Full of eagerness after downloading the brand new version of Lotus Notes this Friday, I started to play with it on my „normal“ machine for the first time. And started to be disappointed more and more. No, I cannot be happy with them to much.
Installation was quite easy, but have several surprising moments. First of all, the installation file is quite big, almost the same size as Domino server installation. Yes, I know, there are Productivity tools, but who care about them when he has Microsoft Office or OpenOffice installed? Never mind, let’s run the installation. And another surprise – it is impossible to deselect DESC installation (this mistake is here from 7.0.x code stream), there are still modem files which IBM planned to removed and new features – Activities and Productivity tools aren’t enabled by default. Doesn’t matter, let’s go.
It was quite long and I dislike especially the moments, when progress bar starting from zero again. Yes, the progress is divided to about three parts and each of them starting from scratch, so you don’t know where you are. Grr. But after all finished, I checked my Start menu in Windows Vista (yes, I use the MS Windows Vista Business Edition) and have two different groups. Installation program is so clever that he recognized my Czech location and created folder with Czech name. But just for part of icons, Lotus Domino Console shortcuts is under folder with the same name, just special Czech characters are converted to normal ASCII. And I have a lot of nice icons on my desktop, cool, they changed them.
Switching from my administrator account to normal user account and running Lotus Notes for first time. Stop, I cannot find icon for Lotus Notes, here is one for Administrator, one for Designer and one for my NOMAD installation, but no icon for Lotus Notes client. Never mind, I’ll do it manually and run them after it. And they are working. But how is it possible, I installed them in Program Files folder where normal users aren’t allowed to write, so it has to failed! Quick check of security settings for Lotus directory and surprise is here – installation setup that Everyone has full access to this folder, which means, by the way, that users can delete Lotus Notes without any problems from their desktop. Uff.
Continuing with start, answering the normal questions of first time run and ups, I responded „No“ for one question (Replace existing ID file?) and setup quickly ended and everything is done. It cannot be true, it must ask me again, or no?
Well, it is running and looking quite good, surprisingly quick and nice. I’m trying to setup new location documents and getting information that „Dialog is impossible to close before….“. But my changes are saved and I’m unable to do it again after new start of LN.
OK, that was enough, let’s quit it and do something else. Do you want to end Lotus Notes? Yes, I do. Window disappeared but both tasks (eclipse.exe and notes2w.exe) still running in memory and don’t plan to stop. You have to stop them on your own.
Final point – I like Lotus Notes itself, but installation is strange and I think there are few mistakes in it. But it should be just problem of my machine and I’m too lazzy to test it on another one.