Lotus Notes, Domino & Outsourcing

The launch of Blackberry devices and service by Airtel pushes the envelop of what is feasible to do while mobile in India. Ofcourse, Blackberry devices support secure access to Domino data, and Domino with Blackberry is one of the hottest emerging niches. We are gearing ourselves up for action both in the local Indian market and in the offshore markets of US by picking up skills on Blackberry and using Blackberry to access Lotus Domino data.

With the Express offerings, Lotus Notes, Domino have become very interesting for mid-sized businesses. With rapid application development capabilities, a ton of in-built functionality and inexpensive offshore software development, mid-sized businesses can have the enterprise style software infrastructure that would let their business bloom.

Check out the SearchDomino article on IBM’s Express offerings.

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

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