re groupware, lotus notes

[email protected] wrote on 13/06/2008 05:26:20:

Apologies to the list if this is all too long or too off-topic.  Hopefully 
it provides some information about Notes.

> There also seems to be a powerful bias against Notes in some circles.
> Personally,  I've never run a production Notes server - I just have one
> here to poke at,  and I've read some documentation.  But I also read
> TechNet articles relating to Exchange.  None of these products are
> "simple".

I'm not sure where the hatred of Notes comes from, but you are right it is 
widespread.  Partly it may be because visually the Notes client is unlike 
other applications - at one point Notes was cross-platform (unix, mac, 
windows, os/2, even DOS), and the interface didn't really conform to the 
look-and-feel of  any particular platform.  Partly the hostility may be 
because the Notes client is a complex piece of software, and that 
complexity is hard to hide.  (A few people have advocated that there needs 
to be the ability to strip it down to have the option to hide un-needed 
complexity from users.)   IBM has long marketed Notes as being an email 
system, yet if that is how it is being perceived/used by end users, then 
there is definitely too much complexity in the client.  I don't believe 
Notes itself is over-complex, since it can do so much.  But most end-users 
probably don't need to see that complexity.  Maybe the way Notes is used 
is to 'manage' people and working practices leads to people transferring 
their hostility to the tool rather than the process itself.   Another 
point is that it is probable that the majority of Notes developers were 
never developers before they started using Notes - that was certainly true 
of where I worked with Notes.  Until about  6 or 7 years ago, every Notes 
client was also an IDE, and since the @formula language and the free-form 
structure of Notes databases makes it very easy to start getting something 
going, it was not unusual for someone to 'drift' into Notes development. 
Consequently, many departments/businesses were able to get useful/needed 
applications developed, often by people with no knowledge of programming 
but with direct line-of-business knowledge, bypassing either their IT 
department or even external contractors.  These applications don't even 
require modification when the server or client is upgraded - apps 
developed using the tools available in 1993 can be used in the latest 
clients.  The really weird thing is that by starting the HTTP process of a 
Notes server, applications that were built before the web can be served as 
web applications with no modification (OK, but of course they look 
rubbish).  Anyway, it is not unusual for large companies to have hundreds 
of Notes applications, making it very hard for them to move off Notes even 
if they stop using it for email.

But there's no doubt about it, Notes is a bizarre mixture of technologies 
- a kind of swiss-army knife.  There are currently 5 programming languages 
that can be used for various (over-lapping) areas: javascript, @formulas, 
lotusscript (vb), java, and c.  And to do any development in Notes you 
really have to know at least the @formulas.  So, many 'serious' programmer 
will never take Notes seriously, because at some point they are going to 
have to start doing the kind of development that was done by 
non-programmers in things like Excel or 1-2-3.  But it is very powerful. 
Besides the normal things you'd expect of a groupware application, I've 
used Notes to write online payment systems (including integrating with 
Paypal), software deployment/update systems, SQL replication, server admin 
tools like Nagios, scraping and archiving of remote web sites. 

Notes has a very flexible built-in cron like system, which will run code 
not only at specific times, dates, periods etc. but also run it as 
specific users, or on specific servers.  And not only can databases be 
encrypted so that only a specific server or only a specific user can 
access them, data can even be optionally encrypted so that only specific 
fields are encrypted whilst the rest is unencrypted.  And it supports 
about 5 different networking protocols (although these days there are few 
uses for most except tcp/ip - although there are uses for e.g. having 1 
notes server communicate with another via SPX or IPX, or even by Notes own 
networking protocol where one server can dial up another modem-to-modem 
without crossing the intenet at all).  The granularity of access control 
is extraordinary: control extends down to the level of paragraphs, fields, 
and even GUI controls such as section-expansion controls, and since the 
directory is hierarchical, one can even use wildcards in specifying access 
control e.g.allow editor access to everyone in  '*/finance/US/SomeCompany' 
and author access to '*/US/SomeCompany'.  The administration of Notes is 
also surprisingly easy - large enterprises can have hundreds of Notes 
servers all interacting across the globe, yet administered by only a 
couple of people.  And because of the quality of the replication system, 
in over 10 years of working with Notes I've never taken a backup, even in 
production environments.  After Sept 11th, I had responsibility for 
building a disaster recovery system for my employers main Oracle based 
application.  With Notes we just installed additional servers in the DR 
site, and included them in the replication cycle.

Over the last 7 years or so IBM seems to have been mostly going in the 
wrong direction with Notes.  They basically indicated that it was being 
de-emphasized in place of Websphere Application Server, and even the 
datastore was moving in the direction of being DB2-based rather than 
free-form (yet here we are with the web development abuzz with the idea of 
using non-relational databases such as CouchDB or Amazon SimpleDB).  IBM 
de-emphasized all languages except Java, when even Java developers would 
need to know at least the @formulas.  And now they have made the client 
cross-platform again, by making the 'standard' configuration be 
Eclipse-based, which means it needs about 1-2gb of RAM on a client OS to 
get reasonable performance.  Bearing in mind that probably the majority of 
Notes users use it for mail and calendaring, that's pretty onerous.

So even though Notes is second-nature to me, I don't want to work with 
something where the people in control of the technology seem to have so 
little understanding of the strengths of the technology, and so clueless 
about its direction.  I couldn't be more passionate about the need for 
RAD, replication, access control, encryption, etc.  But not if the only 
way to get those things is through Eclipse on the client and J2EE on the 
server. 

> while it has more users certainly, doesn't seem to have nearly the
> active and open developer community that notes does
> <http://www.openntf.org/internal/home.nsf>

Actually, the open source, community spirit in Notes developemnt goes way 
back before OpenNTF.  For probably 15 years or so Lotus hosted a "sandbox" 
where developers contributed samples and useful pieces of code or even 
whole applications (
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/ByDate?OpenView&Start=849).  It is 
not used so much in the last few years (people host code on their own 
sites now, or through openNTF).  But you can see from that URL that there 
are approx. 850 entries in the sandbox, the oldest of which is about 10 
years old.  Because the code is included in the database, it is open 
source (in Notes you have to go through an extra step to actually hide the 
code in your application). 

> > I think 
> > that all businesses need groupware providing at the very minimum the 
> > features of OGO.  The businesses just don't know it :-)
> 
> "  I think that all businesses need groupware providing at the very
> minimum the features of OGO.  The businesses just don't know it :-)"
> 
> Man, how many times have I said that during a pitch/presentation! :)
> 
> Inevitably you'll have at least one of these <http://www.jwz.org/
> doc/groupware.html> in your audience. 

I can't take that seriously as a critique of the irrelevance of a whole 
area of application development. I grew tired of nightclubs at about the 
same time that he grew tired of software development (
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/).  Seems from the article you referenced that 
his major interest is getting laid.  Maybe he'll finally end up as 
glamorous and successful as Peter Stringfellow (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stringfellow).  I think that putting 
'getting laid' as your number one motive can only appeal to those who 
never got laid.  I'm assuming that no-one has ever seriously cited that as 
a critique of groupware ;-)

The important thing is being able to demonstrate useful functionality to 
users rather than explain to them what 'groupware' is.  The fact is that 
after 25 years or so since Notes was created, most Notes users would still 
probably just say that it is 'email' rather than 'groupware'.  Yet there 
are other web applications that they might well use on a daily basis, 
without realizing that Notes has been shipping with exactly those kinds of 
applications since before the web existed (I'm thinking of blogs cf. the 
Notes 'personal journal' app, and wikis cf. the Notes 'discussion 
database').  Notes was almost predicated on the grounds of secure, 
signable B2B communications via email and inter-networked apps. Slowly the 
internet is building applications and functionality that existed in Notes 
at least a decade before.  The whole business with tagging makes me laugh 
- for more than a decade the Notes client has had the facility for users 
to tag any document in any application with categories.  The irony is that 
IBM often only sees something as useful when it is used on the internet, 
and then wants to add it to Notes, apparently not realizing that Notes 
already has those features, and that they were allowed to languish because 
IBM had lost their vision for their own technology. 

> Ohloh actually offers some convenient and easy to use tools.  Especially
> the ability to check if anyone is committing code to a project anymore.
> It also has some flaws such as really underestimating the activity of
> some projects depending on how they are structured.

I can see how the idea is useful in principle, but it's a pity if their 
system for estimating activity is so flawed.  Although really, the metric 
should not just be how much active committing is going on in a project, 
but also the feature set, longevity, etc.  In terms of what OGO offers 
there are very few open source competitors. 

Bernard

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