Just in short - if you think that Groove is "just Notes without server", you are very, very wrong.

Have you ever seen Lotus Sametime? It's not peer-to-peer as Groove, but it provides much more, but it's not my intention to speak about Groove at all.

I couldn't agree with your sentence that almost all Notes clients are using Notes for e-mail only. Actually, I don't know any such client at all. And Notes/Domino is even more than "groupware", or discussion database - it's complete platform for Document Management System (DMS), based on the same architecture, from the same vendor. Theoretically speaking, DMS have to provide: a) core DMS (like check-in/out, version control, doc control, FTS, etc..) b) imaging (with or without OCR/ICR... COLD) c) workflow and d) messaging (e-mail, on-line conference, chat, etc...).

Using Lotus Notes/Domino "family" of products, you can provide all those functions, right? Now, name it any other vendor that provides *all* that? Documentum? FileNet? PC DOCS? OpenText? ... ?

Regards, Bine.Zerko@src.si http://www.imaging4notes.com AIM: BineZerko

-- Anonymous, April 21, 2001

Answers

I think the point was that though it is good for all those things that email is what it tends to get used for, and I can confirm that that's how it ends up. Largely this is because different groups in large organisations have different tools to create and manage all their documents and that its really too much of an effort for anyone at the departmental level to manage that content and there's no way they want some central IS/IT bod to do that.

So content management is an increasing and persistent problem, software tools aren't actually going to solve that problem because its not a technical problem but a human work problem.

Simon

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001

I can testify that Notes is pretty much only used for email.

And as a email client, it is slow, baffling and irritating; certainly inferior to free email clients like Netscape or Outlook. About the only thing it does better than those is have built-in access to the company user directory.

Just for an example, consider the mini-dialog box you get when you close a partially composed message:

O Send and save          OK
O Send only              Cancel
O Save only              Help
O Discard changes

Ignoring help, thats 4 x 2 possibilities! What do they all mean!?

-- Anonymous, April 24, 2001

Most of the Notes installs I've seen (and I've worked with it for five years now) are either exclusively email or don't use email at all. This is a shame, because Notes is admittedly not the world's greatest email system, but it shines when integrated with the rest of it's document management/workflow/application development tools. For example, a workflow form with approval buttons can be sent directly to a user's mailbox, and then forwarded automatically when they click on the appropriate button. Workflow applications can automatically generate notification emails with links back to source information.

Most of the Notes work I've seen uses it as as sort of glue to tie messaging, workflow, web tools, back-end enterprise data, and all those approval processes that bureaucrats love to dream up - all with a kind of quirky but, once you get to know it, powerful and easy to use development environment.

-- Anonymous, April 25, 2001