HCL proves Lotus Notes will never die by showing off beta of lucky Domino 14.0 HCL Domino, the product that started life last millennium as Lotus Notes, will soon reach its 14th version. It’s a major upgrade that rebuilds the code’s core, changes the compilers that can work with the suite (VS 2023 will be an option), and the supported Java version jumps from 1.8 to 17 which will mean apps need to be …
But Microsoft’s Exchange came to dominate, in part because it focussed on email and calendaring while Notes/Domino was pitched as an environment in which to build and run messaging-centric apps
It was also the peak of FUD at Microsoft which saw Microsoft squash many other software companies through dubious practises.
I don't think that's fair. Lotus Notes is horrible to use and Outlook is rather pleasant to use. Usability matters a LOT for software that everyone needs to interact with day in day out. Notes has a very thin veneer of modernity but scratch it just slightly and you're facing arcane, inscrutable, incomprehensible dialogs that haven't changed much in the last 30 years. That is not to say Microsoft's offerings are perfect and I find Sharepoint and Teams can be extremely trying at times, but nothing on the magnitude of using Notes & Domino. I'm just thankful that our company got rid of it after rebuilding infrastructure after a ransomware attack a blessing in disguise IMO.
What you said. I had the misfortune of having to use Notes when I was blue. It was pretty infuriating. I never understood how someone could send me a link to a Notes database, that didn't work, unless I also added a 'connection document' into my contacts. It just seemed poorly implemented.
My company tuped us to big blue, and we knew we were going to "go back" to Notes for email due to that. Was excited at first to see what they had done to the various templates, specifically mail as we had customised the shit out of ours and wanted to see what they, as the owners of the product had done.
Big Blue had left it as OOB - absolute crap.
I applied our template to my mail file as did everyone in my team which made is useful and almost Outlookish
I am not going to go down some of the problems we had with migration and that none of their support teams had a clue and refused to listen to us when we told them the problem and soluition (frequent, and in each case, when they did fix it, it was what we said)
That was around the time (2005) I left GSK, moving to Notes wasnt the straw that broke the camels back, but there were quite a few with it making up a bale.
I do recall one lab worker being all excited over moving to Notes having used it before, singing its praises to her colleagues & on receipt it was OMG this is awful, how have they broken it this badly.
A university I was associated with wanted to get rid of Exchange on ideological grounds, so they went to Notes. That was so awful that they reverted to Exchange after 6 months. It wasn't because they wanted to stay with Exchange: after another year they switched to Gmail, which, while it wasn't as good as Exchange, had improved enough by that stage to be a valid competitor.
Quite. A former employer had a Notes setup (either r7 or r8, I forget exactly), and as much as I like to rage against MS for the way their current UI concepts can be rather user-hostile, I do need to remind myself from time to time that things could be a whole lot worse for us if they ever decided to take inspiration from the way Notes did things back then.
The main thing that won Microsoft a lot of migrations was integration, especially with AD but also to a lesser extent with Office. They used that to claim a lower TCO.
The Office integrations were merely niceties in Outlook, like re-using Word for email editing so it was a little more familiar, and having a few Send To type options in Office applications.
Integration with Active Directory was always touted as a significant lowering of TCO. And to some extent it was - by comparison Notes had ID files to distribute, and although IBM did fix that with the ID Vault it didn't arrive until version 7(?). By that time most companies had made their own arrangements, so it was a bit too little too late.
I've met plenty of people who have "managed an email system" on their CV because they created and deleted mailboxes on Exchange. They know nothing about mail routing, or the SMTP protocol, or email headers. They wouldn't know what SPF was if it tap danced on top of a piano whilst singing "SPF is here again" and waving a sign that says "I am SPF", but that AD integration is all they need to claim being an email administrator.
I can certainly make an argument that the day to day TCO of Exchange Server is lower than Lotus Notes. However, I also know what the cost of doing an upgrade for each is, and whilst Notes is easy to upgrade - it's a trivial install over the top of the existing server software, then a rollout of new mail templates at your leisure - Exchange Server is horrifically expensive to upgrade
You have to specify and purchase new hardware, and deploy it. Microsoft has almost always changed something in the storage layer that means research and training, and you effectively end up building a new infrastructure and then migrating your mailboxes and applications to use that infrastructure. This requires more knowledge than just creating/deleting mailboxes, so often organisations are ill equipped for the project.
You can upgrade to the latest version of Notes in an afternoon. Exchange will take you many, many months. So overall I'd say that the TCO is probably about the same, but it's distributed very differently for each product. Notes has a consistent but slightly higher TCO with an occasional mild increase for upgrades, whereas Exchange has a slightly lower TCO with mountainous increases at the start/end of each product lifecycle.
(This is why most on-prem Exchange instances are ancient, and why so many people are happy to move to O365 - why not let Microsoft do the mountaineering for you?)
Integration with AD, and its lower day to day TCO, were a definite factor. Combined with the FUD, it's what got Exchange into its dominant position.
Try to restore a Mailbox from exchange, compared the an NSF from domino (where the user can access the current one and original one at the same time)
When I used to do Notes and Exchange work, I always though Notes backend was far superior. It was the front end that let it down
End user issues are rarely if ever included in TCO.
I wouldn't necessarily jump at the opporunity to go back to Notes, even though I miss having tabs and a couple of other features. But then again I just returned from 2 weeks off, and spent almost 3 hours watching my laptop crawl as Outlook indexed 11,000 messages. Fortunately, I could use webmail in the interim. Unfortunately, each change I made simply meant more indexing queued up on Outlook...
There is no perfect mail client. It doesn't exist - never has, never will.
My experience is that it doesn't matter if enterprise software is a fucking nightmare because the people who sign off on it are not the ones who use it. They get the pressure sales treatment and get worn down by the carrot and stick and then everyone else suffers. Then it's too late for anyone else to say anything. Most enterprise software is like this. The best thing a company can do for its own wellbeing is NOT commit to any platform, hire some people who know what they're doing and trust them.
Updating recent versions of Exchange isn't so bad.
Install Exchange on a new server, add it to the same forrest as the existing exchange, and migrate the mailboxes in batches from the old server to the new one. If you connect to the wrong server, it will act as a proxy for the correct one.
Also, given that pretty much everything runs on virtual machines these days, a new server doesn't necessarily mean new hardware, and new hardware doesn't necessarily mean a re-install.
(puts on Exchange Admin hat)
Indeed; that and the almost monthly "WHOOPSIE WE FOUND ANOTHER CVEE 12.0* ZERO-DAY THAT'S BEING ACTIVELY EXPLOITED" notifications are the straw that broke my back. Especially when it occurs while I'm crotch-deep in a super critical infrastructure project and have to drop everything in order to slap on either a band-aid patch, or apply some hastily written www filtering rules that may or may not fix the problem to all the servers in the farm....
At this point, I welcome our Office2954 overlords. This way, all I have to say is "Yes, we've let MS know that our tenant is affected, we'll let you know when they fix it."
* Yes, I know the scale only goes to 10.0. Cope. :D
"I can certainly make an argument that the day to day TCO of Exchange Server is lower than Lotus Notes"
Maybe - but only in the context of an email platform. Messaging is only one of the services it provides - at a high level, it's also is an authentication server, application server and web server. Yes I know you can probably get the equivalents for free if needed, but they will never work as well together as Notes/Domino, with everything under the same hood, and all connected by the same coding frameworks.
Furthermore, when you get into the details, if you were to replicate the functionality of a Notes/Domino setup with MS equivalents, you'd be looking at AD, Exchange, Sharepoint, Teams, Power Apps, Power Automate, IIS... the list goes on. Not sure if the TCO of that lot would be lower than Notes/Domino!
In fact these days, the messaging component is rarely used now - Domino's mainly used is as an application/web server.
Having been involved with Exchange since Beta 1, the focus was to build an Enterprise grade messaging system. Not a replicating database with email as an app. Connectors as bolt-on's (think x.400 was Honeywell code originally).
The market decided and the shift to Exchange was brisk, driven allot by bad share filesystem email products including MS Mail (boy do I have war stories about that product).. we needed something allot better.
Where Notes has excelled was in developing apps, and I lost count the number of engagements I got called into trying to migrate them to SharePoint, only to disappoint as the app needed to be redeveloped its no wonder its still has legs.
Putting the hype to one side, a good decision was the support of x.400 and x.500.
It facilitated the integration of mail systems; on one project we managed, using EMS/Exchange as the hub, to integrate 27 proprietary email systems being used in one multinational in a matter of months. The only function we found missing was directory sync., which we solved through the use of some Rexx scripts (don’t remember why Rexx specifically was used although it probably had something to do with the IBM integrations).
Remember please - eMail was just ONE use case for Notes/Domino.
I'm going to hold up my hand and say that I've been using Notes, then Notes/Domino, for just on 30 years now, and for so many things other than eMail.
I've worked on global deployments (50,000+ seats) of Notes/Domino that absolutely rocked when it came to custom written applications. SharePoint and their ilk are not even in the ballpark for some of the things I've built and worked on.
But I've also worked on small deployments, hundreds or tens of users, and in the case of one client that I now support, three users.
Those three users run a custom written application that they currently put $50 million of transactions through per year. It's part CMS, part tracking system, part inventory, part contract management.
The app was written in 1996, and was deployed on a Notes/Domino 4.5 server running on NT4 Server.
After 25 years of use, the server failed due to an expired certificate. It took me less than half an hour to fix that problem, then move the server to a new O/S and restore the server to operational status, and that same Notes/Domino 4.5 server is now running on Windows 2019. And the staff use Notes 4.5 to access the database from their Windows 10 systems.
Now if only HCL would return my calls when I ask them for upgrade pricing...
@Someone_Unimportant
In 1996 I worked for a large accountancy and consulting firm with multiple offices across the USA. They sent me on a Lotus Notes course.
When I got back to my own cube, I looked for Lotus Notes "databases" containing collateral which might be useful for me and my team.
I found that the firm had HUNDREDS of Lotus Notes "databases" containing collateral on hundreds of useful topics........
.......but then I found that each "database" had a different administrator............
.......and each administrator wanted me to set up different account and password.........
.......so I gave up!!!
Maybe the company policy was at fault, or maybe Lotus Notes configuration was at fault......but I never used Lotus Notes afterwards!
If that is true then its an incredibly poor setup*.
Access to Notes databases is based on group membership or name along with further "permissions" allocated in defined [Roles]
Your one password is tied to your cert and these days SSO does away with typing that as well.
*Only way I can think someone did this is by either letting have each department have a server to play with - no cross certification in place requiring swapping of IDs or the database designer deliberately setup some secondary authentication profile.
It would cost around $300 per year for 3 CCB (Domino Complete Collaborations for Business) entitlements e.g. per user. Everything is included, including as many Domino servers as you like on whatever hardware that you like (cloud/virtual or physical). You should be able to upgrade (not migrate) direct from 4.5 to N/D 12 or even 14 (as well as the OS of course).
I administered Notes/Domino for 15 years. No one in my team of 20 people wanted to move away from it. It wasn't awful to use - it was just different to the standard Windows interface which was effectively imposed by MS. But we as a technical team were overruled by our CTO - as far as I could see because he personally liked Outlook as an email client. I ran the migration project from Notes to Exchange for c. 30K people and as far as the email and calendaring side went we got it done in six months with relatively little disruption (although it was hard work and migrating people in e.g. Japan turned into a bit of a challenge because of character issues. I will never forget having to troubleshoot our migration server in Japan which involved setting up the Japanese language client in Outlook.)
However what no one considered at the time in spite of the fact that as the technical lead for the team I pointed out to them repeatedly - was that Domino was not just an email product. As a pharma company doing medical trials for drugs we were regulated by the FDA and we had thousands of databases with hundreds of different designs - many of which contained highly confidential data which was also medically important to the people taking part in the studies.
So guess what happened. The email went to Exchange. Without jumping through massively expensive hoops we couldn't move the databases. So they left the databases on Domino - and here comes the really funny/sad part - they never upgraded the Domino servers again so they went out of support.
By the time I left five years later - Domino was so hugely out of support that I doubt it could conceivably have been upgraded again.
I would guess that hackers who wanted to steal the massively valuable drug data we stored must have been delighted about that.
I'd say no.
Which no doubt sounds bad, but you're asking the database equivalent of "Does that submarine have ABS brakes?"
The Notes database is a document-oriented noSQL system that's specifically designed for working in distributed and often disconnected environments. So let's take each ACID element one by one...
Atomicity - I'll say Yes, providing you're on a server and the database is using transaction logging. If so then all writes are atomic, via the transaction logging. If you're using a local database or don't have transaction logging enabled then this is more debatable. (Transaction logging can be circular or archival, depending on your backup strategy.)
Consistency - Kinda. As a distributed NoSQL system Notes doesn't have relationships or foreign keys to care about. So the consistency being asked for was never offered by this database engine. Consistency is an application level concern, not a database level concern.
Isolation - Like Consistency, this is coming from a data viewpoint that isn't really part of the Notes database engine design. Isolation is hard to provide when a database might have upwards of 100 replicas across three continents, many of which are on laptops that are not currently connected to the network.
Durability - Absolutely. Not a problem here, if it's written it will stay written.
The issue with Consistency and Isolation is that Notes could only really offer that at the Document level - there are no tables or rows. The Document is a bit like a row, but that's not quite right as it still implies tables.
The Notes database engine was built to solve different issues, and that's sometimes why it's so hard to replace old Notes applications...
IBM kept Notes in being by including it with their enterprise license. I can't remember how many Notes/Domino migration projects I've planned and seen scrapped before completion. So long as HCL keep their license from being too onerous and allow backward compatibility then it should continue to have a long life.
Usual practice was to look at all the old "apps" on Notes, decide to move them so the licenses and (usually physical) hardware could be scrapped. Once any email and any data was moved there would be a few dozen Notes dbs holding a combination of UI design, business process workflow and unstructured data that no-one had documented requirements for and that were giving some business benefit but not a lot. Developers would say they could replicate it for maybe €15K and 2-3 months elapsed per application (it could be less, it really didn't matter what the actual numbers were) and the business case would collapse since it cost less than a few grand a year to keep. At best there'd be a P2V migration to let the servers be scrapped and a remote desktop accessing an isolated VLAN to reduce security risks.
Wait what, I admit I am from the version 6-9 era but everything could be access in the web client that was in the admin client.
When did that change or have they just made it clearer as I must admit until I got training I didn't know myself.
You just need to know which .nsf file was needed to launch or what .ini file to amend
The web admin interface (webadmin.nsf) was still there and fully documented in version 11.0.1:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220127062108/https://help.hcltechsw.com/domino/11.0.0/admn_thewebadministrator_c.html
https://help.hcltechsw.com/domino/11.0.1/admin/admn_thedominoadministrator_c.html
Just quietly disappeared with no mention at all in 12.0.1:
https://help.hcltechsw.com/domino/12.0.0/admin/admn_thedominoadministrator_c.html
That said, the webadmin still operated under 12.x (if you already had it) but not quite everything worked after upgrading. You ended up getting saddled with the 2GB Notes client installer that has the admin software somewhere in it.
Notes was horrid then and it's probably horrid now. We had it enforced on us around 1999 or so, and a staff revolt saw it replaced with Exchange/Outlook sometime around 2004 I think. I'm genuinely amazed t's even still alive, it should be flogged to the software-graveyard company Infor or simply buried and forgotten forever.
Memories, memories ... I set up and administered a Lotus Notes server in the early/mid 1990's. My main job was Finance Manager, so Lotus Notes admin was just a hobby.
A bit later, Lotus Notes was made THE standard of the multinational company and "my server" was moved to the IT department.
Contrary to most of commenters, I liked Lotus Notes, and was running it on OS/2 (more nostalgia). I never liked Microsoft or any of their products. Nowadays, as retiree, I'm in the Apple ecosystem spiced with some Linux and Raspberry Pi.
Wait, what? Bloated Goats still alive?
Why not just stick to 64-bit everything? This will ensure that AV do get their thing done without fuss.
Besides, trying to run Windows10/11 on a 32-bit platform is asking for trouble... in our experience Windows10/11 requires 8Gb RAM as a minimum to function properly after all the latest updates have been shoved down Windows' throat.
Then there's Office365 requiring its own share of RAM.
I can still remember the halcyon days of WindowsNT running on 32MB RAM... or of OS/2 Warp running purdy on 8Gb RAM...
That was the other fun thing, lack of resources & having to delete user profiles & folders (Oldest ones) on shared PC's in production areas as 4Gb HDD's rapidly ran out of space with 60 - 100 user profiles that hardly took up any space with Outlook/Exchange filled up rapidly with Bloatus.
Tried suggesting they limited each shift member to use one PC from the 4 available in each of the production area control room's, with all the success rate of a snowballs survival in hell.
I'm pretty astonished at the Oulook love here.
Outlook is by a very long distance the worst email client ever devised, unless you consider interoperability with other Microsoft systems to be the arbiter.
Notes takes a -- quite distant -- second place, but then it was never designed to be (primarily) an email client. Nevertheless it at least it had some notion of then-current conventions and standards. Things like properly quoting replies, whereas Outlook foisted entirely non-standard, non-conventional proprietary cc:Mail defaults on to the internet.
RTF, WTF?
Anyone else remember the e-turd named winmail.dat?
Notes was great for those applications that needed it.
No one needs Outlook.
-A.
Outlook is pretty crap ( especially the web interface ) but compared with notes eMail client it looks really good.
Part of the problem with Notes is that when you complained about the eMail client all you got was the “it’s a database” mantra and all issues were ignored by the dev team.
Given that eMail was the most used notes “application” the contempt for end users was shocking. Any application that got a dedicated section in the “user interface hall of shame” should have sat up and taken note especially as Notes was the only one. But the arrogant team just ignored all criticism and pointed out what a great database it was.
>> Outlook is by a very long distance the worst email client ever devised, unless you consider interoperability with other Microsoft systems to be the arbiter.
Well, Outlook is to email what Teams is to messaging - both apps look nice but are horrible at what they do, regularly failing even at the most basic functions while exhibiting sporadic bugs and failures as the cherry on top.
But then, so do most of the various MS365 online services (of which critical parts tend to fail almost every other day).
But clearly that's what most businesses want, so I'm not feeling particularly sorry for businesses being held at gunpoint by Microsoft while constantly increasing the subscription ransom for it's wobbly software stack built on quicksand.
I've used a lot of systems over my long computing career but never one as versatile as HCL Domino. I welcome this news as yet another area in which Domino is embracing open standards and becoming even more transformative and versatile. Version 12 has done some amazing things for us and I can see a lot more potential in version 14.
No software is perfect and I personally don't like the notes mail client. Of course, I hate the outlook one too. My preferred standard is Gmail but I use all three. Whenever possible I use web versions rather than thick clients. Mail clients don't get me excited but exposing my NoSQL data via APIs and standard languages on the latest platforms while enjoying the unparalleled out of the box security provided by Domino certainly does. Bring it on HCL.
As for your reporting; If you persist in calling the software Lotus, I'm going to have to ask you to refer to Microsoft's offering as hotmail. It was rebranded decades ago, so using old names doesn't sway opinions, it just preaches to the closed minded "already converted" and shows a lot of ignorance. There is much more out there than the off-the-shelf Microsoft Office environment.
>> As for your reporting; If you persist in calling the software Lotus, I'm going to have to ask you to refer to Microsoft's offering as hotmail. It was rebranded decades ago, so using old names doesn't sway opinions, it just preaches to the closed minded "already converted" and shows a lot of ignorance.
So you're saying that HCL Notes is aimed at consumers then, not businesses? Because Hotmail certainly was and there has never been any Hotmail branded product aimed at businesses (that's Office 365 which was later rebranded to Microsoft 365; and yes, people sometimes still call the product "Office 365" even though that branding is obsolete).
Besides, Hotmail was only rebranded to Outlook.com in 2012 which is 11 years, not "decades" (plural).
Just saying since mentioned "showing ignorance" in your post...
HCL has demonstrated that Lotus Notes is far from dying by showcasing the beta version of Domino 14.0. This release proves HCL's commitment to the ongoing development and enhancement of the Lotus Notes platform. With its latest features and improvements, Domino 14.0 offers a modern and robust collaboration and application development environment. It includes enhancements to security, usability, scalability, and integration capabilities, ensuring that Lotus Notes remains a viable and relevant solution for organizations. The beta release of Domino 14.0 signifies HCL's dedication to supporting and advancing the platform, providing assurance to existing Lotus Notes users and demonstrating its ongoing potential in the industry.
HCL has demonstrated that Lotus Notes is far from dying by showcasing the beta version of Domino 14.0. This release proves HCL's commitment to the ongoing development and enhancement of the Lotus Notes platform. With its latest features and improvements, Domino 14.0 offers a modern and robust collaboration and application development environment. It includes enhancements to security, usability, scalability, and integration capabilities, ensuring that Lotus Notes remains a viable and relevant solution for organizations. The beta release of Domino 14.0 signifies HCL's dedication to supporting and advancing the platform, providing assurance to existing Lotus Notes users and demonstrating its ongoing potential in the industry.
The tone and content of this article was very disappointing. While you may have been aiming for humor (sarcasm?) IMHO you totally missed the mark. I suspect you haven't used or even seen Domino in many years, if ever, thus making your criticism and apparent disdain totally unfounded and, frankly, irrelevant.
While no software product is perfect, and all can be criticized for some fault, it is quite a different item to disparage a product as if it were unworthy of any consideration. Domino was designed to be a workflow application development platform, document storage, email, etc. It was not attempting to be everything to everyone (not a word processor, not a spreadsheet, etc.) rather to be a robust email and business application development platform. Email is naturally a part of the workflow design as that is the primary form of communication to the business user. Expecting Notes/Domino to be as simple and focused as Exchange Server is simply not a fair assessment of the products. Both serve a purpose. Notes/Domino was designed to provide a broader range of capability and delivers that elegantly and reliably. With the innovation brought by HCL we have seen a greatly improved product and new feature/function has been delivered rapidly. To dismiss Notes/Domino simply based on ancient history is a mistake.
I last used Notes around 2008. I am surprised the genuine pros and cons aren't ever mentioned when people discuss it. It's this simple:
Pro: it's dead easy to build powerful and functionally rich applications on it. Lotus used to claim you could build applications 6x faster than on other platforms. They weren't exaggerating! I really miss being able to build such good applications so easily. There was calendar integration as well: I built applications to tell people who was on holiday, and when a rep visited a customer, they would automatically be sent a report on that customer's sales history by product category.
Con: you have to pay for each client - and nearly all employees are going to need a client. THIS is what people didn't like: people wanted web applications, where the client was a free web browser. Notes had a web interface - but it was much more difficult to build for, and wasn't the same as, the Notes client.
That's almost everything anyone ever needs to know about Notes. There are products today that make it easy to build small applications (Notion, Smartsuite (the new "Smartsuite" - not Lotus SmartSuite, the dead MS Office competitor) etc), but none of them have managed to get as big as Notes was. People who have never used a product like Notes simply cannot understand the value of being able to make applications so easily: I think it has to be experienced. Everybody thinks that building apps requires HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Web service calls to a back end, microservices set up, and that all that has to be amended when changes are needed. Those of us who have been Notes developers KNOW it doesn't have to be that way. Everyone in a company that needs an application can have one - and can have it amended when needed!
I am a Notes/Domino lover and developer since version 3 until yesterday (>30 years). Yes, Domino is a fantastic and unique software product. But HCL's latest move could kill it. You can no longer order permanent licenses, nor renew your support contracts. Now you have to pay a license fee for *every* internal user (CCB, about $20/month) and for *any* external web user (CCX, about $2/month) who must write or edit their own work on the platform. Users who only read or write once and don't edit are *free*. How the hell should a company pay a monthly license for *all* possible external users of its systems? How do you implement this on publicly accessible websites or apps? There used to be some (complicated, yes) licenses from IBM that allowed you to license an underpowered but enought server with unlimited possible web users.
They also have plans to install new license managers and to increase prices and requirements in the coming years, this is clear. If you don't pay every year, your application dies. And it is already known that there is no way to migrate applications, because there is nothing like it. Who is going to hire and develop applications with this system?
HCL Notes is a Horror. My company forces me to use it and I hate every second i have to make a click to this pond of sh*t. 2024 and this software belongs to the top10 worse produced software of all times.Nothing is intuitive, navigation is cascaded into a unseen number of irrelevant information. you can not search properly, you can not trust that the software does what it should do, it is like someone with really bad skills wanted to produce something and it just went out of control. if you are considering even for a minute to buy or use this product - trust me - you are going to regret it so much.
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