Domino is Not Dead: Why Now Is a Good Time to Consider a New Value Proposition

I came across a really good article yesterday, which looks like it was written on Christmas Day.  Someone need to get a life!!  However I digress. 

The Article is all about Notes/Domino and and starts by giving a ringing endorsement to Notes.

I have been a Domino developer for the past 13 years, and for as long as I have been working with the platform, I am continually surprised and dismayed to have to explain to technical recruiters or interviewers what Lotus Domino is and what you can do with it. My dismay is because although there are a few key features that make Domino stand out from other application development platforms, I've heard repeatedly throughout my tenure as a Domino developer that "Domino is dead." 

Thus, I write this article to set things straight.

The Author then goes on to discuss a brief history of Notes and looks at how secure Notes is.  One quoye I love is:-


Domino servers can be configured to accept only encrypted network connections. As a result, your data is secure in transit, even when connecting over the Web. Secure transit effectively makes your Domino server network as secure as any VPN without the need for any other software or hardware. This is impressive given that Domino server has been providing transit security for free, even before VPNs were a gleam in Cisco's eyes!

Martin describes the Domino replication model say that Domino had replication way before anyone else even realised that you needed it.

He also describes Notes as "1 Platform many Languages"  I really think that this is a key feature of Notes, the ability to do programming in 1 of several languages.  The simple @ command language is great for someone who is a beginner and is very powerful all by its self.  It allows lookup of data from its own database of to other database, thus it is possible to have Notes lookup data from another Notes Db and import that data into the current databases.  You can also use the Lotus Script language, which is a superset of Visual Basic and go one right the way up to Java.  Can Exchange come even close?

This article is 1 of 3, can't wait for the rest.

You can read the whole article at this URL:
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1431315

Notes is 20 years old

What a mile stone, 20 years old and still growing, changing and meeting the needs of customers.

As some of you may know I started using Notes version 1 at the end of 1990, about 1 year after it was launched, in those days there was always some new software being launched, which you had to try.  Very often IT professionals were given a copy of the latest software.

So many good software products have disappeared over this time period, products like Wordstar, Word Perfect, Dbase, Lotus 123 and just so many others.

Its a testament to Notes that not only is it still with us, but its here and growing, I hear that IBM will be telling the world, very soon, that there are now over 150 million users and that the growth rate is increasing.

Everytime when Lotus releases a new version there is a significant step forward in what Notes can do and how useful it is to business.  When 8.5 was released it had DAOS, which allowed attachments to be removed automatically from the mail file and stored separately.  I have heard of a mail file going down from 79 Mb to just 10 Mb, that is a pretty amazing reduction in file size.

With Notes 8.5.1 we got the new Domino designer, which is now free for anyone, this is a full Eclipse designer and allows the Notes developer to create far more creative and powerful applications, especially web based apps, using xPages.

What really annoys me is the childish attacks that MS makes on Notes whilst there product hardly moves forward at all, if you compare what Lotus has released by way of new functionality over the last 10 years against what is new in Exchange its an order of magnitude different.

Anyway congratulations to IBM and the lotus team on this massive event and I look forward to the next 20 years of innovative and cleaver Notes development.

Above is the UI for Notes 1 that I still remember using, in those days it was very different Windows had not yet arrived and yet it had Windows, in DOS.