The Lotus Notes Tribunal

This guide is an attempt to display, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the distribution and continued development of Lotus Notes constitutes a crime against humanity. Well... at least the humanity that's forced to use it.

Many of the following pages feature large, potentially scary, screen captures of Lotus Notes. Users with slow connections or weak hearts should approach with caution.

These charges are brought strictly against the end-user interface of the Lotus Notes client. Is Notes a great back-end system? Is it easy to administer? Does it offer freedom beyond belief in server-side configuration options? I don't care: it's connected to a steaming, stinking pile of a front-end.

Areas of Evidence

In an attempt to catalog the many and sordid actions of the defendant I've defined the following areas of evidence:

Crimes of Assumption

Notes commits the crime of assumption with a callousness unheard of in modern development. It assumes that the end-user has intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of the application. That the user understands all of the metaphors (mixed and otherwise) in use and that the user is both heavily technically minded and, often, omniscient.

Crimes of Omission

Workspace Configuration

Crimes of Distraction

Notes presents the user with many elements seemingly designed only to draw the user way from the work they hope to complete. User messages are presented in dozens of different styles. Scroll bars appear and disappear seemingly at random. Fundamental user-interface elements change behavior maliciously and vindictively.