"Adam Gross, Salesforce.com's vice president of platform marketing, told The Register on Monday that Salesforce.com is working on a set of Notes-specific conversion tools. These would migrate Notes applications' data and schema to run on Salesforce.com's hosted Force.com service."

Marketing people - got to love their optimism.

Unless Ray is working on this personally, I would put the chances of success at somewhere around zero, for non-trivial cases.

Google apps anybody? Those have been a huge success also. Nobody uses MS Office and OpenOffice anymore. Nobody, I said!

Blimey, another load of old corporate marketing crap. Perhaps Salesforce are hoping that if they shout it long enough someone, anyone, might believe them.

You would also hope it might make someone in the Notes dev team get off their fat backsides and start doing something to make users really sit up and take notice.

>Notes dev team get off their fat backsides and start doing something to make users really sit up and take notice

Notes may well have some wonderful features, but the majority of users use it for email. I've yet to find a "normal" user who likes Notes as an email client, and don't blame them - it's a classic example of how not to design an interface.

So Nic, have you seen Notes 8 or are you one of those stuck in the past and judging Notes on some 5 year old release?

>So Nic, have you seen Notes 8

Yes, it's a great improvement.

>you one of those stuck in the past and judging Notes on some 5 year old release?

Do you mean like the majority of the users?

Yes, here, we are stuck with 6.5 and there are no plans to upgrade. They tried a pilot of 8 a while ago, and the consensus was "it's better, but still not good enough, can I have outlook/thunderbird/evolution instead please, it works properly".

I'm with Nic on this one. Notes as an email package is just awful - even Windows Live Mail Desktop is more user friendly and intuiative. Notes may have useful database features etc... (well I'm assuming that's why we have to use it at work), but for the most common use for everyday users, it's user interface is in the dark ages.

The skull and xbones - because that's what I feel like having to use Lotus.

Fun Jim

we hear about some great new thing that's going to replace Notes. It's usually by people who don't really know what Lotus Notes/Domino can really do. I've been developing web applications using Notes/Domino for about twelve years now. I'd like to replace it too but whenever I look for something to take it's place I never find a system that even comes close.

Notes has a rich set of security permissions unmatched in any other system I've ever used, read about or heard about. I've been looking at the Google offerings but they have poor security granularity. The expect the programmers to implement it all from scratch in Python. That feels like having to go back and program in assembly language to me.

And that's just one feature. There are about five more that are killer that I'm not ready to give up. On the other hand if IBM doesn't bring the dynamic web code generation into the 20th century, I may be forced to move to new tools (and it won't be Websphere).

Peace,

Rob:-]

Rob: Why not have a look at Salesforce.com and the Force.com API? You can signup for a free Developer Edition account at developer.force.com. You will be impressed by it's easy of use, RAD capabilities, security, integration capabilities, scalability....that sounds a bit like Notes/Domino.