Selling Lotus Notes within your organization
This is a followup to my answer over on Ed Brill's site. I wanted to write more about how I sold Lotus Notes solutions within the Government agency I work for and the role it's played.
When I arrived at my current position Lotus Notes didn't really have a very good name. It was seen as ugly and only email with the exception of training sign-up trackers, simple document repositories and other basic applications, nothing complex. There was a current Lotus Notes project that was started prior to my arrival for doing building assessments after a natural disaster that was prompted by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While the application worked, it kind-of wasn't what it could be. I took on this application with the goals of a) Improving the overall way it looked b) Adding more notification capabilities c) Simplifiying the interface. With these goals in mind, version 2 of the application was a success and version 3 will be much better. The community liked it, the managment staff liked being notified of events and less hand-holding was required. While some of the people that used it aren't very technically savvy and still required some hand-holding the majority of people understood it and were able to use it.
This application started the ball rolling of more awareness of what Notes is capable of. This application also had a sister application for managing building contacts. Some of the assessors would go to a building, have a contact number to call to gain access to the building but when they called that number, the phone inside the building was ringing. This was unacceptable and a new application was started to manage all the contacts for a building. The building manager, elevator contractors, janitorial contractors, etc. This proved to be invaluable and improved the response times by providing people the information they needed when they needed it. With the release of this application it really opened management's eyes about what was possible and that maybe Notes should have a bigger role in disaster response tools for keeping track of tasks, who is assigned tasks, who needs to be contacted to complete a task and communication between people in the field and people back in the office space. Since then a couple of other disaster response applications have been developed and are looking to be nationally used within the agency I work for.
Now, with all the applications I develop I try and come up with a nice color scheme and get inspiration from people such as Chris Blatnick , Nathan Freeman and Martin Vereecken for simple, elegant user interfaces. I can't stress enough how important a nice interface is. It really does affect the way that Notes is portrayed within an organization. If you can't provide nice UIs and include features that can at least compete on some level with your .NET applications, people won't even think twice about waiting for .NET developers to become available to work on their particular problem.
Fast forward to today. Now, if a project has a tight deadline or has been waiting for .NET developers to become available for a long time, it's now considered acceptable to at least ask if it's a fit for Lotus Notes. If it truly is a problem that Lotus Notes can solve I'll say so and sell it passionately. If it's not a problem that Lotus Notes can solve then I'll say so for that too and defend it. I'm not a "Notes can do that" guy if Notes isn't the most logical solution to a certain problem. Some applications NEED a relational database behind it. While notes can be a solution for most any problem if addressed properly, it really isn't for everything. With this in mind, if the customer wants an application to only be web based then it'll usually (9 times out of 10 anyways) be a .NET application. If the customer really isn't sure of what they want, it'll usually end up being a Notes application, with this the .NET developers and myself have come to a mutual respect. They get to do what they love and I get to do what I love, win/win.
I wrote this to show that a single person can make a difference in how Notes is perceived within an organization and how often it is looked at to solve a particular business problem. If someone is a "Notes can do that" person no matter what the problem might be, you probably won't be taken very seriously within your organization and get a lot of eye rolls. If you are passionate, yet still are willing to say, "maybe Notes isn't the best solution" when it's really not the best solution people will have much more respect for you and Notes which in turn will bring more people to your doorstep seeking a solution. To go along with this you have to be able to at least show what the product is capable of, provide nice UIs, include "added value" features such as charting capabilities, inclusion of reporting features (we use SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with LEI pumping data to SQL Server), inclusion of other .NET applications embedded within Notes (via a Microsoft Web Browser control) when it makes sense and they compliment each other. Do all of these things and anything else that will shed a positive light on Lotus products and yourself, avoid taking on project that will show the weaknesses of Lotus Notes and yourself, and you'll always come out ahead.