Many times I run into customers who use Notes. I say it this way because they don't use Domino. They really just use email, nothing else.
When you inquire about it, you hear all types of answers:
- We have a different platform for the development
- What else does it do, isn't it just an email server like Exchange?
- No one knows how to do anything with it
- No one wants(my emphasis) to do anything with it
- We are set in our ways, we don't need any more applications
- We pay our people so little, we don't care if it takes them an extra hour/day to accomplish a task (TRUE QUOTE FROM A CLIENT!), so why spend money on a new workflow application?
Surely there are more copout lines from your clients, feel free to add them in the comments.
The magic pixie dust(one of my personal favorite IBM ads) which will help these poor companies collaborate is some other software according to them, just not Domino. Google, Microsoft, Socialtext, and others want to be the magic pixie dust for your clients.
But what about poor Domino? Nothing.
None of these companies, and probably even some of you reading this, have pushed an agenda with your clients based on all the great things in Domino they get for FREE. Why should they? Instead, they push the magic dust on your clients that their server farms can create when really Domino owns the magic dust and has for years.
What single offering from anyone on the planet can do what 1 Domino server(some items may not be available in all levels of the server) and a Notes Client can do?
Wikis, Blogs, Team Room/Project Site, Discussion Boards,
Polling/Voting, email, Web Server, Push Email, SMTP,
LDAP, Run on multiple platforms of OS, have multiple clients,
Webmail, Directory Catalogs, RSS built-in, SSO, Chat/IM,
Document Management, Office Library, Run Widgets, PKI,
Encryption, Java support, Backwards compatible to Release 1,
Archiving, Transactional Logging, Clustering across multiple platforms,
Host other Domains, Replication with no limits on location or distance,
Server Load Balancing, Anti-Spam filters, Mail Rules,
Calendar and Scheduling, Remote Server installation,
Conference Room and Equipment Reservations and Scheduling,
Java console administration, Full Text Index and Search,
DB2 integration,
natively connect with many platforms from SQL to Oracle to SAP.
And did I mention it all comes in one box?
So next time you hear about it, or someone says they don't understand what Domino is all about, you have no excuses, point them to this list.
Have more items to include let me know and I will add them.
You forgot another use of Notes: local file installation. I wrote a unique (to my many years' experience, at any rate) Notes app a few months back that did a local installation of files which made up a local web site. The users would press a button in the Notes app to update any changed/new/delete files on their machine. Changes were detected using file hashes (thanks to to a certain Mr. Buchan for alerting me to this!), and I injected the "mark of the web" in all files to stop Internet Exploder firing out security warning messages. It also dropped an icon on the Windows desktop to open the web site. The admins have a nice interface to upload new archives of files. It's all been working a treat. Of course, this should all have been done by our enterprise remote file installation software, but apparently this would have been tricky to do. Lotus Notes / Domino is truly the swiss army knife of the software world!
ReplyDeleteChange Control is a a great benefit, but has to be setup for people to use it. But agreed a great beenfit.
ReplyDelete