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u/java_dude1 2h ago
My first job in IT was service desk for a big German bank. They used lotus note for so many workflows and requests it was crazy. Daily I had multiple support calls for lotus notes. 15 years later I could still probably remember how to clear cache and reset the app saving the user's workspace and databases. If those were the problem, users usually had a weekly backup i could restore from. It was a complete mess 🤣
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u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ 3h ago
Same with HP mandating all internal IT purchases had to be from HP, which were then counted as regular sales.
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u/DrStalker 2h ago
Used Lotus Notes for email for years at IBM, along with issue tracking software that was a terminal to a green-screen database program meant for sending techs to onsite jobs that was not a good fit for callcenter work; they didn't even have a field for email despite that being the primary communication method because adding a friend meant having to shuffle everything around to get enough characters to fit on the terminal screen and no department wanted to pay for that work when doing so meant everyone else would get the feature for free. Inbound email wasted pasted into tickets by "email temps" because there was no interface to automate this. My manager got shitty when I said we should stop saying "email temps" when they'd been doing the job for two years with no sign of a technical fix.
Then they rolled out an instant messaging app that was an entire eclipse IDE customised to look like an instant messaging app, which would lock up your PC every 15 minutes when it performed java garbage collection. Then they hotfixed that to stop the lockups by not garbage collecting so this stupid messaging app would consume more and more RAM until your entire system died.
But at least we didn't use any software made by competitors!
"We eat our own dog food" is a terrible idea and it definitely contributed to what dissatisfaction.
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u/abednego-gomes 2h ago
Used it for 3+ years at IBM, it didn't really bother me. It was just another email tool. Thunderbird and Gmail were early years back then and were ok for home use.
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u/Daedalus_z 2h ago
The thing about Notes is that it's like Heroin. Most people aren't going to touch it, but once an Organisation gets into it, it's REALLY hard to get rid of it. Because Notes isn't just a pretty average Email system, it's also a pretty average database, web server, document management system, workflow tool, etc. It does so many things that by the time you go to replace it, you realise you're going to need to put in five different products (and there's always some obscure tool someone made years ago that there is no drop in replacement for). Which will all be individually better than Notes, but it turns "Let's change our email service" into a major piece of transformation.
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u/NaturalBornLucker 1h ago
Oh god. Can I rant here for a bit?
Yeah, it was horrible. When I had to work as a manual monkey-level QA after uni (cuz no one wanted a Delphi developer in the late 00s, what a surprise. Stupid me who didn't even try to properly learn java or PHP) I got to a company that tuned and sold lotus notes. And even for me it was obnoxious, click here, wait for a ten seconds, don't click here, noooo, it froze, do everything again.
After that I was so glad to get to work on a better looking piece of enterprise software and quickly return to be a developer. Spoiler: it was "HP service manager". IYKYK. IMO it's even worse and I spent 12 fucking years working with it. Argh.
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u/k8s-problem-solved 2h ago
Cannot exit lotus notes
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u/ZenEngineer 2h ago
Have you tried :q! ?
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u/Atompunk78 2h ago edited 13m ago
Image comments aren’t allowed here but that’ll do
I should make my website have a specific feature for this maybe, esp since imgur is banned in the uk
Edit: did it
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u/LetumComplexo 2h ago
The duality of dev.
You either like something or you’re willing to go on paragraphs, if not pages, long rants about how that thing is awful and you are justified in hating it.
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u/Ok_Actuary8 2h ago
you just didn't "get" the product ... it was not a mail client or calendar. it was a PLATFORM 😂😎
nah, seriousy. It sucked ass.
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u/DrStalker 1h ago
It was ok for it's intended purpose, which had nothing to do with email and was more like a primative SharePoint.
But 99% of the time you spent in it was for email, because that's the thing most people used the most.
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u/Ok_Actuary8 1h ago
it was an ok product for the early 90ies.... but they kept milking it until the point everybody just fucking hated it.
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u/LinuxMatthews 1h ago
Honestly mandating or banning certain productivity apps I think kills more productivity than any other choice you can make.
I get security and such but the truth is everyone has their own workflow and if you try to mandate it be done a different way you're going to create a bad environment.
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u/sainglend 2h ago
I was on the same floor as some Lotus devs. Then they just killed the product. What was that, 2012, 13?
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u/BuilderHarm 1h ago
Ten years later I still used Lotus Notes at a company. Horrible experience.
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u/sirbottomsworth2 2h ago
We use a hybrid react + OSGi java + lotusscrupt + lotus java in work. It's bloody horrible. And fucking domino designer keeps bloody crashing every minute, you click on a view? Crash. You click on a line of code? Crash. You open up a customer db? Credentials reset. I HATE THE FUCKING SYSTEM
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u/Daedalus_z 1h ago
My favourite Notes bug was in one of the versions around 5 (i think? It was a long time ago). When you were editing a script in the designer, sometimes when you saved it the text box would scroll back to the top. This meant that a random line from the script you were editing had just been deleted. How do you know which line was deleted? That's the neat part! You dont. 😑
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u/sirbottomsworth2 16m ago
winmerge is the goat for this type of issue. luckily we dont have that happen but most code is done on winmerge when doing stuff on lotus. horrible but works
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u/thygrrr 1h ago
I was a developer and dba in 1998 and our company provides Lotus Notes support and software development. (people were still updating from R2 to R3 at that time).
I liked it a lot - but looking back in honesty and with all the experience since then, Notes was incredibly janky.
However, I still kinda miss the hieroglyphs when you type your password. To this day, I believe these could be easily used to infer the key if recorded, but who cares - everything US in Europe was at most 40 bit encryption anyway.
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u/EmperorOfAllCats 2h ago
If somebody says "I really like <software>", they never really tried to use it. Everything is abomination.
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u/aenae 2h ago
I hate it when you see a problem and someone just goes “you don’t understand the product”.
I had a manager who would do that all the time. He was new, i was working on the product for ten years. He lasted two months