Notes on OS X (Lotus Notes)

Member Name: Putto

Product:	Lotus Notes
Date:	14/12/06 (495 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can't really think of any

Disadvantages: Slow, unreliable, overly complex, irritating

I’ve used a lot of different email clients over the years – Eudora, Thunderbird, Outlook, Evolution, KMail, Claris Mail, Apple Mail, even Pine. Apple Mail is my hands-down favourite (fast, simple, clean and reliable), while Thunderbird is my preferred option for Windows or Linux.

I’ve recently been forced to switch to Lotus Notes 6.5 for OS X in a corporate environment. How do I put this politely?

Lotus Notes is, by far, the worst email client I have ever used.

It’s slow. Painfully slow. It may take several seconds to open a simple text message. A similar time is involved to change mailboxes. It doesn’t multi-task within itself – if it’s busy sending a message, you can’t switch to another function to, say, read another message or view a calendar until it’s done. That can be a while. It doesn’t check mail unless its window and tab are active. It often hangs on startup.

It doesn’t remember settings. Every time you start it, you have to say “Yes, I want a preview” and “Yes, I want the window this big”. Every time.

The interface is appalling. Some functions are in the message window, some are on the tool bar, with no logical reason for the choice. The buttons and icons are inconsistent, non-intuitive and ugly. It doesn’t automatically scroll down the mailbox to show new messages. You’re always moving the mouse from one side of the screen to the other and back again for even simple tasks.

Preferences could be in one of five options under Notes/Preferences or under Actions/Tools/Preferences. Whether or not the second set of preferences appears is context sensitive – that may sound clever but it’s just plain annoying in practice because it makes it harder to find what you’re after. The preferences that you really want don’t exist at all. To change default font size, for example, you need to manually edit a preferences file. That’s silly enough, but you can’t do it with a standard text editor – you need a separate dedicated program to do it. That’s just ridiculous.

Attachments? Where do I start? When you double-click on an attachment, a pop-up asks you if you want to open it / view it etc.. Of course I want to open it! What the hell else would you want to do with it? There should be an option where you can set your preference. It compresses attachments in outgoing messages by default, which makes them unreadable to anyone not using Notes (most of your recipients). You can choose not to compress them, but that requires yet another mouse click. Every time. Again, there’s no way to set a default.

It doesn’t play well with OS X. It doesn’t respond to the scroll wheel. It doesn’t integrate well with the standard Mac Address Book or iCal. Copy and paste is inconsistent. Some of the included help files relate only to the Windows version, not the Mac version. In a really nice touch, the automatic installer automatically installs things in the wrong directories.

The web interface is a disaster – slow, ugly, and poorly-designed (you can’t see all of the buttons at once – you have to scroll to and fro).

It’s incompatible. Even Microsoft allows you to use other clients with Exchange Server, but Notes is the only client that can access most of the features of Domino Server.

Yes, I know it does more than just email, but that’s really its main use. It has some useful additional features (eg. shared calendars) that may be useful in some corporate environments, but there are other, more elegant solutions out there.

Use something else.

Summary: There are better solutions for email and collaboration

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