Lotus Notes - The Asbestos of Enterprise IT
On Friday, I threw up a post saying that, actually, it was fairly easy to leave Lotus Notes. I described a way for any half way decent coder to pull information out of Lotus Notes by screen scraping content in what Lotus Notes calls a “database”. I suggested screen scraping because it requires zero knowledge about Lotus Notes itself. The programmer only needs to know how to crawl through websites in a given domain.
The reaction from IBM and Lotus Notes experts has been amazing. Amazing and generally pretty angry.
Richard Schwartz began with
With all due respect, Rod, you clearly haven’t got a clue about what you’re talking about…
As for your strategy for moving off of Notes, it’s a really great strategy… for any organization that just has static data in their Notes applications that never needs to be updated, never needs to be integrated with other applications, and doesn’t need to be secured. I.e., it allows any organization that has already moved off of Notes to move off of Notes.
Richard is partially right. While you can screen scrape text data, you can not screen scrape Lotus Notes applications. However, once you do extract the text data, it should be very easy to layer on top tools to update the content and systems for access control layers.
It is important to note that the Simple Recipe for Leaving Lotus Notes calls for the screen scraped content to be put into an Enterprise 2.0 style read/write Intranet system, such as iUpload, Blogtronix of SocialText. In each of these web based content management and collaboration systems, the screen scraped content can come alive in a new dynamic environment. The right end users can continue to edit things like your travel policy.
There are two ways to add back in the existing access control rules.
The first requires that you know something about Notes. Notes can integrate into LDAP directory servers, including Active Directory. Under this approach, you would need to query the AD system and apply the same access control rules to the new post or page in your read/write Intranet tool.
The second is cruder, and involves end users. Simply lock down all the new web pages, and add a button in a template requesting access to be able to edit the content. This might require an admin to baby sit the transition, but it shouldn’t take too long.
What do end users want and need?
Much of the negative reaction from IBM and Lotus Notes experts comes from people who seem to believe that business end users are just like factory workers; they only do what you tell them to. I am going to pick on Richard again only because he writes so well:
Re “in my experience 99% of users to not know how to use these features”… you clearly show your lack of experience by that statement because Notes users don’t need to know how to use those features in Notes any more than they need to know how to use those features in Java, Ruby, Powerbuilder, PHP, or whatever? Users just need to know how to use the applications that their organization has built with those feature
As readers of this site know, I personally have a problem with the view that knowledge workers only need fully bakes solutions to automate their business processes.
Instead, I view knowledge workers as Innovation Creators, constantly evolving their business technology, process and people to handle new situations. In today’s globally competitive market, they are forced to constantly improve upon the way they do business.
McKinsey calls this kind of work “tacit interactions”. Tacit Interactions are gray areas of business. Areas that require expert subjective judgement. And constant changes in the business process. If you build systems, you have encountered this in the form on constant changes in the system specification.
End Users Need Tools to Build Their Own Solutions
In the face of this constant change, end users do not need a “solution”. Instead they need a platform with simple Web 2.0 style tools that help them to define and then constantly refine their business process.
I’ll be posting more about what these kinds of end user built mash-up and work flow engines look like over the next week.
I know of at least one will be detailed at the Office 2.0 Conference.
The coding that some IBM Lotus Notes fans feel end users “do not need to know” will now become drag and drop easy. The resulting end user defined systems are loosely coupled, standards based and truly emergent.
The Original Vision for Lotus Notes
As the various people commenting on this blog have assured me, a decade ago, much of this highly flexible end user driven collaboration was possible in Lotus Notes.
There are two reasons why this highly flexible dynamic way of working has not taken hold within shops using Lotus Notes.
First, in my experience, end users do not like Lotus Notes. It is ugly. It is hard to use. It does not create the passion, enthusiasm and participation of Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and systems like MySpace. Some might say those are consumer sites. They are. But if participation is the killer app within Enterprise 2.0 and if companies want to achieve constant innovation in the face of global competition, then those companies have to create ways of generating consumer levels of participation within the enterprise.
Second, many Lotus Notes / Domino Admins never actually gave their end users the chance to use the full capacity of Lotus Notes. Perhaps they did not have much respect for their end users. But there in lies a problem. How can you build a collaboration engine that truly empowers your end users when you think your end users are idiots?
Lotus Notes: The Asbestos of Enterprise IT
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it is hard as all hell to get out of Lotus Notes once you have installed it:
Rob McDonagh says:
You’re kidding right? Bring your “halfway decent VB, C#, Java, or Ruby programmer” to my office, I’ll give them access to our language-independent, 100% dynamic workflow-driven forms engine, written in Domino, you can tell them they have the afternoon to rewrite it in the tool of their choice, and we can both watch while their head explodes.
That is some scary lock-in.
If Rob McDonagh is right, then once you put Lotus Notes in, it costs you a huge amount to switch back out. In a constantly changing world, does this mean you constrain your future options by selecting Lotus Notes?
And that is the problem with asbestos. It was really easy to install, but it wasn’t user friendly, and it was very expensive to get out.
Other Interesting Comments:
1) Charles Robinson says:
Not everyone likes working with applications in a browser. We’ve done extensive usability testing at work, and in nearly every case users prefer the Notes version to web-based implementations. We tried to force a group of users to only use web-based mail and they simply stopped checking it because they hated using a browser. (We tried them on Zimbra, too, and had the same result so it wasn’t just Domino Web Access.)
This, to me, is a surprising result. The examples of Yahoo! Mail, HotMail, Gmail, MySpace, Flickr, YoutTube, FaceBook, Wikipedia and the 50+ Million blogs out there would tend to contradict that user testing.
2) Andy Broyles wrote a really interesting long comment on how Lotus Notes has had most of the features of Enterprise 2.0 web based solutions since release 2. That is years ago. I am sure he right.
Andy’s story reminds me of portable MP3 players. They were around for years before the iPod. But, it was the iPod that succeeded in capturing the public’s imagination. Enterprise 2.0 might be as simple as some better marketing and a tweak to the sales model. For example, SaaS is a tweak on the Lotus Notes / Domino sales model.
When participation is the end goal, you must win over the end users. Maybe it is the heavy software sell, with the big expensive install that is trapping Lotus Notes.
IBM’s Dilemma
A system today needs to be open. That means it has to be as easy to get in as it is to get out of using a platform.
Lock-in does not make sense from the client’s perspective. They have learnt that lesson the hard way.
Today, IT companies now have to earn their keep on a daily basis by always adding value. Charge too much, and you loose the market share. Don’t innovate fast enough, and a Microsoft steals your PC platform, or a Google renders that platform irrelevant.
IBM can make Notes Domino a platform for innovation if they make it freely accessible to lots of little start-ups. They can make it a platform for innovation if they make it as easy to get information out of Lotus Notes as it is to get information into Lotus Notes. IBM can make it a platform for innovation if they radically improve the usability.
Or, they can ignore end users like me, and try to milk every last penny out of the terrifying lock-in they have put in place.
Either way, the revenues are going to fall. The question for IBM is do you build a new future, with new Lotus Notes revenue streams, or hold on to a glorious, but ever more distant past.
Intellectual Honesty
If I am right that Lotus Notes faces a real threat from a new generation of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools, then it is easy to understand why both IBM and people with an extensive personal investment in Lotus Notes / Domino are going to do everything they can to forestall that change; including shooting the messenger.
I have already felt the brunt of some personal and nasty comments. My guess is there will be more. That is unfortunate. I am not in competition with IBM. I am just an end user who is interested in seeing better technologies within the enterprise. It would be nice to see a civil debate, instead of name calling.
One Big Disappointment
I really enjoy writing this blog. I do make mistakes and amazingly, kind people help me correct them quickly.
However, that has not been my experience with Ed Brill
Ed Brill is Business Unit Executive, Worldwide Lotus Messaging Sales, IBM Software Group.
From his post entitled Rod Boothby on Notes, part two — second verse, worse than the first
Between that and his linkedin profile, we can determine that Mr. Boothby has never been in IT, has no background in Lotus Notes (other than that of an end-user), and that most of his academic and work background is in finance.
As many comments here and on Rod’s posting suggest, Mr. Boothby should have quit while he was behind.
First, I think it is interesting that as far as Ed is concerned, 2 1/2 years of using Lotus Notes as an end user counts as “no background in Lotus Notes”. That shows you what respect he has for end users and their opinions.
Second, I find it shocking that a senior IBM executive would use his site to comment on an individual blogger in this way.
Just to set the record straight, I have ten years of IT coding experience. I have coded systems in FORTRAN, C++, C#, Java, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. I lead the development of two systems that were put into production on the Fixed Income Derivatives trading floor of the 5th largest bank in the US.
I am one blogger. I dared to say it was easy to get out Lotus Notes, and this is how a senior IBM executive uses his blog to attempt to besmirch my professional reputation.
How does that saying going? “If you can’t win on the facts, attack the other guy’s reputation?”
My email is on the site. If it was important for Ed to find out the details about my IT background, he could have simply asked. Unfortunately, he did not do that.
Ron, Great blog. I like your focus on web 2.0 in enterprise.
Users just need to know how to use the applications that their organization has built with those feature.
This has been my pet-peeve with most enterprise apps. They force users to follow and adopt to a predefined process and doesn’t account and adopt for differences in user behavior. It doesn’t matter how inefficient these processes are to some users. Users need to learn to get along with computer instead of computers adopting to user.
I am hoping someday we can use blogs and wikis in service management instead of being forced to enter info one way and presented info only one way.
Anil
Rod, oops! addressed you as Ron. Sorry. Anil
Hi - came here from TechMeme. Work in an office of ~250 people and everyone I know despises Lotus Notes - speaking as an ‘end-user’ its sh1t, does not promote collaboration or knowledge sharing and encourages siloed working and departmentalism.
We are in the process of putting in a new intranet/extranet and they are getting rid of Notes because of the 100s of complaints from people about how awful it is to use as a system. Just give us outlook and a web-based start that can have value added to it thru different applications and services and I’m sure we’ll all be a lot happier!
Rod, I think much of the problem is that there are two facets of the argument here (at least) - one perspective is how Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 as a set of principals are discussed in terms of organizational dynamics and how IT strategists should rethink approaches towards applications and infrastructure — the other area of debate deals with technology instantiation — what tools, software, services, products and vendors are good fits within those principals.
One the first point, I agree with much of what has been said re: organizational implications of user-centric design and socially-oriented applications et. al.
But on the second point, you badly misrepresent existing software such as Lotus Notes/Domino and the complex set of issues large enterprises face when it comes to technology.You also seem to assume that existing software platforms are static and not adapting. Vendors that don’t adapt will disappear. Vendors that are adapting, and adapt well, will survive. Both IBM and Microsoft are adapting. Perhaps not as fast as we all want but there should be acknowledgement of the progress achieved in upcoming releases. There also needs to be some criticism of so-called “Web 2.0 vendors” when it comes to their product gaps. People seem to be giving these vendors a free pass. Issues around security, integration, identity management, compliance, and migration/co-existence cannot be easily dismissed.
Some additional thoughts:
http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2006/10/rule_1_when_you.html
http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2006/10/simple_recipe_f.html
Cmon Rod - if you publish information that would appear technically misinformed you have to expect some come back. This is especially when your posts are picked up by very highly knowledgable people within the Lotus community who are passionate about their work and the innovation etc they create with it. Incidently just like you or else you would not be blogging on these subjects.
Anyway Notes/Domino is a very adaptable and changeable environment which can be used in so many different ways. Those ways are generally set by the people who administrate and manage the environment (you seemed to have picked up on this) - so the limits are generally not set by the software. So education is something that needs to be stepped up within many of these environments.
If you look at any of the evolutions of IT since Notes began you will see at every step of the way Notes was there. We are not talking about catchup - it was always at the forefront and still is. Web2.0 has got a lot of interest over the last 12 months especially and a little before that. I was writing AJAX/Web2.0 applications for huge multinational corps (I cannot name them here) using Notes/Domino 5+ years ago. I was only able to do this because the Domino development team were innovative and forward thinking and started adding the ability for us todo this.
Personally I like a lot of your thoughts - I’m interested in them with a passion - just like my passion for IBM/Lotus software. I would be very willing to talk to you about them and perhaps spread a little knowledge from my side of the fence and at the same time add some knowledge and thought from yours. I almost feel a personal mission coming on to prove Notes/Domino existance in the web2.0 world!
Finally - forget screen scraping html from Domino - that would be one painful way of extracting data (like chopping your leg off because you had an ingrowing toe nail). Notes/Domino has many ways of extrating data a lot less painful and automated than that I can assure you!
>>This, to me, is a surprising result. The examples of Yahoo! Mail, HotMail, Gmail, MySpace, Flickr, YoutTube, FaceBook, Wikipedia and the 50+ Million blogs out there would tend to contradict that user testing. MS > web x discussion I like your site for the innovation part and would love to see your blog in a web 2.0 style
Thanks
Rod,
Another great post Rod! I am so glad that you are standing up to these guys. We are with you. At least, I am. While I must say that I was very surprised at the tone of the comments you got, I am not surprise at all at the viewpoints of your opponents. This is how IBM thinks. They think that they rule the world, like the dinosaurs. We all know what happened to the dinosaurs! Are any of these guys realizing what harm they are doing to themselves by attacking their own end users? Why are they not listening?
The real problem is that IBM and other large software companies are still talking about their great technology and how it can do anything and has been doing it for over 10 years. Good for you IBM! This is old technology and we don’t want it any more.
I argue that is not about the technology any more, it’s about solving specific communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing problems in today’s world and how you do it. It’s about community! It’s about ease of use. It’s about new ways to interact and share information from your clients and partners with your employees. It’s about how fast you do this and how quickly you can innovate your products and services based on the feedback you got from you conversations. There are many multimillion-dollar systems on the market that address many specific value chain problems today. They work great, they are secure, they are integrated with other “old” systems and they are old.
The power of Enterprise 2.0 is that a simple application such as a Blog and RSS feed can replace an old system at the fraction of the cost, with little or no implementation time and this is what many companies like IBM are now afraid off. This is why these OLD IBM’ers are so angry with you Rod. They know that they are a dieing breed and they will no longer be able to have their 20+ year jobs and get paid $400 an hour + expenses to consult you. How can you innovate if you are working in a time capsule for 10-20 years?
In large organizations like yours, it is up to the business units to request new solutions. In large organizations like yours however, the IT team is also the one to recommend and implement such systems. This same IT team is used to running their old IBM systems. This is what they know. This is what the CIO knows. So, in order for a large enterprise to move to Enterprise 2.0 /Web 2.0 technology, their top business and IT management need to see the benefits first and only then this can happen.
The good news is that most new workers that are fresh from College know about these wacky things like blogs, wikis, social networking, RSS, web based email, video, etc, etc and they will eventually be the once to request and recommend such Enterprise 2.0 systems.
I would love to get a small group of end users and do a usability test. Let’s put your Notes and our blogging, wiki, RSS, Social Networking tools (oops IBM don’t have that one yet) and see what they will say. Let’s see how fast can you create a new workgroup, a new blog, add a picture, some video, tags, posting, get a new wiki folder, search for an expert within your corporate network. I guess that we could first do an IT test too and test how fast you can install this software on a single server and get it up and running.
Best,
Vassil Mladjov
Vassil - I can deploy a blog/wiki/RSS/Social Networking solution from IBM/Lotus from my office to any server I have access to in the world in less than a minute - you want to race? ;)
Admittingly thats to an active server - but full server install might take me five minutes
Rod,
The mavericks who dare buck the trend will always be the latest target of agression, as you know. But in this case, it does appear that the IBM folks are scared about some of the truths you define in your posts.
Lotus Notes can be good for document-workflow applications, but it really does stink when it comes to email and other usages. And I agree that the lock-in to the Notes-way of doing document workflow is too restrictive.
The continued proliferation of easy-to-use tools that link together and give the customers great solutions, without the lock-in to one company’s idea of structure, will eventually render Notes as a has-been application software “platform”.
Keep up the informative and provocative posts!
Rod,
I suppose this is a “fight fire with fire” post. Your blog, your rules. But none of this smokescreen hides the fact that you obviously don’t know anything about Notes/Domino architecturally other than to label it with every negative and derogatory term you can think of. You’ve even gone back to ignoring the way your original post was eviscerated by people more techncially adept than either you or me. You can say that I should have e-mailed you — but honestly, for the points I made, there was no other logical conclusion based on the lack of understanding displayed in your original posting. As Mike Gotta says, you chose to dig in deeper with the modification of your posting and then decided to criticize anyone who pointed out useful counterexamples or absolute facts. You stuck to your McKinsey quotes and Web 2.0 buzzwords without answering basic questions asked of you.
If you would like to have some credibility in this space, answer the questions being asked –
1) Why is the approach to leaving Notes that you outlined technically feasible and realistic? What situations have you encountered where such an approach was successful? What alternatives were considered?
2) Other than at your employer, what experience do you have with Lotus Notes and Domino? At some point, you seemed willing to agree that weblogs like mine, which run on Notes, appear to be as “Web 2.0″ as the best of ‘em. (By the way, my blog software is so good, I don’t get comment spam. Why haven’t the web 2.0 guys all figured that one out yet without imposing character recognition, math equations, and the like)
3) How do you explain the 40,000 organizations using Notes/Domino today, the publicly-reported revenue growth (5-10% Y2Y) for the Notes business over the last six quarter, and the thousands of companies buying Notes for the first time each of the last two years (about 3000 across 2004-05)?
4) What response do you have to Mike Gotta’s reasoned analysis that Web 2.0 and IBM and Microsoft aren’t mutually exclusive?
5) Other than “the UI sucks”, what actual complaints do you and your other readers have about Notes?
You may expect different from an IBM executive, but welcome to the web 2.0 era. As long as a technically irresponsible posting exists somewhere offering pure conjecture as to how to deal with my product, you can bet that I’m going to respond in kind. There’s no legal recourse to someone exposing their lack of understanding on the web, but I can make sure that someone googling on Lotus Notes doesn’t stumble across your page, present it to their boss as a simple way to migrate from Notes, and have the boss make a decision that has absolutely no basis in reality.
Thanks for the link Rod,
Maybe my experience has been to limited. Maybe I don’t understand the concept of a ‘knowledge worker.’ Maybe you can help expand my horizons?
I have experience in three different areas: big pharma, health-care, and P&C insurance. I would consider the majority of the workforce in these three areas to be ‘knowledge workers’ (the exception being the actual medicine producers working on the factory floor in pharma.)
I have always assumed that they are ‘knowledge workers’ because they deal with information more than anything elese…they process data…that is their job.
However, being a knowledge worker processing data doesn’t mean laissez faire work.
One of the most full filling projects I have worked on was building a knowledge management system for a big pharma company. This system was designed to ‘link’ the company’s 5000+ scientist and technicians together, breaking down management silos. This organization was trying hard to overcome NIH syndrome (not invented here) and expand its horizons with regard to buying and licensing technology. However, it was running into huge efficiency problems…departmental issues to be precise. A typical scenario worked like this…one group, say working on liver function improvement, would go an investigate a newly developed technology. They would do huge amounts of research and diligence and maybe eventually license the technology. All of this unbeknown to the cardio group who had either already done the same work, or was beginning the same effort themselves. Quite literally scientists from one group would be leaving the vendors office when scientists from other groups were arriving…and worse, when they didn’t pass, holding multiple licenses for the same technology.
These folks needed structure to their work and it was my project that delivered it. Amazingly, it was a Lotus Domino application that allowed incredible amounts of collaborative work. Participation, as you have pointed out, was key. Following traditional thinking, we decided to base the app in the browser. Huge mistake. Browser inconsistency led to excessive amounts of work building the UI, wasting money and time, and when it was in place, we were unable to deliver certain UI related capabilities due to the browser. We revised the app to be Notes client only, over came the browser limitations, and had nearly 90% acceptance. Interestingly, the appplication had nothing to do with the rejection rate…it had more to do with politics and resistance to change.
It was by far an Enterprise 2.0 application in my mind, but probably not a Web 2.0 app in yours.
You may not like the Notes client…a lot of people don’t. Thats fine. However, don’t call the Domino server old technology, unless you think things like XML, web services, identity management, RSS, IM, etc are also ‘old’ technology.
Ron, a quick qestion: How do you manage to handle all of the issues dealing with SOX, HIPAA, GLBA, etc. while the same time time rolling all the various web 2.0 apps to thousands of users?
Rod, I think that focussing on complex systems, irrespective of vendor, would result in many being termed “asbestos”. Any system in an enterprise with thousands of applications, some very complex and bespoke will be difficult to migrate away from - the complexity of the migration directly proportional to the complexity of the original database. I’ve blogged about this here and that post also links to some other posts on migration which I wrote back in January. It would be interesting to have an astestos scale with simple to migrate up to astronomically difficult and lay out all the present day enterprise tools from various vendors in there. I’d hazard a guess that most would come out on the more difficult end of the scale.
Wow these things do blow up a bit.
I guess my problem with the initial and follow up articles is one of purpose, many of my clients use Notes/Domino for application development, whilst Notes is all about collaboration, in many companies I deal with its used as a full blow application development platform.
As a development platform I have created CRM, huge workflow applications, Salesforce management apps, Document Management etc, and I just dont see how many of the tools mentioned in the article would be able to achieve this with as little complexity ( 1 server the Domino server, no seperate database, directory, web servers etc), without major re-work, and as quickly, Domino is a fantastic RAD environment.
Thats not to say it cant be done with these tools, but I dont think it can be done as well… I may well be proved wrong…
Yes blogs, wiki’s etc have made collaboration easy, anyone can pop online and set one up, and for many this is a more convenient, simple options than a collaboration platform such as Lotus Notes.
However the Domino server is also a very good host of Blogs, Wiki’s etc, there are a number of templates available, and I have introduced a number of customers to them, and they are now deploying them in their workplace. A good example of the Domino platforms flexability when new concepts/technology comes along.
One of the interesting points that many large companies raise is security and control concerns around blogs/wikis etc, even if the blog is within the firewall many companies dont like to give control over creating content/blogs to end users.
This is also a problem with Lotus Notes as well, I know of a number of companies that have discussion database etc all over the place as they have been created from Notes standard templates with little control !!!
As to the idea of being tied into Notes/Domino, I dont really think that you are any more tied in than other platforms, you can use SQL, Webservices, RSS, etc to get at/manipulate the data.
The comments about the Notes client are intersting, I am a big fan of browsers but even with AJAX etc it is still often easier /quicker/more functional to use a thick client. I believe that in the corporate space at least thin cleints and thick clients do not deliver, I think the future is Rich Clients, like the IBM Hannover client built on Eclipse, the server provisioning, plugins etc on a standard framework seem to me to give us the best of both worlds..
And speaking of Hannover, yes many critisms of the Notes Client are valid, and IBM has been slow to overhaul the Notes Client, but checkout the Hannover client, its a big step foreward…
However I can provide screens of many good looking and highly functional Notes Client and Domino browser apps, many of the problems of poor user interfaces are due to poor development.
The last thing I would like to echo is that many people (including myself) have been building Domino application using AJAX (although it wasnt called that at the time) since Lotus introduced XML in Domino 5.
I hope that this has been a constructive post (if written from a Domino persons point of view). I would say to anyone reading these posts to have a look at some Notes/Domino appications written by skilled developers and get a proper feel for what Notes/Domino can do…. you will be surprised, many organisations run there entire business on Notes and there is a reason for that.
If I may respond directly to Mr. Brill:
I am the CEO of a small, growing company. We may not yet be the taget market of Notes/Domino, but we find ourselves struggling with the issues that Notes and a host of Notes competitors are attempting to address. You (and by proxy IBM) are coming across as extremely arrogant about your product - and you may be right, it might be the best. I don’t know. We have no dog in this fight, no platform we are looking to defend or advance. Lots of great comments back and forth.
However, when we are in a position to make a choice about our platform, what will stick in my mind about this whole discussion is an impression that IBM believes that the way to respond to criticism is to attack. I am now not sure IBM would treat criticism from a customer any better, or help us solve our problems.
I do admire your passion and lack of corpspeak, and personally hope you keep jumping in - but would like better arguments.
Rod — Your analysis of people liking the web interface of Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, Flickr, etc. is inherently flawed. The main reason to use those tools is that they are FREE. If I want basic, simple email, GMail is my preference. It certainly isn’t buzz-worthy or filled with bells and whistles, but it works. And it’s free. Of course I can’t change it, get a restore, get credits for downtime, or anything else. But, it is fine for my personal use. Everything you mentioned is for personal use. When it comes to choices for an enterprise, you have to be more selective. That’s why Domino and Exchange own the market. They are the enterprise class email platforms. It so happens that Domino can do much more than email (which has been drummed here quite a bit), but as an enterprise email solution, it is top notch. Some people hate the UI, others love it. UIs are like art. It’s all a matter of personal opinion. If you want to see some great UI work, Mr. Nathan Freeman can show you some applications in Notes that are as simple and beautiful as any I have ever seen. On the technical front, Domino is fully compliant with all email standards, has enterprise calendaring, S/MIME support, security, scalability, reliability, etc. All of these items come with a price tag. Any organization with more than 10 people needs something stronger than GMail.
You seem to think that knowledge workers want to spend their time tweaking tools and making applications. I think nothing is further from that. As a manager of knowledge workers, I don’t want my revenue generating resources wasting time tweaking some UI or application. That is a poor use of their skills and time. We have lower cost options to do that for us, with our input needed on a much smaller level. If the trend you describe were really true in the IT world, we wouldn’t be seeing 15%-18% growth in the datacenter/email/security/hosting/application outsourcing markets. These markets are BOOMING. Why? Because it is not the core competency of a pharma company to manage these technologies. In the end, it’s about doing what what you do best. Knowledge workers do not code/tweak apps. That’s a poor use of their talent.
Finally, what I think people really want is for you to readily admit you have no knowledge of Domino other than as an end user. The reason people came here and started posting was because of your completely naive rambling on migrating off of Domino. Honestly, Rod. Simply ‘fess up that you had no idea what you were talking about on the migration piece. It’s painfully obvious to everyone here that you have no clue on that one. Your ideas on Web 2.0 and the role of the knowledge worker are certainly more developed. Whether we agree or not is irrelevent. They at least have merit. Your arguments about Domino do not.
re: your response to my comment, which you chose to ignore in the discussion about your original post and then quote (in full, thanks!) in a completely separate post, which is more than a bit odd - but hey, your blog, your rules. You said:
“That is some scary lock-in.
If Rob McDonagh is right, then once you put Lotus Notes in, it costs you a huge amount to switch back out. In a constantly changing world, does this mean you constrain your future options by selecting Lotus Notes?
And that is the problem with asbestos. It was really easy to install, but it wasn’t user friendly, and it was very expensive to get out.”
You’re demonstrating your ignorance again, Rod. Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, use whatever buzzword you choose. What you’re ignoring is the fact that organizations have business rules and processes, and they design applications to implement them. Regardless of which tool they use to build those applications, moving to a different tool is painful. That’s lock-in, all right, based on the amount of money and effort an organization has invested in a given solution and the similar amount they would have to invest to move to a different one. But it has nothing to do with my post, and even less to do with Lotus Notes/Domino.
My point was that you claimed an average programmer could replace my Domino servers in an afternoon. You were, and are, factually incorrect. The applications deployed on my servers are much too sophisticated to be replaced without months of effort. They required months of effort to build, and they would require similar effort regardless of the toolset.
You seem to have this dream that end-users are going to build their own business systems. And in small (less than 100 person) companies, that will work fine. But in enterprises, it will not and it can not. The reasons are not technological, they are business-related. That makes it particularly surprising that you don’t get it, because you are supposed to have a lot of knowledge about business, based on your own claims.
You were “attacked” by the Notes community because you claimed Notes is technically trivial, when we all know perfectly well that it is not. You have also been taken to task because you’re ignoring business realities in enterprises. Perhaps your approach plays well when you deal with people who don’t write enterprise systems for a living, but you shouldn’t be surprised when you are corrected by people who know more about that particular subject than you do.
If you don’t want to be corrected, but rather engage in a discussion, you should approach your subject with a different tone. Rather than, “Well, this is brain dead simple, I’ve got the answer right here! Why are you all so dumb you didn’t think of it?” you might want to try, “Has anyone thought of interesting ways to combine the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 movements with existing business systems? And is it possible to replace some of those systems with others?” When you phrase something as a question, a suggestion, or a proposal/theory, you will get a different response than if you phrase it as The Answer. Of course, then you might not get lucrative consulting contracts, so perhaps you have a business reason of your own for such an inflammatory approach to writing.
Mr Chambers,
While being a N/D practitioner may bias my comments, I would like to share a little bit of a story regarding my small company’s successful use of N/D and our interaction with IBM.
I work for a very small P&C insurance company with 25 employees. We are not the typical N/D shop. We use N/D technology for everything but our core business functions (we are in the process of migrating those as well.) Why? Because it is a complete solution platform that works. If something should happen to break, we have a single vendor to point at to get it fixed, and they do. If we need a new process, we build it and deploy it to our staff via the Notes client. Our agent and customer portal are built on Lotus Domino and serve thousands of pages a day, all dynamically built from data stored in other systems via our Domino server. Our customers (policyholders) rave about how a small company can deliver big company features yet still have the small company customer service they love.
IBM in is the polar opposite of our company. It is a huge company that can deliver all of the bells and whistles (for example technical support to a customer base of 100 millions)…it is deploying the same technologies that we use to handle the opposite problem…how a big company can have the same ‘closeness’ to its customers, regardless of size, as a small company can.
I have never felt closer to IBM as a vendor than I do today. I know their product road map because they talk about it constantly. If I have a question, more likely than not, I can find the project manager’s blog and get the info…if not, I can IM him/her via SameTime and chat WITH THE PRODUCT MANAGER!
Ed Brill is a perfect example of this. In the ‘old business model’ my company would be of no concern to IBM…25 licenses at $133/license is nothing to their bottom line, yet Ed Brill listens to my concerns when I voice them. He loves his job so much that he blogs constantly about the ‘new stuff’ that he gets to talk about…he also acknowledges his products’ shortcomings and go about try to resolve those issues.
If I were to attack your company’s product in the manner Mr Boothby did with intellectual dishonesty, shortsightedness, and lacking in factuality…would you not respond with passion? That is all that Brill did.
Why does everyone insist on attacking “the IT guys”? Why are the IT people the inhibitors, the nasty wee sods in the enterprise?
In my experience, we’re the guys who try to help out the business with its vision. We’re the guys who clear up the mess when the half-baked “solutions” pushed-through by some fall down. We’re also the guys who have to fight your corner with the “risk” people, the bean-counters, and everyone else who wants you to “toe the line”.
As for holding MySpace up as a poster-child for Web 2.0-style attractiveness and ease of use, you must be kidding. That is the nastiest thing ever, and far worse than anything you can do in Lotus Notes ;o)
Speaking briefly from an admin standpoint, one thing I appreciate is the fact that I can do a Domino upgrade in less than an hour and walk away. Then I can send a CD and simple 5-step instructions to admins overseas and at other sites and they can do the same thing and have few, if any, issues with the results.
As far as user administration is concerned, this is again a fairly simple thing. My gripe would be more with the interface than the mechanics. I have found Notes/Domino a stable, adaptable, easy platform to manage especially for situations with IT headcount constraints (our enterprise has no full-time and about 8 part-time admins for a multi-national operation).
Security-wise, we have had relatively little impact from the many virus outbreaks in the last few years, partly due to use of third-party tools and partly due the the fact the Notes is not targeted by many of the mail-borne viruses.
To assume in an enterprise that has security, corporate liabilities, SOX and all these things to contend with, it is nonsense to give the end-user the keys to the car and tell them they can drive whatever, whenever, whereever they want.
Last… the end-user client experience. Every product should have to win the mindshare of its users. Notes is no exception. In my opinion, this is where the war is being lost for Lotus. They have a lot of catching up to do and a lot of lost ground to cover.
I love Notes, but may the best product win. The only way for Lotus to insure that they are the winner is to produce a system that is a slam dunk.
Rod,
Lotus Notes, properly deployed, allows the creation of fantastic applications, the accumulation and indexing of valuable knowledge, and the flexible interconnectivity of global users.
It does so at less cost than any other tool.
I compete all day long producing applications with Lotus Notes that scale better, distribute better, remain secure, and provide business function at a cost that is often two decimal places cheaper than any other proposed solution.
When you can show me other tools as flexible, comprehensive, manageable, and proven secure — we can talk. The rest of this discussion is just noise.
I hope this is getting you attention, because about half the market now thinks you’re a blowhard who expounds about things he doesn’t have the background to begin to understand.
You’re like a nun teaching a class on human sexuality.
Mr. Boothby,
I am no programmer, although I have programmed things, I am an administrator. I am a business owner and I have worked in aerospace, Management Consulting, Banking and Government organizations as an admin. There is no easy migration of anything. Especially apps, maybe mail, but even then there are problems no matter which direction you are going.
Lotus (IBM) does not have a lock on anything. It is difficult to get processes from any platform to any other platform, regardless of the manufacturer. Many of the comments about not being able to do something, were taken out of context in my opinion. Consider any application that you may build (whether from the ground up or using “templates”), how easy would it be to then move that to another vendor’s platform? Not easy, sure you could “screen scrape” some data, but the *work*, the reason the app exists would be left in the code somewhere else.
BTW, just as you can in many (most, if not all)other platforms, you can export the data from any Notes/Domino application, you don’t need to build something to scrape screens. Usually this can be done without being a developer, or having the designer client.
I feel that your original posting could just as easily and with just as much credibility been re-written, replacing “Notes/Domino” with “.Net” and vice versa, etc…
Of course, you probably would have gotten the same response, from different people.
Let’s face it, if you want to change development platforms, it’s a big job. Period.
Regards,
–Pete
Rod, you still don’t get it, so I’ll spell it out more slowly: n o t e v e r y o n e c a r e s a b o u t “2 . 0″. How, exactly, would I use a blog as a collaborative resource in an environment where the participants need realtime notification? And how, exactly, would this tie into backend order entry systems? It could be done, but at the end of the day, after investing all the time and money, how would I have anything any better than what I have today? I could say it’s fully buzzword compliant, but what business value does that have?
Rod - Aren’t you asking for it? Comparing a product to asbestos and not expecting an emotional response?
Also - isn’t this a total flip-flop from your original post? Can Lotus Notes be migrated off of in an afternoon or never? Which way is it?
You seem intent on fanning the flames of this debate rather than focusing on substance. Makes great reading - but so do a lot of trashy novels. (See, now I compared your blog to a trashy novel - emotional response?) :)
Anyway - this makes for fun reading - but hopefully no one takes you too seriously.
Hi Rod,
welcome in the world of Lotus Notes.
Be assured. Vendor lock-in still works and I am not too proud of it (as I still earn most of my money with Notes & Domino).
Count the responses here and you have the opinion of less than 50 of the mentioned 40.000 Notes customers out there. Not saying that those all have a different opinion but the Notes world is not the link list on edbrill.com.
But the fact that a Notes migration is not as simple as in your example remains and he is right pointing that out.
And yes, it is a shame that now this story is more about disrespect than of a constructive discussion.
And no. Notes is not like asbestos because nobody gets ill of using Notes (you might loose some hair though) and a lot of companies get value out of Notes.
The solution is not to move from Notes to Web 2.0 stuff but to take the good out of it and incorporate it in Notes.
There are companies that leave Notes for something else but those normally do not choose your Web 2.0 stuff but plain old Microsoft Exchange and Sharepain. Sad but true.
At least you post was a welcomed change from the usual we are all doing great stuff.
How fun. It’s always entertaining to watch one of these grudge matches. I’m not convinced they accomplish anything, but it gives lots of people a renewed opportunity to feel supremely right about their stance. And what a warm, fuzzy feeling that can be. Sort of a bathrobe for the ego, I suppose.
Just thought I’d chime in on the premise of knowledge workers as innovators. You’re absolutely right: regardless of toolset, if I.T. simply decides what the business and its end users need without actually asking them, it’s going to be a nightmare. The revenue generators need to drive the vision for what their tools become - including a definition of what is most important to them (i.e. security, scalability, cute drag and drop right clicky pastelness, etc.) - but that doesn’t mean they should be the ones writing the code.
Some of the companies that have the most negative impression of Notes, ironically, are those that originally benefited from the ease with which it allows workflow applications to be created. People that really had no business creating databases realized that they had software that would allow them to nonetheless, and before they knew it, their business was relying upon dozens (if not hundreds) of applications written by folks who did a fair job of constructing them under the circumstances, but rapidly got in over their head. Not surprisingly, in these cases, it’s quite common to find a complete lack of standards across all of these one-offs, because their authors were spread across the enterprise with no governing development standards in place. As a result, end user productivity suffers because, in jumping from one application to the next, one has no idea what to expect and has to learn each new application from the ground up. Conversely, I suspect most companies that adore Notes/Domino would tell a quite different story about how their applications are created and maintained. When each resource’s efforts are directed within a tightly defined scope, the true strengths of any toolset are going to become much more apparent.
That said, I’ve never worked for a company that wasn’t using Notes reluctantly. But none of them has abandoned the platform - not because they couldn’t, but because at some point (in some cases, repeatedly) they evaluated the alternatives and realized that porting the data - and processes - to another system would hurt their business somehow: namely, in the form of reliability, security, flexibility, or a combination, all of which ultimately impact productivity, which sooner or later translates directly back into cash.
Attmpting to take this seriously for a second (not sure it’s worth while, as the thesis point seems to keep changing)…
The current idea that “Web 2.0″ (which isn’t a real anything, by the way, just a collection of techniques and version requirements) can somehow provide enough live real time collaboration features to make products like Lotus Notes obsolete is interesting but very flawed.
Users can build apps. Web 2.0 style programming is one way they can do it. Excel & Access are other ways. In many respects, both are more powerful. The results, however, end up as islands of data which are not tracked, managed, secure, or integrated into the corporatation as a whole. The end up being more of a long term liability than a help.
Think of all the dead attepts and shared spreadsheets and access based tools users have put on shared drives to accomplish things. I would put web 2.0 as a collaboration platform for user-designed applications in that category rather than with Lotus Notes.
Rod,
A few points.
Because of your limited exposure to Notes / Domino and maybe the specifics of the implementation at your employer, and the applications *they* have written, your perception may be colored. This is your frame of reference. And I am not specifically criticising your employer’s implementation, just pointing out that it can play a big part in a negative perception.
Anyone can write an ugly application that has poor usability on any platform. You could make an appalling looking/functioning blog very easily. MySpace is not a great lookign site.
There is nothing worse than a poor implementation of Notes / Domino to give users the wrong perception about the products. I have seen quite a few in my time as a Notes/Domino consultant since 1993 - not on yours however.
Poor configuration, poor coding, lack of technical understanding, poor capacity planning, etc. all contribute to an environment that is less usable and less appealing yet is no fault of the products themselves.
You continue to gloss over the hardest part of migrating and that is recreating the business logic and associated services of the platform.
Let’s take your one simple example; security. And this is just one service of the ND platform, multiply this several times for all of the other inhernet services.
You said: “Under this approach, you would need to query the AD system and apply the same access control rules to the new post or page in your read/write Intranet tool.”
First of all you assume your new tool has some notion of access control built in - if not, guess what, you have to write it. And if you are lucky enough to have something, then you have to map the capabilities that you have (maybe just read/write) to the seven or so levels of the access control of Domino, because guess what, those levels are all used in good applications. You see, the public access model of the consumer space is not suitable in an enterprise environment.
Notes and Domino can embrace and make use of standards more quickly than I think you could create an equivalent to the Domino platform using web / enterprise 2.0. And that is why customers continue to use it, because they do not want to rewrite their own application platform cobbled together with a lot of individual products that still cannot provide a complete replacement. How long have Microsoft been trying to pull that off ?
Because once you have to start writing the services for yourself to make up for the shortcomings of the web 2.0 space, you the customer are then responsible for maintaining and enhancing those services. Suddenly your cheap cost of adoption of the base components, is bloated by development of missing pieces, integration (oh yes, even in the standards Nirvana you still need some integration), migration, and ongoing maintenance.
I have seen many customers get sticker shock at the cost of tools recommended to them. I’m specifically thinking of licensing costs for a partner product of around $100k. They declined to buy and proceeded to fund a team of maybe 4-5 developers for 2 years building their own version of the same tool. How can that be good for their business; it costs them more and digs them deeper into something that is not their core competency ?
You’ve seen others tell you they can upgrade a Domino server in 10 minutes or so - that’s no lie. How much time would you the customer spend coding the updates to your platform compared to that, never mind testing and rolling those out?
And that does not even start to ask the question about the viability of the companies producing the products you state could be used to build your new platform, or their support capabilities - all things enterprises care deeply about.
You hold up MySpace as one poster child for openness and web / enterprise 2.0.
By your reasoning then, it would be extremely easy to migrate that whole environment to a completely new platform, how long do you estimate ? I mean if the closed-shop that is Notes/Domino would take an afternoon, then surely with your shiny open tools this could not take more than an hour or so ?
Finally, you say IBM is slow to innovate around these new standards and technologies. Have you looked at Sametime 7.5 ? Built on Eclipse, plugin expandable, runs on W32, Linux and Mac, and went generally available 9 months after announcement.
This post is hilarious. And brought to mind the first rule of holes - when your at the bottom of a hole, stop digging.
I can think of two very large customers that have exceeded 100,000 lines of code in at least one of their notes applications. One in Lotusscript (and is purely notes client-only), and one in a combination of Lotusscript, Java and Javascript for web-based clients.
Are you seriously *still* trying to assert that a simple screen scraper approach could even begin to replace the business logic inherent in these monster applications ? I think not. So in your years of Notes end-user experience, you’ve not yet came across an application that contains business logic ?
You fail to grasp even the simplest premise that Notes is an application infrastructure - and a relatively cheap one at that. Its very robust - hence why its still in the marketplace despite ill-advised comments such as yours.
And ugly ? Perhaps you should check the “Help, about” box on your client and make sure that the verison number starts with six or seven ? If its before v6, then its out of support, and is like comparing outlook 2003 with MS Mail v3 for windows.
Why do corporates still keep installing and enhancing notes within their business ? Its nothing to do with Web 2.0 or other “bubble” style fluffware. Its because it *works* and works well. Perhaps you just dont understand why.
You or I cannot help a corporate IT department who doesnt respond to their customers in the business. Thats another problem. But I can help stamp out complete misinformation - so hence the reason I’ve spent time on this response.
But hey - dont bother doing any research or validation - why should actual fact get in the way of your opinion, right ?
—* Bill
There are just so many errors in your post that I don’t know where to begin. I find it very difficult to believe that you have any background in IT because generally you don’t seem to have a clue. However you do seem to like the sound of your own voice and you appear very skilled at using buzzwords. And like most people that use a lot of buzzwords, you don’t have any understanding of what they mean.
Your point about lock in is a complete joke. You think that platforms like Exchange or Oracle don’t lock the customer in. Give me a break. You seeem to think that those platforms are going to disappear because they lock the customer in. Think again.
And why on earth you compare business applications with consumer applications is beyond me. Do you expect people to participate at work like they do on sites like You Tube? Do you understand the differences between work and play?
You response to Ed Brill is pathetic. The problem is not that you dared to say that Lotus Notes was easy to get out of. The problem is that you write a load of crap.
last weeks infoworld magazine’s cover, and then the cost of the deploying IE patches by the dozens, leads me to conclude that browser only IT apps are costing businesses significntly more in time and effort than just application license costs. This is an interesting Web2.0/MashUp perspective.
http://www.infoworld.com/print_issue/archive/2006_40.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/10/02/40FEbrowseapp_1.html
Can Web-based applications outwit, outplay, outlast the desktop?
We sentenced InfoWorld Senior Contributing Editor Oliver Rist to 7 days of using only Web-based productivity applications. Here’s how he survived
By Oliver Rist
October 02, 2006
So we seem to be in agreement that migrating a Notes application to something else is more involved than just pulling out the data. There’s all that code and built-in platform “behavior” (security, etc.) that you’d also need to get going on whatever your Web 2.0 platform of choice is.
You still seem to think that (even with this added complexity) it’s not that big a deal.
I would point out to you that Microsoft has been making that same claim for many years, and that they have mostly failed miserablly at pulling it off.
Their much-hyped, but ultimately failed “Red Bull” tool claimed to be able to “analyze” a Notes application and tell you how hard it would be to migrate it to the .net stack. But it turned out that, except for apps based only on the most vanilla, un-modified of Notes templates, all other apps were in the “real hard” category.
I suppose one could conclude (as you seem to) that this means Notes is not “open” enough to allow easy migration.
But you could also look at the situation as evidence that Notes has way more (even better) built-in functionality than other platforms. Building collaborative apps on Notes is just easier, because Notes does so much of the work for you.
Re-creating all of that functionality elsewhere so that app migration becomes possible (let alone easy) is (so far, anyway) just way too much typing.
It seems to me that this thread is just touching the tip of the iceberg. It is pretty clear that end users will demand the same kind of web 2.0 experience that they now have at home, with many types of operational data; not just Lotus Notes. While the approach you suggest is doable for Notes, it won’t scale to a more generic solution for making operational data that reside in applications and enterprise data stores available to the enterprise users. A one-off approach for each application is not the right way to addressing the problem.
In a previous position, I dealt with many of the same issues of connecting to multiple data stores and handling access rights in a more generic fashion. To really provide a solution that enterprises can use to leverage their operational data and make them available to information workers using web 2.0 technologies (RSS, Ajax, mashups, etc.) – will require a more structured approach to the problem. Only when organizations can manage data access rights, while shielding the enterprise users from all the “ugliness” that goes on under the hood, will the information worker user experience truly approach the experience they now have at home with web 2.0 tools and technologies.
Rod gives us a ludicrous and impractical way to migrate data from “Notes” to Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 but doesn’t present any business case as to why this is will help Enterprises other than some vague notion that it is “open”. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has understood that the point of Web 2.0 is not the technology - it is the application of those technologies. That is, using technologies to promote social networking and collaboration. Technologically there is nothing new in Blogs, Wikis, Flickr, Basecamp, Youtube, RSS, mySpace etc. None of this is new - just existing technologies resurfaced for a new audience. Notes, Windows, Macs, Mainframes, Linux, Office, Firefox - whatever. The Enterprise does not care how new and cool the technology is - but how does it help them do their job. Lotus Notes does that - proven over tens of millions of users across tens of thousands of customers. Web/Enterprise 2.0 is an idea not yet a business tool.
And if every answer you give is Web 2.0 - beware of Web 3.0. What is it? Well by your criteria, does it matter?
So the blog is more drama than content.
You state 2.5 years experience on Lotus Notes as an end user and suggest a technical programming attempt to move away from Lotus Notes. Your example gives you no qualifier for explaining or suggestion how to move away from an environment you don’t understand. Your suggestion mean no email meta data is important - then why even attempt to move the content.
to Daniel Chambers the CEO talking to Ed Brill : I wonder if you problem stems from improper implementation. I can’t grasp the point you are making because it does not denote the problem, I find it very arrogant to point fault without giving specifics or examples. Dis you get any support in your licene aggrement? If not, then tell how that is not arrogant? I would get a new solution without support. Do you buy a new car without maintainance? Do you get a home without home owners insurance? Do ou work and not elect to save away for a retirement without using 401K?
Why are companies as big as 100 employees able to bring a Domino system up in less than one day? No consulting body involved! Maybe because they scoped out the goals and bought into software support and got hardware adquaint for the environment. A lot of the problems today is a good number of email admins sell their experience from taking college Microsoft courses and never implemented a soltuion in the corportate world. Or the implementation never account to items the ISP could filter/block or the individuals never request reverse dns records at the ISP level. Usually small companies are deciding to grab a work force within their budget means and a biproduct is a person unskilled in deploying the software solution. To me I can’t blame the software because of a lack of knowledge from the company employee. The person could be a good server admin but unskilled in Email solutions.
To anyone posting: give credible examples because it gives you no credit if you can explain your point of view with real life examples.
Rod,
You chopped off half of the first sentence of mine that you quoted. You chopped it off at exactly the point where it makes me look rude, and yes… angry.
What you left was this: “With all due respect, Rod, you clearly haven’t got a clue about what you’re talking about… ”
What I continued with, as you well know, was “… when it comes to the capabilities of Lotus Notes and how (apart from basic mail and calendaring) it is used.”
First of all, I stand by the full sentence. I stand by it as a statement of my opinion, based on what you have written — and particularly based on what you had written before you revised the post I was responding to. That initial version is what I was commenting on, it clearly didn’t demonstrate an understanding of Notes. Your revision was an obvious attempt on your part to demonstrate some degree of broader knowledge, although still quite limited and not enough to get me to change the expressed opinion.
What you implied with the chopped off quote, however, is something that I did not say, nor did I imply, and which I do not believe. By cutting it off where you did (despite the ellipsis) you created the impression that I wrote that you don’t have a clue about what your talking about, period. By leaving off the qualfiying clause, which narrowed my focus to your understanding of the the capabilities of Lotus Notes, you created the impression that I was saying you know nothing about IT, nothing about web 2.0, etc.
That’s not what I said, that’s not what I meant. I was not angry when I wrote the post that you quoted, but you have made me appear so with your selective quoting, and in so doing you have indeed made me angry.
Now, my second response (done when it appeared that my first was lost, and I was very frustrated by that; and also done after you had already revised your initial post) — did indeed not include a qualifier. I did say in that one that you didn’t know what you were talking about. That was too broad, and I apologize for that, but I stand by everything else in that second response.
The context in the rest of that response was very, very specific. I confined that response to two specific phrases that you had used in your revision of your initial post. In that response I was engaging you, asking you questions, and even conceding some specific areas where (Notes guy that I am) I believe web 2.0 technologies have made important advances over Notes. So despite the way I started that second response, I believe my overall tone, while challenging, was anything but a demonstration of “anger”.
Anyhow, enough of the past. Continuing on: I will engage you once again.
In this current post you now say that “once you do extract the text data, it should be very easy to layer on top tools to update the content and systems for access control layers.” I’m going to make the charitable assumption that you actually meant “extract the text data and structural meta data”, because (a) it’s quite possible, and in fact quite easy, and (b) because you wouldn’t stand a chance of doing anything meaningful unless you did that. I’m going to make the assumption that you understood that as being so obvious as to not require explicit mention, and I’m going to ask you: where’s your example? Can you tell me about one non-trivial Notes application where you have done this? If not, how about one where you have scoped out the work and have quantified what “very easy” means? What features did the original application have, and what features will it end up with? What tools have you chosen for the “layering”, the presentation, manipulation, and management of the data going forward? And, how much of what you do in the effort on this one application will be reusable, saving you time and effort on the next non-trivial application that you do this with? Finally, and most importantly for the enterprise, what did (or will) you gain in terms of cost of ownership and operation, in terms of user adoption of collaboration, and in terms of user efficiency and organizational productivity as a result of this? What’s the bottom line dollar savings that you expect over, say, a three year period?
If it “should be very easy”, then these specific questions should be very easy to address.
Rod, here’s my apology for all the trouble the Notes community is causing you:
http://bbenz.typepad.com/softwaresoapbox/2006/10/rewriting_my_re.html
I’ll be short and sweet.
It’s a bit rich saying Notes is a lock-in technology. Look at every other software vendor….Microsoft (Exchange/Active Directory), Oracle, SAP…etc. If anything I see Notes opening up to web standards as much as possible when the web technologies are mature, but they don’t yet cut it for capability.
Pete
This is fun. So, Rod, I will quote your new post:
[quote]If Rob McDonagh is right, then once you put Lotus Notes in, it costs you a huge amount to switch back out. In a constantly changing world, does this mean you constrain your future options by selecting Lotus Notes?
And that is the problem with asbestos. It was really easy to install, but it wasn’t user friendly, and it was very expensive to get out. [/quote]
So …… if Lotus is expensive to get out, I would also like to get out DB2 and replace it with Oracle, is this free of charge and/or resources to migrate ? :)
Beyond that statement (why did you make it ?), the Lotus community responded to your post which is very (to be polite) ’simplistic’. I see lots of Notes geeks wasting time to try and argument back a post which does not worth such attention.
Well, I’m a Notes professional so I’ll get that confession out of the way. The issue with lock-in here is not to do with the software, its the enterprise. Enterprise needs for control (either regulatory or “just because”) mean that information systems are locked down. Notes/Domino is as open as the enterprise allows it to be - Quickplaces, TeamRooms, Domino Web Access, Sametime, etc.
In the enterprise world I don’t think you’ll find wikis, RSS feeds, and other “Web 2.0″ content gaining acceptance any time soon. I wish they would as they are powerful collaboration tools. The problem is that the people who get these great new technologies are too young to have enough influence in IT departments, let alone the business as a whole…
Ron,
Each person is entitled to their personal preferences about technology platforms and I applaud your passion about Web 2.0.
However, I do take exception about your assertion that you can easily migrate any Lotus Notes application to another software platform by simply screen scraping the data contained within the Lotus Notes database.
This is like claiming you can migrate a major banking application to another technology platform by simply copying the data from your bank statement or reverse engineer Microsoft Word by copying the text in a Word document.
This is a gross misrepresentation of the effort involved and seriously undermines your technical credibility.
I have been involved with hundreds of Lotus Notes Applications over the last 13 years and if it was as easy as you assert, Microsoft would have explioted that avenue a dozen years ago.
I have worked with several Lotus Notes applications that contained tens of thousands of design elements and hundreds of megabytes of application logic, and your approach would never have worked with any of these applications.
Clearly simply migrating the data is trivial compared with redeveloping the programming logic encapsulated in these Lotus Notes databases.
Also the Lotus Notes development environment is incredibly productive, so not only do you need to migrate the application logic but also the underlying services provided by the Lotus Notes runtime platform.
It’s not impossible, just a huge migration effort.
You are then critical and claim that because this migration effort is so huge that it proves that Notes is a technology lock-in. This is unfair, because every development platform contains it’s share of proprietary elements, so migration from any platform to another is never trivial for any but the most simple application.
The other Lotus Notes advantage you ignore is full backward compatibility of application code. Applications written in Notes version 1 still work in version 7 and will continue to work in future releases (due to a huge and expensive commitment to backward compatibility by IBM).
Lotus Notes has it’s quirks and I agree that the current Lotus Notes Client is dated and many Lotus Notes aplications are visually unappealing, but the upcoming Hannover (Notes release 8) will make a huge jump forward to address this current weakness.
The other question that your Blog ignores is why would 40,000 companies around the world and thousands of professional Lotus Notes developers migrate their working applications to another platform if the current Notes applications are continuing to deliver significant business value.
Surely if Web 2.0 provides such a compelling advantage over established software platforms such as Lotus Notes that there is more than enough work for you with developing new breakthrough applications, rather than trolling for migration business for existing Lotus Notes applications.
Wow, I am amazed at how uninformed you are! For the record, I am not a Notes user nor is my employer using Notes (yet). Even with my limited knowledge I can see gaping holes in your logic. Screen scraping content? What about the business logic (as many have already said)? What about the security? Notes has a built in PKI. I’ve implemented standalone PKIs before. One based on PGP’s products, another on RSA’s. They are difficult to implement and time-consuming to manage if you want them to remain secure post-implementation. I’ve also led software development teams in commercial organizations developing everything from VAX/VMS, UNIX, Windows, and database applications. I will never recommend my organization take the custom-development route again. We did a great job (high quality, usability, and integration) but it was expensive in human resources to maintain and evolve these apps. The decision for us will always be buy versus build if something out there can do what we need done - that is, if you care at all about your company’s bottom line.
I suggest you take a course on Lotus Notes - or spend some time reading a Notes/Domino development text - or don’t talk about subjects you’re ignorant in.
Opinion as a Business user of Notes for last 6 years supporting 1500 Notes Clients and 4000 web users.
I like the discussion revolving on Web 2.0, but as a CIO, I need to find economic value on doing new things yielding higher returns. I run over 200 Notes applications and so this post could be Notes biased.
Our HR system built on Notes screens over 50,000 resumes a year, built at 30% of the cost compared to any other alternate technology. We hired 2000 employees last year and the cost per hire has been a delight to my CEO. Do i need Web 2.0, absolutely not… There are several such applications that I would not bother to upgrade to Ajax, because they dont yield economic returns
We embraced Notes 7.0 on Linux and we save a good ton of money on MS licenses. In the last several years, I dont recollect a virus attack using our messaging infrastructure.
We have embraced SQL 2005 for datawarehousing requirements, cheap, flexible, easy to build.
We use a ton of php applications for all our internal portals. Saves a big ton of money if you have the right people
We use appropriate technology to deliver results to our business. Examples are Google maps mashups in our Lotus notes sales force application, all domino applications newly return embrace Ajax type usability.
Lastly a large portion of global businesses require regular work to be done and in most of the cases contextual collaboration is essential. I would not want 75% of our work force reading wikis for 80% of their time, without doing their basic work. Maybe the big consulting firms want to, but not companies that have customers who require predictable delivery of products and services
No offence meant to anyone here, but I enjoyed the thread
Rod, I found your second point quite interesting since there have been references about “…many Lotus Notes / Domino Admins never actually gave their end users the chance to use the full capacity of Lotus Notes”. Your example is quite off mark, although I might agree that in Pre R6 versions of Lotus Notes it might be considered true, but only of the IT Management and only in cases where such installations of Lotus Notes were being used for email only - the Notes Admins don’t make these decisions.
I’d like to see any large company where the CIOs, CTOs, etc. have relinquished the ‘helm’ of this direction and decision making to their Notes Administrators, Exchange Administrators, or any IT Administrators for that matter. Getting the full benefit of any product platform is not credited to such folk but rather to those executives and decision makers who have the vision and understanding of what their organization needs to get the job done with the best ROI. There is no better value proposition for what can be done on one Domino server when you compare all of these technologies. IBM/Lotus has always enhanced their products with upcoming standards, and imagine they will continue to do so. -Irv (B.S. Business Administration, Lotus Notes Administrator)
In the days of Notes 2.0, Ozzy convinced Mich Kapor to run with Notes, by citing uni. research in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (first coined by Irene Greif and Paul M. Cashman in 1984). Today we are still trying to figure out a better way for groups to work together. Social networks (using web2) is the biggest advance to this idea, since Notes 2.0.
It is normal to denounce Notes (and Ozzy) and push collaboration and cooperation in a massively multiplayer world. Technology changes, but the goal is the same.
That said, your first post was about moving data from Notes to a text file. Your method was, without a doubt, the worst possible method possible (apart from re-typing the thing in).
Congratulation on writing a good article on what Notes was designed to achive.
@Villi, his name is Ozzie. Ozzy is an old, brain-addled rock star who’s somehow still really cool.
Sorry but I cant understand this.
I have been following this religiuos software battle for a god many years know, ever since R3.0.
I hear arguments like it’s ugly and doesn’t conform to windows standard, well it’s different (dont forget it’s a client and it works as expected, my 2.0 applications works without having to change a singel line of code). I hear my web shop collegues, who by the way are working with another brand, complain loudly about inconsitencies in MS Explorer and lack of complience with industri standard (and this is not my words).
Domino is a closed environment, well it runs on top of Linux, varius Unix languages, iSerie, zSeries, Windows and by the way the client also runs on MacIntosh. I have never had any problem integrate the Domino environment with any other environment. Why screenscrape? are you about to steal my content. I can easily export any content using industry standard technology, well i need to understand how Domino works. So what? I need to understand the target environment.
Domino are, if you all have forgotten, an infrastructure with mail and SMTP routing, database server, directory services, replication, security, webservices among other services.
I hear that Notes databases are not real databases (ie they are not relational databases). Hey, they are not supposed to be relational databases. Whenever i need highly structured data I use DB2 and I have done so since god knows when. It integrates nicely with Domino and Notes using industry standard technology.
If I want to build intra/extranets well I do so using industry standard software and using Domino as a repository for content and design, incorporating backend data have never been a problem, I Domino is such a lousy webserver, well use Apache and it fits suggly with Tomcat using Windows AD as a directory for security. Using standard technology with Domino is not a problem and applied with intelligens a shift in technology or platform should never create a problem.
Notes and Domino is like a old Toyota its not pretty, its not the fastest car around, you could be more comfortable. But it shure gets you where ever you want to go at a fantastic milage, if it still breaks down you always get at repair shop wherever you are. Don’t forget that at every 10000 miles or 6 month you get a minor upgrade of the vehicle.
What ever way we put it, Notes/Domino is an efficient and cost effective tool for most shops and whenever it’s costly or non-efficient is when it’s used for something it was never ment to be used for or USED BY SOMEONE WHO HASN’T GOT A CLUE what Domino and Notes is or can do for the organization.
Office 2.0 has still to prove what Notes/Domino already proven.
Well I have around the IT business for 25 years now and I am still amazed that all to many IT decisions are made by heart and hearsay rather than based on god analyzis and common sense.
I dislike all this sweeping arguments. I rather use a tool that cost efficiently supports a sales department whenever the process changes and promptly supports any switch in the sales pitch. I like beeing able to give my collegues the tools they need to be able to perform.
Well there are a good many other combinations of infrastructures that can do an equally god work, but don’t get blindsided.
Well I can get heated on this subject. Why cant we look at the problem at hand and then decide how we best solve the problem instead of debating on what infrastructure is the best. What ever way we choose it is never going to better than the people that is implementing a solution and as long as we persists in sweeping arguments and refuses to handle each business situation separatly and analyze them proffesionally, we will never get solutions that serves our collegues and customers.
Well english is not my languages and my spelling is poor.
Ed you are my guy….
Rod,
I hope you find the reaction to your posts as interesting as I do and don’t take it too personally. Like most of the responders I have a background in Notes/Domino, development/admin/consultancy. Basically, I’m a fan.
Have you considered why so many Domino ‘fans’ have responded, though ? News of this ‘debate’ has spread to non-Domino related blogs (e.g. Cliff Reeves - http://cliffreeves.typepad.com/dyermaker/2006/10/is_it_dangerous.html ) so where are the Microsoft fans claiming that what you espouse is perfectly feasible ? Or the Ruby-on-Rails programmers saying they’d already tried it and it was hugely successful ? Hmmmm. OK, lets be charitable and say no one has even thought of doing it before and they’re all out there giving it a go as we speak (although they really should have finished by now, shouldn’t they ?).
Anyway, my point is that Domino people are very passionate about the product, to a fault (and I mean that last bit very seriously). Like most such situations in which the object of people’s affections is insulted, they react - big time. I have seen the attack dogs strike a few times now in response to comments that are misinformed, plain wrong or, more worringly, just espouse a different point of view. I believe that the response to your original post should have been a tad more measured, and I will assume that if a couple of private emails had been sent back and forth then you would happily have made the appropriate corrections, or perhaps even started a mutually beneficial debate. Too late now.
Moving on, I can’t let a couple of points in this post lie unanswered, although I hope you take my comments as an attempt to provide some extra information that my experience of Notes/Domino affords me.
Firstly, Access control has already been mentioned, but I would like to point out that page-level access control just won’t cut it in the Notes/Domino world. Many workflow applications make use of section or even field-level security to hide information on a page from the ‘wrong’ eyes. So already you’re looking at multiple pages were one sufficed in Domino.
You also said “many Lotus Notes / Domino Admins never actually gave their end users the chance to use the full capacity of Lotus Notes. Perhaps they did not have much respect for their end users.” This statement alone has the potential to attract flames for time immemorial. It simply comes across as arrogant and rude, and I hope you have the good sense and manners to apologise to Domino admins everywhere. My experience is that the passionate, dedicated Domino admins fight tooth and nail to open up Notes as much as possible to end users, but in a way that doesn’t create islands of data.
My biggest gripe though, Rod, is with this statement. “This, to me, is a surprising result. The examples of Yahoo! Mail, HotMail, Gmail, MySpace, Flickr, YoutTube, FaceBook, Wikipedia and the 50+ Million blogs out there would tend to contradict that user testing.” This is in the face of Charles Roinson telling you that he had carried out extensive testing and his users preferred the thick Notes client to webmail. Can’t you see just how arrogant that is ? You are esentially sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting ‘Can’t hear you, can’t hear you’ ! Please, consider what Charles has said and don’t become a blind apologist for ‘Web 2.0′.
Colman
I have read through this thread and the previous posting, and it has been very interesting. I am a humble Domino Developer who has worked with Notes for 9 years. Our organization uses it a great deal. I think the ‘passionate’ responses are not surprising. To some degree, these kind of discussions I believe go on in every company at some time. There are always those that ‘want to switch to outlook’ or switch to whatever system they feel is better. Our organization is no different, and I usually am passionate about defending ‘my’ system.
I think the passion comes from the fact that usually a developer/admin/etc. in Notes is because they are so proud of the environment they have created. I have helped so many end-users achieve their business goals, with custom databases that take minutes or months to create. Ranging from the simple, to the most complex. I don’t think many of the decision makers or analysts that ‘wish to switch’ realize how a product like Notes can penetrate into the fabric of an organization.
If I flipped the switch, turned off Notes, we would be dead in the water.. Migrating to a new system, would be very painful, I just can’t imagine the work effort involved.
I am especially passionate about my Notes environment, because we use it in a health care environment, and the software I create in Domino, is helping assist Doctors, Nurses and helping all of us maintain and improve a patients health.
Just my 2 cents. I think if Rod wants to take his stance on Notes, he should be allowed to do it - I am attempting to explain why people in the Notes world would reply so vehemently.
I have read through this thread and the previous posting, and it has been very interesting. I am a humble Domino Developer who has worked with Notes for 9 years. Our organization uses it a great deal. I think the ‘passionate’ responses are not surprising. To some degree, these kind of discussions I believe go on in every company at some time. There are always those that ‘want to switch to outlook’ or switch to whatever system they feel is better. Our organization is no different, and I usually am passionate about defending ‘my’ system.
I think the passion comes from the fact that usually a developer/admin/etc. in Notes is because they are so proud of the environment they have created. I have helped so many end-users achieve their business goals, with custom databases that take minutes or months to create. Ranging from the simple, to the most complex. I don’t think many of the decision makers or analysts that ‘wish to switch’ realize how a product like Notes can penetrate into the fabric of an organization.
If I flipped the switch, turned off Notes, we would be dead in the water.. Migrating to a new system, would be very painful, I just can’t imagine the work effort involved.
I am especially passionate about my Notes environment, because we use it in a health care environment, and the software I create in Domino, is helping assist Doctors, Nurses and helping all of us maintain and improve a patients health.
Just my 2 cents. I think if Rod wants to take his stance on Notes, he should be allowed to do it - I am attempting to explain why people in the Notes world would reply so vehemently.
Rod,
I think you’ve made an unfair pot shot on this one.
Frankly the more time an institution spends developing custom applications in any environment the more they lock themselves in. While the data of any system is always portable the programmed logic is unique to the environment used to create the custom application that brings the back end data to life.
You speak of screen scraping data. Well I could screen scrape Amazon.com, but what good would it do me? I would still have to invest thousands of hours to take a development environment and then architect a way to bring the data back to life. This is the world of reverse and re engineering, and is costly and time consuming.
As for the simple ports you are talking about? You are talking about standardized applications, like lets say a word processing for a simple example. Today you can throw a .doc file into a dozen different programs and get formatted text. That’s because they use standardized conventions for bold, table, paragraph ends, yadda yadda yadda.
Email certainly is standardized thus why it can flow between different mail server types. Lotus Notes email is no exception. Because of such give me some hours and I could move any companies mail from Lotus Notes to product x. So mail isn’t the clincher.
Custom applications are the reason customers get locked into ANY development environment from C++ to VB to HTML/xSP to Lotus Notes.
Any customer today who feels they are “locked in” into any environment, including Lotus Notes is because they have loved it to death. They’ve invested so many hours programming business rules into it, that programming those rules into a different environment would be painful.
The notion that converting from any development environment to another is “easy” or “simple” is somewhat laughable. Sure there are pairs that are more complimentary than others. Latin is easier for a Spanish person to learn than English. But still that person is going to have their work cut out for them.
I do see your point that Notes is an aging technology and Web and Office 2.0 are new and cool. Eventually every application will hit its planned end of life. The question is will the newest version of Notes be competitive for the replacement application or not. This is what will make or break Notes.
Sorry,
Your complains on Notes is not a problem of the Notes, but a problem of organisation. Notes is an implementing technology, which is applied and sold by different groups of interests. The enduser is really not encorporated in the decision process of the architecture of the information net. All chiefs of an area of responsibility have the intention to control by means of information. The enduser is a memeber a net, which has an area of interest and within an area of responsibilities. The limits a continous changing. By means of a consequent P2P architecure one is able to implement the so called fractal organisations.
Today Notes Domino is a suitable technology to support fractal organisations. But most of the applied solutions, products and administrative regulations within the IT architectures restrict the flexible on demand organisation of cooperation ans information access. The new Webtools realize functions, which are available within Notes Domino since many years. The different approach is organisation.
Funny, people have been telling me for 10 years that Lotus/Domino aren’t going to be around much longer and that I should start looking else where. Sorry but the same people, in my office, who complain about Notes are also the ones who can’t figure out how to use PDF Writer to create a file, so they print an article out just so they can scan it back to themselves.
Oh, and when was the last time you heard of a Domino server getting a virus and spamming an entire corporation, or having the email servers harddrive formatted?
I want to get on myspace from schoooolll
I am not a Notes advocate but I do disagree with the hype around Web 2.0. Sure its nice to be able to create free flow content and share but when was the last time someone tried to make a decision from a BI system of data in a Wiki? I agree that some so-called Web 2.0 features are great but the reason why there’s structured data is to be able to analyze it in a structure way for reporting. Let’s not kill all birds with one stone. Notes may not be a good database but neither is your screen scapping idea.
Rod, 2 questions:
1)Why do you dislike Notes/Domino so much?
It is the single best tool for business, you would be really daft not to realize that. It runs on anything - you’ve heard of Linux right? and doesn’t require a tonne of m$ licences, and its unified, and you can build your own apps very quickly, and convert them to web-useable very easily if not immediately.
Web 2.0 is old news - the rebranding of something old which domino had the constructs of almost 2 decades ago. Sure rebranding may help it catch on but the fact is it is the Visionaries at Lotus that have always been far ahead of the curve - From public/private key security, to ECLs and ACLs, to built in http translation, instant awareness, replication and team collaboration.
But all this may be too complex for you because you are lazy and like many others probably live in your email. Sadly today we still have people, who work in offices, that dont know how to use a computer let alone collaborate. M Kenney above summarizes that nicely. I’ll go one step further and implicate you as one of those users Rod.
2) Can you even tell me why you think Notes is not a good database?
A single Notes db handles hundreds of thousands of rows effortlessly. Its very searchable, it is completely document centric, its portable and its robust. It is not a sql style database with tightly defined columns and a relational store. The design of a Notes db is by far optimized for day to day business processes.
Rod, you just don’t know what you are talking about here, and I’m sure that’s obvious to you.
“It does not create the passion, enthusiasm and participation of Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and systems like MySpace” - then how come every time someone writes an article or blog post dissing Notes there will be a huge number of passionate people replying to tell you how wrong you are?
“It is the single best tool for business, you would be really daft not to realize that.”
Based on what rationale? Compared to what?
“It runs on anything - you’ve heard of Linux right? and doesn’t require a tonne of m$ licences, and its unified, and you can build your own apps very quickly, and convert them to web-useable very easily if not immediately.”
So do lots of M$ apps now thanks to the web, everyone wants browser based apps and with ajax/asp or php you can get them. Granted your development time with domino maybe quicker.
ACLs and replication for notes, yes give it that.
2) Can you even tell me why you think Notes is not a good database?
Well it doesnt even conform to a relational model does it? So thats a good thing? Handles hundreds of thousands of rows? so *what*, so did clipper 87 and dbase II! The big boys measure databases in giga or tera-bytes not rowcounts.
I spend my time doing erp/crm work and certainly here in the UK notes has been dying a death for a looong time.
Okay…
I agree that Notes is hard to set up and administer. Domino is also hard to set up and administer. (More specifically, there is a “high barrier to entry” for people who want to get involved and administer it.)
I also agree that IBM’s policy of ensuring that R4 clients can still talk with R8.5 Domino servers and operate correctly means that there’s a lot of obsolete crap in there.
But.
Notes has some very useful properties, which are not addressed by “traditional” SQL-based servers. One of them is “you don’t have to predefine your schema”. Another is “database replication”, which means that you’re not necessarily actually tied to a server. (It also means that you can work offline and know that you can still upload and replicate your work back to the rest of the replicas of the database.)
I find it telling that IBM owns both the heaviest-duty SQL database server software in existence (DB2) and the only denormalized database software in existence (Notes/Domino).
It wasn’t until I started realizing that there are actually good reasons for the fields to be carried along with the documents that they refer to — most notably data portability, but also the ability to look back at a snapshot of a document’s state at a moment in time (as well as potentially keeping edit histories with the data) that I started to understand why denormalization is a perfectly valid concept.
I call normalization (just like I call denormalization) instances of Gödel’s Theorems of Incompleteness. Every time you define a rule, every time you impose a boundary, you prevent a perfectly valid solution that doesn’t fit within the bounds from being even thought of.
Now. That said, I think that Notes itself has outlived its useful life, and that the administration system should be completely revamped. And, I also believe that it’s priced far out of the range of those who would really, really be able to use it. The knowledge of how to administer it is specialized, which also increases business costs for having to attract, hire, and retain at least one person who understands it.
But I’m also rather astounded by the lack of insight by the OP. There’s a C API that you can get the data from the documents with (each document is essentially a collection of key-value pairs, also known as a property list). The way that the rich text fields operate is amazingly elegant. And older code will still operate with newer code. Unlike Microsoft, IBM has made backward compatibility a primary goal. (As I said, this comes with a price, but…)
Wow! I didnt read everything, but you certainly hit a hot nerve. I’m Notes application coder. also done C C# Pascal and COBOL, and tiny bits of many other languages that I never became confident in. Just saying that up front so you know a little about me. I love Notes, but sometimes I wish I could do an outer join. All that is almost completely irrelevant.
I agree that Notes should be easy to leave. And any coder with an ounce of insight (and google) should be able to get some data out of notes in a few hours. Well, perhaps it would take a couple days to find the right question, but once you have the basic concepts you should be able to get the data out into a variety of formats with little or no thought, mostly cut and paste. (Isnt that what 90% of coding is? ouch!)
However, I disagree with your impression of the data management abilities of the average knowledge worker or data owner. Most of them dont even know what question they are supposed to ask. Left to their own designs, we will have huge databases containing graphic images of scanned paper documents. When the time comes to report on the “data” they will run to the warehouse where the actual paper is stored and compile it manually into a word document. Half of the time they will convert that to a PDF for electronic distribution. After distribution most people will print the mess and file it.
While Notes isnt necessarily the best tool for every job, I dont think letting end users design without guidance is a good practice. Of course, its equally bad to let coders design without enduser control.
If a coder *really* knows the business of the enduser, it can work. However, most projects cant dedicate 5 years of training to make a coder understand what is really happening. Perhaps 5 years sounds like a long time. I’m not talking about a superficial knowledge. It really does take a very long time to be an expert. Likewise, endusers shouldn’t be forced to endure 5 years of programming training. (maybe you think you can train a real programmer in less than 5 years?)
Couldn’t help but laugh, when I got to the end of the comments the anti spam image said “fair”.
and the next one said valid !
i have been using lotus now for a few years and find it most usefull