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Lotus Notes To Receive Better Mac Support
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Tommy Wasabi said:
Incredibly well thought out comments. You should pat yourself on the back. I especially enjoyed this gem:
Tommy Wasabi said:
That embodies ignorance. It is in fact, just the opposite, more companies use exchange because it's already there and they don't know any better, not to mention that MS practically forces you to use it and they attempt to make it so easy that a baboon could set it up. Notes is good if implemented properly, better than exchange for what it's designed for. I have a feeling you just wanted to flame, so I'm just going to ignore you from now on.
Toodles.
Contradiction...
You seem to be contradicting yourself here... You say you hate notes.. But suggest it's "equally" as crappy as Exchange.. Then you admit that the CAL's are actually cheaper then Exchange... From your reasoning it would seem that makes notes better by itself. Your listed items are meaningless so I won't address them..
Some advantages to Notes....
the server runs on many platforms (Windows, Linux. iSeries, etc...)
The client runs on many platforms (windows, linux, mac) or you can just use a browser...
REPLICATION... Say it again. REPLICATION.. What does this mean? You can replicate a database to other servers or desktops/laptops. That's really nice to have if something happens to your hardware... It's not clustering - Notes has that too... So the same database can be on many servers if need be or you can take it locally and work with it off-line.. I don't know a microsoft technology that would let someone take a CRM application on the road.. make updates to the data while off line and put it back on the server later.. And it doesn't matter if it's one person or 100 people doing this. Maybe Sharepoint can kinda do this now - I truly don't know - But notes has been doing this for over 15 years... Not bad..
That's just a couple advantages..
Oh one more thing...
It's nice getting new versions of the server on a regular basis that actually improve performance on existing hardware. What's Microsoft do? force Exchange users to 64 bit servers....
It takes us longer to download a server update then it does to install it.
Tommy Wasabi said:
You seem to be contradicting yourself here... You say you hate notes.. But suggest it's "equally" as crappy as Exchange.. Then you admit that the CAL's are actually cheaper then Exchange... From your reasoning it would seem that makes notes better by itself. Your listed items are meaningless so I won't address them..
Some advantages to Notes....
the server runs on many platforms (Windows, Linux. iSeries, etc...)
The client runs on many platforms (windows, linux, mac) or you can just use a browser...
REPLICATION... Say it again. REPLICATION.. What does this mean? You can replicate a database to other servers or desktops/laptops. That's really nice to have if something happens to your hardware... It's not clustering - Notes has that too... So the same database can be on many servers if need be or you can take it locally and work with it off-line.. I don't know a microsoft technology that would let someone take a CRM application on the road.. make updates to the data while off line and put it back on the server later.. And it doesn't matter if it's one person or 100 people doing this. Maybe Sharepoint can kinda do this now - I truly don't know - But notes has been doing this for over 15 years... Not bad..
That's just a couple advantages..
Oh one more thing...
It's nice getting new versions of the server on a regular basis that actually improve performance on existing hardware. What's Microsoft do? force Exchange users to 64 bit servers....
It takes us longer to download a server update then it does to install it.
iNewbie said:You seem to be contradicting yourself here... You say you hate notes.. But suggest it's "equally" as crappy as Exchange.. Then you admit that the CAL's are actually cheaper then Exchange... From your reasoning it would seem that makes notes better by itself. Your listed items are meaningless so I won't address them..
Some advantages to Notes....
the server runs on many platforms (Windows, Linux. iSeries, etc...)
The client runs on many platforms (windows, linux, mac) or you can just use a browser...
REPLICATION... Say it again. REPLICATION.. What does this mean? You can replicate a database to other servers or desktops/laptops. That's really nice to have if something happens to your hardware... It's not clustering - Notes has that too... So the same database can be on many servers if need be or you can take it locally and work with it off-line.. I don't know a microsoft technology that would let someone take a CRM application on the road.. make updates to the data while off line and put it back on the server later.. And it doesn't matter if it's one person or 100 people doing this. Maybe Sharepoint can kinda do this now - I truly don't know - But notes has been doing this for over 15 years... Not bad..
That's just a couple advantages..
Oh one more thing...
It's nice getting new versions of the server on a regular basis that actually improve performance on existing hardware. What's Microsoft do? force Exchange users to 64 bit servers....
It takes us longer to download a server update then it does to install it.
I agree that Domino holds many advantages over MS. My complaints are mostly regarding the Notes user interface. It's crap, plain and simple, even on the MS platform. It's just really flakey. Not a day goes by when Notes doesn't crash on at least one of the desktops I'm working on, Mac or PC. it's just really annoying to work with.
good idea / bad idea (see animaniacs)
good idea: anything that will allow me to get a mac for work is great.
bad idea: anything that will keep me using the notes interface is anti-great.
good idea: anything that will allow me to get a mac for work is great.
bad idea: anything that will keep me using the notes interface is anti-great.
Same exact way I feel about Exchange/Outlook
This is similar to how I feel about Exchange/Outlook. Companies want to use Exchange only because it is one stop shopping for IT. In a corporate environment, Exchange is so inadequate as to be laughable. This is from a user stand point. It message/email tracking are simply pathetic IMO. It really feels like it is a personal email system forced to live in a corporate environment.
I have used Notes extensively as a database platform and have been dually impressed with what it can do. In one case, it was a bug/change tracking system and the implementation of the database was simply sweet. I have never heavily used the email system but going from Groupwise to Exchange was a shock in just how bad Exchange was.
Steven
This is similar to how I feel about Exchange/Outlook. Companies want to use Exchange only because it is one stop shopping for IT. In a corporate environment, Exchange is so inadequate as to be laughable. This is from a user stand point. It message/email tracking are simply pathetic IMO. It really feels like it is a personal email system forced to live in a corporate environment.
I have used Notes extensively as a database platform and have been dually impressed with what it can do. In one case, it was a bug/change tracking system and the implementation of the database was simply sweet. I have never heavily used the email system but going from Groupwise to Exchange was a shock in just how bad Exchange was.
Steven
Tommy Wasabi said:
gauchogolfer said:People still use LotusNotes?
My wife uses it at her work, and I've been contemplating working there as well. Maybe this will eliminate a barrier to bringing my Powerbook to a Windows-centric business
I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, Lotus Notes.
The current version (available to us) is 6.55. It's carbonized and STILL has a bunch of lame pre-1998 artificial software locks built into it. It's slow, it's cumbersome, and the UI is terrible.
Another quality piece of **** brought you by the people who crapped out Tivoli.
Are they going to make it so the ***** "Synchronize Address Book" feature works? That's one feature that I'd like to be able to use and has NEVER worked on the Mac (you click it and it does nothing).
iNotes upgrade?
I sincerely hope so. I can't even login to my company's iNotes site from my Mac because Macs are not supported (only runs with IE 6.00+).
I sincerely hope so. I can't even login to my company's iNotes site from my Mac because Macs are not supported (only runs with IE 6.00+).
Yet another Notes hater here.
I first came across it at work in 1992 or so, back with version 2. We used it for our customer support and sales databases, and the company were still using it in 1999 when I finally left them. By then they were also developing a web-server product based on the current Notes webserver component, and re-launched the company around this product, floating the company to obtain extra venture capital. It was quite frankly the worst performing web server I'd ever seen, and the company folded when the money ran out.
As part of supporting this junk product I had to pass a Notes exam. For that I learnt how Notes mail handled multiple copies of the same large attachment within multiple mailboxes. I forget the full details, but there was a nightly process that ran through the mail database and consolidated such attachments. It was a horrible mechanism. The previous mail system I came from handled this in a far simpler way by simply using hard links.
A collegue once ran the then current Notes release under the debug version of Windows 3.1, and had never seen so many reported errors in code.
I'd also had to integrate Notes (version 4 I believe) into another E-mail sytem via a gateway at a customer. Configuring SMTP to an external source under Notes was a pain, and it took 3 'engineers' about 4 hours to try all of the combinations before we could get it to both send and receive mail.
I've come across Notes a few times since then. Still horrible.
I first came across it at work in 1992 or so, back with version 2. We used it for our customer support and sales databases, and the company were still using it in 1999 when I finally left them. By then they were also developing a web-server product based on the current Notes webserver component, and re-launched the company around this product, floating the company to obtain extra venture capital. It was quite frankly the worst performing web server I'd ever seen, and the company folded when the money ran out.
As part of supporting this junk product I had to pass a Notes exam. For that I learnt how Notes mail handled multiple copies of the same large attachment within multiple mailboxes. I forget the full details, but there was a nightly process that ran through the mail database and consolidated such attachments. It was a horrible mechanism. The previous mail system I came from handled this in a far simpler way by simply using hard links.
A collegue once ran the then current Notes release under the debug version of Windows 3.1, and had never seen so many reported errors in code.
I'd also had to integrate Notes (version 4 I believe) into another E-mail sytem via a gateway at a customer. Configuring SMTP to an external source under Notes was a pain, and it took 3 'engineers' about 4 hours to try all of the combinations before we could get it to both send and receive mail.
I've come across Notes a few times since then. Still horrible.
JQW said:
The versions you have mentioned are from 10+ years ago. Why are you bringing this up? The Mac will get the latest version ported and I see it as a good thing. Whether you like it or not, Notes is used widely throughout many companies (over 120M "seats" worldwide) and having a modern up to date and supported version for the Mac is good.
JQW said:
I just don't understand all these Notes haters and their anectodal stories.. I'm not trying to flame or argue... but only have a reasonable discussion..
You had a bad experience in 1999... Since version 5 came out in early 1999 you were likely on version 4.x. Notes has come a LONG way since then. This is like hating OSX because you had a bad experience with OS7 or System7 or whatever it was called. The webserver in those days was basically the FIRST version of it in the product. It was probably the internotes component.. you're right it probably wasn't very good back then.. The whole internet thing was jsut really taking off back then...
I haven't done much with shared mail which is what you're referencing regarding the attachments but again in the EARLY days it was something that people on notes.net said was not perfected.. Again it's a lot better now..
Notes is NOT going to cure cancer.. similar to Visual Basic it get's a bad rap because it's a RAPID APPLICATION development system. It's also easy to learn. Many Notes developers started out with no prior programming experience. As such not all notes apps in the early days were written very well. But do you know what's cool? All of those applications will still RUN on the latest version. There's no microsoft rip and replace business here. But is that really an advantage? I think so but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe companies really like to re-write existing applications because they will no longer work because Microsoft want's to do something "different"..
Another Notes hater here
One of my clients is a huge, global corporation (that shall remain nameless), and they use Notes. I only support a smallish design department that uses Macs, and I quickly learned to loathe Notes.
Allow me to quote a rant I wrote about it on 10/8/02, after coming home from a long day of battling Notes issues at that client:
"Lotus Notes [6.0] for the Mac is a turd that they just keep trying to polish. Whoo hoo, it's finally Carbonized and sports the Aqua interface-- that's like putting a fresh coat of paint on an outhouse. This is the most half-assed Mac port of a Windows app since Microsoft Word 6-- scads of 8.3-named library files, a terribly unMaclike interface that is possibly the worst mangling of the 'web browser' metaphor that I have ever seen, and a complete inability to accommodate more than one user per machine, even on a multi-user based OS like Mac OS X. You'd think a company like IBM could actually assemble a team of competent Mac programmers, but judging by the quality of Notes for the Mac, they can't. Memo to IBM/Lotus: Half-assed Mac support is worse than none at all. Rebuild Notes [for the Mac] from scratch, or take it out back and shoot it. It makes Outlook/Exchange look like paradise, even with all the security and virus problems."
That client is now using 6.5.4, and I still hate it. Four years later, and it *still* wants to put the user data folder inside the Notes application folder by default when you install! Last week I ran Migration Assistant to move someone's data back to a PowerBook that had returned from being serviced, and Notes got messed up somehow. It was set to spellcheck all outgoing messages automatically, but lost the location of its dictionary. How do you think Notes would handle that? Just inform the user, "I can't spellcheck, but would you like me send out the message anyway?", right? Wrong! It wouldn't let the user send any mail at all, until I remoted in and disabled the spellcheck entirely. When I was back on site today, I had to reinstall Notes on her machine to fix it.
Which brings us to the problem of support. The only solution I can find for 99% of Notes issues on the Mac is to just reinstall the damned thing.
I could keep on going, but you get the picture.... Notes is a godawful abortion of a software program, and I would lead a much happier life if I didn't have to deal with it. IBM claims they want to improve it? Well they've certainly got their work cut out for them, don't they?
~Philly
One of my clients is a huge, global corporation (that shall remain nameless), and they use Notes. I only support a smallish design department that uses Macs, and I quickly learned to loathe Notes.
Allow me to quote a rant I wrote about it on 10/8/02, after coming home from a long day of battling Notes issues at that client:
"Lotus Notes [6.0] for the Mac is a turd that they just keep trying to polish. Whoo hoo, it's finally Carbonized and sports the Aqua interface-- that's like putting a fresh coat of paint on an outhouse. This is the most half-assed Mac port of a Windows app since Microsoft Word 6-- scads of 8.3-named library files, a terribly unMaclike interface that is possibly the worst mangling of the 'web browser' metaphor that I have ever seen, and a complete inability to accommodate more than one user per machine, even on a multi-user based OS like Mac OS X. You'd think a company like IBM could actually assemble a team of competent Mac programmers, but judging by the quality of Notes for the Mac, they can't. Memo to IBM/Lotus: Half-assed Mac support is worse than none at all. Rebuild Notes [for the Mac] from scratch, or take it out back and shoot it. It makes Outlook/Exchange look like paradise, even with all the security and virus problems."
That client is now using 6.5.4, and I still hate it. Four years later, and it *still* wants to put the user data folder inside the Notes application folder by default when you install! Last week I ran Migration Assistant to move someone's data back to a PowerBook that had returned from being serviced, and Notes got messed up somehow. It was set to spellcheck all outgoing messages automatically, but lost the location of its dictionary. How do you think Notes would handle that? Just inform the user, "I can't spellcheck, but would you like me send out the message anyway?", right? Wrong! It wouldn't let the user send any mail at all, until I remoted in and disabled the spellcheck entirely. When I was back on site today, I had to reinstall Notes on her machine to fix it.
Which brings us to the problem of support. The only solution I can find for 99% of Notes issues on the Mac is to just reinstall the damned thing.
I could keep on going, but you get the picture.... Notes is a godawful abortion of a software program, and I would lead a much happier life if I didn't have to deal with it. IBM claims they want to improve it? Well they've certainly got their work cut out for them, don't they?
~Philly
To recap all the comments above...
Pretty muc everyone who actually had to *use* Notes for work hates it.
The only people who seem to be praising it are the ones who are paid to maintain it. Notice how the Notes fanbois refer to it as a "product", "platform", "solution", etc - and yet provide not a single example where the features of the client itself would make the user more happy and productive.
Yes, I said the word: User!
It's the users that matter most.
And Notes client makes any user miserable.
It is slow, it uses non-standard interface elements, and it has a really steep learning curve (even for the 'engineer' types). I am not a big fan of Outlook, but even Outlook is light years ahead of Notes.
As for the Domino server itself... That thing is just as bad as the client.
Its raison d'etre seems to be simplification of development process.
And it might have made (some limited) sense in 1995.
Not anymore.
Everything, and I mean everything, that you can do with Domino, you can do with Ruby, PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL, WebObjects, or Java.
You can do it in less time, using highly visual dev environments. You can also easily collaborate on the development process, and systematically create concise documentation. The finished product will run fast and solid, and it won't depend on proprietary (terrible) client software. You will just need a web browser.
Domino, on the other hand, is pure garbage. I remember working in a 20 person company back in '00 where we had a Domino server running on a dual 500MHz PIII server with 2 gigs of RAM - very expensive at the time. It was very hard on the poor machine. It was choking. And the only three things the server was used for were email, very basic scheduling, and a billable hour tracking app. Not that that server is any speed demon by modern standards... But a non-Domino system having the same functionality would not have created any measurable load on the server at all with only 20 users. Did I also mention the server was less than stable? And I still remember how SP6 for NT completely brought the damn thing down... Ouch.
Pretty muc everyone who actually had to *use* Notes for work hates it.
The only people who seem to be praising it are the ones who are paid to maintain it. Notice how the Notes fanbois refer to it as a "product", "platform", "solution", etc - and yet provide not a single example where the features of the client itself would make the user more happy and productive.
Yes, I said the word: User!
It's the users that matter most.
And Notes client makes any user miserable.
It is slow, it uses non-standard interface elements, and it has a really steep learning curve (even for the 'engineer' types). I am not a big fan of Outlook, but even Outlook is light years ahead of Notes.
As for the Domino server itself... That thing is just as bad as the client.
Its raison d'etre seems to be simplification of development process.
And it might have made (some limited) sense in 1995.
Not anymore.
Everything, and I mean everything, that you can do with Domino, you can do with Ruby, PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL, WebObjects, or Java.
You can do it in less time, using highly visual dev environments. You can also easily collaborate on the development process, and systematically create concise documentation. The finished product will run fast and solid, and it won't depend on proprietary (terrible) client software. You will just need a web browser.
Domino, on the other hand, is pure garbage. I remember working in a 20 person company back in '00 where we had a Domino server running on a dual 500MHz PIII server with 2 gigs of RAM - very expensive at the time. It was very hard on the poor machine. It was choking. And the only three things the server was used for were email, very basic scheduling, and a billable hour tracking app. Not that that server is any speed demon by modern standards... But a non-Domino system having the same functionality would not have created any measurable load on the server at all with only 20 users. Did I also mention the server was less than stable? And I still remember how SP6 for NT completely brought the damn thing down... Ouch.
valiar said:
I agree for the most part. It's the same where I work. We had one resident Domino fan (who left us about 8 months ago), and she was the only one in our department who really liked it. Most IT people I know hate Lotus Notes, and our department is no exception. The client is an absolute pain in the ass to contend with. The whole system of IDs and certifiers is a nightmare.
Here are some perfect examples of what's wrong with Domino/Notes.
1. A friend of mine where I work accidentally deleted her Notes ID file one time. (for those of you who don't know, unless you're using the web client, a Notes ID is what stores your personal information [including your password] and you need this to log on to the system). We tried to restore her ID from a backup copy we made when the account was originally created, but it wouldn't work because this copy of the ID was from before she got married, and her name was changed on Domino. The resident Domino fangirl putzed around with it for hours, and could not get it to work. She ended up deleting the account and recreating it, blaming my friend saying "she made a dumb mistake by deleting her ID file." That may have been so, but doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous that there isn't a "Regenerate Notes ID" button in Administrator? Seems like a stupid thing to leave out. So, someone accidentally deletes their ID file (which I'm sure happens at places all the time), you can't regenerate it, and you have to recreate the account? Ludicrous.
2. Or how about the fact that in Domino Admin, I can't change the password in an ID file, so if someone forgets it, they're SOL? As the admin I can't change a password???!!?
3. We've currently got about 5000 users on our student email server. These are iNotes only users -- they don't get ID files and they don't use the Notes client, just web-mail. Domino doesn't provide anyway to track usage of these, only with Notes-ID clients. I've been trying to come up with a way to show how many people are accessing their accounts, and you just can't do it. I've spent hours on the phone with IBM trying to figure this out, and I can't. Their techs don't know how to do it. I'm trying to figure out who hasn't used their account in a year or more so they can be deleted, and IBM doesn't give you any way to track usage through the web client.
Good stuff.
I do have to say though, that although the client is awful and a pain to use, and that users are difficult to administrate sometimes, the server itself holds up pretty well. It really doesn't crash much.
thunng8 said:
Same here, except we have 2x that many users on Notes. I find it funny all the emails sent out that we get as Domain Notes Admins complaining about mail files nearing the 2GB limit (file size limitation in the version of AIX being used).
MattG said:
MattG,
Regarding your item #1. Notes is this way because of SECURITY. When an ID is created it contains encryption keys. This is what allows it to communicate with the notes server and also secure data. IF the user chooses to encrypt their data, like e-mail, then without that ID the data is safe. End of discussion. Even the administrator can't get to it. Notes is a highly secure envoirnment. You don't hear stories or people hacking the notes server, or getting spyware, or any of that Exchange business...
Security is the opposite of convenience. Now if the user in question did NOT take advantage of encrypting data then your notes "fangirl" could have simply deleted the user from the address book, created the user again with the same name and it would have worked fine which is what she ended up doing.. The reason why the name change caused a problem is because the backup ID wasn't updated at the same time - which is ok at long as you store your history of changes in the admin4 database. That change was probably very old and purged from the database. Regarding ID's what some companies do - mine included is store all the users ID's with a default password in a secure place - give the users copies and force them to change their password. Obviously there's a huge problem with this. Whoever stores these ID's has the keys to the kingdom - including being able to get to encrypted information. We chose to add some convenience at the cost of security in this case. Certainly the user did NOTHING wrong! One way or the other it should have been a 15 minute fix.
Also there is a built in method for password recovey of notes id file - but I'm more a developer so I haven't messed with that. It does need to be setup ahead of time I think.
Regarding item 3. You can easily see who's accessing a domino server by using the notes log (log.nsf). Wether it's the client or browser all access is recorded. Look under usage by user. Only the people who are using the sever will show up in this list. Typically data is only stored for 5-6 days but this can be changed. You can also go into any database and via the property screen get all the activity detail from there.
Regarding your specific need. You should be able to get a pretty good idea of the last login time of a user in the person documents last updated field. I think that's updated daily.
If you have other questions I highly recommend you head over to www.notes.net. (now called ibm developerworks or something) There are excellent forums there.
Sorry, but that's just stupid (not what you said, but the fact that it's like that). If you've got the enviroment setup correctly, then it's already secure and only the administrator should be able to log in as one and regenerate an ID anyway. If it's setup securely, then I'm the only one who should have access to it, and I should be able to do it. Period. It doesn't need to be so secure that the administrator can't administrate.iNewbie said:
We've tried to make this work a number of times and have been unsuccessful. Again, this should be an easy thing to do. All of the security-overkill that Domino turns on by default should be optional. If this were a government agency, it'd be one thing. We're a small private college. Our email server should be secure but it doesn't have to be Fort Knox. I should be able to change a password as an administrator more easily.
Again, this does not show accesses via iNotes. When I list by user, it only shows the people accessing using Notes IDs and the Notes client, which is our administrators, not students. See the attached picture...there's 7 users listed there, and they are all admins and servers. I need to see accesses via iNotes. And, I need to go back a year, so even if this method did work we'd be talking thousands of accounts that I need to get last-opened dates on. Looking it up this way would be tedious. I need to export a list and this information simply does not exist.
The 'last updated' field shows when the person doc was last updated by an Administrator. I tried that already...believe me.
I know Notes/Domino has a lot of upsides, but in my opinion, the difficulty of doing simple tasks as mentioned above makes the bad outweigh the good.
Attachments
MattG,
I stand corrected on a couple or your points. Again I'm mostly a developer and only dabble with admin.
Regarding the iNotes user issue. Their activity IS logged differently. You need to turn that on in the server document. On the interent Protocols tab you can Enable logging to text files and then review it with a standard application or to a notes database Domlog.nsf. It's likely done this way for performance reasons. A quick search on notes.net gave me this answer.
Regarding the last login time of a user, again it looks like you're correct regarding the person document. I did not find an immediate built in solution for this, which doesn't surprise me. Remember notes is more of a programming environment then a simple application. It's understood that if it doesn't do something out of the box you can build it yourself. If you don't like how mail works, change it or download a new template. If you need new views in the log database you can add them. If you want to track the last time a person hit's their e-mail database there are several ways to do that. Searching on Notes.net (2 forums) for "last login" or something similar will give you some ideas. If you activate the domlog.nsf database then you can write a little code, get the information you're looking for, and track it however you want. While it's not a built in feature, the fact remains that using the notes development tools you can do it yourself and you're not limited to how Lotus implements a solution.
Regarding the stupidity of the security solution.... In some Environments like the CIA and NSA which use notes, you simply don't want a notes administrator to be able to access peoples e-mails or other information that they shouldn't be able to get to. They need to administer the system but not all the data. Notes security solves this problem.
Now as you say you're a small college so you don't need this level of security. There's lots of posts and thoughts on ID management. Again if the user that was renamed wasn't using encryption then there is no issue as something can be recreated. the other was to go is to store the default id's in a "secure" place with the default passwords. But while convenient, this can cause problems.
However, I would say that if an administrator ever got caught reading the Dean's e-mails the school would quickly want to increase the security level. There's now a lot of laws regarding privacy...
Notes is not an end user solution. It's marketed to businesses and organizations. In my opinion, there should never be a notes environment that has an administrator but no developer. It can be one and the same, but someone really needs to know formula languge and lotusScript. With some development, you can write simple programs which do simple tasks.
As an alternative you might want to check openntf.org. It's a Notes Opensource site and has things like a new mail template, user administration tools, etc...
I stand corrected on a couple or your points. Again I'm mostly a developer and only dabble with admin.
Regarding the iNotes user issue. Their activity IS logged differently. You need to turn that on in the server document. On the interent Protocols tab you can Enable logging to text files and then review it with a standard application or to a notes database Domlog.nsf. It's likely done this way for performance reasons. A quick search on notes.net gave me this answer.
Regarding the last login time of a user, again it looks like you're correct regarding the person document. I did not find an immediate built in solution for this, which doesn't surprise me. Remember notes is more of a programming environment then a simple application. It's understood that if it doesn't do something out of the box you can build it yourself. If you don't like how mail works, change it or download a new template. If you need new views in the log database you can add them. If you want to track the last time a person hit's their e-mail database there are several ways to do that. Searching on Notes.net (2 forums) for "last login" or something similar will give you some ideas. If you activate the domlog.nsf database then you can write a little code, get the information you're looking for, and track it however you want. While it's not a built in feature, the fact remains that using the notes development tools you can do it yourself and you're not limited to how Lotus implements a solution.
Regarding the stupidity of the security solution.... In some Environments like the CIA and NSA which use notes, you simply don't want a notes administrator to be able to access peoples e-mails or other information that they shouldn't be able to get to. They need to administer the system but not all the data. Notes security solves this problem.
Now as you say you're a small college so you don't need this level of security. There's lots of posts and thoughts on ID management. Again if the user that was renamed wasn't using encryption then there is no issue as something can be recreated. the other was to go is to store the default id's in a "secure" place with the default passwords. But while convenient, this can cause problems.
However, I would say that if an administrator ever got caught reading the Dean's e-mails the school would quickly want to increase the security level. There's now a lot of laws regarding privacy...
Notes is not an end user solution. It's marketed to businesses and organizations. In my opinion, there should never be a notes environment that has an administrator but no developer. It can be one and the same, but someone really needs to know formula languge and lotusScript. With some development, you can write simple programs which do simple tasks.
As an alternative you might want to check openntf.org. It's a Notes Opensource site and has things like a new mail template, user administration tools, etc...
So, unless the new Notes is NO LONGER a carbonized app, and therefore made universal, this is all ******** and Lotus Notes on the Mac still sucks.
Lotus Notes
Does anyone out there know how to change the system Fonts on Lotus Notes for Mac?
I use the program to connect to my company email while at home, but the fonts are so small I have to change my display resolution in order to read messages.
The only thing I've found is under system preferences which allows you to change the font, but not the size of the font.
The help menu tells how it can be done in Windows by changing the lotus.ini file settings, but all it tells me for the Mac version is to go to Preferences.
Does anyone out there know how to change the system Fonts on Lotus Notes for Mac?
I use the program to connect to my company email while at home, but the fonts are so small I have to change my display resolution in order to read messages.
The only thing I've found is under system preferences which allows you to change the font, but not the size of the font.
The help menu tells how it can be done in Windows by changing the lotus.ini file settings, but all it tells me for the Mac version is to go to Preferences.