I think its safe to say that the biggest obstacle to our upgrade plans for Lotus Notes 8.x has been: training. How much? Of what? Where do we start? Comprehensive or just what’s new? What features are most important to train on? How do we explain ALL of the great new features in a time frame that will keep people’s attentions.
Enter: Multimedia Library for Lotus Notes
This clever little utility is a comprehensive rundown of just about anything your end users might want to know about the new version of Notes. Its broken into Courses (90 minutes – more topics), Lessons (a grouping of related topics) and Topics (individual, short sessions on discrete topics).
With the help of the Lotus contact, I was able to get access to the utility to demo and it looks very nice. Multiple lanugages are available and the price is reasonable if you assumed you would out-source your training (or consider people’s internal time to be financially accounted for already).
Our pilot group has spent some time looking at this as well to determine if people will actually take the time to go out and run through these training sessions. I want to believe that they will, however the reality is that people are busy and forget. We did a similar training program with a Cisco launch and found that VERY few people actually used the on-line demos (which were fantastic! – just not used).
Feedback on the idea is still trickling in as people continue to use the recently deployed Notes 8.5 client, so time will tell just how beneficial this tool is “in the wild.”
One last note, if you’re interested you might want to bookmark the link above. I didn’t and returned to Lotus.com (not remembering what the product was called and knowing it had a name that didn’t exactly convey what it was: a training/education tool) and couldn’t easily find it. I did what I always do in that situation: google Ed’s blog. – Ah, there it is! Found it!
February 27th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Thanks for the article. I agree these training videos represent an easy-to-access educational opportunity for Lotus users like our non-profit mental health company of 170 employees, but…I was informed by the ’sales’ contact on the site that our cost would be $4,000 or $24/user. While that may not sound like much, it’s a significant cost for a non-profit in these poor economic times. I get a kick out of the fact that other IBM’ers have mentioned ‘volume discounts apply’ and yet the little guy pays full price.
This is a bit off-topic, but IBM in my opinion, has a poor record supporting downward cost initiatives for the non-profit sector. Unlike, Microsoft, who has a great program to provide substantial discounts, IBM and it’s resellers offer virtually nothing. These educational videos are another example. Lotus may be a platform we can no longer afford.
Rodd Ahrenstorff
February 27th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
That pricing is consistent with what I’ve seen as well. We had them quote out a subset of our user base (250) and got to the same numbers.
Its a price point that seems low when compared to doing training via traditional means. However, we’ve seen that even giving people access to the test site to play around with it resulted in VERY few people taking advantage of it — which is frustrating because its a good tool, however it makes it “feel” more expensive since you know people won’t use it as extensively as you want them to (in our case).
Perhaps if it had some integration into the Notes client – like in-context links to specific sessions; a sidebar widget; something like that.
March 1st, 2009 at 4:54 am
Kevin – from what I understand there is Notes client integration.
One of the features highlighted is the ability to embed into Lotus Notes.