The other day I saw a posting in comp.groupware.lotus-notes.programmer, where the poster said that he have been defending Lotus Notes from people that dislike it and want to get rid of it. I asked what problems the users had, and this is the response:
This is the only application we have in Notes – we do use notes mail –
but it is the application that is giving Notes a bad name.
It is the result of a extremely bad design and implementation of an
application 12 years ago in Notes 4.5.The application – a customer order configurator – was created by
someone else in a branch of the
company which sold us off so the designer/programmer is no longer
available to us..This has been compounded by massive changes over the last 6
years. I have added 2 new databases (6 databases now) and possibly
140,000 lines of code to the application over the last 6 years. However
this has been hampered by the original bad design.This results in users getting annoyed rather frequently.
So basically, one badly written application, probably developed by someone that was not a programmer or did not understand Lotus Notes, then patched over 12 years is giving Notes a bad name… What can be done about things like this? There are some (old) best practices out there, but perhaps it would be a good idea to write some new ones.