Carl Tyler's Blog :: Why did Notes subscriptions never take off?

Category Notes Subscriptions

A feature added to Notes R5 that I rarely see used is the Notes subscription option, are some of you scratching your heading because you've never heard of it? The easiest way to think of a Notes subscriptions is as an RSS feed for a Notes database, at the time there were no RSS feeds so we couldn't describe it that way. With Notes subscriptions you can be inside a database and choose Create, Subscription, which would add it the subscription to your subscriptions database, like adding an RSS feed to your feed reader. Periodically your Notes Subscriptions are collected, again think RSS Feeds , and consolidated into a single database, headlines.nsf think of this as your RSS Feed Reader.

So why didn't they take off? How come people didn't use them? I know why I turned them off back in R5 when I wasn't demoing, the main reason being that you had to enable scheduled local agents in preferences, which use (might still don't know) to slow Notes down. Why didn't you use them? Did you know the feature existed? Do you only use Notes for email so don't care about anything else? If you didn't use that feature, do you use an RSS reader today?

Subscribing to databases to receive the latest updates

Comments

1 - Either dragged, or never worked right, as I the user would expect it to.
Yep, precursor of RSS and again lotus was WAAYYY ahead here, but just couldn't rename it or reposition it as time caught up to it.

Posted by Keith Brooks At 01:40:48 PM On 08/21/2008 | - Website - |

2 - Iris dev gave up on this feature after the first release. I assume negative feedback came back from marketing, customers or somebody.

Posted by Wassim At 01:51:17 PM On 08/21/2008 | - Website - |

3 - I tried it, but quickly shut it off. It kicked the @#$$% out of my machine. Good idea, bad implementation.

Posted by Rob McDonagh At 02:21:54 PM On 08/21/2008 | - Website - |

4 - There was something like this in R3 even...something like "scan unread" for "watched databases". It was totally awesome since you could breeze through a whole bunch of discussion boards, see the ones that had unread docs, choose to "mark all read", skip, or open and read. Way ahead of its time.

Posted by Kevin Pettitt At 02:29:34 PM On 08/21/2008 | - Website - |

5 - Word got around very, very quickly that it didn't scale/could create severe performance problems.

Posted by Richard Schwartz At 02:45:44 PM On 08/21/2008 | - Website - |

6 - I didn't like it because most Notes applications have only a few documents that one person has to really read, so, monitoring all docs in a DB didn't sound very useful.

Also, it caused huge server performance issues, not only on client side. On one of my customers, I had to disable the monitoring feature in the server doc.

Posted by Edson At 04:52:36 PM On 08/21/2008 | - Website - |