DominoKeys.com

For those of you clicking on this post w/o reading “Part 1″ you might want to do that. If you’re busy and don’t want to, here’s what you’ve missed:

I was reading someone else’s blog who had a link to an article about why Notes is still around, which cited a website from some dude who has 80 reasons why Notes sucks. It was Valentine’s day, so I decided to share the love and pitch in my 2 cents about why Notes DOESN’T suck. Here’s my rebuttal to items #11-20 on his site…
11. Deleting an Email Message
Suck Synopsis:
The dialog box that appears when deleting messages is confusing. (What’s the difference between “delete” and
“remove” from sent?)

My Rebuttal:
The ability to specify if you want to DELETE the document completely from the database or REMOVE it from the sent (meaning you probably saved a copy in a folder or something for reference later) is actually quite powerful to help manage documents in your mail file.


12. Accidentally Starting Notes
Suck Synopsis:
When you accidentally hit the icon to start Notes, you have to click ESC three times to exit Notes.

My Rebuttal: The author of the site acknowledges that this really isn’t a problem anymore, and each version of Notes has a new and improved dialog box to help you out here.

I think its important to point out that Notes has always supported multi-users (IDs) on a single machine and that the behavior of hitting the ESC key is quite handy when you’re using Notes on a machine with many IDs/Users.

Since Notes defaults to the last user who authenticated, its nice to be able to hit ESC and switch IDs without having to know someone else’s password or having to sign on to Windows differently … or however other people do that with other inferior mail clients.


13. Another Unnecessary Dialog Box
Suck Synopsis:
When clicking on an embedded document (possibly without a file extension in the file name) an un-helpful dialog appears.

My Rebuttal:
Hmmm… get the feeling that this guy has a problem with dialog boxes? Yeah, me too. I’m also starting to think that whomever is building their applications uses embedded documents a bit too much (I avoid it whenever possible).

Honestly, it looks like a developer and/or training issue here. I get why the Notes dialog box isn’t helpful, but its probably just bad programming on the application.


14. Drag and Drop Text
Suck Synopsis:
Notes doesn’t support drag and drop’ing text.

My Rebuttal:
Correct. That’s a decent idea. I see some potential challenges when you get to applications with different field types… but even if it only worked within the same rich-text field, it could be handy. — Why not submit it as a feature request.
LotusNotesSucks-guy: 1 … Lotus Notes: 13 and counting.


15. Canceling a Message
Suck Synopsis:
The dialog box Notes displays when cancelling a mail message is bad.

My Rebuttal:
I don’t think there’s a person at Lotus (or Iris, back in the day) that would be able to disagree. 6.5 was a big improvement and 7.0 is even better. It just takes a moment to think about what the options mean, and then it makes sense.

Whenever I do Notes training, I always include a slide and go through that with people… so they’ve seen it at least once already when they actually cancel a message themselves. — Seems to help.



16. Reinventing the Menu Bar
(note… I am not putting a link to this one on purpose… the page crashed IE for me and has lots of ads, as most of this
guy’s pages do, which screw with your computer. If you want to look, its nyah: http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/lnEx16.html but don’t say I didn’t warn you)

Suck Synopsis:
The Notes menu bar is different than Microsoft’s (and others).

My Rebuttal:
I started reading this and knew I’d agree. Then I saw his side-by-side comparison of Notes and other app’s menu bars and I realized Notes isn’t that bad after all. In fact, its more like other menu bars than I gave it credit for.

While I don’t think that “Actions” is a terribly helpful name, I’m not sure what it could/should be changed to. … And neither does he. Its a rant w/o a helpful suggestion.


17. Windows Color Scheme
Suck Synopsis:
Notes doesn’t adopt the Windows color scheme.

My Rebuttal:
It does. Not sure what version didn’t do it, but it works fine on my machine in 6.5 and 7 running on XP.



18. Publishing Databases
Suck Synopsis:
Notes allows you to publish a database to a library … why?

My Rebuttal:
Seriously? Well, Ok. So that others can be aware of your database and easily find it in a list of databases that are categorized in a way that is helpful to your company.


19. Is There a Ship in Port?
Suck Synopsis:
The dialog box for “No ports capable of calling are in use…” is unhelpful and requires you to go several levels deep into a menu to fix the problem.

My Rebuttal:
Who uses dial-up? And of those people, who uses automatic dialing in Notes? Its an obscure feature anyway that few use. Having to go several menus deep just gives you time to think about how you really should find a way to get access to a high-speed connection.


20. Toolbaritis
Suck Synopsis:
You can’t move toolbars around in R5.

My Rebuttal:
Yes/no. Some you could change and/or turn off by modifying the toolbar settings. However since 6+, you can move them at will. Upgrade.