I stumbled across the article “You’ll Pry Lotus Notes Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands” and found it to be interesting and quite true. It reviews what the rest of us has known for some time:

• Notes isn’t legacy, infact, its getting better every year
• Hannover will be a BIG UI improvement and if they can get it to do all of the “Office” stuff that they say it’ll do, it will be HUGE
• Notes rocks for rapid application development and can scale to be 3M or IBM size.
• Notes is much much more than just email

But the most interesting part of this article was a comment about how IBM has put substantial effort behind converting Notes geeks to WebSphere and their progress is slow-going, at best.

As I entertain the idea of WebSphere in my organization, I’ve yet to see it as anything close to a replacement for Notes/Domino. Infact, I look at WebSphere as a way to extend the life of our ERP system by delivering a better UI, better graphical metrics and role-based dashboards. The fact that I can have any level of integration with Domino is icing on the cake.

Of course, then you look at a specific application and start to wonder why you can’t just do the same thing with Domino, LEI and a bit of HTML/CSS/XML magic? — Which brings us right back to how powerful Domino really is.