Lotus Notes, Domino & Outsourcing

It was interesting to find an article that points to how Notes/Domino’s replication capabilities are still being “discovered”.

In this article in Intranet Journal, the advantages of a Notes/Domino based Intranet are outlined: http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200606/ij_06_21_06a.html
As the author John Roling points out “I know that the Notes and Domino faithful will think I’m preaching to the choir when it comes to replication. Still, it’s an important technology that regular users take for granted, and non-users may not know exists. ”

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

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