Why I Love Domino Lightning Talk

A few people asked so I am posting my talk as i had written it up on my 24 hour plane trip to Think.
I also did a 2 minute reminder for admins, developers, devops whatever that you can save/protect not just your job but your hardware or software by keeping management aware of what these things do to make or save you money. Your executives have no idea, nor care, until they can truly understand and visualize the correlation.

Lightning Talk Speech:

Imagine you are a startup, an entrepreneur, just starting out on your journey in business. What will you need on your journey?

Most people would say you need a company name, which then provides you with a Domain name which in turn leads you to an email address, right?

And now you are business right? Because an email address and a domain are a line in the sand showing you are committed to an outcome. Or at least a start.

But, not so fast.

You need to start booking meetings in a calendar, you need to start saving emails, phone numbers, sales, and other CRM related bits of information….and a spreadsheet is NOT THE WAY to run a business!

And of course you need something to sell, or you need a platform to build an application on, one that will work across desktops, devices and operating systems that you can sell maybe as a SaaS offering.

You also need a website, a blog, 613 social media accounts and how to manage them or interact with them.

Damn that is a long laundry list, isn’t it? And we haven’t even gotten to HR, finance, taxes, vacation days, company holidays, monthly reporting, let alone quarterly or annual reports.

And you want a platform you can share with your vendors, contractors, employees and make it easy to collaborate without having to login to too many places.

And of course security is paramount.

Maybe in the cloud, maybe on premises. Maybe hybrid?

And what if I told you there is only one solution that can do ALL of this for you, today and for the future?

Would you buy it?

Would you want it?

Would you use it?

Would you sell it?

That my friends, is the beauty of a Notes and Domino environment. You never have to leave it to login somewhere else, to synch this or that, to “add on” security. You can do almost everything from one little self- contained NOSQL solution + Adobe Acrobat and an Office suite. Hey, no one can do everything.

No other solution exists that can do all of it at once. No, it is not perfect, some parts do work better than others, it is not a panacea.

I know what you are thinking, if it is so awesome, why do people not use it? Well, that is a different talk. Talk to me afterwards or at lunch.

You know, I have rarely heard Exchange admins saying they love their Exchange server, how about you?

In contrast, many Domino admins say they love it and mean it wholeheartedly.

A majority of the Fortune 100 companies run Domino for apps that run their businesses. Think about that for a second. REPEAT IT!

In 2009 IBM said more than half were using it. I tried to find newer data but nothing definitive with % from 10-45% so suffice it to say, it is out there and people use it, even if users have no idea about it, just like Mac people run Linux. You all know your macs run Linux, right?

What happened really, was I was introduced to Notes R2 and fell in love with it immediately. Why? Because I could not understand why if I worked for a company, and this was a Wall Street bank, why information had to be so hard to get, find or use. Weren’t we all one big happy company?

And here comes this yellow like the sun, breathe of fresh air that says, hey, share information, don’t horde it. 1+1 can equal 3! I volunteered to be on the team managing the Notes server, as the server was called back then, and rolled Notes out to everyone. And it was awesome!

I still love it and am frustrated when using other products that can’t share information easily or need my data in multiple depositories. These apps aren’t sharing, they are hardware buying apps or in Microsoft’s case software buying.

You know Oauth? Please, we have had IDs and certificates in place from day 1 over 30 years ago. What a completely different internet it would be if we had produced a Federated Directory to handle millions of people’s IDs.

For over 25 years, I just turned 50, 7 days ago, my client of choice for personal use and business has been a Notes client.

We should be so lucky it will be around another 25 years. You and I should be so lucky to still be around in 25 years.

My friends, some are admins, developers, even general users, found something in Notes and Domino that works for them. Write some simple apps! Start with some out of the box basic templates then go to OPenntf.org and get some awesome ones!

Then make some changes to them, customize them, and before you know it that little app is running your business.

And what makes it soooo amazing is those applications live on, not just for a year or 2 but decades.

Sure, you DB2 people say the same thing, but no one, no one, interacts with your database, just your data in it.

With Domino, we get to create the UI, the UX, the world our users live in! Granular security down to the field level and multiple levels of administrators or owners and you have a very flexible, yet secure, environment.

Domino lives because of this security in many industries!

We don’t care what hardware you run it on! We don’t care what OS you want to run, we do it(some PM is going to kill me for that one)! We cluster it all, Windows and iSeries, Zseries, AIX, Domino doesn’t care, mix and match to your heart’s content.

We don’t care what language you need the UI in, we do it! Because that is how you get people to share and care about your product, you customize it for them or better yet, let them customize it for themselves.

I got my wish, I worked for Lotus because I loved the products so much and someone believed in me just as much.

Because it is not an easy fight out there and we needed a Lotus Evangelist then, and now more than ever.

Microsoft loves their silos, to them it is about the worker working, Sharing…to a Point and not open sharing.

Domino shares forever, which is the point.

Once you as the user start playing with it, you find you are only limited by your imagination, and coding ability, to really enhance your business.

My personal favorite part is how Domino monitors itself…and other parts of your world. You can tune your notifications to so many different things you can get overwhelmed at first but as you experience your environment you start knowing what is “normal”.

If you have interactions with other environments you can monitor your connections between Domino and them in most cases so if your Cloud server is down, you get notified. How awesome is that!

Your cloud vendor doesn’t bother to tell you, but Domino can!

Still not convinced?

How about this one….Spotify makes a big deal about taking your music offline with you now.

How cute.

Notes and Domino have been taking ALL of our applications offline from day 1. On a plane, train or hot air balloon, you can get your work done, without an internet connection.

Oh, and mail just happens to be THE MOST elaborate application that Domino runs.

Us Yellow Bleeders as we call ourselves, are rabid fans of Domino, just as you may be about your own Champion area. Everyone finds what they need and loves, some of us just found it earlier in life than others.