Debbie Farley

Since my last post we have scheduled monthly training sessions.  We do them via a Sametime session which allows anyone in the company to have access to training with incurring any costs for travel.

Our sessions have been small but lively.  We've had a few folks that happened to be from the corporate office that joined us in the conference room during the session.  I actually like that because it does give me some immediate feed back.  We've had lots of questions but there have been a few times when I wondered if everyone had fallen asleep it was so quiet.  

We currently have Basics and Intermediate classes.  I am working on an Advanced session and look forward to continuing to promote IT and Notes within our company.

I have expressed my frustration with end user complaints and the fact that many of these complaints are because the end users just don't know how to use the tool they have been given, namely Lotus Notes. 

 

I took the advise about having Lunch & Learn sessions and last week was the first one.  Being the week of the fourth I didn't expect too many to attend so be booked a small conference room and sent out invitations.

 

We had a full house and just as I expected they did not know the basics on how to make Lotus Notes work for them. 

• Stationery,
• F2 to increase font size on the fly
• Permanent Pen
• Highlighting Text
• Meeting invitations
• Go to View and moving multiple messages to folders

All such simple things but you'd thought they'd been given the holy grail.  We are plaining future sessions and many out of this first group have inquired about attending the next one.

 

Some days life is just good....

My company has been in an "evaluation" period of Exchange vs Lotus Notes / Domino.  It has been hard to get across the fact that it is NOT  "just email."   I have discovered that the biggest complainers are the ones that have never been trained.  I do not understand why companies will purchase Notes or any big software roll-out, only to ignore training.  There is the usual push to train as the application is rolled out, But after that the new users are left to flounder and figure out what to do by themselves without so much as a "cheat sheet" on how to use the product.  I have never understood the mentality of not wanting to spend money on training employees on the tools they are to use as part of their job function.  It never fails the first thing cut during budget time, in my experience, has been training dollars .

 

I believe 90% of the complaints we hear would be eliminated if the end users knew how to use the product.  I am thankful we are undertaking a monthly "Lunch & Learn"  to hopefully get our end users a little more training and to share the knowledge.

 

My preference would be a "New Employee Training" program but I'll take what I can get at this point.   Especially since the existing user base is frequently in desperate need of knowing how to do anything more than send an email through Notes.

 We had a help desk application that ran under Domino that worked great.  It's only down side was some of the reporting that the Executives said they wanted wasn't easily available in exactly the format they wanted. 

 

A representative / trainer from this company came in to train us on how to better use the product and did a dog and pony show about how much better their Windows version of the product was.  Said they weren't going to be updating the Domino version as they didn't see a big market for future sales, blah, blah, blah.  Long story short, they convinced us to "upgrade" to the Windows version for "free."  Big joke there, we found the licenses were more expensive when we needed to purchase additional.  The license renewal is the same cost as a new license.   And the biggest pain is we have problems every week with one thing or another in this product. 

 

My question is:  What do you use?  Are you happy with it?  Do you have any suggestions for us?  We want to do research before our renewal is due so we can make a change if we can find a product that will do what we want and need.

I had a wonderful time at Lotusphere this year, and came back  full of ideas and plans for our future with Domino and excited about what I saw being developed in 8.5. Now our CIO is tired of being questioned all the time about  why we are using Notes and being told it be so much better if we went to Exchange.  In all fairness, he is all for staying on Domino but is getting tired of all the complaints and arguments over Notes.  He will be doing research to find what the true business value is and compare TCO and ROI between Domino and Exchange.  We did a similar fire drill about a year ago and I had hopes of not having to do this again for at least a couple more years but alas it was not to be.

I have been given the task of  gathering data on why we should stay with Notes/Domino.  Any of you have any examples of ugly Notes to Exchange migrations that I can use in my presentation?

Basic data:
Servers Windows and iSeries both running 7.0.2 
The majority of the clients are still 6.5.4 as we want to move to ND8 as soon as possible.  However, we may need to start upgrading at least corporate users to ND7 just to head off some of their complaints.

I really want to stay a Notes shop but this is going to be a tough fight since even our internal developers don't seem to like Notes and the decision has been made to outsource all future Notes development... I can use any and all help available.