October 31st, 2005
Thoughts on Notes support costs from the field.
Like many others. I keep my eye on the
Notes and Domino job market on places like Dice.com etc. - they give you
the "pulse" of the market. And since the start of 2005 that pulse
seems to be quickening.
While both Exchange and Notes / Domino claim similar market shares, there
seem to be more Exchange jobs out there than Notes / Domino ones. I've
been thinking about this for quite a while, and then it hit me... Could
the difference be simply because once Notes is up and running smoothly,
it can stay that way for years without much attention? In other words,
given Notes and Exchange shops of similar size operating in "the field",
it takes more technical support to keep Exchange running that it does Notes.
I would be curious to hear any other thoughts on this subject.
October 30th, 2005
IBM web site not an example of "easy to use"
I often need to use the IBM web site to
find information, but can be a hopeless task. Very little is where you
expect to find it. Just try and find the Notes Domino fix list from the
ibm.com and you will see what I mean. And the search does not respect context.
For example, if I am in the Lotus part of the web site and search for a
term, I am not interested in Tivoli, Websphere etc.... I just want items
relating to Lotus. Yet 80-% of the items returned have nothing to do with
Lotus. It is easier to use Google to search IBM than it is to use the native
IBM searching!
Maybe this has something to do with this article
on TechWeb..."IBM has agreed to support within its OmniFind corporate
search engine Google Inc.'s desktop-search software, an indication of how
the latter company is warming up to business software makers that can open
the door to large corporations."