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HCL Notes Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.4 out of 10
Score
8.4 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for HCL Notes are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Seamless Integration: Users have found that HCL Notes can be easily integrated with other software platforms, such as Sametime chat, Concur, and Productivity Management System. This integration allows for seamless communication and access to various tools and resources.

Efficient Calendar Management: The calendar management feature in HCL Notes is highly praised by users. Once they accept a meeting invite, their calendar is automatically updated, and they can easily view all their meetings for the day or week. Additionally, users can book meeting rooms, and the availability of these rooms is visible to all employees, making it convenient for planning meetings.

Robust Database and Custom Applications: Users commend the strong database of HCL Notes which is extremely scalable and can handle thousands of users effectively. They also appreciate the enterprise-grade framework for developing custom database applications in HCL Notes. This simplicity of access makes it convenient for users while reducing administrative burdens.

Reviews

16 Reviews

HCL

Rating: 7 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HCL Notes provides business collaboration functions, such as email, calendars, to-do lists, contact management, discussion forums, file sharing, websites, instant messaging, blogs, document libraries, user directories, and custom applications. It can also be used with other HCL Domino applications and databases. I particularly use it for email, calendars, and to-do lists. It helps me to be more organized and save time by making everything stay at on place with easy access and user-friendly experience.

Pros

  • Helps me with notifying the email status.
  • Helps me with better organization of my time on calendars.
  • With the help of calendars, I am also able to use to-do lists to adjust my time and hence saving me a lot of extra effort.
  • I can also save important notes as well.

Cons

  • Could be more user friendly with a better UI.
  • Can add time blocker to be synced with google.

Likelihood to Recommend

HCL is well suited for emails, calendars and to do list. Helps in organizing my work and time as well. Has a good UI but can be improved. It should also be able to sync with Google Calendar so that I just have to update my calendar at one area only.

KK
Karan Kundra
Data Engineer I in Information Technology at Innovaccer Analytics Pvt Ltd (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
HCL Notes
1 year of experience

Convenient Platform For Global Organizational Management

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HCL Notes (or formerly known as IBM Notes) is used by my company in all its regional offices worldwide. HCL Notes in my company serves many functions such as emails, sending meeting invite, booking meeting rooms, accessing to my company intranet, template sharing, leave management, notebook entry, creating to do list, raising IT issues to global IT team, and even booking guest room for business travel in other countries. As the result IBM notes standardized my company processes across all regions. In short, it enables fast and easy global communication within the company.

Pros

  • HCL Notes can be integrated with other software platforms such as Sametime chat, Concur (expense management platform), and Productivity Management System (platform for consultants/analyst to access to assigned projects). For example, once the status of my claim expenses is changes by the finance team, I'll receive automatic notification from Concur to IBM Notes.
  • Calendar Management - Once I accepted the meeting invite, it will automatically block my calendar and all I need to do to see all my meetings of the day/week is to simply check my calendar in the HCL Notes. Moreover, I can book any meeting rooms in my company and the booking will be made visible to all other employees so that they can see the availability of the room when planning a meeting.
  • Secured Platform- All email from the external party will be hold by the delivery system of the IBM Notes. User can either allow or block the email or site easily.
  • Global Meeting - Regional or cross-regional global meeting can be easily participated remotely. With HCL Notes installed in my laptop/notebook, I can conveniently join company meeting from my working desk or even when travelling.

Cons

  • HCL Notes needs to largely improve the quality online web/internet browsing as HCL Notes takes considerably long time to connect and load of the web content.
  • The links shared in HCL Notes emails won't be connected often and the web content won't be visible sometimes. I need to copy and paste the link in Google Chrome to view the web content.
  • Sometimes, HCL Notes will get jammed and need to restart all over.

Likelihood to Recommend

I often work with teams from other country and regions, hence HCL Notes is a very useful platform for internal company management operations. It standardized organisational work standards in most of the offices worldwide. HCL Notes also enables chat with other team around the world that I find very helpful when initiating conversation or just want to have a quick update rather than sending emails and waiting for replies. However, HCL Notes is not very efficient in web browsing and user still need to use other internet service providers.

MT
Mogana Tashiani
Research Analyst and Consulting (Technology) in Professional Services at Frost & Sullivan Asia-Pacific (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
HCL Notes
3 years of experience
View profile

IBM Notes Full Feature Email and More, a Good Mid-Size Solution

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Notes is being used across the entire organization both nationally and internationally. Notes is primarily our email, calendar, and contacts solution, but also serves as a collaboration tool, messaging, and database client/server.

Pros

  • Data sharing via small database format is valuable as they are quickly deployed, easily managed and distributed on backend email servers.
  • Integrated messaging allows quick communications between geographical sites reducing long distance costs.
  • Policy documents for registering new users, setting initial security levels, assigning default database access is managed easily with the admin client.

Cons

  • There is room for improvement in the OS compatibility arena. IBM Notes tends to run behind and crash issues exist.
  • I would like the Recent Contacts feature removed, it has caused many issues within our organization, it is activated by default after a local installation.
  • Client misunderstanding of the "All Documents" view. This is a dangerous view, primarily because many users misunderstand it as a "folder".

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe Notes is well suited for small to midsize organizations that could utilize it's integrated database and messaging components. The format of the databases, however, leave the migration of those databases problematic inasmuch as compatibility to other platforms is an issue. I believe most end users find the interface open and intuitive with features that are useful and functional.

CS
Christopher Stark
Division Network Support Specialist in Information Technology at The Salvation Army (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
HCL Notes
19 years of experience

Lotus Notes Insights

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Lotus Notes is used by most of the departments in our organization. It is used as documentary storage for all the requirements at a single place categorized accordingly. It has the client wise requirements along with their specific details.

Pros

  • It consists of all the client requirements arranged in a user-friendly manner.
  • We can customize the Workspace as desired.
  • It can hold the contacts of the organization in one database and can be readily accessed.

Cons

  • It can incorporate the latest updates as per market standards
  • It lacks behind in the access speed if It contains more data.
  • Migration to a new database takes much time.

Likelihood to Recommend

Lotus Notes is well-suited to holding the requirements and file details, etc. in one single application.

VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
Vetted Review
HCL Notes
2 years of experience

IBM Notes is basic, but gets the job done

Rating: 5 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Notes is used by some departments in our organization, but others have moved on to the Google suite of tools. I still use IBM Notes on a regular basis as I work across many different teams so I need to stay in touch with them. We use IBM Notes as a scheduling and communications tool mainly at this point. IBM Notes integrates well with IBM Sametime which is the main reason that some people at our organization have not wanted to move on.

Pros

  • IBM Notes does a great job as a calendar and scheduling tool.
  • The features available on mobile are comparable to that found on a desktop.
  • Very simple user interface keeps distractions to a minimum and makes it easy to use.

Cons

  • The simple user experience can be touted as a positive, but it is also a negative in some ways. Compared to other calendars, email and chat tools, IBM Notes looks like it is from the 90s.
  • We have constant issues with chat crashing. This is the main reason so many people in our organization chose to switch away from Notes.
  • There aren't a lot of integrations with IBM Notes and other applications we regularly use. Notes seems to have been left behind by many.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Notes works great as a basic email, calendar and chat tool. While there are better and more feature-packed tools available, if you are familiar with IBM Notes, there is nothing really wrong with it. It looks a little dated but works well (when it works). We have had some issues with the tool crashing on us.

VU
Verified User
Analyst in Product Management (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
HCL Notes
4 years of experience

IBM Notes: Decent interface, old school style

Rating: 3 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM notes is being used by our whole organization as an email and meeting scheduler. We also have sametime, another IBM product, which we use as an instant messaging system. It is currently being phased out as we are moving to a new email provider. It addresses our need to have a communication and scheduling platform for the organization to collaborate.

Pros

  • Collaboration
  • Scheduling
  • Communication

Cons

  • Archaic
  • Weak user interface
  • crashes frequently

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM notes is well suited to situations where you need to communicate with coworkers, or when you are trying to send out an email. I do not think that it is well suited as a calendar source. My calendar oftentimes gets very unorganized and I feel that Notes could do a better job of helping me to keep things better organized.

MF
Mark Franklin
RLDP Consultant - Prospect Center in Sales at Sun Life Financial (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
HCL Notes
1 year of experience
View profile

Notes is dead! But not really - it can still benefit you!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization is a small IBM Business Partner. We use Notes for email and application development. It provides us secure access and storage of our mail data. Since we are small, it's used across the organization. We can also do team scheduling through calendaring and/or custom applications. We also write business-critical applications in Notes and Domino for our customers.

Pros

  • Calendar and Scheduling are extremely mature and implemented well.
  • In general, email is email. Notes is the frontend just as Outlook would be. The presentation and implementation of the mail system are on par with any other vendor in the market.
  • Although at certain points the integration could be tighter, Notes integrates well with the other IBM Collaboration products like Connections and Sametime. It is a single point of entry for enterprise collaboration.

Cons

  • IBM need to solidify their roadmap for IBM Notes and work more on marketing the software.
  • Lately, the fix packs (or feature packs) have had some bugs - more so than ones prior to the 9.0.1 version. This needs a little more attention.
  • Though it is great with newer hardware, especially SSD, the Eclipse-based Notes Client can still be rather slow to load for some users.

Likelihood to Recommend

Notes for mail is well-suited for organizations of any size (from 5 to >100,000) and I've supported organizations throughout the spectrum. Though some of the modern application platforms are also good, Notes is also well suited to provide users with a solid platform through which to do their job. However, without professional service or someone with prior knowledge on the staff, it could be quite daunting for smaller organizations.

CW
Chris Whisonant
Lead Consultant in Professional Services at Best Methods (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Reseller
HCL Notes
15 years of experience
View profile

Strong Secure Email Collaborative Suite with Competitive Edge!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's main function is two-fold. The first is obviously email, calendar, contacts, enterprise-grade shared storage and social networking available in Notes 9. The second function is we have around 20+ internally developed Lotus Notes databases which we use to store all infrastructure inventory, workflows, work queue for builds, audits etc. We also have the Lotus Notes DB's integrated with our ERP and Remedy ticketing system along with other systems which automatically pull data from the various Lotus Notes DBs. It is used pretty heavily on a daily basis.

Pros

  • It has a really strong and robust database that's extremely scalable and holds up well to thousands of users and many different environments.
  • It has a really good enterprise-grade framework for development custom database applications
  • All of the custom database applications along with the email all have a nice uniform look and feel so their easy-to-use.
  • I really like how it's developed and supported on every client OS (Windows, OSX, Linux)! The competitors definitely do NOT offer this (M$).

Cons

  • I would say the GUI could use some improving to make it more appealing to less saavy and new users
  • I don't really have any other cons

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe you could find a way to utilize IBM Notes for really any scenario and any sized company whether it be a mom-and-pop SMB or a large corporate enterprise. There's a LOT of really nice and useful features for ALL audiences.

MJ
Matthew J. Fitzpatrick
Sr Technology Engineer in Information Technology at Travelers (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Reseller
HCL Notes
9 years of experience
View profile

IBM Notes Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Notes as our main CRM for the entire company. It's integrated nightly with our back-end accounting system. We also use it for publishing real-time information to up to 45,000 homeowners and 1,500 board members via our web portal. Additionally, we host several other websites to provide real-time information to our vendors and auditors.

Pros

  • It's a rock solid single server platform that runs every standard protocol you could need.
  • Notes security is top notch. Starting at the network port level down to field level encryption.
  • Rapid development environment using eclipse is fantastic.

Cons

  • SSL handling.
  • Dev tools all should be based on the eclipse side.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anything document centric or collaborative

SR
Steven Rieger
Director of Information Technologies in Information Technology at Lieberman Management Services (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
HCL Notes
25 years of experience
View profile

IBM Notes an Application lost in the Wilderness of Technology

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM notes was used in this organization primarily for mail and workflow management. Various applications were built that could handle top executive approval flows and other document routing, commenting and decision-making processes. The most important features that were relied on were the impeccable security measures that were taken advantage of, such as encryption, compute when composed fields that maintained an un-editable audit trail log. IBM notes features like replication were a great advantage. And the beauty of the whole system was in the ease with which you could backup and restore, apps, clients, and servers.

Pros

  • Backup and Recovery... even when done manually it is a piece of cake.. granular recovery of individual records (Documents as they call it here) is possible without any third party licensing / software.
  • Replication is such a beauty, you could have a PC configured such that it will receive replicated data for any critical app at scheduled intervals for off site backup when running on dry budgets.
  • Server Clustering - Another 5 second job, just create a cluster group, add member servers, and click save -- you are almost done... click on the notes apps you want on the cluster and create replica.. system does all the rest
  • Field level Encryption -- Don't encrypt the entire document if it is not desired.. even a single field could be encrypted on the form
  • Any user could download the entire app for offline work but would only be able to download data that he/she is authorized to view - Working offline on an online app is possible out of the box. when you connect back to the network (dial-up, dsl, vpn whatever your company supports) only changed are replicated.

Cons

  • Marketing -- IBM needs to do more .. they just cant seem to do it better, far worse products are doing better... selling points for notes despite being strong, are overshadowed by the sheer marketing campaigns of others. Notes just doesn't glitter.
  • Front end need total re-engineering - the legacy out of the box templates need updating
  • More determination and commitment from IBM - seems they are abandoning a great product by lack of will

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for companies looking for a robust platform that can handle dynamic change in application design, fluid SOPs and a dispersed workforce, low budgets and high-security considerations. Easy to maintain, implement, and upgrade. Where you do not have to even think whether upgrading the system will affect the old apps. Apps written for R2 would be guaranteed to run on R9.x without a single piece of code requiring change.

UQ
Umar Qureshi
Dy Manager Enterprise in Information Technology at Pak Gulf (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
HCL Notes
18 years of experience
View profile