Forgive me for going off topic within this forum. However, I have to share this.
Unfortunately we are moving to Outlook for our email services. This is the result of an acquisition. The organization which took us over is quite large, some 31,000 employees, and their investment in Exchange/Outlook is significant to the extent that I would have to agree that moving us to Outlook rather than 12 other divisions to Notes is the only option…however tragic I feel that truly is. In other words, this mistake is a foregone conclusion.
In good conscience, I was the ONLY one within our entire IT staff who at least tried to make an argument otherwise. As some of you may remember, I was very critical of the marketing approach that IBM had taken with Lotus Notes in the past. However I would say that they have corrected the ship and it appears that now is a great time to be on board with Domino.
They have finally achieved true consistency in their message. I do not think it is a coincidence that this consistency seems chronologically aligned with the arrival of and commitment to Mike Rhodin as General Manager. How could they have expected to project stability when we saw a different figure as Lotus GM each year we attended Lotusphere? Mike Rhodin was, and is, the right guy at the right time. I had the pleasure of meeting him at Lotusphere two years ago and this was a genuinely nice guy. His message now resonates with developers and administrators alike, because we have seen that it is based in truth and reality, not the current trend or designated market campaign. He has established the all-important element of “trust” not readily found in today’s “outsource your mother to China” IT world.
The ROI that we have realized by leveraging Lotus Notes for ALL of our business applications has been so large that it is almost immeasurable. I loved it so much that I went out and got PCLP certifications on releases 5, 6.5, and 7. I still love it. Bill Gates loved it so much that he went out and hired its creator to be his CTO, and now Chief Software Architect. That is saying something.
So on to the “funny” thing that got you reading this post to begin with.
I had to attend Outlook training today. Not that I am going to become an Outlook developer, (is there such a thing?), simply to become familiar with its “functionality”.
The training meeting was shorter than I expected. Outlook generated continuous and seemingly unstoppable script errors on every single PC in our training room…(all of which are brand spanking new Dell laptops with all the latest patches and service packs applied).
In a weird, devious sort of way, I do hope this predicts the future. I am not a disgruntled employee. I have become a capable .NET developer…more or less to meet a personal challenge and expand my knowledge base. (In other words, to maintain my income in a location that is close to home!). Visual Studio .NET is a nice development platform, but it is not the all-in-one that Domino is. You must consider your back-end data source, a definite transition for a spoiled Domino developer. I love the OO nature of the entire .NET platform. It truly is all that cryptic stuff from those dry, boring Computer Science courses we all dreadfully remember from back when…finally come to life in a production environment.
But when you peel back the skin, Lotus Notes is a brilliantly productive, world-class document management system, which remains alone in its class despite numerous attempts to mimic its capabilities.
That is exactly why Gates bought, I mean brought Ozzie on board.
I will always recommend it, and will stay as close to it as possible in my own endeavors. Good luck to all!
-A. Young