back to article US Bank dumps Sharepoint (to spend more time with Lotus)

One of the largest banks in the United States will stop writing checks for Microsoft Sharepoint and standardize on the IBM Lotus platform instead. US Bank will begin rolling out IBM's collaboration software, Lotus Quickr, and social computing software, Lotus Connections, for all 58,000 employees. More than 5,000 sites running …

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  1. Bill Gould
    FAIL

    Why?

    Notes is ass. That is all.

  2. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Interesting

    @ Bill Gould - is Outlook any better?

    Sharepoint is a dog to work with and fucking expensive for enterprise. I'm not over the moon with Notes but it does do some things very well.

    Long term: this stuff is going to commodified.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    bollox

    i have been using notes on on off as a developer and user since the since version 3 and there is still functionality and integration aailable that Micro$oft still hasnt got licked!

    the king is dead, long live the king

  4. Dylan Bright

    Poor US Bank employees

    I feel so sorry for them. I'd rather use a filing cabinet as a collaboration tool than Quickr.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Why not

    Notes was ass - now its based on eclipse, an open source platform, and is surprisingly a lot better. Having eclipse as the client base for Notes, IM, office etc makes for a good case against the lock in that is Microsoft.

  6. Solomon Grundy
    Badgers

    Sales Award

    Whatever sales droid from IBM pulled this off just got a huge bonus.

    Too bad he'll get fired next year since this is a one time thing he won't be able to repeat.

  7. James O'Brien
    Joke

    @Bill Gould

    They couldn't afford the licenses for Sharepoint after getting free money in the Failout.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Finally some sense

    Lotus software has been coming on in leaps and bounds, this news is not really about Notes, more the other products.

    However Notes/Domino 8.5 out of the box includes clustering over a WAN, SOX compliant journalling, deduplication of data and automatic archiving.

    We are about to migrate to Exhchange and it doesn't have any of those :-(

  9. I'm Brian and so's my wife
    FAIL

    @Bill Gould

    Why so down on Notes? As I understand it, the version to which my employer will upgrade next year will allow one to undo multiple actions rather than the one that is currently permitted. This is ground-breaking stuff!

    Oh wait, I see perfectly what you mean...

  10. The Original Steve

    @AC 20:52

    Utter bolloxs - Exchange has all those features.

    The fact they were running a mash of domino server half explains why they're switching - a fair portion of sharepoint's cool features require Exchange.

  11. Charles Manning

    Sharepoint is horrid

    Sharepoint just has to be the most awful collaboration suite. I'd dump it for pretty much anything.

  12. captain veg Silver badge

    how hard can it be?

    My employers ran Notes/Domino for some years, during which I hated it. Then they went for Outlook/Exchange and I discovered that there is something worse!

    Give me the search from Notes, the HTML support falsely promised by Outlook (and almost entirely absent from Notes), and a user interface that makes even a minimal amount of sense, and we might be talking. Why is that so hard? Something that could quote properly would be good too.

    It's not rocket science.

    -A.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    eclipse...

    We have moved to the latest version of the notes and sametime clients and its embarrassingly slow.. on a positive note its almost as pleasing on the eye as Outlook 2003

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    Lotus

    The Notes GUI is no match for Outlook from an email / calendar perspective. However, the capability has always been far superior. The problem has been development has been too easy and organisations have had business critical processes engineered by "end users" without the normal rigours... the development environment was not like others. I guess it's a similar problem with allowing users to build databases in Access.

    Sametime and Quickplace were out in a more functional form than the equivalent Sharepoint.

    If your desktop is entirely Microsoft, it's such an easy choice to go for the Microsoft collaboration tools from an IT support and integration (and training) perspective.

    The bank has made a tough choice - it will take longer to reap the benefits though in the long term they may well have a better solution.

    I don't work for IBM, I have however run a detailed ITT for collaboration tools (including email) and the IBM products came out on top.... this was 6 years ago and I would have thought Microsoft would have overtaken IBM/Lotus by now.

  15. Mark 65

    Deliberate

    Do you think it's deliberate (on whos part I know not) that the F5 key is refresh in MS Outlook, and log off in Lotus Notes. Used to irritate the shit out of me when I had to suffer Notes.

  16. Nick 6
    FAIL

    @filing cabinets

    If that's a filing cabinet, then Sharepoint is a skip.

    Where I currently work, the on-going joke when asked where your document/presentation/spreadsheet/diagrams are is to say "they're on Sharepoint". Because the recipient hasn't got a cat in hells chance of finding them unless you can dictate a precise folder path off the top of your head. Search doesn't work, and it doesn't work very very slowly.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re: Deliberate #

    It's not just Outlook where F5 is refresh - it's also web browsers. And yes it is really irritating.

  18. James Anderson
    Jobs Halo

    Why stick with such a tarnished brand name?

    Consider that one of IBMs most succesful products in terms of cash revenue has had over 20 names over the years OS,OS/VS,OS/MVT.......OS/390, z/OS.

    Even the venerable IEBGENER got rebranded to Tivoli.

    Why do IBM stick with the hated Lotus Notes brand name?

  19. Citizen Kaned

    @ mark...

    "Do you think it's deliberate (on whos part I know not) that the F5 key is refresh in MS Outlook, and log off in Lotus Notes. Used to irritate the shit out of me when I had to suffer Notes." - god i hated that too.

    to be honest as much as notes annoyed me now im at a new company and i have to mess with sharepoint. oh my god. nasty piece of s/w. i avoid it at all costs and will write a collab tool for this place over working with the least intuitive bit of crap ever.

    notes over shaerpoint ANY day!

  20. cmrayer
    Flame

    @The Original Steve

    In Exchange 2010 maybe some are there but even then the WAN clustering is not active/active and depends on the OS that you are using. Oh and we cannot use 2010 because some of the estate is on 2003 (meanwhile in Domino land 5, 6, 6.5, 7, 8, 8.5 all coexist perfectly.

    Notes 8.5 F5 is refresh, html rendering is as good as IE7, nowhere near Firefox/Chrome but that's another rant!

    8.5 can be slower than Outlook (ie is uses more memory) but if you have thousands of mails in your inbox (not in folders) then Outlook is slower that Notes - maost of our users do!

  21. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    @captain veg

    captain veg wrote: "Give me the search from Notes, the HTML support falsely promised by Outlook... "

    So you're the fucking idiot who actually thinks HTML emails are a good thing?

  22. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    RE: The Original Steve

    This is how it works - company buys old Notes/Domino, gets big discount from IBM and gets lumbered with P-series kit. Users are horrified, but the back-office DBAs love the sense of power from the "centralised" design. Years later, when those same back-office noddies have written so many critical business processes into the DB2 database in Domino that there is no way the company can extract itself from the Domino quicksand, and seeing as so-caled compatibility with Outlook has always been a joke, the users are still suffering Notes. Come the recession, and whilst the users and advisors are screaming for Exchange/Sharepoint, the company can't afford the long and painful de-Dominisation, which is what IBM have banked on all along. So the IBM salesgrunt offers the CIO a fat discount if they let IBM GS come in and "integrate" Quickr and other Lotus bloatware, and the CIO thinks "well, I know this is in reality just pushing us deeper into the quicksand, but I won't be here in three years, and the discount means I can give myself a bonus later and let the next schmuck live with the fallout", so he signs on the line. And so the Domino/Lotus/Notes horror rolls on.

    Sure, Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint is not perfect, but IMHO it beats anything IBM can do with Lotus by a country mile!

  23. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
    Coat

    Does...

    lotus Quickr come with a spell checkr

  24. Inachu
    FAIL

    Grrrrr LOL Grrrrrr HAHAHA GRRRR

    The only postive Notes has over outlook is that Outlook is crippled by not supporting PST files over 1 gig in size.

    Microsoft really truly needs to fix that. A gigabyte limit..... really stupid.

  25. TerryG
    Happy

    @Inachu

    They fixed it 6 years ago. The limit is 20GB, although why you'd want a 20GB PST is another matter.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Business Value

    Is the important factor, no one wins a technical p1ssing contest. This customer obviously saw the frightening roadmap(guessmap) from MS where Sharepoint 2010 is 64bit only, needs Windows 2008 R2 64bit & SQL Server 2008 64bit only & didn't fancy a massive rip & replace exercise.

    The alternatives from Lotus are truly (imho) collaborative & don't require an army of BP's to fix problems & add functionality that should be there from the get go.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    I dream of a world without Lotus Notes.

    Wherever there is a discussion about Notes I usually try to reason with the fans (i.e. the people who maintain rather than use it). I usually try to explain the science and history of UI design, how we have got to where we are and why Notes did not come along for the ride. It's an argument which cannot be won because the fans don't want to listen, and I just can't be bothered to make the same arguments again.

    This is the rub...

    They are just too dumb to understand. If they could understand software design, they would be designing proper software rather than developing Notes applications. Notes is Visual Basic for distributed applications. It lowers the barriers of entry to people who just don't know what they are doing. A good web developer who actually knows how to design a database will kick the arse out any Lotus Notes application.

    If you are a Lotus Notes developer please feel free to take this personally.

    Go.... just go

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Well

    Well US bank has needed to do something for years. There systems are such a cluster old and dated stuff I am surprised they could stay in business even after the bailout

  29. Mike VandeVelde
    FAIL

    RE: Matt Bryant

    There is no "DB2 database in Domino". Version 7 introduced the capability to hook your forms and views to a separate DB2 backend data store.

    "Sure, Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint is not perfect, but IMHO it beats anything IBM can do with Lotus by a country mile!"

    LOL!!

    You have Lotus Notes clients accessing Domino servers, on almost any OS you want. Painless upgrades. RAD.

    Or you have I think a bit more than "Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint" - Internet Explorer and Outlook and Office on Windows accessing Exchange / Sharepoint / SQLServer / IIS on Windows Server. Deadfully painful upgrades. Developing something that you could do in days with Domino takes... weeks? months?

    Hhhmmm....

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Both are shite

    Notes is utter crap for Exchange/Outlook functionality. Utter. Crap. Yes, Notes fanbois, I'm running the latest version, and it's still utter crap.

    OTOH, Shitepoint is a pile of overengineered, cobbled-together dog feces whose only purpose is to keep overpriced, useless consultants supplied with a lifetime of work.

    The only solution is to have the developers for both products face off in a Thunderdome-style deathmatch and then feed whoever survives to a horde of ravening razor-toothed chihuahuas. A plague on both their houses.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Sharepoint is a software dustbin!

    Sharepoint is balls, clunky and it's a nasty mess that end-users are allowed to "develop" applications, without a second thought for design prinicples and app use that usual coded apps go through.

    My shop allows users to create document dumping grounds in loads of Sharepoint portals, they are nightmare, they just eat SAN space by constantly duplicating office docs found out on the shared drives, you can't search SP very well so no way to locate the duplicates in all the seperate SP repositorys. I work on the Unix side, I use MediaWiki and only keep one copy of my Office docs on the network drives, so I haven't got to deal with the SP menace.

    Basically Sharepoint is a glorified MediaWiki clone, but without the class!

  32. Stevie

    Bah!

    My first PC came bundled with Lotus Office and a nice little inexpensive alternative to the six-times-as-pricey MSOffice it was too. Of course, it didn't have the tight integration and increasingly sophisticated automation that the MSO components sported, and no database product at all, but it was nice all the same. I thought the screen recorder was probably the most innovative addition to any IT trainer's toolbox I'd seen in years.

    Then IBM acquired the company and, well, that was all she wroted. They couldn't dump features fast enough. Screen recorder was the first to go.

    All I remember of "notes" was that the bucketful of toolbars a new user was faced with were confusing and difficult to figure out. The suck factor was about the same as for the MS products of the day, and everyone was talking of building intranets to replace the need for either of them.

    Never was tempted to try sharepoint. Glad I didn't, from all the buzz here.

  33. Spikey
    FAIL

    Sharepoint - aka Silo Maker

    http://www.contentmanagementnews.com/contentmanagementnews-82-20080102SharepointanECMVirus.html

    "A North American bank reported more than 5,000 uncontrolled and unaudited instances of SharePoint"

    Softies - Gotta love 'em! I guess these Microsoft-only companies have never heard of a Document Management System?

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