Report says IBM is switching from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony | Hacker News Reader

Report says IBM is switching from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony

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15 pointsjacquesm15 comments

"330,000 employees have already switched"? I think they mean 330,000 employees have already had Symphony installed on their machines. While internal teams may eventually switch tools to conform with some corporate standard the external teams will always use whatever is most appropriate for dealing with their customers. Customers may not care if email comes from Lotus Notes but they expect documents to be .doc, .xls, .ppt, .mpp, etc.

Not really surprising since I believe IBM already uses Lotus Notes for email. Office is just the next logical step.

Anecdotally I haven't heard very good things about Lotus Notes though. (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=hate+lotus) So I wish all IBMers the best of luck with the transition.

Snarky comments: "Lotus Notes is what the web would look like if it were design by committee."

Pithy comments: Notes Mail and Calendar consistently fails at the tasks of notifying you when you have new mail or a scheduled meeting, two essential tasks for mail and calendar software.

The last time I developed for it the back end pretended to be a database, but it is not relational and does not allow arbitrary queries. It also claims to support HTML in email and other documents, but its rendering was bizarre and arbitrary, and its support for CSS was almost non-existent.

A former housemate started a relationship with a cute girl. Of course, when non-geeks are around conversation must veer wildly away from anything in the field. But he said that she might be a bit geeky herself.

Conversation turned towards computing when she was over a bit later on, and I let it go there. Said housemate and I were having an enormous bitch about Lotus Notes from shared work experience. She wore on a sour expression, and I thought my instincts had been shown right.

But then it came out that she was a self-taught Domino developer, and had a web application with tens of thousands of users hosted off it, built on Domino - something she'd just done as a hobby.

Now what are the odds of that?

Not every database needs to be relational. Some applications, such as e-mail and groupware, are better suited to the document database built in to Domino. If you want to run arbitrary queries that can be done easily using the full-text query language, or with the free NotesSQL add-on.

You can try Lotus Notes/Domino for free and see for yourself. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/notesanddomino/testdriv... Most of the complaints come from those who have only used older versions (which did have poor usability), or companies where incompetent sysadmins didn't set it up correctly.

I can't speak to the competence of my employer's sysadmins, but Lotus Notes, as an email client and calendaring system, is pure dogshit. I've read justifications of Notes as being some kind of architecture-astronauty groupware application platform, but my company has just about zero useful applications for it, and in the meantime, the fucking thing drags down our email like none other.

What specific problems have you had with it? I'm part of IBM's design partner program, and they actually do take feedback from us seriously.

Canonical URL: http://www.ihatelotusnotes.com/

Because the slick design (say the artistic name Symphony), I've just tryed it on my Ubuntu Jaunty. Being honest, it failed to meet my expectations. Besides it's built on OpenOffice, it works no better than OO, or even worse. Now I just use OO, letting Symphony sit there quietly.

Time for them to eat their own dog-food?

Lotus Symphony is even slower than Lotus Notes on my machine (Lenovo T61) and neither of them startup in less than 10 seconds. That's a deal breaker right there. But at least it LOOKS (superficially) better than Lotus Word Pro which they preinstalled on my machine. I still use that though because Lotus Word Pro takes about 2 seconds to start up. Way better.

This isn't anything new. IBM has been gradually increasing Symphony use for a couple years now. The whole Symphony suite is included as part of the Lotus Notes e-mail and groupware client application.

yeah, and they are already forcing symphony 1.3 onto our computers via auto-update. the team I'm on still uses office religiously though.

How heavy handed will they be? Are you concerned that they'll interfere with your productivity or is this more of a small incremental step?

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