Lotus Notes, Domino & Outsourcing

This article from www.codeproject.com is among the best of material I’ve read analyzing this whole offshore trend. Absolute must read for anyone affected by offshore - either side of the spectrum.

- Venki

Running a outsourcing company focussed on Notes/Domino, recruitment and retention of Lotus Notes Programmers is one of my biggest tasks. I’ve worked in the past with programmers specialized in other technologies, specifically Microsoft VC++, Windows SDK, Java and Database programmers.

I’ve noticed some key differences between other programmers and Lotus Notes programmers. Here is an attempt to sum them up:

• Notes programmers are customer focussed.
• Notes programmers don’t bother with nitty gritties of design, till design issues rear their ugly head in a project
• Notes programmers have a cult-like following of Lotus Notes, Domino technologies

Now, these are generalizations and don’t apply to all the people I have seen. Some of these traits apply to other groups of programmers too. But, Notes being a RAD tool, and giving the programmers a high level programming platform leads to programmers not focussing on design too much. To avoid the pitfalls of such an approach, we actively encourage our Lotus Notes, Domino programmers to look at other technologies - specifically open source technologies like Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP. These technologies are outstanding in the level of control they offer to programmers, and the visibility of how the underlying platform functions.

Another thing we are actively working towards is getting our Lotus Notes programmers trained in Java. With a cross platform approach, we find developers picking up ideas from other projects, tools and knowledge pools and applying them to great effect in Lotus Notes applications.

What we do want to maintain is the level of customer focus our Notes programmers typically show. This again has evolved out of Notes being an effective RAD, prototyping tool that lets you quickly create apps that can move into production, and the opportunity it gives for iterative development with customers. While the concepts of Extreme Programming are exciting and well articulated, I feel a lot of Domino programmers have done that for quite a while.

- Venki

An interesting article in SearchCIO .. published a few weeks back, but I stumbled on it only today. Two of their editors argue whether the offshoring issue is real or hyped.

I found the following statistics from the article very interesting:

• Of the 2.7 million jobs lost in the last three years, only 300,000 were lost because of offshore outsourcing.
• Business Week magazine reports that 1% of productivity growth can eliminate up to 1.3 million jobs a year.
• According to the Organization for International Investment (OFII), foreign companies with U.S. offices employ a record high 6.4 million Americans and support an annual payroll of $350 billion, which is heavily invested in the U.S. economy.
• The OFII also reports over the last 15 years, total insourced jobs grew by 117% and total outsourced jobs grew by 56%.
• A 2003 report put out by the market research company International Data Corp. and which was cited by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal was later called “a little wobbly” by an IDC spokesman.
• U.S. educational institutions collected $1.2 billion from Indian nationals in 2002, a reported six times the amount received from British students.
• According to The Economist, America’s population grew by 23.9% between 1980 and 2002. The number of employed Americans grew by 37.4% in the same period, a near record high.

We have been evaluating SWING Integrator, a cool Notes add-on that lets you do two way integration between Notes and MS-Office. You can pull data from Notes into Word, Excel & Powerpoint documents and push changed documents back into Notes, with very little programming.

A very cool product for the reporting requirements in any project which always make for the biggest impact with top management. Maarga will soon be reselling SWING software in the Indian market. If you are interested in finding out more about how you can integrate your Notes applications with MS-Office, send a mail to swing@maargasystems.com and we will give you a demo of how this can be done.

- Venki

One of the most innovative use of technologies I’ve seen in recent times comes from a Boston based company called First Mile Solutions. It is about providing connectivity to villages, poorly-connected areas in a most economical fashion. The problem on the ground is that the demand in these areas is not too high, and it is not commercially feasible to provide connectivity to a vast area with sparse demand. The solution First Mile Solution provides is one of setting up village kiosks and a Mobile Access Point .. essentially a vehicle (typically a motorcycle) with a Wi-Fi access point that drives past all the villages. This Mobile Access Point stops for enough time to replicate data with the village computer and drives to its next destination. After covering the entire beat, the vehicle goes back to the city which is connected to the Internet and replicates all the village data with the appropriate gateways.

Now, can you think of an architecture better than Notes/Domino to serve this market? Replication, Rapid Application Development, Mail Routing … Notes has everything that is needed to provide a comprehensive solution to these villages. Delivering services to villages will be a key piece of e-governance in countries like India (which is facing a renewed thrust on the rural sector). And by capturing the first mile, IBM can capture a big chunk of the e-governance pie.

- Venki

Barbara Bowen and her team at Lotus have been working on Workplace certification in tune with the big push IBM is giving Workplace in the market. IBM has announced two new tests:
Exam 820: Implementing and Administering IBM Lotus Workplace Messaging 2, and
Exam 830: Developing Websites Using IBM Lotus Workplace Web Content Management 2 with Java

I see the Workplace products taking J2EE towards a new direction … not so much focus on the underlying plumbing, but focussing on the business requirements and making it happen in a simplified manner. Kudos to the Lotus team in bringing out these certification programs. I look forward to more offerings soon.

It is also interesting to note that clearing a single test gives you an IBM Certified Application Developer/System Administrator title. Incentive for guys to get going with Workplace Certification?

Watch this space for more news on this front!

IBM announced quite a while back the support for Tamil, Hindi scripts in Lotus Notes. That was way back in 2000. I’ve been searching for customer examples of organizations that have used the Tamil/Hindi versions.

There was much fanfare when Office was made available in Hindi in 2004. With e-governance gradually gaining momentum, I guess we will see some big installations in local languages in the near future. With Lotus Domino Global Workbench, it would be a cinch to produce highly interactive sites in Tamil, Hindi etc. This should be a huge opportunity for IBM when the Indian government IT spending inches up.

If any of you have examples of use of Lotus Notes, Domino in Tamil/Hindi, please send an email to me.

- Venki

Motorola has had its share of success with the wireless handheld and infrastructure market in India. Now they are clearly articulating their plan to focus on India, both as a market and as a research & development hub. Check out the Economic Times interview with Mr Mike Zafirovski, president and chief operating officer of Motorola.

I found this comment insightful:
Asked if technology companies of the future would necessarily have to have an India presence , as some venture capitalists believe, Mr Zafirovski was more candid: “Nothing is that imperative. Offshore presence is necessary for the business model, but it could be in other low-cost countries. However, I would say that a technology company would fail in its IQ test if it did not have anything significant in India. There’s quality, speed, process orientation in India and at a cost that’s still attractive.”

- Venki