Tuesday 15 May 2012

Lotus Notes Means No HTML ?!?

Boy, have we got Lotus Domino stories to tell! ;)

We were in the process of tweaking our Financial Times Daily Briefings subscriptions when:

image

  • Text only (best for BlackBerry, other Smartphones, and Lotus Notes)

An e-mail client that does not support HTML formatted e-mail is so 1990s! And early in that decade to boot.

We actually hardened Outlook to use Text Only via GPO a number of years ago when scripting became a problem behind the HTML e-mail pages and Outlook 2000/XP/2003 did not have any facility built in to block them.

Once the security measures were better in Outlook 2007/2010 we left those policies behind.

Lotus Notes users, we have an _awesome_ Hosted Exchange product we would love to talk to you about!

It even _includes_ an Outlook 2010 license!

We do in-house highly available mail solutions too! :)

Let’s talk.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lotus: this is Just silly!
I have never commented here before but this is an awesome blog thanks so much!!!!
Milton G incredibly small SBS Admin

Keith Brooks said...

Laziness of developers to accommodate other platforms mail quirks most likely led them to list Notes under text email.
As a long time Lotus Notes user, almost 20 years, I rarely have problems with HTML formatted emails.
I have more problems with them on my android phone than in Notes itself.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Keith,

I wouldn't put that onto the developers.

The reality is that Lotus has what % of market share?

Developers work for the majority not the minority. That's why standards have evolved and finally all browsers are essentially on board.

Financial Times is no slouch. Why would they single out Lotus? Because a statistically significant portion of folks read their stuff on Lotus. What is statistically significant? Could be five calls into the call centre about their FT e-mail not displaying right, it could be 100, or even 10,000.

In the end the number is not high enough for FT to devote develpment time to produce a Lotus friendly e-mail.

It's up to IBM to get the e-mail client stnadards compliant as our own Outlook/Word and Outlook Web Access e-mail viewers are (or very close to).

It would be really interesting to see the churn for Lotus to Cloud Exchange and Lotus to in-house Exchange.

In my own experience over the years most clients we have touched that had Lotus _had_ Lotus at some point.

Domino was very difficult to work with at times. Much more so than Exchange ever was.

So, while there may still be a niche for Lotus, probably for those already all-in, I find it very difficult to believe that the Lotus offering would out compete Exchange in-house or Cloud.

Please feel free to prove me wrong. :)

Philip

Steven C. Pitcher said...

Would you like me to post screen shots of perfectly formatted HTML-based emails in my Lotus Notes somewhere for you to see? I've probably received 3,000 this year so far. I never have issues with HTML formatted e-mails in Lotus Notes.

My Blackberry gives me more HTML grief than anything.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Steven,

Not to worry. I believe you.

This blog post was initiated by my seeing that FT comment and our own experiences with Lotus and Domino.

Take it for what it's worth.

Philip