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!!