I rounded out the week with a very interesting conference call. I asked out (new) IBM/Lotus account rep to setup a brief conference call to chat about Domino.Doc with the manager of our Design Engineering department (which handles so many HUGE CAD files on a daily basis, its frightening).

Before the call even started, it was weird. He informed me that he’s bring in a local IBM/Lotus business partner to the discussion - a guy I’ve know for a long time but hadn’t talked to recently. I realized that my IBM/Lotus rep’s “system” must have had this other business partner listed somewhere because many years ago we talked with him about the same product. Our IBM/Lotus rep assumed it was appropriate for him to be in the discussion - without asking about the dynamic of how that worked out last time.

That was a flaw in his logic, which I tried to point out ahead of time stating that there were people in our company who felt strongly that the project never got off the ground the first time as a function of some bad information and direction from other local business partners that were brought in to talk about the product. Regardless, the call went on.

The timer on my phone said 22 minutes had gone by before someone mentioned “Domino.Doc” (the purpose of having the meeting) and the only reason it was mentioned was because someone said “I thought we were going to talk about Domino.Doc, not Quickr.”

All that aside, its clear to me how Quickr really could be a better fit for us. Its also clear that IBM wants to use Filenet to provide the backbone to Quickr for people who need some seriously powerful document management utilities. Now that we have the latest verison of Quickr installed, we’re going to get more serious about evaluating it (the first time we tried, all of us ran into odd bugs within the first 5 minutes of using it — that’s been MUCH improved).

At about 45 minutes into the call, the IBM guys said “Quickr is really the perfect tool for shops using Notes 8.0.1.” That’s true! But we’re not adopting 8.0.1 any time soon because of the performance issues we’ve seen in testing. We mentioned this on the conference call, to their surprise. They said (and while this isn’t truly a quote … its a pretty close paraphrase):

‘Really?! You’re the first place that has EVER said anything like that! We’ve seen NO performance issues with Notes 8.0.1. Of course, you could use the “-sa”‘ switch run it without Eclipse, ’cause that’s the thing that slows it down. Eclipse is slow. Notes isn’t. I mean, anyone that has 2GB of RAM is going to see no problems with Notes 8.0.1 whatsoever!’

My problem? 95% of our systems don’t have 2GB of RAM. 65% of them don’t have ONE GB of RAM. And, oh yeah, the coolest part of 8.0.1 is the functionality that Eclipse brings to the table (side shelf, etc.) … so I just can’t justify the amount of time an upgrade would take when some of the biggest payoffs aren’t there.

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While this may seem like a vent, its not intended to be. Its intended to be feedback. I see a lot of IBM/Lotus blogs where people enlist the “what do you, the customer, want?” type of question. I think its important that blogs, like mine, exist to provide everyday insight into a sort of moment-by-moment recap of the challenges and thoughts we have about using the software that supports our business.

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