Debbie Farley

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.