The much-maligned email and calendar software, formerly and more disdainfully known as Lotus Notes, has been cited by a range of departing executives recently as one of the things they disliked most about working for the holding company. It crashes all the time, it’s not intuitive, and it’s generally “old and clunky,” they say. Don’t even mention the near-useless webmail access. For a holding company that loves to brag about how digital it is, it sure does give employees archaic technology for the most basic of modern communication.
“Emails would take hours, and sometimes days, to be delivered through the Notes servers,” said former Digitas CEO and current Weather CEO David Kenny. “It became common practice to text people to have them watch for and confirm sent emails. The redundancy drove me crazy.”
It’s really easy to fly off the handle on this article, but I think that it served a purpose. What that purpose was, I’m not totally certain, as the whole story isn’t told, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. Leave it to the commenters on the article to ask some intelligent questions, which will never be answered. In the past, I have written to the authors of these sorts of articles, asking for more details, only to have those messages go unanswered. Color me surprised.
The other Publicis news. I wonder what messaging system Omnicom runs?
Gregg Eldred 
The question is what are the IBM sales teams doing about this …..
My guess nothing as they are not financially motivated to ensure licence renewals, hence the c**p coming from a list of people is allowed to pass unchallenged.
I love the comment, “I left the company because of the email system” now there is a person with highly developed intellect!
Not only does Denny’s comment ring of truth, from what I’ve seen, it is up to the admins/developers on-site to defend and keep the IBM software within the organization. IBM sales seems to only concerned with selling new installs of Connections.
My first impression – a clear case of inadequate and/or incompetent admins
If this is the case, then it certainly can’t be IBM’s fault that the users don’t like the software. However, that isn’t made clear in the article. Too bad, really.
Mmmh, knowing Notes/Domino and what it can do … this is quite telling about the (bad) quality of their network and their most probably clueless IT-Departement in any terms of quality 😉
So this company would make it on top of the list of companies I definately never ever would work for 😉
@Ged Allen – Because IBM doesn’t care if they migrate off Lotus Notes. Had an IBM employee (whose role it was to go in and fight for IBM) stand in front of my company’s booth at Lotusphere 2012 and tell me these exact words, ‘We don’t care if they leave mail, we still get the Domino License for all the Apps that will never be migrated’.
Well, if you don’t fix problems and let the infrastructure go to shite, the move away from Notes makes sense. I’ve seen that happen time and time again… someone wants to get off of Notes/Domino because they don’t understand its potential, so they ‘make’ an excuse to make that happen!
Looks like the parody account is having some fun with the Notes thing too…
But, this may be the best one! https://twitter.com/PublicisOmnico_/status/361340452701609984
And this sounds pretty typical. “old and clunky”?? They must be using R7 still unless they believe that Outlook is “old and clunky” as well since R8+ can’t really be seen as much different than Outlook.
The article says that Bertozzi had a killnotes icon on his desktop. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the killnotes program was circa R4/R5, and stoppe dworking somewhere around R6…I know it doesn’t work in R8. So, their version of Notes could have been 10 yrs old or more. (Compare to Windows 98.)
There is a version of KillNotes that works with 8.5.3 (for the most part)