A lot of people who stumble on my blog figure out that I have a sort of love-hate relationship with Lotus products. However, they often incorrectly assume that at any given time, I’m more on the “hate” side of the pendillum.
That’s actually not the case at all. Infact, I’m sort of a self-appointed customer evangelist for Lotus products. To prove my point… I’ve SAVED two companies from jumping ship off Lotus Notes in the last 6 months alone!
I just got a call from a former co-worker who said “hey, I just got back from our planning meetings and the company finally agreed that we need to invest more talent into our Lotus Notes area, not jump ship to Outlook … and the decision was based on the info you armed me with for the meeting, so thank you!”
That’s great news! In this case, it was a company that was on Notes 6.x and had used very few applications. They had lost two developers and never replaced them. I spent some time meeting with their IT team on one occassion and a group of other executives on another to walk through the applications we use at my company. I talked about the power of Notes security, replication and administration tools. But I focused heavily on how we’ve used Lotus Notes to augment our ERP systems and deliver information via the Notes client and/or the web.
For the record, the first company had an install base of 500 users. The second was roughly 15,000. – Hmm… I really should get a cut of something for that, don’t you think?
Now here’s the bad news. JUST yesterday, I met with yet another former co-worker who said “yeah… Lotus Notes might be on the chopping block forus.” I absolutely hate hearing that kind of comment and I’m convinced that the reason the comments is made is because the people using the Notes don’t have a clue how to maximize their investment in it.
And yes, I insisted he set up a time for me to stop by and do a quick demo of what Notes can do for them, too. I’m going for the hat-trick of Notes saves this year!
Tags: notes
What people here are saying…