Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Chicken and Lotus - Clarification on my last blog post

In my last entry regarding which flavor of the Notes 8.0.2 client to roll out, and I was surprised by one of the comments that was left last night. In the comments, Anonymous wrote:
Use Notes 8.0.2. Much better performance. And, Imust ask, "too slow for what"?? compared to the fact that now you can move entire mail trhead to afolder 9incl trash0 all at once? how much time does thAT save?
see your calendar in the sidebar without swtiching? how much time does THAT save??
So I of course replied to the comment stating that my post is not a "slam" on the Standard Notes client, rather its just a comment on the speed of start up and shut down. So if I offended anyone, please take this as an apology. For those interested in how I fixed the issue, Tim Brown pointed me to a previous entry on Andrew Pollack's blog, my new hero, about tweaking Eclipse to make things work faster. I set the jvm.properties value to 512 and it's working MUCH faster now.

Look, we all know that the Standard Notes client in 8.0.2 is a beautiful piece of software, I don't think any of us in the "Yellow Bubble" would argue it isn't. The new features and time saving enhancements that are included have been blogged about and expounded upon by others, so I'm not going to rehash it here. I'm just coming from the viewpoint of a single Admin in a quickly growing environment, (the place where I work), that needed to make a call on what to do for the next step...a very BIG step.
So in fairness, what's your favorite feature and or success story with rolling out the Standard Notes client. Share it up, peoples!

5 comments:

Keith Brooks said...

I am very fond of the ability to float any section in the sidebar and then move it anyplace on my 2 screens.

Anonymous said...

Andy,

If you have 2Gb then use 768 rather than 512. With 3Gb 1024 flies!

HTH,
Bob

Anonymous said...

you may also want to look into obtaining Notes 8.0.2 CCH1 and/or Notes 8.0.2 HF66 from IBM Lotus Support and see if either one of those help also.

HTH,
Tim E. Brown

Unknown said...

As a Notes Admin, I installed the Standard Client (Admin and Designer as well) first. I love pretty much everything... except the number of times a day I have to reboot. I have 1Gb of memory and did some 'tweaking' as recommended Andrew's blog and it seems to load faster. However, if I have both the Notes Client and the Admin Client open at the same time, it will lock my system up 90% of the time if I try to open an attachment (.doc or .xls with MS Office). Get's pretty frustrating.

As far as the roll-out to my users... we've hit a snag as approx. 30% of my users are still on Windows 2000 Pro. I've been able to install on desktops, but it won't run. So, I have to set it to use the Basic Client. On the laptops, it won't even install. We're trying to decide where we go from here.

Merch said...

We've done a fairly extensive pilot on 8.0.1 and that was met with a luke warm response. We have plenty of machines running with 1 GB (or less!!) of memory around this company and we didn't even attempt it on something with less than 1 GB.

8.0.2 WAS faster and has met with a much better response. While I'm talking about speed, startup speed is one key, but simply the over all responsiveness of the client was slower than you'd like to see when you took 8.0.1 and coupled it with only a GB of RAM.

Get more RAM? Not always feasible in a company with a lot of 2-3 year old PCs. Budgets like it better when they cycle through hardware slowly and 2+ years ago, 1 GB of RAM was considered plenty.

So Andy nailed it on the head, 8.0.2 is better...