With Lotus Notes appearing to cause more problems than the number of e-mails it can hold, almost 2,500 of the 13,750 undergraduate students have begun to forward the e-mails sent to their student accounts to other e-mail servers such as Yahoo and Gmail.
Susan McCabe, assistant CIO and director of Systems Integration, said there are multiple reasons 20 percent of students forward their Lotus Notes e-mails. One reason could be the limited space Lotus Notes provides, leaving many students' inboxes full and unable to accept new e-mails.
Limiting the students to 100MB of storage does provide some challenges, especially if the student is familiar with the larger storage options on Yahoo! and GMail or rarely deletes mail. However, it is interesting to note that the university is on Notes/Domino 8, provides iNotes to all users, provides an option for the full Notes Client, and allows them to forward their mail to another account. It seems that they are doing a lot of things right. The part of the "problem" that I question, and it probably shows my naïveté, is the need to have all your mail in one account. Thunderbird, my Treo, a Blackberry, and even Outlook, can all poll separate e-mail accounts and pull them into one place. Whether I have one e-mail address or five, I simply open one application and have it do all of the heavy lifting. Most applications even understand separate "reply to" addresses.
In addition to mail, the University of Dayton leverages their Lotus infrastructure:
Along with e-mail, a Lotus account provides you with access to all of the other information and applications that reside on our Lotus servers. This information includes threaded discussions for courses, libraries filled with important office or course-related documents, reservation systems for conference rooms and many other important applications. In addition, SameTime, a tool for instant messaging, supports immediate communication with colleagues through text messaging, audio and video, or full collaborative meetings.
Now, if I could only find out if they had courses on LotusScript or XPages . . .
Link: Flyer News: Students Choose E-Mail Options Over Lotus Notes
Comment posted by Darren Duke02/11/2009 04:19:44 PM
Homepage: http://blog.darrenduke.net
DAOS!
Comment posted by Steven Smith02/11/2009 05:09:40 PM
Homepage: http://www.udayton.edu
Nope, no courses on LotusScript or XPages...
DAOS is something that we planning to look at.
- Steve
Comment posted by Tim Tripcony02/11/2009 05:34:50 PM
Homepage: http://www.timtripcony.com
I'm intrigued by the phrase "the limited space Lotus Notes provides"... shouldn't that instead read "the quota imposed by the university upon Lotus Notes mail accounts"? Nitpicky, to be sure, but it always bugs me when unintended consequences of a particular implementation decision are described in a way that implies a flaw in the platform itself. Anyone who doesn't "know better" might read that and think, "Wow, Lotus Notes only supports 100 MB databases? How incredibly archaic." In reality, Domino supports 64 GB databases (even larger if DAOS is implemented), but very few organizations are willing to support individual databases of that size.
Comment posted by Ed Brill02/11/2009 06:57:32 PM
Homepage: http://www.edbrill.com
I found Ms. McCabe's e-mail address and sent her a note (before I saw this blog entry). I talked about DAOS and other improvements in that mail. It concerns me to see Notes painted with this broad brush in a student newspaper -- it's not a product issue.
BlogSphere V1.3.1
Join The WebLog Revolution at BlogSphere.net