Notes' Strengths and Weaknesses

BYTE conducted 15 interviews with CIOs of companies that use Notes; the goal was to learn what they like about Notes and what they'd like to see improved.

What Users Like About Notes

Improved communications. Interviewees universally praise Notes for its ability to open new channels for customer communications while improving a company's internal communications, both within and across departments. "Notes does not come in and hit just one horizontal section of your company," says Mike Bertrand, president of Notes consultancy Uptime Computer Solutions (San Jose, CA). Instead, he says, Notes typically fosters improved communications that span a company's departmen tal boundaries.

It's easy to program and use. CIOs say that writing and fielding a complex work-flow application with Notes requires programming expertise, but they also say it's easy for end users to develop their own applications and customize existing ones. "That's an incredibly important feature--that our users can build applications without any input from MIS," says Sheldon Laube, national director of information and technology at Price Waterhouse in Menlo Park, California.

Notes Mail. Users like the basic functionality of Notes Mail. Although some complain that it lacks rules and is somewhat inefficient, they like the fact that it's easy to forward documents and embed graphics and spreadsheets into mail messages.

Work flow. Developers throughout the world have written distributed work-flow applications that run on top of Notes.

Built-in security. Some CIOs say they won't even consider any platform for fielding ap plications that are replete with sensitive customer information unless it has the level of security that Notes has.

What Users Would Like Improved

Notes' programming environment. Several developers and CIOs lament the Notes macro language's lack of support for even basic FORNEXT looping capabilities. Most say they're looking forward to Lotus's integrating LotusScript, the company's BASIC-like programming language, into Notes. Most express the hope that LotusScript will support OLE Controls.

Replication. Replication is a key feature in Notes. Notes 3.0 introduced selective replication, which can reduce network traffic, but administrators, especially those with large worldwide Notes installations, want a more efficient replication engine and finer control over its options. "Field-level replication would be a very nice feature," says Mike Mandelvaum, vice president of information technologies development for Chase Manhattan.

Administrat ion. Interviewees' requests for improving Notes' management and installation tools range from improved network-monitoring tools to a utility that would convert a Notes mail-address book from flat-naming to the newer hierarchical storage scheme. Lotus's partnership with AT&T portends less administration hassles on the back end.

Cost. It currently costs about $330 per seat for Notes' client software, but that's just the beginning of the price of a Notes installation. Adding Notes to your network can require RAM and computer upgrades, plus the related additional management headaches.

To address the price issue, Lotus has introduced scaled-down Notes Express clients that cost approximately $99 per seat. But Notes Express won't run your custom applications. "We would really like to see a Notes run-time version that strips out the development tools," says Rick Bernard, information systems manager at Software 2000 (Hyannis, MA). "In our eyes, Notes Express has a limited use for our needs," he adds. "We need a version of Notes that will allow us to execute a custom application, and Express will not do that."

Reporting and database access. Many interviewees are using products such as Lotus's Notes ViP and Brainstorm Technologies' (Cambridge, MA) VB/Link to complement Notes' basic reporting capabilities; a need for better integrated reporting is a common theme. Also, Notes is not designed to support transactional processing tasks performed by relational databases. But users sometimes want to import structured data into Notes in batch operations instead of using @dbLookup. This is why they're looking to products such as Brainstorm Technologies' DataLink for Notes.