I have Gone Google and returned to Lotus Notes!
Almar Diehl
12 July 2010 19:53:04
The company I work for has not only been (premier) IBM/Lotus businesspartner for the last 20 years with a good track record in both Notes/Domino/Sametime/Quickr/Connections system administration and application development, but is also Microsoft Gold Partner and Google Partner. Within our company we have approximately 60 users using Lotus Notes for mail & calendaring, approximately 40 users using Microsoft Outlook and a handful using Google Mail (i.e Google Apps). Since we see customers moving to Google (and also customers moving to Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook by the way) I wanted to experience myself how the migration to Google Mail would work and if (after using Lotus Notes for almost 20 years) I could get used to mail & calendaring 'in the cloud'. So, three months ago I got the sticker on my laptop:
Migrating my mail, calendar entries and contacts to Google Apps was easy. Google supplies a, free, Notes based solution for the migration which in my case worked without a problem. Since I also have a BlackBerry I had my device activated on our Hosted Google BES environment. Working with Google Mail took some getting used to, mainly because you tend to compare it to Lotus Notes. However, in the end it is 'just' mail & calendaring.
There was one thing however that I could not get used to: the way Google Mail handles mail threads. When I replied to and archived a message I would suddenly see it re-appear in my inbox?! (Because someone sent a reply). When I forwarded a message and after then wanted to reply to the same message it was hard to find the message to reply to (since every reply/forward is kept in it's own 'section' and only the last mail in the thread is expanded, being the forwarded one).
What I really like about Google is the way they constantly (try to) improve their products by adding new functionality and especially the ease if implementing functionality (of course possible by being in the cloud).
Mail in offline mode worked just fine, most of the time..... I had two instances where the offline store was corrupt and no synchronization could be performed anymore, also leaving messages in the outbox. Disabling/re-enabling the offline store solved this (although I believe this is hard to explain to an end-user).
So today I decided that I am too much a YellowBleeder and moved myself back to Lotus Notes. So the sticker is gone and will be replaced by:
Moving back to Lotus Notes has a couple of reasons:
- My company uses a lot of Notes applications, so I still have my Notes client open all day
- Testing/experimenting with new Notes functionality (f.i. 8.5.2) is harder when you do not use all functionality in the Notes client
- I have agents in my Notes mailfile, doing all kind of stuff, that I really missed
So, for the rest of my working life I will stick to Lotus Notes. 'The cloud' is OK, but for my daily work as a IBM Lotus Notes consultant it is just not giving me any extras.
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