I’ve always said that no user interface could possibly be worse than that of Lotus Notes. Well, our company recently announced that you could access your Notes through a web interface on the intranet. Hooray, I thought, I could get rid of Cross Over Office and the bletchery of running a Windows emulator on my Linux computer.
Then I tried it.
First problem – every 5 or 10 minutes, it pops up a window to tell me that my session has expired, which requires me to click on it, then enter the first character of my user id in the pop-up authentication window, then tab to accept the Firefox fill-in of the user id and password, and click again on the login button. Then retry whatever I was doing. Ugh.
Second problem – every time I accept a meeting invitation, it disappears into the ether, and I get some warning about it being outside my available time. So I looked, and evidently I’m only available from 10pm to 3:30am. I tried to change that to something more sane, and my meetings didn’t come back. I guess they’re gone for good.
Third problem – after leaving the application running for three straight days, I start getting a Firefox popup saying that the script is unresponsive and do I want to end it. If I say “Continue” the operation I’m doing will complete, but I’ll get the same popup a few minutes later. If I say “End script”, the operation I’m doing won’t complete, and I’ll get the same damn popup when I *do* want to do the operation. Shift-reload won’t fix the problem. Even closing the tab the Notes client is running on and re-opening it won’t fix the problem. I suspect I’m going to have to exit Firefox, and that’s just ridiculous.
So I’m back to running Notes under CrossOver Office. Sigh.
