Jan Schulz

There are a lot of people who argue for a "personal edition" of notes to get some enduser promotion. In its current form, this won't be a good idea:

Yes, you gain LiveText, nice email-environments like eProductivity and maybe even some personal apps. But I haven't found any apps yet, which will satisfy a casual user! Password store? Keepass is better (ever used strg+v to autopaste a user/pw into a browser window?). Note taking? Personal journals might be eligible, but there are apps like evernote which sound better. And I can't think of any other apps which might be interesting to a *normal* end user!

Any then there are things like this, when you use notes as a pop3/smtp client:

• No Spam handler: you need to setup your own.
• 20+sec startup time and 500MB downloads just to open email (thunderbird is 5 secs away and a tenth that size)
• preferences for email all over the place and much to cryptic for "normal" emailusers: smtp.box, location docs, smtp & pop3 accounts, "replication" instead of "send and receive", File->Preferences overload.
  
• lots of features, which are no use to a normal user: sametime, replication, ID management, ...
• Strange behavior uncommon to other clients: for example no warnings that pasted images are not attached if the email is sent as plain text. You can edit received mails. Folders vs. Views.
  
• I also don't think that the code for POP3/SMTP in the client was much used:calendar invitation don't work: You can't send replys because of a bug in the code (the From is sent to your emailadress and the replicator expects a NotesName -> reported to IBM, reproduced, waiting for action: PMR 67543SGC724, SPR MALZ7Q249V).
  

Notes strength are the easy collaboration features with a client attached to a domain and servers. As a standalone product all these strength become weaknesses because they are too complex for a enduser and to heavy (and in most cases useless) to be convinient.

Some examples: in a company you use connections, replicated doclibraries, KM and CRM Apps to collaborate. But as a enduser without a server? Excel + dropbox. Secure and replicated storage of notes? Textfiles and Dropbox. Webpages or blog on a domino server? much easier with LJ/blogger.com or even some html files uploaded via ftp. Chatting via Sametime? Again not useable without a  server, so I use skype.

So I think that releasing (and promoting) notes as it is now as a enduser standalone tool will result in much disappointment and negative feedback/ publicity.

Maybe if vulcan becomes available and it integrates facebook/Xing/StudiVZ (german facebook clone), doodle, skype, sharepoint, and whatever there is to become a "universal inbox, calendar, todo and contact manager" for everything. And gets a enduser open server in the cloud, so that your data is replicated and secure.

Recent contacts were a PITA when the location settings "first local, then server" and "stop after first match" are enabled:

• Receive a mail from 'sales@otherorg.com', have your own 'sale' group in NAB. Send a mail to 'sales' and it will go out to 'sales@otherorg.com'. Fun (see Comment 9 here). Happens even when replying to such a mail...
  
• Have a group called "XY" and a group caled "XY group". You get a Mail to "XY group". You can't send a mail to "XY" anymore, every time it will be (quietly) resolved to 'XY group". Even more fun...

Both could have security implications: You more or less don't notice that the names are expanded and it happens after you press send. And you probably don't want internal mails to sales ending up at the competitions site. Or sensitive mails to "XY" at maybe much bigger group.

Enabling exhaustive lookup will result in other errors (group is available two times -> doc.send will fail!. Also the user will get a strange picklist, where he must choose between the two addresses) or will not resolve the issue when the user is offline.

This seems to fixed as of 8.5.1 FP1:

SPR# MCMA7VPKUN - When a group with the same name exists in the local and server replicas, and was also in recent contacts, the recent contacts version was used and the ambiguous dialog box was not displayed. This problem has been fixed in 8.5.1 FP1 and was a regression introduced in 8.0.

Lets hope for the best... downloading right now...

You might also vote for this ideajam entry: notes.ini variable to exclude internal NotesNames from Recent Contacts, which is another problem with recent contacts.