Lotus Notes 8 review - improved but still not user friendly (Lotus Notes)

Member Name: usability-first

Product:	Lotus Notes
Date:	30/01/08 (2078 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Better than earlier versions of Notes, for the most part

Disadvantages: Vastly inferior to other enterprise-grade e-mail and collaboration products

Lotus Notes 8 review - improved but still not user friendly

Summary
While the Notes 8 and 8.01 clients have indeed been notably improved regarding user interface and user experience, there are still far too many remains of the "old" Notes client when scratching the surface. It is my belief that end users will be somewhat relieved of their frustration if they are currently running an older version of Notes, but this client still has a long way to go before it reaches the usability and speed of other enterprise-grade e-mail software.

Introduction
The latest version of Lotus Notes comes in two flavours, the so called Standard and Basic clients. While the Basic client is little more than an upgraded version of the 7.x client with a new layout scheme, parts of the Standard client has been rewritten using Java/Eclipse. However, both clients still share the same core, which essentially means that many of the Notes peculiarities are still present, though displayed in a new, arguably better looking, fashion.

User interface
The single most compelling improvement from earlier versions is the completely new user interface in the Standard client. For the first time, Notes users can enjoy things such as persistence of user interface adjustments such as changing column width or sort order in the inbox view, improved possibilities to change typeface and text size, more versatile preview panes and more.
Some minor gripes of the functionality in earlier versions have also been remedied; for example it is now possible to browse to an attachment through folder shortcuts. Also, contacts and calendar entries can finally be exported to standard formats.
It is also a pleasure to note that there now is a normal "refresh" button for the users to press if they want to query the server for new email. Pressing F5 no longer results in a locked client since this "feature" has been moved to another shortcut key combination. Most other shortcuts, ie for switching between tabs etc remain notoriously non-standard in the Windows client.
When editing email, the added functionality of so called "in-line spellchecking", while totally un-exciting, is a welcome addition of standard functionality that has been sadly missing in previous releases.

After using the 8.0 and the beta 8.01 client for a little while, however, it soon becomes evident that many of the odds and ends of the "old" Notes client is still around; some of these quirks relate to the age-old architecture of the Domino/Notes platform while others are more like tell-tale signs of an early release - the new UI hasn't been implemented throughout the client, it's as simple as that. This will hopefully be somewhat amended in coming releases.

Notably, the dialogs for replication settings, management of ID-files and more are essentially unchanged from previous version, which may simplify things for users already accustomed to earlier versions of Notes, while they will undoubtedly continue to flabbergast new users as these concepts are rare in other pieces of end-user software.

During my brief testing of the 8.01 beta I encountered a recurring bug, which made dialogs from the revamped user interface somehow get stuck behind the Notes main window, thus locking up the entire client. Here's hoping this one is squashed before the product is released, otherwise end users will inevitably encounter this bug frequently enough to make for a poor impression of the new client.

Functionality
As already mentioned, the new client has been gifted with support for inline spellchecking, for the time being only in English but more languages should hopefully be released before summer according to IBM employees on the Lotussphere08 event.
Another improvement here is that in a pure version 8-environment, the out of office agent can now be replaced by a standard out-of-office function that is able to immediately dispatch replies, as well as allow for more fine-grained (and automatically inactivated!) settings for dates and times of absence. Mixed version environments, however, will have to make do with the existing out-of-office functionality until upgrading.

Calendar printing hasn't changed from previous versions, which means there remains some major usability issues as well as the fact that the prints are plain ugly.

It is also worth noting for environments using Sharepoint, that Lotus Notes still doesn't support calendar integration or even the possibility to save and create attachments to and from Sharepoint sites, without the use of third-party integration tools.

The client is not yet capable of doing single-sign on (SSO) towards Active Directory. This functionality is allegedly scheduled for the next version of Notes, due later this year. I was unable to get a clear understanding as if and how this functionality would work on a mobile client in offline mode.

Included for free with the Notes client is the basic version of Sametime, IBM:s take on instant messaging. This version however is severely crippled compared to most other offerings in the area, lacking basic functions such as detection of inactivity. It can only be assumed that enterprises looking into IM are better off investing in at least the Standard version in order to provide a reasonable level of IM functionality.

One of the more frequently occurring gripes about earlier releases of Notes has been its ineptitude in properly displaying HTML formatted email. Again, according to IBM staff, this has been improved but there are still certain limitations when viewing e-mail messages with inline images, tables etc. When I tried out the 8.01 beta, in some cases e-mails with inline images became entirely unreadable.

Lastly, it is worth noting that many peculiarities originating in the architecture of the Lotus Domino/Notes platform itself are still present: the user is still presented with an incomprehensible Delete/Remove/Cancel dialog whenever trying to delete a message from, say, the Sent View. Users must still be wary of the fact that when accepting an invitation to an appointment, deleting the invitation afterwards still results in the meeting disappearing from the calendar. Search functionality has likewise been odd and unintuitive in previous releases of Notes, and remains so in this new version which in fact adds a third search mode in addition to the existing ones.

Performance
With the new improved user interface, comes rather hefty hardware requirements. Although the 8.01 client is faster than 8.0, I still believe that a powerful computer, in the order of a 2 GHz+ Core 2 and 1 GB of RAM is needed for comfortably running Lotus Notes 8.01 on a Windows XP box.

Manageability
The use of ID files means that a form of PKI must be maintained in an enterprise deploying Notes, which specifically means complex and time-consuming administration of lost passwords. IBM plans on introducing an "ID Vault" which essentially stores the ID files within the Active Directory, thus opening for a significantly simplified process for restoring lost passwords. This functionality won't be introduced until the next version of Notes at the earliest.
Deploying Lotus Notes can be difficult, in part because the client consists of a huge number of individual files, many of which are installed in different non-standard locations. This has been improved, according to IBM experts on the matter, but there still seems to be a significant amount of files in non-standard locations, making installation on Vista clients or through application virtualization more difficult or in the latter case, next to impossible.
If an organization decides to migrate it's existing Notes applications to the web, this has always meant rewriting of many parts of the application as the automated conversion tool has been very limited. From my understanding after attending a seminar on the subject, this tool has been largely unchanged from previous versions and one should thus consider web-ifying Notes applications only if there is a substantial investment already made in the Domino platform as there are now many alternatives for rapidly developing web applications from scratch.
IBM has been slow to jump on the virtualization bandwagon, but it is now said that running the Domino server within a virtual machine is in fact supported. However, I've been unable thus far to successfully install Domino 8 on a virtual Windows 2003 server using VMWare, but I will continue to look into this matter and see if there is a solution somewhere.

Security
While many a Notes administrator and developer has praised the security model of Notes, it has also been a well known fact that the encryption libraries within Notes has been weak enough to trigger doubts in security aware organizations such as government offices. This has been much improved in the Domino/Notes 8 environment, as it is now possible to use industry standard encryption algorithms such as SHA-1 and AES for authentication and document encryption, albeit performance wise there seems to be some issues when applying key lengths in excess of 1024/128 bits. Document signing using these new libraries has yet to be implemented. As a final note on security, Notes now supports using keys stored on smart cards for document encryption.

Summary: Despite improvements made in version 8 and 8.01, Lotus Notes 8 cannot threaten Exchange/Outlook

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