HCL Notes Reviews

We have an on-premise deployment. After all, it is an email client. The way you use Microsoft Outlook or any other email client it makes sense to be deployed on-premise. They do have a SaaS version. The way it works when we are working on an enterprise laptop — the laptops that the company has provided us — it is installed on our systems. Other than that, the particular tool or email client can also be accessed via web login. We often use that when we are using it from a smartphone or any other non-company device.  

Our primary use case is just what it is: an email client. It is my stable solution and the only email client that I use. Web meetings are also a part of what we use it for. They have a solution — their adjacent solution is called IBM Sametime or HCL Sametime — which is the chat functionality. But our primary use case is as the email client.  

This is the third or fourth company that I am working for in my career and I have used several different email clients over that time. What happens is that an email client is just an email client. You receive emails, you send emails, and basically all emailing stuff that you normally do — like schedule meetings — goes through that email client.  

With HCL Notes, my organization has been able to do a little more in that regard. They have built in and integrated with other systems like the leave management. Because of this integration, I do not have a separate HR portal where I have to go in and apply for leave. All of that is managed through my email client. So rather than just being an email client, Notes ends up being a dashboard of all the communications that you want to take care of from within the company.  

Another example of integration is our custom IT management system which offers specific capabilities. Suppose I have to raise a ticket. I do not have to go to a separate IT portal and do that. I can create the ticket right through HCL notes. Suppose I want to access some internal files, I do not have to go to another internal portal which is built separately by the company. Again, I can find the files directly within HCL Notes.  

We are actually in process of shifting away from this software. I can not really think of any pros to talk about when it comes to this solution that make it better than something else. All I have to mention are cons because this is pretty outdated software. As proof of how outdated it is, even IBM — the creator of this email client — sold it to HCL to get rid of it.  

It is pretty much outdated and there are no not many pros of using it. Although, if you have to count, integrations are easy. My company has integrated a lot of different systems into HCL Notes. We have systems like leave (vacation) management, we have systems like resource management, and internal files and documents. All of these have been integrated with Notes. So it is a tightly knit tool. Really there are so many integrations that there are far too many.  

We have not done any comprehensive search to see if there are other email clients that allow this type of integration. For example, I would not know if even something like Microsoft Office allows users to build integrations or your own features into their email client. HCL Notes sure does allow integrations of many kinds and that is maybe the only pro that I currently find in this solution.  

The way Notes has improved us is that we are able to do a lot of things from the single platform of Notes. While it is a good thing — I would definitely say it is a good thing — but then this software is pretty heavily outdated. So that is a pain point. We do not really want to do everything through this platform, but it is the only platform where we have those tools now. In a way, it is good that we have a lot of capabilities built into the same platform, but this platform is old and it is sluggish.  

The first thing that I would like to see in a new version of Notes is a major improvement with the UI. With HCL Notes, once you open it, it looks like you are using Windows 98. That is how basic and rudimentary it is. The UI is definitely the primary area that can see improvement.  

Also in the UI, the general sense of the user experience can be enhanced. Things are really not always where you might think they should be. If I want to recall an email, two years after using Notes, I will finally know how to recall an email. I am sure that even 80% of my colleagues do not even know how to recall an email because that option is hidden somewhere deep in the options. HCL definitely needs to prioritize what users understand about the interface, what users want, and redesign the UI accordingly. It really is too late now. You are stuck in an ancient system when you compare the other solutions that are 20 years ahead of you.  

It feels pretty primitive. If you check the smartphone interface it is pretty basic. Things that you could do with Outlook in 2006 are things that can only be done by HCL Notes in 2020. The sense you feel when using Notes on a smartphone is almost like I am using a first-generation Android phone again. HCL does not really encourage using Notes through smartphones.  

There is a chat interface and they have a software called Sametime. That enables users to chat and send files to each other in real-time, which is similar to something like Skype for Business. It is there in HCL Notes, but it also does not work properly.  

There are many different, small examples that I can use to state how Notes does not work or where it is lacking. Definitely a tighter integration is needed to check what users want, and what users do not want. A total UI overhaul would be necessary to keep the product alive.  

We have been using HCL (Hindustan Computers Limited) Notes for two years.  

No matter what I say about the product otherwise, it is a very stable solution. There are problems when some of those integrations do not work at first, but that is not from the solution side. I know about that for sure. That is from our side because we are using a primitive solution because we are a primitive company. So the problems within HCL Notes are not because of HCL Notes itself. It is because our IT infrastructure is pretty outdated. So there is no instability with the product itself. I would give Notes a 10-out-of-10 for stability.  

Notes does have the ability to scale. In that way, it is not a problem at all. With email clients, there are always some stability issues or scalability issues that can be there to get in the way of function, but one thing Notes does not have is a scalability issue.  

When it comes to scalability — I do not know if this particular parameter fits in — but it is pretty heavy software. If you were to use it with systems that were underpowered, it might crash the system. But, these days you do not have laptops that have so little computing power that they would not handle Notes. It could crash in some systems that are not powerful enough.  

For example, if you are trying to use HCL Notes in a primitive laptop, maybe something that was built in 2012 or 2010, it might take more memory than the full capacity of those machines. To run Notes, you need a machine with sufficient RAM and you need a better CPU because this is a heavy solution. An email client should not be heavy in the sense of consuming resources.  

We have between 1,500 and 2,000 users using HCL Notes in our company.  

As far as the technical support for this solution, I really have no comment. Our contact point is through our internal IT handlers. I do know that they are difficult to reach.  

Previously I used Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook. That is really all I used before. Microsoft Outlook worked with Microsoft 365 and Office 365. If you are going to bifurcate between both of them — technically they are still different — I used both Office and Office 365.  

The main difference between Office 365 email client and HCL Notes is that everything is different. Microsoft Office for once works when compared to the competition and this competing product does not.  

Microsoft Office is tightly integrated with the normal software that you normally use because everyone uses Microsoft products when it comes to office productivity. If you are using PowerPoint or you are using Word, it is easy to integrate and send a file to someone within Microsoft Office. Microsoft also connects with OneDrive — a cloud solution — so there is really built-in centralized storage and collaborative capabilities. The files are easily transferable. In HCL, they do not have their own cloud which is integrated with Notes. Competing in the market is about being updated and keeping up. It is about being up to date with other tools in 2020.  

A new user of Microsoft Office will take maybe 10 days to learn to work with Outlook. Even Microsoft support is available. You might contact your own it staff, but Microsoft support is easy to contact. That is not the case with HCL. I mean, I am not sure if HCL support can even help me with Notes because I do not have a way to contact them. I can just go to my internal team and that is what I do.  

The lack of support is an issue. Usability, user experience, and feature placement are all definitely issues. If you just look at the number and the kind of features that Office has that HCL Notes just does not have, it is very apparent how behind-the-times the product is.  

We are moving to Office 365 and getting away from HCL Notes as soon as it is practical to do so.  

This product was implemented back in 2000 and I joined the company two years back. I really do not know much about the initial setup. I hope that it was easy. The integrations are not very difficult.  

I can not be sure how many people in total are responsible for the maintenance of HCL Notes exactly. Our staff is distributed between something like 45 countries, so it is difficult to tally. I am not sure how many IT people are situated in each country, but not more than 20 that are dedicated to Notes.  

The biggest lesson I have learned from using HCL Notes patience, I must say. Other than that it becomes a much tougher question. I learned that there is not much to gain from this product, but that sometimes you can manage with inferior tools if you have to. That would be the tagline of HCL Notes if I had the opportunity to add one: "You just have to manage."  

On a scale of one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product as a four-point-five out of ten. I will not be so harsh to give it the three or four that I think it deserves even though I would like to. It has worked at least somewhat to manage to be a centralized solution. I will give it a five.  

I mainly use HCL notes for email communication purposes.

The loading time can be excessive. In the next release, I would like HCL Notes to have a feature like Microsoft Teams built into the platform.

I've been using HCL Notes for three months.

HCL Notes is stable most of the time.

I would give HCL Notes a rating of eight out of ten.

It is easy to manage. We have experience with HCL Notes, that is why we prefer it. I personally have 20 years of experience using it. 

The interface could be more user-friendly. Some additional trainings could be added as well. 

I have been using HCL Notes since 2004.

HCL Notes is stable. 

HCL Notes is scalable. 

The tech support is good. If we run into any issues, we contact the HCL Notes sales support and that has been OK for us so far. 

The initial setup was easy for me. 

The price tag is not small, but it is appropriate. It is reasonable. 

I would recommend this product. 

Lotus Domino is an excellent platform for making groupware applications that are natively integrated with email.

It gives you the flexibility to publish applications in the web with practically no effort if you use some of the templates provided.

The security (private key / public key) is very strong.

You have a lot of predesigned templates for doing workflow applications.

We used Lotus Domino / Lotus Notes a lot few years ago for:

• Corporate politics and procedures
• Corporate phone book
• Email
• Workflow applications for authorization (vacations, travel expenses, refunds, etc)

We created some excellent applications for managing our enterprise / corporate procedures. Before the BPMS tools were created, we created some applications to manage our corporate workflows.

Using Lotus Notes, we had to solve some issues because Lotus Notes is a document-oriented database and not a relational database. At the beginning, we had to solve some performance issues.

First, we had to develop a standard to document our corporate processes. We used Microsoft Visio to do the documentation and a proprietary standard (before the BPMN standard was established).

As soon as we solved the issue of the standard, we wanted to cover in detail the business requirements and time to market requested by the enterprise, so we developed a flexible application that let the developers to configure instead of programming the workflows.

We created a catalog for adding roles, people, activities, processes, fields by role, among other information, so we were able to configure a new workflow in days, not in weeks.

With this template, we created the main corporate processes, for example, the presales process and the installation processes for the corporate, government and IT market.

We were also able to copy the template created to use this application for other kind of workflows.

It took almost 15 years of work to have this template customized to fill the needs of the enterprise and the aggressive time to market needed in telecom companies.

The problem with Lotus Domino is that there are no new versions of the product. The last version that I know is 9.x.

20 years (since 1997)

Practically no deployment issues.

Because the Lotus Notes database is a documental database, there are some stability issues if the database grows a lot. I think that you can avoid this issue if you send the information to a database or Split the database in files no longer than 4 GB to have better performance.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.; it's a very scalable solution (as a platform).

Customer service is 8/10.

Technical support is 8/10.

We are currently using the Office 365 solution; it has the advantage that now it's in the cloud and it can be accessed from any place.

Initial setup was complex; you have to have some technical expertise to implement the solution.

An in-house team implemented it.

I am not sure if IBM is still selling this product.

Talking about the support, I think that it is average; it is not the cheapest solution.

Before choosing, we also evaluated Office 365 for businesses (Exchange).

Review the roadmap with IBM before trying to implement this solution, because I think that IBM is not investing in new versions and there's no roadmap.

The solution is practical, good interface, and performs well.

The usability of the old applications to the new version of the client is very good. The migration is very good for some legacy applications.

The solution could improve by adding some more features.

I have been using I rate HCL Notes for approximately 30 years.

I have found HCL Notes to be stable.

The solution is scalable.

In my company, we have 20 people using the solution and our customers have approximately 20,000.

The technical support is very good.

We have 10 people that do the implementation of the solution.

We pay annually for the use of the solution.

I rate HCL Notes a nine out of ten.

We are using this solution in our company.

The most valuable feature is the UI.

I would like to see integration with other solutions.

I have been working with HCL Notes for ten years.

We are using version 10.1.

HCL Notes is a stable product.

We have more than 10,000 people in our company who using this solution.

Technical support is good.

We did not work with similar products prior to HCL Notes.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is easy.

We have approximately 30 people to maintain this solution.

The price is reasonable.

I would recommend this product to others who are interested in implementing it.

We have been customers for more than 20 years.

In summary, this is a good product but there are always some areas for improvement.

I would rate HCL Notes an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution as a CRM. We are customers of HCL Notes. 

Security is the most valuable feature, better than you get in 365. It's a great system.

GUI, the graphic user interface, could be improved as well as replication.

The solution is stable. 

This is a scalable solution, we have 1,250 users in the company. 

I'm satisfied with the technical support. 

I rate this solution a seven out of 10.