AUSLUG finished a few days ago now. While I had every intention of keeping my blog updated with some of my views on the event, life has been busy.

For me, the highlight was not about the technology or the fantastic announcements, but rather, one of the presentations which impressed me.  The presentation entitled, “Spend 60 minutes to save 60 hours”, was absolutely fantastic.  Karen Hooper from Dr. Notes went over a lot of the functionality of the Lotus Notes mail client, calendar and contacts.

I have been a Lotus Notes user and Administrator for more years than I care to remember, but somehow, Karen seemed to be able to show amazing features that I had never seen.  Some of which, she said, often surprised users who made comments about Microsoft Outlook not having those features.  The funny thing is that some of the features are in Outlook but the users are unaware.

This raised an interesting point.  There is often an argument about Lotus Notes not being as intuitive or as easy to use as Microsoft Outlook.  However, whenever I try to use Outlook, I struggle to preform the most common tasks as it is something that I am not use to using.

Occasionally, I have come across people who have made a decision to move away from Lotus Notes, for email, to Microsoft Outlook.  There’s always a list of reasons for making the move, none of which are at all compelling, certainly not for the the cost involved.  The one thing that I never hear about is user training.  Of all the reasons that people use to poorly justify a move, these could all be fixed by adequate professional training.

Karen Hooper, didn’t seem to be “ just” a trainer, but she was also very entertaining.  Well done Karen.

While Dr. Notes is an Australian company, New Zealanders are able to get local user training through ACE Training.