Thursday 26 July 2007

It's Alive I tell you Alive!!!

Well another 3 weeks roll past and I haven't updated my this blog, the reason, everyone else in the dept appears to have gone on holiday. Anyway with this period passing and the arrival of 2 new Contractors here in the UK and another developer in Chennai things should improve somewhat.
Following my colleagues attendance at Collaboration University last week in London, the feedback on Quickr seems to be all positive and something that has to be pushed internally. I feel the work that Snapps have completed on the Quickr templates will go along way towards allowing IT departments to truly show what the capabilities of Quickr are, even if the templates are not all appropriate for the business. This is surely something that needs to be addressed with other applications, we used to have the "Nifty Fifty" that were Lotus produced Notes applications which could then be built upon. Surely IBM have in house applications they have produced that can be used as some kind of basis for releases. I don't mean that we need a whole suite of products that are going to allow companies to run their entire business on these applications, but for me I would be looking for small chunks of code that show off the nice things that Notes/Domino can do and can be modified to fit into other applications that companies already have or code. For example rather than a fully fledged application, just a couple of views that demonstrate In-View editing from a large application, a simple Web interface that shows Data Entry methods. Anything to spark interest in the product and have people go "Wow, we could use that in......" and then expand what they do with Notes and make it a better more relied upon product.
Some years back we faced the prospect of migration to MS Exchange and we did a calculation that we were going to have to spend 5-10 Man Years of work to get all our applications across to MS equivalent applications. Eventually we managed to fight off the threat and Lotus Notes rose from the ashes, in the intervening years we have integrated Lotus Notes where ever we can, building applications that have become critical to our business. If someone was now to come around and ask the question as to how long it would take to migrate, I would estimate the figure around the 20-30 Man Years.
This increase has been through making Notes do things that people had not envisaged it was possible to do and through the use of Internet resources and experts out in the Blogosphere. Releasing a set of small pieces of code that developers can use to demo and also easily understand, I know from experience how difficult it can be to try to unpick one element from a large template, is surely a benefit to IBM in the long run.
I know this is a topic that comes up for discussion regularly among the IBM Blogs but surely there is a reason for it and it will continue until IBM see sense.


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2 comments:

Thomas "Duffbert" Duff said...

Nice post... I used it as the basis for an entry on LotusViralMarketing.com. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

I must confess,I am a bit of a bummer.