I am beginning to do some contract work out of hours for some small businesses. (<10 employees)I see that most are using Outlook. I want to change that.
I am a CLP (development) and have 4 years administrating/developing a mulitple server enviroement for large accounting firm.
However, small business cannot afford to run a mail server and the licence costs associated with Domino.
Has anyone else developed applications for business outside a server environment that still provides groupware functions eg. Making appointments in other peoples calendar files. etc.
I see this product has numerous benefits over outlook as I can develop custom apps eg CRM, Document management and all they need is a Notes CAL.
What are the major drawbacks to this arrangement. Please provide some feedback.
Subject: Lotus Notes without a server for small business. Discussions welcomed
I wrote an elaborate standalone personnel scheduling application in Notes for a small business. Just one Notes license. It’s perfect for them.
But you asked about groupware functions. One thing you can do, is have a third party host it (such as http://www.prominic.net). It’s as low as $10 per month. Then you just need internet access for your clients. Users can access the server with Notes clients or web clients.
Another thing to keep in mind is that education and government businesses get huge discounts. The Domino mail server license is as low as $400. Enterprise server as low as $1,000.
Or how about Groove (http://www.groove.net/)? Isn’t that suppoosed to be a peer-to-peer version of groupware?
Subject: Lotus Notes without a server for small business. Discussions welcomed
if you can manage to get them to spend enough money for minimal server hardware then take a look at the domino collaboration express licences, currenty selling for approx AUD $230 per user (max of 1000 users - the business requires an ABN though), cheaper if you upgrade from a competitive product, also the good thing about these user licenses is that the server licences are free/included
…I’ve never seen standalone Notes clients used for anything else but POP3 (and some private data management, e.g. storing one’s personal documents in a doclib). You can’t replicate. You can’t share data over the internet… it really has major drawbacks. We’ve asked IBM for C2C replication (Client-to-Client) before but there doesn’t seem to be much demand for it, so I doubt IBM will ever do that. I seem to remember someone mentioned a tool for enabling c2c-replication, but I forgot the details, I’m afraid.Have you thought about doing something with ASP? You could host multiple small organisations on one central server. I believe an Enterprise License costs about 2300 dollars per year, so you’d need several small clients to share the cost. But that will give you a fully functional Domino environment.
The 2 main problems with hosting outside a business are:Performance
Availability
Number 2 is particularly important. If an internet connection goes down so does your business processes.
Also isn’t it possible to access Notes databases outside a server environment.
Therefore you could say write code to perform functions that are normally handled by the server. All you need to do is make sure security is setup correctly.
Just trying to think outside the square.
Gerco, personal document management could be extended to a small business as you could access the database from a file server. And document management is what notes does well.
Greg, thanks for the 2 suggestions but at this stage external hosting is not an option. Will investigate groove.
I see the following small business needs being handled by a notes client:
Email
Calendar and Scheduling
Document Management
Contact management or CRM
Work Scheduling eg. ToDo
I’m going to have a play with some code in the next few weeks. And find out if these things are possible outside a server environment.
Because at the moment every small business uses outlook / outlook express and it is no where near as powerful as notes.
…the problem is sharing of information. Mailrouting without a Domino server works, but replicating databases isn’t. So once your data is added to a local workstation, there is no way to share it with others - unless you put it back into email. So one of the main advantages of Notes, the easy and safe sharing of information with lots of other people with different methods to access that information (browser, mobile, notesclient etc) gets lost when you’re not using a Domino server.
When using a hosted environment, you could (should!) always make local replicas. People can work on local, and their work gets replicated to the server. Even with the internet connection down, they continue to work, only their changes replicate some time later, instead of every x minutes. Of course, this model doesn’t fit everywhere, but the ability to share information as described above combined with the ability to work offline (local) is a very powerful one.
I’m curious, what server tasks do you plan to rewrite for the client?