IdoNotes (and sleep)

School spends thousands searching Lotus Notes for past emails (someone explain this to me)

by Chris Miller at 11:31:27 AM on Thursday, July 6th, 2006

I was reading this article, make sure you read it all to get the effect. Here is the excerpt that confuses me (bolds are mine):

Despite expectations that it would take only days to retrieve student reassignment e-mail, Wake school officials needed 15 weeks and spent almost $17,000 in response to a public records request from The News & Observer.

But it was apparent by Feb. 14 that the district's information technology staff did not have the ability to easily search past e-mail.

Wake's e-mail system -- called Lotus Notes -- was installed last year, said Vass Johnson, director of network systems. Officials felt the system could handle a large public records request, but this was its first big test.

Staff members soon found they had to do much of the time-consuming work themselves, such as writing computer scripts that reconstructed databases and searched for specific e-mail.

Someone needs to tell them that they could have had journaling turned on, multi-database searching or whatever instead of all this wasted time and script writing. Life can be much simpler.

Location: St. Louis, MO

Category: Domino 7 Technical
Tags :Domino 7 View blog reactions

1) School spends thousands searching Lotus Notes for past emails (someone explain this to me)
Created by Rob McDonagh at 7/6/2006 12:13:22 PM email | website

Yeah, I had the same thought. The "officials felt the system could handle a large public records request" but they never bothered to configure the system so that it could? And yet, to anyone but a Lotus Geek, this article clearly says: Lotus Notes is difficult to search. Which is wildly ironic, given what it would take to do the same search for Exchange.

2) School spends thousands searching Lotus Notes for past emails (someone explain this to me)
Created by iiq374 at 7/6/2006 2:02:31 PM email | website

It is a common problem that is seen throughout the software industry:

Users lack of training or product knowledge blamed on the "product inadequacies".

Not that I'm complaining too much - we make a killing augmenting ERP systems to do things they could already do :p

3) School spends thousands searching Lotus Notes for past emails (someone explain this to me)
Created by Jerry Glover at 7/6/2006 3:50:15 PM email | website

Well, actually, later in the article it does specifically state that the bulk of the expense was from the labor of manually reviewing the results of the search and doing the redacting of student names. Of course, overall the article still leaves a negative impression of Notes.

4) School spends thousands searching Lotus Notes for past emails (someone explain this to me)
Created by Scott Gentzen at 7/6/2006 9:36:33 PM email | website

I've seen a lot of that kind of thing...where an org has sub-par developers, they turn out apps that look and work like crap and the users and management are left thinking "Notes sucks."

Oddly enough when I see bad ASP/ASPx apps, I never hear "IIS sucks" or ".net sucks".

5) re: School spends thousands searching Lotus Notes for past emails (someone explain this to me)
Created by Chris Miller at 7/7/2006 4:06:11 PM email | website

Reading all of these the same result. They spent many man hours and costs because they had not configured or did not understand certain parts. This in turn makes Notes look like it sucks.

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Title	Duration	Size	Flash Player
IdoNotes Episode 80 - Lotusphere Abstract Creation with Paul and Gab	00:25:23	23.25 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 79 - Ed Brill on IBM at IamLUG	00:12:53	17.72 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 78 - Admin2010 with Bill Malchisky	00:13:45	18.89 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 77 - Nerd Girls Strike Back at Admin2010	00:31:32	43.32 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 76 - Lotus Protector Mail Encryption	00:17:50	16.33 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 75 - Exclusive with FewClix	00:25:04	22.96 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 74 - Doodle Around	00:24:33	22.64 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 73 - SnappFiles launch	00:19:51	27.46 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 72 - EXCLUSIVE Gist launch from Lotusphere #ls10	00:34:31	47.41 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 71 - EXCLUSIVE Tungle launch live from Lotusphere2010 #ls10	00:15:09	13.88 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 70 - FewClix and the Mac oops	00:03:04	6.60 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 69 - Lotus Protector 2.5 announcements	00:31:22	28.72 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 68 - Sametime Unyte widget screencast	00:03:51	8.97 Mb	Listen Up! IdoNotes Episode 68 - Sametime Unyte widget screencast
IdoNotes Episode 67 - LotusLive iNotes screencast	00:17:25	432.01 Mb
IdoNotes Episode 66 - Quickr on the iPhone launch with Jonathan	00:07:30	10.45 Mb

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