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Innovation

Rupert Goodwin's Diary

Tuesday 10/7/2001A dark day at the office, as eager beaver Tom Derry from IT lollops from one PC to the next casting a Dark Spell Of Expulsion and an Even Darker Spell Of Summoning. With the first, there is a faint shimmer around the monitor and Lotus Notes ceases to be.
Written by Rupert Goodwins, Contributor
Tuesday
10/7/2001 A dark day at the office, as eager beaver Tom Derry from IT lollops from one PC to the next casting a Dark Spell Of Expulsion and an Even Darker Spell Of Summoning. With the first, there is a faint shimmer around the monitor and Lotus Notes ceases to be. With the second, the room temperature drops, a distant howling is heard from the West and Microsoft Outlook appears on the desktop amid a fug of brimstone. It's not that I ever loved Notes. I didn't. It remains high on my list of most irritating software from the Genghis Khan school of user interface design. Even at the end, it was spewing out incomprehensible error messages (trying to shut down the software by closing the main window, it said "Incorrect parameter specified" and refused to go away), and I'm still not sure that Tom's hounds of hell have sniffed out all the dollops of ectoplasm it leaves around the system. But it has the huge advantage of not being Microsoft software and thus practically invisible to the hoards of hackers out there in kiddyland. As for Outlook. it's not without its good points. It works. I like my email clients to be small, fast and elegant, which it certainly ain't, and why it insists that attachments are called included files I've no idea. And you have to beat it up to stop it sending HTML or RTF. But here we are, having recently kicked out Netware and now no longer a Notes organisation. Borged. It's not a good sign.
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