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Would something like this help?
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I specialsed in Notes/Domino and it still does stuff that Outlook/Exchange struggles with:
2FA out of the box - web access aside you need a physical ID file (public/private key store). Your "password" is actually a decryption key for the higher level keys used for server authentication.
Malfiles are literally that. Individual files.
Replication - Mailfiles can be repiclicated server-server or server-laptop/PC just by creating a replica of the database.
Clustering - Two or more servers with the same mailfile in a cluster, the client will automatically switch to the another server in seconds then revert to the primary when it's back.
Encryption - Encrypting your local replica takes minutes and is invisible, functionally, so long as you have your ID file.
Offline working - You can switch your "Location" to Local and carry on working offline. Any sent mails are held in an Outbox and sent when you next connect. Along with Read tags, deletions and folder moves in the mailfile.
Since the mailfile is just a Notes database with a particular design you can add custom Views to it to show the data (mails) with any fields/order you like (eg in a multinational you could group them by location/dept of sender).
Full text search or use an inbuilt search builder to specify boolian search terms (eg Sender=Bloggs AND Contains="ACME".
I could carry on but try doing most of that stuff with Outlook/Exchange without non-trivial effort.
I'll allow the client interface was a bit clunky - it originally being a database system with email bolted on but I maintain, as above, functionally superior.
You ever tried recovering a ballrocked Exchange messagestore? Been a few years so it may have improved but still...
Heck yeah!
Recovering a user's email file from a set date and time in Exchange? Recover the entire mail store database from around the time you need it to a dedicated offline Exchange server (or very carefully to an online one) then use Powershell tools to extract a .PST file of the user's mailbox.
Recovering a user's email file from a set date and time in Domino? Recover a single database file SPECIFIC TO THE USER that you want from the backup taken on the required date and time, then open it in your Notes client with an Admin ID.
And Notes Client v15 can open a standalone Notes Client V1 database file. That's 32 years' difference.
(of course, far more backup and storage is required to do this - but you want the benefits of simplicity, you have to pay the piper!)
Gentlemen - thankyou for your honest and accurate comments on Lotus Notes, and thanks for these Kettle chats.
I consider myself a Notes "tragic", in that while I was aware of and agree with everything you said about its downsides, to me it's still the best software system ever developed.
It is so much more than mail, and so much more than workflow - it is a replicated, distributed, application and database system that can work in a single office or scale and work at a global level.
The first time I saw it - 1991 - I remember the presenter being ridiculed by the audience. Looking back though, I think that this was because even the presenter from Lotus didn't really know what it was all about and what it could do.
The following year, I started using Notes 2.0 on Windows 3.11 with OS/2 server backends (at one of the big five, er, big four firms) and have used it ever since.
To me, it's a tool that with some effort can fit to a business, rather than other tools that seem to require that the business fit to the tool.
It's good that HCL are still developing it - there are many big companies that are using it at a national or global level - though their support for anyone other than a global organisation leaves a little to be desired. It took me two years to get quote from them for a Domino upgrade for a small business that I support, and in the end I decided against the upgrade because their existing system was still working perfectly well..
...and that system was coded and deployed in 1996 and still running on Notes/Domino 4.5 on an isolated Windows 2000 server instance.
it is a replicated, distributed, application and database system that can work in a single office or scale and work at a global level.
I guess for a lot of sites, that's just feature bloat.
My wife's employer transitioned from Exchange to Notes -- and that went so well that they transitioned back to Exchange again. They moved to Google 18 months later, which wasn't as good as Exchange, but with the extra 2.5 years had improved enough to be competitive (was fairly new at the time).
Once upon a time, I worked for a large multinational. I went on some internal Lotus Notes training. When I got back to my cube I did some research and found quite a few potentially useful "databases". Then I found that every single one of these useful resources had a different administrator, and each administrator enforced completely different user access rules. So:
- lots of different database names
- every administrator wanting to know who I was and why I wanted access
- every one requiring its own password for access
Maybe there was (is?) a better way to implement and support Notes in a large multinational....anyway....I gave up.
P.S. I'll keep my rant about Sharepoint for another day!
quote: Icon because without realising it I've become an old git.
You are amongst friends. A substantial chunk of El Reg's UK readership started out on 8-bit machines and are now old gits, myself included.
We know the value of saving those extra bytes. Would love to welcome an intake of computer science students on Day 1 with an intro to Z80 assembler.
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