Write it on a Rock

I've disappeared recently because I haven't really had much to say. I am happy that Titans are 10-0 and are just a few wins away from clinching a playoff spot. The Dolphins are doing well thanks to a pretty schedule and unless something crazy happens an SEC team should be going to the NCAA Championship Bowl Game. This isn't about sports though so let's move on in hopefully a semi-coherent way.

I was looking over Planet Lotus like I do a few times a day to see what is out there and came across this post from Ed. The post itself didn't say a lot and I haven't gone to read the article but I often find value in the conversations that occur in the comments area.

I'm not some longtime Lotus advocate. In fact, when I first used the client back in 2001 I couldn't stand it. I don't really remember the exact version but it was a 5.x release. I had just started working for the company, where I am still employed, during my senior year of college as part of a Cooperative Education program. Easily the smartest thing I did in college. I was primarily doing IT Support and got hired on full-time after graduation in August of 2002. In May of 2003 I went to some training on Lotus Notes Development. Ever since beginning to do development on the platform my opinion changed entirely of the product. I saw how powerful it could actually be and everything it could, especially with how quick you could develop simple applications. All my previous development experience had been with Visual Basic, COBOL and ASP so picking up on LotusScript was easy. Since then I have been to every subsequent Lotusphere (2009 will be my 6th) as well as some Lotus Notes Administration training and The VIEW's Domino Workshop for Domino Developers. I an IBM Certified Application Developer in Lotus Notes and Domino 7. We've recently hired a second developer so everything Lotus related isn't my sole responsibility any more but it was for several years. I was the administrator and the developer.

I'm not a longtime Lotus advocate but I am a Lotus advocate. I don't think there's a product out there that can do what this can with as much ease in both installation, configuration, upgrade or developing new tools for it. Sure, it has downsides and if you just want to just focus on email there are other applications that would work better for email-only needs.

Back to Ed's post and the conversation in the comments. My first Lotusphere was the "two lanes" Lotusphere where it seems that IBM wanted to do away with Domino and everything was going to be Java and Portals and all that mess. At least that was what I thought when leaving Lotusphere and I thought it was a terrible idea and they were going to alienate part of their customer base. Namely, me.

We aren't a 100% IBM shop but we have IBM Bladecenters. We have two i5 boxes that are running 4 clustered servers. We are running Sametime, LEI, BES on Domino and I have a few Linux servers that are IBM eServers. We are a company with about 600 employees, roughly 550 are Notes users. We are a Notes client shop. We have maybe 3 web applications out of 300-400 total applications running on Domino. Portals DO NOT interest us. Web applications DO NOT interest us. XPages, while they look cool and powerful, will be USELESS to us unless they can run on the Notes client. I have no desire to run Sametime Advance on a J2EE server much less run anything on a J2EE server. The 8.0.2 Standard Client is very cool but isn't very practical here in terms of what it provides over the 8.0.2 Basic so the majority of my users are on the Notes 8.0.2 Basic client. It's much faster and does everything they want and need.

With that said, I don't have anything against any of the above mentioned things (Portal, Java, Xpages). If other people want them, hey, great. If other people do amazing things with them, awesome. All I know is that it is not essential for our business and we won't be using any of them. If this happens to be the direction IBM is trying to make things go (I doubt it is but what do I know?) then at some point we will just cease to upgrade our Lotus products. Much like if they take the Workspace away in some future version it will mark the time when we stop upgrading Notes clients. =)

While I'd like to think, and hope, that IBM isn't going to make mistakes they have made in the past there's always the chance that they will but I'm going to remain optimistic. I doubt anything I've said will influence anyone but maybe it can help somehow in some small way.

Now to just get the final "OK" from my boss....