From...

April 5, 1999
Web posted at: 2:30 PM EDT

by Eric Bender

(IDG) -- They say love/hate relationships are the strongest, and we Lotus Notes users harbor intense feelings about groupware's grizzled veteran.

On the upside, Notes offers powerful (some say superhuman) tools to manage e-mail, group calendars, to-do lists, and access to online news. And our information systems folk have finally built custom databases that are immensely useful for teams like ours, spread out across the continent.

On the downside, Notes is always littering the ground around itself with Kryptonite. It's immensely difficult to master, partly because of all that raw power but just as much because of its clunky interface and general strangeness. There are times when it, like Superman, really does seem to hail from another planet.

After seven years of using Notes every day, I still get stumped by inexplicably balky address books and replication schemes, or evil glitches that reappear months after I've painstakingly fixed them. Notes is ferociously hungry for memory and other PC resources; it actually runs a utility designed to crash other programs that might get in its way.

But it is the corporate standard.

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So it was with extreme personal interest that I first heard a year and a half ago about the Notes 5 client, a stand-alone package that finally ships this week.

Bundling browsing

Notes 5 adds a browser that's integrated with its mail and other tools. It also provides an AOL My News newsfeed and improvements in key areas. It supports Internet-standard POP and IMAP mail servers, improves its support for MIME mail, and has a better user interface for mail. There's a more intelligent calendar setup and printing process, offline browsing, help with configuring dial-up connections, and a host of other tweaks and tucks. It also, of course, is tuned for the latest release of the Domino server.

The software sells for $55 in a basic e-mail version and $69 with full collaboration tools. I'd guess that almost all purchasers will be Notes stalwarts who buy the soup-to-nuts version and use it with Domino/Notes servers.

A beta experience

I looked at a very late beta of Notes 5, working off our standard Domino/Notes 4.5 servers. (I expect that it will be months before companies like ours upgrade their servers -- no carefree step, that.)

The software installed without difficulty on my PII-266 desktop with 64MB of memory. (It ends with an annoying registration form, which you can dodge by hitting Esc.) It also installed on my older notebook with 24MB of RAM, but then found it didn't have enough memory to run. The recommended minimum is 32MB of RAM.

Open up Notes 5, and you find yourself at an attractive welcome page with the familiar menu and toolbars on top and some browser-style controls in the top right corner. A new toolbar on the left edge of the screen contains icons for the main tools (mail, calendar, address, to-do lists, replicator) plus information sources (Notes/Domino databases and bookmarks for Notes and Internet Explorer and Netscape -- if those browsers are on your system). As you start opening up tools, each is marked by a tab under the top icon bar, which makes it easy to switch among them.

I can't say I've been looking for yet another browser, but this package seems reasonably useful. You have a choice of browser setups; I selected Notes plus the Internet Explorer 4 renderer, and it works quite well. The quick Web access can come in handy, but having the browser controls far from where they live in other browsers is a pain. Performance was slow, but that might have been because of beta code. In sum: This is a mildly useful addition to the multiple browsers I usually have open, and when I'm on a dial-up connection I'll try to use it as the only browser.

Far more critical to me in Notes is mail, and here we find some advantages to the new version. It's a bit easier to set your preferences (although it took me ten minutes to figure out how to change the standard message letterhead). You can have a spelling checker and signature files. You can scroll messages without losing message recipients in the process. And you can view your mail and calendar simultaneously. On the other hand, my most-desired enhancement, an automatically refreshed mailbox, didn't make it in.

Or maybe auto-refresh is lurking there but I haven't yet found how to turn it on (despite those years of experience and doing this for a living). That's the Notes way of life -- all those buried features, and a Help system that always changes but is always nonstandard.

I'll spend the coming months poking around to see which of my wish-list features (like Intellimouse-style mouse scrolling for mail) made it in. I'll look forward to the far-off day when my company's servers integrate Lotus's Sametime instant messaging capabilities into Notes. And I'll check out Notes 5's mobile tricks on other, more powerful notebooks. (Running Notes away from the office offers the most gain -- and pain.)

In the meantime, Lotus's Superman software looks like a hero fully qualified to stand beside the Incredible Hulk (Microsoft Outlook) and Spiderman (Netscape Communicator). This software's staying on my machines -- those that can run it, anyway.