VB and Lotus Notes

Filed under EMail, Software Architecture

Not something that often ends up on a VB developer’s plate I suspect, but I had need to do some investigating of Lotus Notes and possible integration/extension development using VB (classic, v6.0, not .NET).

Come to find out, Notes does have COM support as of 5.0.2b, so appearently, you do not have to dive down into ever joyous C++ in order to take a stroll through Notes-ville. Unfortunately, finding actual documentation for that object model online feels like finding your kid’s matchbox car that fell out of their pocket in the ball pit at Chuck E Cheese. I’ll try to post my results, if any, when I have some.

Now, as to why you’d want to dig into Note, one look here should dissuade all but the foolhardiest of souls. Granted, I know very little of the internals of Notes. From what I understand, internally, it’s actually a quite capable system, and has been for years and years. Still, those screenshots speak volumes.

Me? Well, I have a foot and here’s a Smith and Wesson. With any luck, the obvious won’t happen next.

3 Comments

  1. Sam says:

    Although I agree with you that Lotus Notes could be difficult to use at times, I think it’s disingenuous to link to an article that talks about the version of Lotus Notes that was release more than 12 year ago.

  2. Darin says:

    Point taken. I didn’t right off realize how old that article was, even though there’s a freakin’ date right there are the top<sigh>.

    But, I did a little looking for info on later versions and found several bits:

    http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/office-suites/lotus-notes/1073351/

    http://www.computergripes.com/LotusNotes.html

    In particular, one reviewer commented "the new UI hasn’t been implemented throughout the client, it’s as simple as that".

    Sounds like the latest incarnations are much like what Microsoft has done with Office 2007 (though I dare say the Office UI is far better than Notes). At the surface, +everything+ about Office looks like it’s changed, but scratch just below the surface, open a few "options" dialogs, maybe, and you quickly see that a large number of them are literally the exact same dialog as was in Office 2000 and likely before. For instance, the Find/Replace dialog, the addins dialog, Insert Hyperlinks and bookmarks, etc, etc. I’m not saying those old dialogs are necessarily bad, my point is that often UI changes in these big apps are more or less veneers.

    But I do appreciate the comment. When I dig more into Notes, I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to write about!

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