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.