Loutus Notes

I know, that's not the name. But that's how I feel about Lotus Notes.

According to what I read, Lotus Notes is one of the premier collaborative tools available today. (Fill in appropriate yadda yadda phrases here.) Yet despite its sheer elegance, which is so great that it brings tears to Steve Jobs' eyes ('Oh', he must whisper late at night, punching his pillow in frustration, 'why cannot the Mac be just a little like Lotus?' ), it has some serious flaws.

Its not a database. The doc likes to use that phrase, but what it actually is is a series of documents flying in close formation. There's no clear and unambiguous index.

This leads directly to flaw two: its search capabilities, which are abysmal. I've actually had documents displayed in the summary list, done a search using keywords visible from the display, and been told that none were found. According to some documentation I found, thats likely because Lotus has three different kinds of searches -- one, that just searches titles; one, that searches content, and one that I don't know what it does. Now, I know that searching isn't easy... let alone, when you could swear that the email used a word, and it turns out it used a different one (but it means the same thing!)....but still, it ought not to be this hard. In the words of anguished searchers everywhere, GOOGLE can do it !!!!
Bottom line is, be VERY consistent in how you file things, because the odds are two out of five that Lotus won't be able to find them again.

And that leaves to flaw three: bloated files. Now, I have to admit, this could be just me. But I cannot for the life of me get the damn archiving facility to automagically move files from the live database to the archive backup. According to the 'support group', archiving only moves stuff that hasn't been viewed. (Which is so dumb, I assume this person was on drugs when they said it). So, unless I want to get continual nastygrams from the administration: Warning Your Mail File Exceeds...., I get to manually go through the folders, looking for where all of the space is being used.

Which brings up flaw four: no space display. I can't get Lotus to tell me how big its files are. Surely I'm not the first to think this might be a good idea?

But this is one of the Premier collaborative tools ...... Yeah.