At IBM, we use Lotus Notes/Domino as our central application for collaboration. Of course we do; Notes is our baby. Not just email, but for all sorts of stuff – common databases, team rooms, instant messaging, scheduling, information management, and a dozen other things I can’t think up of right now. As is human nature, we keep cribbing about Notes all the time! Like I (used to) say – If I had a rupee for every feature that sucked in Notes, I’d be a crorepati today! (%s/rupee/dollar/g and %s/crorepati/billionaire/g for all you Westerners).
A few evenings ago, I made a concious effort to get to know Notes better. After all, 118 million users couldn’t all be complaining at the same time. I have discovered that Notes truly is a wonderful, wonderful application with stupendously well-thought-out features. If there is one thing that is responsible for all of the criticism that Notes gets, it’s the fact that its UI isn’t as intuitive as it could be. That’s primarily because Notes tries to be everything to everyone – and very nearly succeeds. There’s SO much to display, and only so much space to do it in. I am sure that power users of Notes, those who’ve been using it everyday for years, have customised this application so much as to become few of the most productive people on earth. It’s that good. I am a Convert to the Church of Notes!
I will be posting tips that I have learnt to manage your information in Notes better, in the weeks and months to come. If you’re in an organisation that’s deployed Notes/Domino, I hope you’ll find these posts useful. For now, here are a few popular sites about Lotus Notes, just for starters. lotus.com is the IBM Lotus home page, btw. Duh.
Alan Lepofsky’s Lotus Notes/Domino Hints and tips blog – http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/
Ed Brill’s Blog – http://www.edbrill.com . Ed Brill is Business Unit Executive, Sales, IBM Lotus.
Richard Schwartz, “Technology Consultant” – http://smokey.rhs.com/web/blog/poweroftheschwartz.nsf