July 22, 2009 posted by David Hoff
Filed under Google Apps
Top 10 Reasons I Left Lotus Notes for Google Apps
For the last 10+ years, I’ve spent countless nights and weekends keeping Lotus Notes/Domino running at organizations of all sizes. In the process, I’ve gathered more certifications than can fit on a business card (CLS, CLP, PCLP…), but at the end of the day, ensuring that email is working 24/7 takes too much time and effort. For that reason, I’ve left Lotus for Google Apps with no regrets.
Here’s my Top 10 List of why I made the switch:
- No more emails with the red “X” replacing the actual image.
- No more weekends spent upgrading Lotus Notes servers.
- No more waiting for the AdminP guy/gal to do his/her work.
- Way too many fixes on Lotus Fix List databases.
- Killnotes.exe should be more of an attitude than a program.
- I never made the switch to Java, and neither did Lotus.
- I never was and never will be a fan of Quincy.
- A smart upgrade isn’t as smart as a no upgrade.
- Google’s 25GB inbox opens in less than 5 seconds.
- Google’s email search function actually works.
Have you already made the switch? Are you thinking about it? Do you have a better Top 10? Share your feedback in the comments section below!
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Let’s at least put this in the context of current versions:
1. The current version of Lotus Notes – 8.x – is fully compliant with HTML standards. The only reason you would see the red X is if you have image security enabled. I’m pretty sure Google email blocks most images by default and shows the red X.
2. If it takes an entire weekend to upgrade a Domino server, well, there is a good chance it just wasn’t being done correctly. One of our customers just upgraded 30+ servers to the most recent version of Domino in a week and mostly during production hours.
3. Not really sure what this means. AdminP is a completely automated set of processes. If you are waiting on anyone, it is likely because they’ve implemented solid enterprise security policies that prevent anyone with a web browser, ID and PW from accidentally deleting the CEO’s inbox.
4. Well, they are also adding features at a rate of multiple releases per year. I am curious how Google apps integrates with private cloud SAP implementations. It’s now a drop-in for Lotus Notes’ Eclipse framework.
5. Not relevant to current versions of Lotus Notes running on the Eclipse framework.
6. Actually, this is false, the Lotus Notes client runs on the Eclipse Framework and the Lotus Notes Designer client is the Eclipse RAD with support for legacy LotusScript. The product is Java at its core.
7. Not even sure what this means.
8. No features or ability to deliver sophisticated Composite Applications isn’t worth the savings…
9. Considering that employees spend 90%+ of their day in the inbox, this only matters once a day, and that is assuming you bother to close it when you leave at night. Considering how often my browser crashes or locks up in a day due to random website content, I would guess it would matter how fast it opens.
10. I am guessing that you are referring to full text indexing? I am not aware of any lack of capability to search your inbox when FTI is enabled on your mailfile.
Question – When I am forced to work offline, how to access a highly secured offline copy with my sensitive corporate information? If it’s just the offline service referenced in Google Labs, I am afraid we cannot even draw a fair comparison to the native capabilities of Lotus Notes.
I’d hate to be stuck on a 9 hour flight with a Beta Offline email product…
Quincy????
Thanks for your comments, Steve.
You’re right! If your organization is flush with the cash, time and the expertise it takes to constantly upgrade Lotus Notes to the latest version, perhaps Google isn’t a good fit. So, if you’re already running Lotus Notes 8.5 Fix Pack 1 and get a 99.99% uptime around the globe, I can understand why you wouldn’t be seeking an alternative. But for everyone else, Google Apps offers lower costs, incredible user satisfaction, and the countless benefits of a cloud infrastructure.
Saqib, the QNC.EXE program (often called “quincy”) is the default debugger program that ships with Domino. It’s often used for troubleshooting Lotus Domino hangs and crashes.
Perspective from a Notes end user who does web development:
1.) Building Notes on Eclipse is a client performance nightmare. Only someone who’s never used Eclipse extensively for development would make such a decision.
2.) Notes’ UI is antiquated, inconsistent and cluttered. Too many unnecessary and confusing preferences are directly available, while essential end user functions are buried.
3.) I shouldn’t need a separate program (killnotes.exe) to wrangle my mail client.
4.) NSF is so antiquated HTML 3.0 laughs at it.
Notes comes across as a product built to satisfy the fetishes of developers, not end users.
Google has some great apps, and there are lots reasons to want to choose them over any competing platform — but your list of 10 shows a profoundlack of awareness of recent efforts by Lotus.
1. No more emails with the red “X” replacing the actual image. — As of Notes 8.0, HTML mail is rendered by your OS’s native HTML rendering environment. The only time you see images withheld is if you’re not displaying them for security reasons. Google Mail has this EXACT same behavior. Instead of a red X, you get a tag that says [info] in blue.
2. No more weekends spent upgrading Lotus Notes servers. — They’re Lotus DOMINO servers and have been since R5.0. And yes, it’s true that they require care & feeding when you run in-house infrastructure, just like any other in-house infrastructure. Of course, if it takes you an entire weekend to upgrade your servers, you’re doing it wrong. But if you’d like the convenience of not having to worry about it, there are plenty of hosting vendors that will keep your infrastructure up to date for you. After all, it’s not like Google’s servers don’t get upgraded; it’s simply that you as a customer aren’t informed or involved when it’s happening.
3. No more waiting for the AdminP guy/gal to do his/her work. — Really? You still don’t have to wait for an administrator to manage new accounts, add & remove people from directory groups, and process name change requests? Who’s the gatekeeper on such changes, then? Google? How would they know your business process rules for, say, who should be allowed to read your quarterly sales report spreadsheets?
4. Way too many fixes on Lotus Fix List databases. — They’ve fixed too many bugs!? Would you prefer they don’t fix them? Or do you just not like the fact that they TELL you what they fixed? Do you seriously think that Google magically never has to fix bugs? Of course, a product that’s been deployed in global enterprises for over 20 years is probably going to have fixed a few more bugs than a product that just came out of beta two weeks ago.
5. Killnotes.exe should be more of an attitude than a program. — Cute pun. Also hasn’t been necessary since R7. More on that later…
6. I never made the switch to Java, and neither did Lotus. — I obviously can’t argue with whether you ever made the switch to Java, but the claim that Lotus hasn’t is absolutely ludicrous. The entire Notes 8 client is packaged INSIDE Eclipse. A Notes client has HUNDREDS of Java packages bundled with it. The Domino server has steadily marched forward in it’s embracing of Java as well, most recently culminating in the delivery of Xpages, which is a complete, integrated JSF framework built on top of the security, workflow and data-store engine of Domino. Just because you don’t know what a java.util.HashMap is doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t.
7. I never was and never will be a fan of Quincy. — Good, because Quincy hasn’t been used as the debugger since release 6, which shipped in 2002. If you want to complain about the debugger now, you have to talk about NSD.EXE.
8. A smart upgrade isn’t as smart as a no upgrade. — You alliteration gets in the way of a valid point: the overhead of maintaining a browser is much less than the overhead of maintaining a rich client platform. SmartUpgrade makes maintaining the RCP substantially easier, but it still involves more effort than maintaining a browser. Then again, Google doesn’t provide a rollout infrastructure for a single, consistent browser version to all your users. So you may have users on IE 6, 7 or 8, Firefox 3 or 3.5, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Konqueror; and every one of these is going to mean a different path on your help desk call. And all that means higher TCO.
9. Google’s 25GB inbox opens in less than 5 seconds. — So does my 25GB Domino inbox. Plus it does so when I’m at 30,000 feet flying across the Atlantic. Did you have a point?
10. Google’s email search function actually works. — This has to be the most absurd claim in the list. Notes has had full-text searching capabilities in email since VERSION 2, when Sergey Brin was still in high school! Since Notes 8, it ships with integration with Google Desktop; so if you don’t like the search capabilities, you can choose to use Google’s.
The previous commenter, pac, has at least offered some reasons to dislike Notes that show some recent experience. However maybe prior Lotus certifications you might have, clearly you didn’t keep them up to date.
I’m reminded of P.J. O’rourke’s response when CBS ran the fake story about George Bush’s service in the ANG. “Why would anybody make up bad stories about this guy? There are so many bad stories that are true — you don’t need to make them up!”
There are lots of things to not like about the Notes platform, some of which are being addressed by Lotus, some of which are not. But you haven’t listed a single one of them here.
First, for those who find this entry without any context, you really should have made it more explicit that you’re writing on behalf of a firm that is trying to get into the Notes to Google migration business — this isn’t just some frustrated user. And while your writing is clever, these narrow reasons certainly aren’t going to justify why a company should spend a decent chunk of changing migrating e-mail for another e-mail system.
While it’s true, the cost comparisons of migrating to another on-premise system don’t apply, it’s not like the cost of running Google is only $50/user/year, nor is the migration cost zero. The Hamilton Beach case study shows that they are still provisioning directory services from their Notes/Domino environment, and that those Domino servers are still up and running. There is still staff cost associated with help desk, compliance, security, network bandwidth, admin move/add/change, and other such features. These are true for cloud-based systems in general, not unique to Google, but they tend to be left out in the US$50/user/year debate.
Commodity email is available from a lot of places. If you really think the security feature that doesn’t automatically render embedded images in Notes is a reason to migrate to Google, then you demonstrate a profound lack of understanding of HTML-based mail. If you are going to pick on the fixes on the fixlist database, you seem to imply that Google’s engineering is perfect and that a defect will never affect a user. Try explaining that the turnaround time for an issue with Google is measured in days or weeks not hours, and that the ability to connect with tech support is limited, and the comparison becomes irrelevant. If you think that smart upgrade is a problem, tell me what is going to happen when Google Wave appears as a client, or for those who use the Outlook connector to Google? never going to have to touch a desktop again? Yeah right.
This whole discussion is narrowly focused on swapping e-mail for e-mail’s sake. It’s like being convinced to buy a new house by the realtor and moving company, rather than looking at the state of one’s own house — and its complete features beyond e-mail — and finding ways to optimize. And if it is cloud where you want to be, LotusLive Notes has been available for almost a year and has the same snazzy fixed pay-as-you-go prices as Google, hosted in an IBM data center and managed to the same high availability. https://www.lotuslive.com/services/notes
Custom lotus dbs are what is saving Lotus at various customers today. Its this funny situation where top management didn’t realize that some core key business process is being run through some R3 designed Lotus Db (usually some ISO process).
A couple of other comments:
- I run the 8.5 client, and I’m still using the task manager to kill notes processes about once a day (after the daily crash)
- notes crashes about the same as my browser, but the browser recovers faster
- for end user complexity – open file-preferences. What else can be said? Google might end up there too – but atm they aren’t this confusing (the old simplicity vs functionality argument)
- those who are upgrading to 8.5 are finding that it is really slow on a typical business user machine (which won’t get upgraded in the next year)
I don’t think the grass is always greener for Google vs Lotus, but today Google is what many would chose at least for SMB. Enterprise? Probably not – but Microsoft is killing it with sharepoint (which appears to be loved by those who use it). Lotus is/was a very good all-in-one tool – good email, calendaring, and app dev. But the world….she is a’changin’