For some users of Lotus Notes, that's all they can see, access, or use.
What an extraordinary waste of resources to pay well for talent and expertise, give workers and extraordinary tool to support them, and then lock it down so all they can use is email.
Today, I worked with a senior executive at a large organization. He had transferred from a global organization that used Outlook. Now, he has Lotus Notes. Like many highly productive executives, he's involved in a GTD community (this one happened to be on LinkedIn) where he learned that Lotus Notes could be transformed into a highly effective information and action management tool. He contacted me for some guidance and I offered to help him. I asked him if he had received any training in how to use Notes. He replied no, so I offered to do a quick web meeting to get him started. It was there that I found out that his Lotus Notes was locked down to the screen above. So, for him, Notes truly is about email and basic PIM. He could not view the Notes workspace or anything else. Strictly email and calendar.
I showed him my Lotus Notes desktop, specifically my Notes workspace where I have over 400 icons on my workspace neatly organized across more than a dozen tabs. It may sound like a lot but Lotus Notes makes it very easy for me to get things done quickly by organizing my work in this way. We reviewed some of the features of Notes and within minutes he said that he could see how Notes could do so much more and that prior to our meeting he had only heard the negatives about Notes. Now, he was interested to learn more about Lotus Notes and what it could do for his organization.
In the short time we had, I did not make him a Notes expert, but I did manage to give him a glimpse into a tool that has served me and many others quite well for over two decades. The very tool he has on his desktop has the ability to transform the way that he and his team communicate, collaborates and coordinate their work.
I am glad I was able to champion the software he already has and give him a new outlook on Lotus Notes.
Discussion/Comments (4):
When we speak Domino vs Exchange, Domino includes everything like messaging, applications, rich enterprise scalability capabilities on replication, clustering and so on, when we speak on Exchange, it is just messgaging. I am not sure why IBM is not demarking Domino messaging to position against Exchange.
Eric Mack (www.ica.com): 8/31/2011 7:44:57 AM
Good points, the only reason I can think of is that email is something tangible that people understand. In our own product email plays a small part, yet customers see email as a pain point so they often think of our product as an email solution.
Jim casr (): 10/19/2011 11:31:40 PM
When we speak Domino vs Exchange, Domino includes everything like messaging, applications, rich enterprise scalability capabilities on replication, clustering and so on, when we speak on Exchange, it is just messgaging. I am not sure why IBM is not demarking Domino messaging to position against Exchange.
Christian Waidner (http://waidner-itsolutions.de): 1/20/2012 3:41:18 AM
The problem is, that even IBM sees Notes only as Email / Social networking tool. Remember the last announcement for Notes as application platform? I don't.
Eric Mack (www.ica.com): 1/22/2012 10:20:00 AM
I agree Christian. Email is mainstream, but Notes is not about email. In fact, early versions of Notes did not have much in the way of email. Notes is about collaboration and information sharing and applications. It's about getting things done. Oh, and it also has a great email client.
As long as people view Notes as simply email, there's not much to compel a user one way or another.
Didn't a company say "it's about the apps?"