Sanity Check

Yesterday my boss approved the purchase of the brand new course "Developing XPages using Domino Designer 8.5" from The Learning Continuum Company (TLCC) . Its on sale for the next 2 weeks at $699. TLCC courseware uses Notes to teach Notes. The content, exercises, and demos are all contained in NSF's. TLCC leverages Notes functionality like few other courseware vendors I've experienced. For example, they make provision for you to replicate the lessons and course discussion databases with the TLCC servers to obtain course updates/fixes as well as to participate in discussions with other students and the course instructors (requires sending a safe copy of your Notes ID to TLCC). This is probably the 7th or 8th TLCC course that we've downloaded through the years beginning in Notes Domino 5. 

Now I am not really an XPages neophyte as I've created a few simple applications, but there are certainly a number of walls that I need to break through before I can be confident that I can produce an XPage app with the same or better functionality as a Notes application in the same amount of time. With all the blog posts, tutorials, wikis, and sample databases out there on XPages, plus the fact that I was fortunate enough to attend Lotusphere this year (won a ticket) and attend many XPages sessions, you could argue that I have exposure to more than enough information out there that anyone with half a brain should be able to figure out XPages. Well, we all learn differently and personally, I tend to prefer a gradual systematic learning process which TLCC provides. I've found that once I've got a solid foundation with a tool, I can tear through the wikis and other resources as well as anyone.

I'm only about 20% through this 28 hour course and already I am psyched up, energized, and creating a list of mini and medium size XPage projects that I'd like to start tackling in the weeks and months after completing the course. Most of the projects are to add web functionality to existing Notes apps as well as refreshing some tired old web front ends. One of the first ones will be to replace the defunct web interface to a Notes Helpdesk application that never quite passed user acceptance. That was one of my first Domino web projects around 5 years ago and I never really got the interface fully working to my (or user's) satisfaction. Fortunately, along came Notes on a stick (Notes Nomad) and the customer found it very convenient to just continue using the rich Notes interface in the field and so I abandoned that effort. If at first you don't succeed, try try again. This time I'll be armed with XPages.