Groupware is not dead! HCL drops second beta of Notes/Domino version 12 and goes all low-code and cloudy

India’s HCL, the new owner of groupware combo Notes/Domino, continues to evolve the products for the faithful and maybe, just maybe, the occasional new buyer. The Register this week tuned into a webinar in which the company revealed that Beta 2 of Notes/Domino 12 wold be released this week. A third beta is due in late March …

[RM Myers]

Notes - a blast from the past,

when "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was the maxim by which IT senior management lived at my former employer. I wasted many an hour in Notes reading unimportant emails from management and colleagues. It is where I first learned to hate the ability to create groups of users and blast everything to everybody, whether it affected them or not.

Lotus Notes obviously wasn't the only email system with the ability to bring productivity to a grinding halt, but it is the one I was subjected to in my daily endeavor to actually get something done.

[Blackjack]

Re: Notes - a blast from the past,

What was the one that came by default on Windows 98/SE? Because I used that one before moving to Thunderbird.

Nowadays I use a web browser.

[IGotOut]

Re: Notes - a blast from the past,

No. Notes was a corporate thing.

You may be thinking of Lotus 123.

[katrinab]

Re: Notes - a blast from the past,

No that was Outlook Express.

[Nick Ryan]

Re: Notes - a blast from the past,

What product are we talking about? One which:

• Has a temprary closed walled garden ecosystem, compatible with nothing else
• Features an ever changing inconsistent user interface that succeeds only in annoying users.
• Adheres to no known standards whatsoever.
• Where the backend is so unmanageable that proper support, backup and recovery is impossible.

Are we talking about Microsoft Teams or Notes/Domino?

[Pascal Monett]

Teams, obviously

Notes has a very consistent UI, which is unique to itself, hasn't changed in almost two decades and mightily annoys many people.

Its backend, however, is a breeze for backup administrators.

[theblackhand]

Re: Teams, obviously

Consistently the worst may give the impression that is unchanging (particularly if you used competitors and just wished it would do X "that" way - you could never accuse Notes of being just another clone...) there were changes.

Honest - maybe even some that were positive. Oh...those were bugs. Ignore me.

[MyffyW]

Re: Notes - a blast from the past,

A consumer goods company, 1995: I a neophyte sysadmin first dipping my toes into the warm waters of Lotus Notes and loving the community of fellow sysadmins it put me in touch with. Message threads that let you vent and rant and generally rail against the world.

I suppose Lotus Notes was my preparation for becoming the confident commentard I am today. Paris, because we're all worth it.

[Mr Dogshit]

God

I feel ill just thinking about it.

[oiseau]

Precedent

26 years after IBM paid Lotus $3.25bn, the Notes email client might be getting useful.

Hmm ...

... might be ...?

It's been a while so my memory is a bit hazy.

But ...

Did IBM's Gerstner ever get to write off $2.6bn from that acquisition and then sue Lotus' Manzi?

I do recall reading that Manzi stayed on with his people at IBM.

O.

[Howard Sway]

How do we salvage this monolithic old dinosaur product we paid way too much for and everyone hates?

Run it in the cloud!

[WallMeerkat]

Notes

I remember the only time I had to use Notes was when the startup I was at was borged by big blue.

This was around 2010 and the UI looked like a Windows 3.1 application. Retro.

If I recall the keyboard shortcuts were completely different from exchange/thunderbird that I had used previously.

[Korev]

Re: Notes

I remember trying to get the email client to refresh by using F5 (which is refresh in most places) and it sodding locking Notes

Yes, from orbit -->

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder if "everyone@" , "users@" and "all@" still work for people on notes domains?

[Outski]

Only if the admin totally fucked up the mail security

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Can I nominate Big Blue did well with the portfolio, but Microsoft did better with Exchange for the understatement of the week award?

[ssharwood]

Go nuts

[Krassi]

Way back , last century , my workplace used Lotus products , cc:mail, 1-2-3, Approach, ami-pro and then Notes. I found Notes pretty good for the sharing , group-working stuff. Sure, it wasn't entirely stable, but in those days Windows was more likely to fall over than any of the applications , so Notes didn't seem that bad by comparison. Overall , it was much better designed at the user interface end than anything I've come across in Sharepoint ever.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Sharepoint's user interface was designed?

I assumed is was done by a less than infinite number of monkeys...

[IGotOut]

No an infinite amount of Monkeys did work on Sharepoint. Unfortunately, the one that created the good one got "Restructed in a holistic business realignment"

[Werner Heisenberg]

You can claim any software is good...

...by comparing it to SharePoint. That is a very low bar indeed.

I shudder at the memory of the Notes development environment. LotusScript was actually a licensed version of Visual Basic for Applications, but for $reasons it was renamed and supplied with an even worse IDE (not sure how they managed that). About the only thing it was good for was agents - I recall writing one that ran on incoming mail and silently unset the "read receipt" field. Oh, how I used to chuckle at reading "critical" emails and then pretending I never received them.

Then we moved to Outlook and grew up.

[rcw88]

To thread or not to thread

I used Notes after it had been adopted widely across Generous Motors in the early 90's. It worked, but the single thing that Notes could do then, that Outlook still cannot do properly is Multi threading - it could send and receive emails whilst you were doing other things. In comparison Microsoft Mail on WfWG clients was horrendous, and IMHO Outlook is still abysmal at properly multithreading tasks. Good to see it has a new home, maybe they will Open Source it?

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: To thread or not to thread

Outlook is very capable of sending emails while doing other things and has been for a very long time. Maybe you're thinking of Thunderbird, which still pops up a window indicating that it's sending mail.

[Death_Ninja]

Heavy is good. Heavy is reliable

Notes was always a bit clunky, totally refusing to accept Microsoft look and feel in any way whatsoever.

Once you got over that user shock, it was pretty good.

We swapped it out for Exchange after about two decades and in many ways its not as robust and predictable as Notes was.

The other thing with Notes was it was eye wateringly expensive and needed specialists to look after it. I guess very much an IBM product.

I don't think anyone would be bold enough to start with Notes now, but I'm glad to see someone has kept it alive.

[Pascal Monett]

Just watched the preview video from HCL

You can find it on YouTube here.

They've finally managed to make Notes browser-based. That is awesome.

Mail still has the same look. That is unfortunate.

But hey, Notes can now be completely browser-based. No more local client if you don't want one. And you can use it on a phone as well !

Can't deny it, HCL has put a lot of work in this version.

As a Notes developer, I can't wait to have V12 on my work laptop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Just watched the preview video from HCL

I remember my old workplace we migrated off Notes to O365, but our mail template for Notes was heavily customised and worked pretty well

We finally got Tupe'd to IBM and on their laptops we all got Notes back again. I was looking forward to seeing what they had done with the Mail template (in a way to show off what it could do), but, no, they used a stock template - no wonder they could not sell it as an email client

Soon put our old one on and shared it around the team.

Also found their support team were crap. A few of our colleagues had issues so we told them the problem, they didn't listen and few weeks later they "solved" it. When asked, they did what we said at the beginning

[IGotOut]

Been a long time.

But didn't Lotus Notes have that crazy, whacky idea of being able to remove the "Reply to All" option?

[AndyMulhearn]

Re: Been a long time.

That and the option to disable forwarding which was also handy.

I worked with Notes a lot in the 90s before it became better known as Domino and could never really understand the draw of Outlook/Exchange (still can’t really tbh but that’s another story) particularly as Notes was as much about building workflow apps as it was email.

[Roland6]

Re: Been a long time.

>could never really understand the draw of Outlook/Exchange

Hype and pressure...

Remember MS were behind (what a surprise not!), so resorted to FUD and putting pressure on big name customers to delay their email system consolidation and migration until they delivered Exchange (a year or so later than they originally said they would).

For one client, MS flew their top brass in to talk to them and gave them "inside track" status so they could contribute to the design.

Because people didn't really get their heads around groupware, MS were able to get people to perceive Notes as just an email system, and not as something bigger. Having seen off Notes, MS were able to take their time and finally deliver Sharepoint - their idea of groupware many years later...

[AndyMulhearn]

Re: Been a long time.

Yep, there was definitely FUD involved. And wasn’t one of the Microsoft mantras at the time “Windows isn’t done until 123 won’t run”?

[Captain Scarlet]

Dedicated desktop clients will be less important thanks to improved web design

Eh that's weird, in my opinion ever since Version 8 the web browser client especially for email was pretty good (Also removed the odd occurrence where you pressed to press Ctrl + Break when an agent went belly up in the NSF).

Was very useful when 9 came out, there was a huge jump in requirements and the web client on lower end machines ran far better.

[Kevin Johnston]

Re: Dedicated desktop clients will be less important thanks to improved web design

The big difference is that they are targetting all the existing databases out there which should now appear in a browser looking the same as if you opened it in the Notes client, without needing to re-code.

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: Dedicated desktop clients will be less important thanks to improved web design

I must be missing something, all our nsf applications and IBM's own nsf applications worked in a web browser and looked the same as within the client (Lotus Notes 5 and 6 I am sure it was for our nsf applications before they were migrated)

[Anonymous South African Coward]

Bloated Goats

Seems like it will never die...

[Fruit and Nutcase]

AIX

That HCL will deliver a version of Notes 12 for AIX speaks volumes about the user base the company feels it must serve.

IBM?