Reality Cheque

It’s amazing how mis-understood Notes is, my Management couldn’t understand why we still need to maintain Notes licenses when they want to move to Exchange. When I pointed out that over 95% of the Notes users rely on other apps beyond e-mail they didn’t want to believe me.

Fighting FUD

Ok, so management have agreed that even though we might move to MS Exchange, they accept that we will still be running Notes apps for at least 5 years.  So they have agreed to us undertaking a project next year to upgrade from Notes 6.5 client to Notes 8.5.x.  However they would like us to make sure that the new version of the client looks exactly like the old one, as they don’t want to have to train the users.

BOLLOCKS.

 

They don’t want the users to see the nice shiny new client that does all this new flashy stuff and go “Why on earth are we moving to Microshit Exchange???”.

Battle is on.

2 months down the line

It’s interesting, I was nearly made redundent, we are moving to Exchange and Sharepoint and therefore my team in the UK was reduced from 3 to 2. However if that is the case answer me this.

1. My team has more work than we can possibly deal with and everyone wants everything now, we have new requests for more Notes apps, mods to improve existing apps and ability to expand the usage etc etc.

2. I keep asking if I can get rid of some of the “Lesser” apps, a few forms and little workflow, move them to Sharepoint, hey I can embrace the future. It’s rather annoying therefore to hear, “Well we’re having a few problems with our developments in Sharepoint, those seem like rather complex apps”.

The icing on the cake was this week when the Exchange team introduced a new Gateway server between Notes and Exchange and consequently lost over 400 e-mails, a small number but they were rather important ones.

Do I think we are moving to Exchange, No I don’t really see it happening anymore, the justification just isn’t there to any one with any sense there are already people simply clutching at reasons to move, the best they can seem to come up with is “It can integrate with our VOIP system” So can Notes, “When you schedule a meeting you can see details about who is available” Errr our 5 year old version of Notes does that. “You can allow you staff to SMS into and out of their Mail Box.” Why on earth would I want them to do that, I can see the idea but I am sure that more than a few people will abuse the ability to text any one in the world.

Oh well while they continue on the decision making process I do get the oppotunity to get Microsoft training before someone makes he mistake. Oh well lets see what the future brings.

Redundancy Day + 4

Well I’m still here, the Notes Development team took a hit and things are certainly going to be tough, but then again as Notes Developers we are not exactly expecting an easy ride.

An interesting conversation yesterday with my boss, a recent recruit to our company and the first experience they have had with Lotus Notes.  She’s been my boss now for about two months and yesterday admitted that she now understands Notes, up until this point she had only seen the “MS Exchange vs Lotus Notes” concept, but can now see to the applications.  As I said to her yesterday, if we were to move our E-mail from Lotus Notes to MS Exchange, there would be an initial hit to convert any doclinks to URLs in e-mails being sent out and then our workload wouldn’t decrease one little bit.  Our use of Lotus Notes mail only impacts our development when we need to roll out a new client version and need to update our customised template to take advantage of all the new functionality available.  I think she was a little put out when I applauded her “understanding” as she tried to defend her position of only using Notes for 2 months.  However as I pointed out to her, it’s only taken her 2 months to get Notes, we have the majority of IT management who still don’t get Notes and most of them have been using Notes for 13 years!!!

The magic R word rears it’s head.

Well we have now been told that a number of redundancies are to be made within our dept within the next 2 weeks. Couple that with the “There is a concerted effort to move Notes out of the company” message I was told and it doesn’t bode too well. Fingers crossed.

Name & Address Book enhancements

Whilst the Sword of Damocles, or should I say Migration to Exchange, still hangs threatening above our heads, day-to-day work continues and one of those projects is an upgrade to Domino 8.5 for all our servers.  As a developer I am not hands-on involved with this, apart from bringing our Template for the Name & Address book up to date for 8.5 and moving across some of the enhancements we have made into the previous versions.  We use a number of modifications specifically for our Company’s setup around the use of Employee IDs to link to Active Directory accounts, some improvements in the Groups Form to allow pasting of these IDs into the Groups and the conversion to proper Notes names and the scheduled generation of groups based on the Canonicalised Naming Convention of Users.  However at a time of change, does anyone else have any suggestions for improvements that they have placed in the Name & Address book???

Sanity has to break out??

One of the big reasons for sticking with Lotus Notes within our company has been the customised template that we use that allows users to designate which project they are working on whenever they send an e-mail.   This then copies this e-mail into a Mail store for the relevant project, therefore at the end of every project we have every e-mail that is sent or received on that project.  Very useful if the client starts demanding to know why a particular decision was reached or why a change to the design was made and you can go back and say “Here you go, this is the discussion behind that decision”, or “The change was made because your boss said XYZ”, a very useful thing to have.  However we have been told that Exchange can’t easily do this, or at least force the users to make the decision, it would have to be a manual process they will have to remember every time they send an e-mail. Yeah right like that’s going to happen.

So we have another initiative around File management in general so someone decides, okay lets ignore that requirement for the mail replacement and we will include it in the specification for the file management project.  My problem with this is that the move to Exchange is scheduled for later this year, the file management project is a little further off, slight gap in functionality if you ask me, but then no body did.

However with a requirement to cut costs our File Management project has now bitten the dust and has been shelved, the question is now, exactly how long before someone realises that the move to Exchange must also been history???

Every cloud has a silver lining

Well the rumours are already starting going round about potential redundancies in other departments within our organisation, however it does raise the question that when a department is trying to save money, surely moving your e-mail system from Lotus Notes to Microshaft Exchange is not exactly the best career move.  Well that’s my opinion, not that anyone seems to take note of it!!

The wickedness of M$

Well a quick update as requested.  Things are still up in the air, approval for a move to Exchange has not yet been requested as the paperwork explaining why this is a good idea have not been completed.  An Exchange/Sharepoint pilot is planned, however  the remit for the pilot does not take in our standard type of users.  We have a heavily modified mail template which is critical for most users, but this is not being considered as part of the Exchange move as it is apparently being solved by another project looking at data management which at this time is still in the data gathering phase and I can’t see an equivalent solution coming out of this.

All in all it doesn’t look good, the reason why we should stick with Notes is being put to the side as simply not an issue whilst a justification for the massive expensive and disruption of a move to Exchange can’t possible be made, even if Exchange is better, it can’t be that good to make it worth while.

Oh to be heading to Orlando

Well another year dawns and another Lotusphere goes under attended so once again I end up relying on the Internet to keep me up-to-date.  Sometimes I do wonder if the next time I attend an interview I should enquire “Would you send me to LotusSphere, pppplllllleeeeeeaaaaasssssseeeeee????”.

With Notes 8.5 now released we are already planning a set of upgrades to both servers and clients (still running 6.5 for most users) and looking forward to the hoped benefits of DAOS.

Yes I know that I have kept on mentioning my concerns over Exchange, but as I keep pointing out to my boss, if we decide to move to Exchange tomorrow, it’s going to take a good year or two to move the users and about 5-10 years to convert all our apps.  Is the benefit really there I don’t think so!!!

So in the mean time we still need to go to Notes 8.5, then 9 and probably 10 the way things currently stand.  It does raise a lot of eyebrows over some decisions, but then again I think that’s not a bad idea.