IBM Notes an Application lost in the Wilderness of Technology
August 21, 2017
IBM Notes an Application lost in the Wilderness of Technology
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Notes
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.
- 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.
- 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
- Savings on licensing costs, as several features are built into single system rather than deploying a whole army of servers
- Very difficult to find technical resources
- Unlike other suites of products, Notes is not resource hungry.
- Back-end servers are available on x86, x64, x128, along with several OS support such as Linux, Z/OS, Windows etc
Exchange is too resource hungry and cumbersome to restore granular. It requires several other Microsoft Servers to integrate just to meet IBM Notes in terms of features. As someone once described, doing an apple to apple [comparison] is difficult. If Exchange were taken as an apple, Notes is the apple as well as the entire fruit and vegetable section.