http://controlfreak.net/2006/11/14/islands-of-information/ a survivor's guide Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:16:09 +0100 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://controlfreak.net/2006/11/14/islands-of-information/comment-page-1/#comment-11155 Pete Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:56:11 +0000 http://controlfreak.net/2006/11/14/islands-of-information/#comment-11155 I agree with John - mostly, anyway. The problem isn't so much that Notes is "bad at what it does" (though few would argue that it's brilliant), but that it's completely incapable of interoperating with anything else. In the rest of the world, with text-based, layered, known, protocols together with swathes of APIs, libraries, open-source implementations, getting two things talking just isn't hard. In Notes-land it's all opaque binary blobs, you can do what the designers thought of and that's it. Yes, it has some scripting ability, but that's not really enough. The only thing that can talk to Notes is Notes, and that's why I'd never willingly start a new collection of data inside it. I agree with John – mostly, anyway. The problem isn’t so much that Notes is “bad at what it does” (though few would argue that it’s brilliant), but that it’s completely incapable of interoperating with anything else. In the rest of the world, with text-based, layered, known, protocols together with swathes of APIs, libraries, open-source implementations, getting two things talking just isn’t hard. In Notes-land it’s all opaque binary blobs, you can do what the designers thought of and that’s it. Yes, it has some scripting ability, but that’s not really enough. The only thing that can talk to Notes is Notes, and that’s why I’d never willingly start a new collection of data inside it.

]]> http://controlfreak.net/2006/11/14/islands-of-information/comment-page-1/#comment-9 techblog » Blog Archive » doc:// - is that too much to ask? Tue, 21 Nov 2006 11:23:18 +0000 http://controlfreak.net/2006/11/14/islands-of-information/#comment-9 [...] The internet hasn’t really affected documents in the way it has many other things. We still think of documents as things we author locally, store on file systems in islands of information and share by email or, shudder, ftp. To be clear, what I mean by a document in this context is: [...] [...] The internet hasn’t really affected documents in the way it has many other things. We still think of documents as things we author locally, store on file systems in islands of information and share by email or, shudder, ftp. To be clear, what I mean by a document in this context is: [...]

]]> http://controlfreak.net/2006/11/14/islands-of-information/comment-page-1/#comment-7 john Fri, 17 Nov 2006 22:49:00 +0000 http://controlfreak.net/2006/11/14/islands-of-information/#comment-7 I totally agree with the spirit of this article. However, I am convinced that use of Lotus notes is going to have exactly the opposite effect on the storage of information. Lotus notes is so bad at what it does that it actively discourages users from storing and sharing their information. To achieve what you want the infrastructure must be transparent to the user in the same way that the filesystem is. I totally agree with the spirit of this article. However, I am convinced that use of Lotus notes is going to have exactly the opposite effect on the storage of information. Lotus notes is so bad at what it does that it actively discourages users from storing and sharing their information. To achieve what you want the infrastructure must be transparent to the user in the same way that the filesystem is.

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