This is my personal view. Wasn’t Lotus Notes not build as a team collaboration tool? The NSF database allowed for easy replication of data and also provided for a robust and secure platform. Is Lotus Notes sometimes being pushed to do something which may be heavily transactional?

From what I have seen, xPages provides the ability to overcome many of the limitations you have raised. I had some developers build an xPages application which brought together data from NSF databases, Exchange, MySQL and also JD Edwards. All of the data was presented to the user in a portal-like fashion. The application was extremely responsive.

And just as I expected, IBM simply does nothing about it. Nothing. Not. a. single.word. about. improving. NSF.
Or did I miss something?

That’s a dissapointment. NSF is falling behind other No-SQL solutions, and while XPages might attract new developers, the will be scared away again when they learn about the ancient problems of NSF. What a pity. ”

full link — http://blog.youatnotes.de/web/youatnotes/blog-jb.nsf/dx/lotusphere-2012-my-thoughts.htm?opendocument

IT department needs to alter the point of view: they are no longer the guardians of the grail, but the enablers for business.

I agree, business should not be in charge of infrastructure as this is not something that most people in management understand a lot about. However, they need to be able to steer IT in the direction of business function, process and culture.

However, you raise some really good points when it comes to “notes guys”. I have worked with teams of notes developers, not only that, but also managed them. While my background is in Administration, I understand what good development processes look like. I once managed a team of developers who would go straight to coding without a plan, let alone a test plan. Their first round of testing would be User Acceptance Testing, which always ended up with users being completely frustrated. They didn’t even have any project management which would have ensured that good practices were being followed. I need not say much more, but you get the idea.

On the other hand I know of many great developers who continually churn out code and Lotus Notes applications which are both stable and able to scale without any issue.

Going back to the main point of this blog post. It is important that business directs IT based on business outcomes, however, this doesn’t exclude IT professionals from providing input from their domain knowledge. IT people are hired into the business do deliver on something that others cannot, but this needs to compliment the direction, strategy and vision of the business.

at first i thought these lotus notes developers are junk, but i came to know that is how things are with notes environment usually..then later one person told me that many notes people r closely working with biz people .. mostly the operations, hr, quality people etc.. not the core domain people.. i came to know that lotus notes is rarely used for LOB apps..just for some quick and dirty apps.

there can be exceptions. may be u r bright developer person working on some complex apps.. i don’t know.. but i think people like u r rare in notes world..

I find your comment about Lotus Notes to be interesting. I have worked on global Lotus Notes systems for some of the worlds largest enterprises who are leaders in their specific markets/industries. Not only that, but I work for an organisation with over 440,000 employees who all use Lotus Notes. You might also want to check out their current share price in comparison to one of their major competitors.

u hv to think of enterprise apps to appreciate it. u r a notes guy after all… u won’t understand much abt enterprise it..