Software Impacts on Organizations

Any application software is only as good as the impact it has on any organization and the advantages it has to offer and the disadvantages that come along with it, if any.

The designers of Lotus Notes planned on building a collaborative application platform where email was just one of several applications that ran in the Notes client software. Lotus lore has it that the first mail inbox application written by Lotus was a proof-of-concept for a sales presentation. The Notes client was also designed to run on multiple platforms including Windows, OS/2, Mac, SCO Open Desktop UNIX, and Linux.

ADVANTAGES of Lotus Notes.

1. Information is located centrally on the Domino server. Centralised storage provides organisation wide access to information for example : the organizational address book , and individual user databases. Thus information stored in various users' Lotus Notes databases are accessible to other users; with the appropriate access, whilst travelling between sites or from anywhere in the world via the Internet.
2. Another advantage of storing information centrally on the Domino server is that if there is a problem with a user’s local desktop application, the Notes database is not lost, but can still be accessed, either at a different workstation, or via one of the web clients.
3. Lotus Notes developers can also develop extremely specialised applications to interact with the information stored in the Notes database. This means that Lotus Notes has the capacity to be customised to a much greater extent than other groupware applications and indeed the implementation of Lotus Notes can be customised to some extent to suit the needs of any organizations environment. Thus improved communication and very customized programming can help businesses achieve a competitive edge over rival businesses.
4. One additional benefit of Lotus Notes is its security. Business security when handling e-mails, and especially e-commerce, is crucial. Lotus Notes proclaims “Lotus Notes provides integrated support for all major industry security standards, including S/MIME v3, Smart Card support (PKCS#11) and X.509 v3. Notes helps protect organizations with the world's most widely deployed public key infrastructure (PKI), with built-in digital signatures and end-to-end encryption.”) Because Notes comes with the security measures necessary, no additional costs are required to meet most corporate standards.
   

DISADVANTAGES of Lotus Notes.

1. Lotus Notes’ size and complexity can be difficult for new users to understand.
2. While having some outstanding features, software that isn’t “user friendly” will have the good features lost among the complexity.
3. Wireless communication is an additional purchase for Notes, which seems to be the same for the competitors (this excludes off-line working). For a business traveler, or a company using handheld PDAs often in business, Microsoft Exchange has a clear advantage in these features compared to Notes. An organization that is not going to use the workspace database features, or build upon the customization potential of Notes, is not going to see the software use a majority of its features.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_notes

(this website gives a summary of the critisims of Lotus Notes and well as how it helps businesses function better via the Lotus Notes).

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/office-suites/lotus-notes/1004424/

(this website talks about the disadvantages of using Lotus Notes and the features it lacks comapred to rival software programs.