Jeff
Thanks for the suggestion. However, that replaces windows at the sever end but not the desktop. While I find that Notes does fulfill a lot of our needs it is still proprietary and licences aren't cheap. I guess you use windows based native Notes clients. If I could get a suitable client(s) that run on Linux for the document editing and viewing the problem would be solved. I could then convert most of our desktops to Linux only. At present I run VMware on one workstation as an experiment just to give him Notes and one DOS application (DBASE) that doesn't (or at least wouldn't when I last tried it) seem to want to run under Wine. I also experimented with Notes under Wine but couldn't get past the initial few screens before it would crash. It was also even slower than VMware. I have looked at viewing Notes documents via a browser but the rendering of the original formatting to something viewable by a browser is fairly ugly. I need something good enough for a business letter. We are only a small organisation but have gone through an evolution over the years with documents like letters. 1. Letter written out or dictated by author and typed by typist. Carbon copy kept on file. By the time the copy was needed it is lost. 2. Same as 1 except kept in word processor. 3. Typed by author on own PC and lost on hard drive. Relies on memory of author to find originals 4. Still typed by author but kept in Notes central store. Provides indexing and browsing functions. I don't know what other organizations do now but I would like to avoid going back to the days when letters were files stored on the writers PC with some obscure filename that no-one but the writer could find (and they usually can't find it anyway). It just seems a shame that Linux is so close, but not quite there, for the desktop (at least in a form that my users will accept). I can't be the only one tackling this. Is anyone using an open source solution for this type of application? Is there a more lateral thinking type solution? Steven On 27 August Jeff Allison replied : I'm not sure about a single application that can replace notes, But there are plenty of free/open applications that you can assemble to replace most of it (IMAP, sendmail, cvs, BSCW, apache) the hitch always seems to be calendering/scheduling. But ! "own personal preference here" why not just use domino on linux its been available for 2 years and fully supported Jeff Allison Senior Domino Administrator Tokata Management Systems Phone 02 4399 3653 Cell 0410 502 702 Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] On 27 August Steven Heimann said : Over the years I have been gradually reducing our reliance on Windows. Our main ERP application runs on the Progress RDBMS under Linux. Really the only thing left now is Lotus notes. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there will be a linux client in the short term. They have now discontinued the Solaris client. (In fact in the long term this could be a good thing because it will push me away from using a proprieyary solution.) We use Notes for email which can easily be replaced. However, we also use it for document storage. Instead of word processing in something like word or Openoffice we use Notes. It is a little primitive but has all the features you need for 99% of letters. This creates a central store of letters and also gives a way for easy seaching for documents and lists document summaries. The email need can be solved with an IMAP server and any number of clients. The individual word processing / spreadsheet need is solved by Openoffice. Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might provide the central document storage, searching and summaries provided by Notes? Then I might be on the way to being Microsoft free. Regards Steven -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
