h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm a Notes user at work. Although I hate it (only pegasus is right for me) it is v. good as its virus resistant, holds many databases and has an excellent calendar. I never expected to see an entry about it! Nice one....

We've built an internet based recruitment system for Woolworths using Notes, and we're just doing the same for B&Q. It's amazingly versatile.

Speaking as an IBM employee, and considering that Lotus Systems have been aquired by IBM, Lotus Notes is the standard used mail tool within IBM, and it is an excellent tool. I'm only an end-user of the application, so I haven't gone into the coding and programming and creating of databases or anything, but it is a joy to use.

Just a little comment about the Workspace being taken away in R5. It's actually there, it's just that it doesn't pop up when you first open Notes up. This, however, is easily fixed. All you need to do is to go to the workspace, set it as a bookmark, and then change the "home page" in Notes, and hey presto, you've got the Workspace popping up instead of that awful start page.

Unless you change locations with either the Design or Administration client open, in which case the homepage tends to revert to bookmark.nsf. I dragged the Workspace icon from my databases folder onto the sidebar under the Replicator, which works OK.

You had to do that manually? Hmm.. Okay.. It's just always been there om my R5-notes... Oh well...

The Workspace icon doesn't appear by default in the bookmark bar, although it is in Databases by default.

Well, there you go. That shows you how much I know of the ultra-clean install of Notes R5. I just sit down, log in and everything's already there.

I'm also an IBMer, and am using Release 7.0 which has some cool benefits over 6.

The best I think is the abilty to directly edit and save attachments within mail, without having to save to the pc, delete from the note, then edit , then attach.

I have heard lots of complaints from Notes users - mostly along the lines of "why isn't notes more like (insert product name here)", but to my mind while it might not be as easy to use for mail as hotmail, and while there may be other database tools out there which manage databases better, and while there might be better calendar tools, Notes does all of this as one package.