Imagine a program used by 120 million people, of whom about 119m hate it. Sound unlikely? Yet that's the perception one garners in trying to discover whether Lotus Notes, IBM's "groupware" application, is - as readers of Technology blog suggested - the "world's worst application". The discussions (at http://tinyurl.com/e4a56 and http://tinyurl.com/d9gdk) suggest that those who have used it are united: to the average person, Notes displays all the user-friendliness of a cornered rat.

Take a few examples from the Lotus Notes Sucks website (http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com), devoted to listing flaws in the user interface. When new mail arrives, you get a message saying "You have new mail". But the mailbox display doesn't update; you have to press a key or menu item to refresh it. So the program is smart enough to know email has arrived, but not to show it - something the clunkiest free email program does routinely. (That's mistake No 38 on the Sucks site.)

Or the user dialogue boxes - such as the one that reads: "You must change your password. It expired on 11/20/2005. Do you want to change your password now? Yes/No". Why offer users the chance to say "No"? What if they choose it?

A typical process

The panoply of interface errors raises two questions. Why do users hate Notes so much? And why, then, do they use it? The answers illuminate a typical process when companies buy "enterprise" software: the people who choose a product tend not to be the ones who use it.

Notes was intended to be the first properly collaborative product. Developed by Ray Ozzie at Lotus (which in the early 1980s made its name with 1-2-3, a combination spreadsheet, database and graphing package), Notes was devised when the internet was virtually unknown, and even local area networks were slow and unreliable. Documents would be stored on a central server, and made accessible to anyone, rather than hidden on personal PCs. It would be able to work on Windows PCs and Macs. Yet even IBM's official history of the product (http://tinyurl.com/ 9mzly), reveals the early quirks that would drive later users mad: "Around this time Apple Computer released the Macintosh with a new easy-to-use graphical user interface. This influenced the developers of Lotus Notes, and they gave their new product a character-oriented graphical user interface." So was it character-oriented, or graphical? You can't be both.

The result, which appeared in 1989, is a product split in two: the Notes "client" side, which users experience, and the back-end Domino server, which administers the processes such as storing documents, passing email, hosting messaging discussions and organising shared calendars.

IBM acquired Lotus, principally to get Notes, in July 1995, and has driven a series of upgrades. Fast-forward to today, and Notes has gained widespread takeup: users in the UK include British Airways, Toyota, Volkswagen, Standard Life Assurance and most major newspaper groups (including Guardian Media Group). But further investigation shows that its proponents tend to be administrators, and its detractors the end users.

The Lotus Notes Sucks site insists its mission is not to put Lotus people out of work. "It's to embarrass them into fixing the egregious problems. Specifically, the front end. Also, to influence people into not buying Lotus Notes until it works for users."

The main focus for frustration is Notes's odd way with email, and its unintuitive interface. But to complain about that is to miss the point, says Ben Rose, founder and leader of the UK Notes User Group (www.lnug.org.uk). He's a Notes administrator, for "a large automotive group".

"It's regarded by many as an email program, but it's actually groupware," Rose explains. "It does do email, and calendaring, but can host discussion forums, and the collaboration can extend to long-distance reporting. It will integrate at the back end with huge systems. It's extremely powerful."

So why are so many people down on it? "Too many companies rely on email too much," Rose suggests. "Email is quite inefficient. People like to 'Reply To All' and send copies of attachments to each other, instead of doing what Notes does, which is to have a single copy on the server that everyone sees."

Dave Delay, who worked on Notes from 1996 to 2002, points out that it is one of the few products Microsoft has tried - and failed - to wipe out. "People dislike Notes because their expectations don't jive with the intent of the product. At its core, Notes is a runtime environment for collaborative applications, but when people complain about Notes, they are usually not talking about core Notes. They are talking about the Notes Mail and Calendar applications (http://tinyurl.com/9v94z").

Where Notes does win praise is from those who administer it, who say it is secure, stable and flexible. Databases can be tied together, and there is even a "bridge" to Microsoft's Outlook.

However, most people aren't administrators, and while Notes' back-end functions have advanced, its user interface has continued in a parallel universe where Windows never happened (though arguably it introduced tabbed browsing years before Mozilla). For Notes users, email and calendaring - the same functions that Microsoft offers through its Outlook and Exchange products - are what they do a lot of the day.

Delay's remarks brought one sharp user retort, who observed that "Notes's backend functionality has no bearing on us 100m or so end-users. As far as we are concerned the GUI is the system. And boyo... is the GUI client a heap of ill-conceived, non-intuitive rubbish."

Missing the point

Stowe Boyd, president and chief operating officer of the collaborative software company Corante, who has a long history of reviewing software, says: "The problem is ... most people don't have Notes, and you need to collaborate with them, too. So, naturally, Notes the platform is judged by comparison with alternative solutions that allow you to communicate and coordinate with anyone, anywhere... not just with other users of the same collaboration product you are using.

"The point that is missed by advocates is that people want to be able to communicate ... with anyone, not just those who are using the same programs. That's why email was the killer app of Web 1.0. And Notes has fallen by the wayside. That's one of the reasons that something as uncollaborative as Outlook kicked Lotus's ass."

That's a red rag to Rose. "Microsoft has been trying to catch up with Notes for years," he says. "It's trying to put collaboration into the next version of Office, something Notes has had for years."

IBM wants to know what you think and says that results of a survey, at http://tinyurl.com/djlxz and intended for those using version 6 and above, will inform the next version. None of the options includes "rip up the interface and start again".

You could suggest it, though.

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