When It's Time to Abandon Ship
An interesting article in ComputerWorld the other day caught my eye. FewClix announced the introduction of a plug-in for the much-maligned Lotus Notes email application.
From the article, the FewClix plug-in allows for the following:
Archiving: While Notes only lets users archive batches of e-mail by date, FewClix offers archiving by any combination of factors, such as recipient + before date + attachment. The beta requires users to search archives separate from the main inbox, but that will be changed by the general release, Kumar said.
Folders and Groups: Rather than forcing users to set rules that route e-mails into various folders, Fewclix lets users keep their e-mails in the inbox but reduce clutter by creating different "Groups." Those groups can virtually offload read and process e-mails to "done" groups, mimicking the delete/inbox removal process advocated by David Allen's Getting Things Done regimen, Kumar said.
Performance: A slick demo Kumar showed involved a Notes database with 12,000 e-mails. He said FewClix's in-memory index enables "very good" performance for mailboxes as large as 200,000 e-mails.
Now, I have not used Lotus Notes in nearly eight years but recently worked with a consultant forced to use the application for email. In a phrase, she hated it, and with good reason. I believed then--as I do now--that Lotus Notes is not remotely user-friendly. It completely deserves its reputation as a clunker.
Note that Notes' purists will insist that you can use Domino Designer to develop databases and web applications. While I don't dispute this, as an email client, I have never met a true Notes' fan. It's simply clunky.
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