Skip to main content

Domino Lives!

I had a very interesting conversation with IBM last week (more on that in later posts) and at one point we discussed the current status and the future of IBM Notes and Domino.  It's a discussion which seems to be largely ignored at the IBM events these days but it's certainly a question that IBM's customers want answered. 

The answer from IBM was quite interesting.

First of all, we were assured that IBM Domino was not dead - far from it. It was alive, kicking and thriving.

It's no longer being considered "sexy" or "new" but is seen as a mature product which does exactly what it needs to do.  IBM made it clear that they didn't intend to over-engineer notes by adding functionality simply so that they could bring a new version to the market.

IBM weren't subtle about it either, pointing the finger at Microsoft Word and asking "how many more features do you need in a word processor"?  It was a good point, well made. After all, how much functionality did "the ruler" make to Microsoft Word - and was it worth the cost of the upgrade? In my experience, it's made a lot of things that I used to do much more difficult.

IBM does not want Notes and Domino to become "bloatware".  In fact, they made it clear that  many of their requests were for smaller clients, for example, to "make the firefox browser-based version of Notes available on iOS". Whether that actually happens is yet to be determined but it's clear that the future is "smaller".

There will be new versions of Notes as new requirements and fixes arise. Domino isn't going away but as it moves past the 25 years mark and loses it's sexy good looks, at least it has a plan to keep trim. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher