Friday, July 3, 2009

Fud Buster Friday #47 - iNotes is Ugly, Slow and Requires Its Own Server

As with most FUD the history of a product comes into play, no matter how old it might be.

iNotes (Also known as Domino Web Access or Webmail) as it is called now in R8.5 of Lotus Notes is a huge improvement over past efforts to mimic the Notes client.

It currently mimics it very well and is much more functional than ever before.

Coming in 3 flavors, Full, Light and UltraLite there is a version for everyone.

Full is like it says, it includes everything, email, calendar and scheduling, to dos, Sametime and other required actions and is meant for normal bandwidth availability.

Would you belive I could not find a video of iNotes in English? Enjoy this one:

Light scales back to the basics, email, simple calendar and ONLY connects to get your email nothing else. Aimed at lower than normal bandwidth experiences.


Ultralite is really for iPhones and the Safari browser. But you can use it just as well under your browser of choice.
Watch it here if you haven't seen it yet:


It is NOT slow at all, in fact it handles previews of email and name lookups quickly and efficiently.

In R8.x the mail templates, which manage one's mail file, have been merged into one compared to previously where they were 2 separate templates. In the past this created a sometimes duplicated file scheme thus wasting resources. Now one server can handle both web and rich client access.

Of course for best performance one should understand how memory and other server tasks handle the nuances of each client and design an architecture accordingly.

Along with this smoother than smooth web based client comes increased compression on attachments and a single template storage method to keep overall file sizes smaller.

So the next time you hear from your vendor that Lotus Webmail is old and slow, ask them to watch the videos for themselves. After all your data is private so you can't show them yours :-) And remind them it's called iNotes just like the iPhone because it is all about what I want.

7 comments:

  1. Briljant last line.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My iNotes mail is sorted by date ascending. Makes it pretty much worthless.

    I know there's a fix but my admin won't let me do it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Keith -- I've had single server handle both client and web access since R4. What was I missing?
    Tommy -- One click on the date column reverses the order.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Tommy,
    David's right just click on the column you want to change.

    David,
    Sure one can run both on one server, I used a single template(sometimes a bit funny looking) from one server.
    But most larger companies have them separated because it's what's best for the server and thus the client experience. Even in R8 you would see some difference although it's less than past versions.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Are we talking about iNotes Lite? Or iNotes? I can't sort in iNotes Lite.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I just tested both Full and Lite and they both adjust dates based on clicking the column. We use the 8.5 mail template.

    ReplyDelete