online?
    Ah, no. I forgot I didn't mention this on the forums. CCP is the alias I use for my old job.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:
    You have the email, you can just reply/forward it back to them, can't you?

    Well, yah, but it loses the headers (thus could appear to just be me making up an email to justify my lateness.)

    I'm a long time Notes user (don't like it but have no choice) and  I've been in the same situation where someone claims they didn't say something.  So I find the email and hit reply and say "Here's the email you sent me where you say the project isn't due till the 27th".  

    If you have to worry about showing headers in order to really prove what you're saying, then you've got  a much bigger problem than whether or not you should use Notes.

    @blakeyrat said:

    You seriously work in an office where nobody attaches emails to other emails? I find that kind of weird.
    Before reading this thread I had never heard of, or ever thought of, "attaching an email to another email".  When I reply to an email the senders message is included in my reply.  The idea of "attaching" an email like you would a picture or other file seems weird to me, since the senders original email is included in my reply by default. 

    But maybe that's just because I've used Lotus Notes since 1998 and my brain is permanently damaged.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    But maybe that's just because I've used Lotus Notes since 1998 and my brain is permanently damaged.

    Probably.

    Look at it like the US Constitution's Bill of Rights. A lot of people don't get the concept that the Bill of Rights doesn't *give* us rights, what it does is *enumerate* rights that we already have as virtue of being intelligent human beings.

    Emails are just files. Like HTML pages, they're just a text file in a specific format. Given that, why *shouldn't* you be able to save it somewhere other than your email database? The exact same way you can save HTML pages from the web? There's no reason you shouldn't be able, it should be a natural computer usage "right". But Lotus Notes, which in this strained metaphor is-- I dunno, North Korea-- doesn't let you. It's taking away your rights to save text files to your own filesystem.

    Ok, re-reading that, maybe my brain is permanently damaged too. But at least I'm not using North Korea for answering emails!!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Emails are just files. Like HTML pages, they're just a text file in a specific format. Given that, why *shouldn't* you be able to save it somewhere other than your email database? The exact same way you can save HTML pages from the web? There's no reason you shouldn't be able, it should be a natural computer usage "right".

    I'd suggest that emails are certainly "streams of data", but not necessarily files.  The ability to save an email as a file in the file system is the root of many security exploits and should be avoided at all costs, unless the email is placed into a wrapper that causes it to be treated as an email message rather than simply a file containing its contents.  So, saving it as a file isn't a "natural right", but rather a specific contrivance created by the developer of the email software.  Since Lotus Notes only does email as a hobby (it is primarily an application platform designed around replicated data), it doesn't make a lot of allowances for treating email properly.  Also, adding a general purpose way of exporting a document from Lotus Notes would be a huge hole in the security system (once again, from the perspective of an application platform, not an email client).



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Well, yah, but it loses the headers (thus could appear to just be me making up an email to justify my lateness.) I mean that's taking it to a kind of ridiculous degree.
    It's really easy to create a forged email forward, complete with headers.  I hope nobody uses the forwarded email as anything other than an assertion.  An email message without a digital signature shouldn't be believed any more than a random text file should.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    The idea of "attaching" an email like you would a picture or other file seems weird to me, since the senders original email is included in my reply by default.
    Certain anti-spam systems want the email attached. This is how Hunter1's (another company alias) anti-spam worked, walk the user through attaching the email and then fire it off to spam@hunter1.com



  • @El_Heffe said:

    Before reading this thread I had never heard of, or ever thought of, "attaching an email to another email". 
     

    Odd, because I regularly receive pre-briefings in the form of an email with multiple communiqués attached to it.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:
    You have the email, you can just reply/forward it back to them, can't you?
    Well, yah, but it loses the headers (thus could appear to just be me making up an email to justify my lateness.)
    I'm a long time Notes user (don't like it but have no choice) and  I've been in the same situation where someone claims they didn't say something.  So I find the email and hit reply and say "Here's the email you sent me where you say the project isn't due till the 27th".  

    If you have to worry about showing headers in order to really prove what you're saying, then you've got  a much bigger problem than whether or not you should use Notes.

    @blakeyrat said:

    You seriously work in an office where nobody attaches emails to other emails? I find that kind of weird.
    Before reading this thread I had never heard of, or ever thought of, "attaching an email to another email".  When I reply to an email the senders message is included in my reply.  The idea of "attaching" an email like you would a picture or other file seems weird to me, since the senders original email is included in my reply by default. 

    But maybe that's just because I've used Lotus Notes since 1998 and my brain is permanently damaged.

     What if you wanted to attach more than one email to your email? This is where attaching an email to an email becomes useful. Let's say I had responses from three different people and I wanted to forward all of them to another party ... I don't want to cut and paste. So I attach the three responses and off they go.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @AMerrickanGirl said:

     What if you wanted to attach more than one email to your email?

    Personally, if the person emailing me felt the need to send me the multi-parent-email-trail leading to their email to me without feeling the need to summarise the points, and at least put some effort into summarising any attachments in said trail (thus negating the point in sending such crap,) I'd probably visualise some wanton violance involving a keyboard, and a CRT monitor.

    Communication should be succinct if it's new to you, not "here's the crap I've had so far, dredge from it the stuff relevant to you. BTW, do $x, LOL!!!eleven!two$$@!!"


  • @blakeyrat said:

    CCP the company that makes EVE Online?
    Dang, that was the first thing I thought of too.



  • I have to play devil's advocate in this case. When used /sparingly/, lotus notes can be quite useful. I say this out of experience from a (psuedo-)new version my school demands we use for our classes. you just have to know what you're getting into and wedge management into realizing that when over-used, lotusnotes is a pile of epic proportions.



  • @Indrora said:

    I have to play devil's advocate in this case. When used /sparingly/, lotus notes can be quite useful. I say this out of experience from a (psuedo-)new version my school demands we use for our classes. you just have to know what you're getting into and wedge management into realizing that when over-used, lotusnotes is a pile of epic proportions.

    It might be Ok for non-email/groupware applications. The problem is that everybody's using it for email/groupware, and IBM sells it as email/groupware, and it sucks shit at email/groupware. Even if it were excellent as a distributed database app, I highly doubt it's better than Access, Filemaker, RealBasic, Sharepoint, or any of the other dozens of applications filling that same space, all of which (except Access) are equally cross-platform as Notes.

    I'm sure the product was built as a database application platform, kind of like Access. And I'm sure email was originally added just as a quick "because we can" hack. What I *don't* get is why, after a solid decade of being sold as an email/groupware client, it's *still* so fucking awful at email/groupware.

    Google wrote a web browser that has near-100% support of an obscure, arcane collection of protocols, standards, and hacks, make it all work better and faster than any previous browser, added a quality UI, and they're on version 6 of the fucking product. In less time than it's taken IBM to get Notes from version 7 to version 8. Why the fuck can't IBM come within an order of magnitude of this performance? They're just inexcusably incompetent.

    (To be fair, Google didn't start from scratch-- they started from Webkit. But, then again, IBM wouldn't be starting from scratch either.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Why the fuck can't IBM come within an order of magnitude of this performance?
     

    IBM is a cobweb.

    Google, so far, is not. But, given sites like duckduckgo that actively and explicitly offset themselves against Google, I fear the spiders are beginning to make a home in the creases of Google's processes.



  • BTW our company's new Windows 7 image has Outlook 2010 and not Notes on it. So victory! At least for awhile.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    our new Win 7

    has Outlook, *not* Notes. So win!

    At least for awhile.



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    2) I work with a lot of (seemingly) amnesiac co-workers. This means I pretty regularly have to prove to them that they actually told me something. "Where is that report? I said it was due on the 20th." "You said it was due on the 27th." "No I didn't!" "Here's your original email." Me: 1. Amnesiac: 0!

    Agreed that this is eminently necessary sometimes, but what does saving the email file have to do with this? You could have just hit up Search in your email client (though I expect Lotus' search to be broken). I assume it's related to:

    @blakeyrat said:

    3) When I get emails relevant to a specific project, a project a half-dozen people might work on through its lifetime, I just drag&drop them into the project's folder on the network drive. Sure, we'd be better off using something like Basecamp or a Wiki, but this is how we do our work at the moment.

    Consolidation instead of spreading shit around. I can totally get behind that. +1.

     

    At my company all email has a 90 day lifespan (and is automatically deleted) unless you move it to a specific retention folder (1 year or 3 year retention). And then it is automatically purged at the end of those timeframes within those folders. But since we're required by law to retain internal and external correspondence for up to 7 years after the completion of a project we're required to save project related emails in the project folder on a shared network drive. This alone drove a stake through the heart of IBM's push to try to get us to adopt Notes last year when they were trying to sell higher management more "features" to our existing Portal, ClearCase and other IBM products that we use. As soon as it came out that there is no drag and drop feature for messages in Lotus Notes they stopped considering it.

    Now if they would just realize hw f'd up ClearCase it would be a good start to the year.



  • @sabbott64 said:

    At my company all email has a 90 day lifespan (and is automatically deleted) unless you move it to a specific retention folder (1 year or 3 year retention).

    I've been in an organisation like that. Why? Why TF do they do that? I've asked, didn't get a coherent response and gave up (in the view of more important WTFs). But it would piss me off on a weekly basis.

    And don't give me that crap about saving disk space. Come on, seriously.


  • Garbage Person

     The 'why' is simple - it's there to cover up questionable activities by one or more executives. They can just 'neglect' to move the evidence to retention folders. The coverstory is disk space.



  • @b-redeker said:

    @sabbott64 said:

    At my company all email has a 90 day lifespan (and is automatically deleted) unless you move it to a specific retention folder (1 year or 3 year retention).

    I've been in an organisation like that. Why? Why TF do they do that? I've asked, didn't get a coherent response and gave up (in the view of more important WTFs). But it would piss me off on a weekly basis.

    And don't give me that crap about saving disk space. Come on, seriously.

    A client of mine once got bitten by not doing this.  They were a county government with an email retention policy of "Retain email server backups tapes for seven years".  A mayor was involved in some sort of controversy and a freedom of information request was filed for his email correspondance with one individual over his entire four year term.  In order to satisfy this request, they had to buy a spare server and hire an IT company to restore each of 48 backup tapes and extract the relevant email for that month.  The final cost was about $170,000.  Their policy is now similar to the stated policy.  The idea behind email retention is not to keep email, it is to keep it for exactly as long as you are required to and provably delete it as soon as it is legal to do so.


  • @Jaime said:

      The idea behind email retention

    I'm all for email retention. My rant was against deleting email after 90 days, which is dumb, unnecessary, annoying, and dumb. Also, dumb.

    One other beautiful WTF from the same (government organisation). The above policy was instated by the "architecture team", which also had decreed that no Java applications could be installed on any server. Which soon proved to be impossible, as their internal customers needed all kinds of 3rd party apps, and sometimes, these were based on Java.  So when I asked what exactly their beef was with Java, they said: Java is unsafe. It has buffer overruns and things.



  • @b-redeker said:

    @Jaime said:

      The idea behind email retention

    I'm all for email retention. My rant was against deleting email after 90 days, which is dumb, unnecessary, annoying, and dumb. Also, dumb.

    Then you missed my point.  Retention isn't about keeping things indefinitely, it's about deleting them as soon as it is legal to do so.  The 90 day rule is to make sure that everything is categorized or deleted.


  • @Jaime said:

    The 90 day rule is to make sure that everything is categorized or deleted.

    Which never works unless you invest an inordinate amount of time in it.


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