Where Has the Day Gone...

Tripp Black  June 16 2010 12:40:25 AM

Today was work all day, but not get a lot of "real" work done. More, by the time I save this, it will be tomorrow.

Part of my day was spent on Ed Brill's blog today. Once again, Ed put himself out on a limb and practically begged to be attacked by all. The post subject is what caught my eye: "I've never been a developer." Although I'm an Administrator and Instructor, it's the development I enjoy most.

I posted twice. However, my second post, is where something I already knew became clarified all the more. Most of us griping, were complaining about marketing and application platform positioning. Lotus is far from dead; it's continually evolving. Where we are seeing pains are not all growth pains but one is an older paradigm that's been partially lost. It's about Enterprise verses Workgroup collaboration, but more core, more soul.

Collaborative applications are where Notes really shines. So it's also where hurt is going to be the "most" felt.

,,, apps is where IBM, BPs, and Lotus admins have all failed us as a community. (I'm a BP, a customer, and an admin.)

How long has it been, since an admin allowed all users to create new applications (aka security field blank) on the server? Where's the start my blog or podcast on the Notes Welcome page that auto kicks off the New App command, brings up a personalization wizard screen and allows me as the user to see "it just works"? That afterwards auto updates to let me add to my new blog or podcast?

It's that shift from groupware to enterprise software. Lotus is so far down the enterprise path that we dole out breadcrumbs to the users who are just barely able to do their jobs (maybe not even). Great, I can scale to 10,000 concurrent users on a 4 procesor box with 8GB of RAM - but they're misserable. We've lost that "SuperHuman" concept which is where Apple markets well, but they still don't even have way of doing a meeting with invitees. iMail and iCal are even separate apps! As for the other goliath in Redmond, you get past a form, a view/table, and a document repository and it's done, you need a real app anyway. Who cares if it had great "themes" to pick from. Let's learn and acquire those attributes back that are lacking now.

Again, a lot of our pain is self inflicted - it's a side effect of our growth and success as "enterprise software". As an admin, I don't want my users messing up the place because they are inherently messy. SharePoint and Quickr are great for admins because they limit the sandbox mess to nice little controlled containers. How many of us really want to get dirty? As an admin, I know I don't want or have time to fix my environment messed up by users. Users hate Notes because we admins make Notes suck - most admins don't even turn on a full-text index in mail files so users can find documents. IBM is partly to blame as they've happily given us what we asked for, but some of the blame is ours. The pendulum has swung too far.

We need to keep what we've gained in scalability, performance, and Notes/Domino's great "guts". What we need to get back to is empowering the user to get work done and get out of their way. That is what we believe we need to demand, and what will get the users on "our side". Because what users want is anyone on their side.

In my opinion, we need to keep the Enterprise global focus but develop and target the actual user as an empowered individual user or small group of users. We need to do it as part of the core.

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