Tales into Commonstore

having a teribble time with the templates.  It sseems the designer didn't change the inheritance and it over wrote itself from the inotes6 template.  again make sure your vendor has a test environment to test all this. Make sure before they put it into the production envirnoment that they build for  you  that it works.  Give them test mail files do as much as you can to help the Vendor test it but make sure they do.  This is turning into development of a new product on our dime.

With IBM not having templates for their CSLD product, your forced to customizing the Lotus Mail template.  Something that is not supported and even though your vendor says they have done it make them prove it.  make them show you the multi language templates they have done and make them show you that they work in thier test environment.   Yes make sure they have a test envirnoment and not learning off of you.    Before you accept the template make them show you it working in thier test environment.  This should be treated,  manageaged and budgeted like a custom software development project.

Also, budget and get in writing a software support agreement.,  things go wrong but if there is not helpdesk or no contact info to the developer then your out of luck because IBM will not support the template changes that are needed to use thier product.

This is not the story of a man named Jed, who barely kept his family fed.

This is my story...or really the story of anyone that is putting commonstore in to work with Notes.   This is a Notes Blog afterall.

We are 2/3rds through the implementation and it's a fight every step of the way.

DB2 o you have to be a DB2 Guru to tune this backend, can only run so fast and then it chokes.   Can't handle the index's that it creates,  poor error messaging, and Logs everywhere that support needs every last one of them before they can comment that it may be a network issue. 

The fact that Commonstore is the only product that can handle doublebyte characaters and search on them corners multinational companies into using it,  But they supply no templates to work with thier products.  The half done one "lite" that doesn't work with DWA doesn't count.  So we are in a multi Lingual software development project with a company, our beloved vendor, has no experiance with, and will not support thier own work when it doesn't.

So to vent my issues with this product i will come here and let you all  have glimispe at what maybe coming to your world.