Lotus – Not dead yet!

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I love how we always hear the Notes is Dead rhetoric every year, and every year we soldier on. Well, I’m here to tell you that Lotus is very much alive and well within MY organization. We use Notes for email and calendaring, Sametime for IM, Traveler for mobile support, XPages apps for various purposes and old fashioned Notes client and web applications for things including our intranet. I’ve built a Notes team that I am very proud of, and to show you just how MUCH we support Notes, let me give a shout out to my guys for what’s coming up at Lotusphere.

First up is Declan Lynch. You may know him as the developer who built Blogsphere, XTalk, FileSendr and has presented at Lotusphere on several occasions. I can give you ‘turty tree and a turd’ reasons why he’s an awesome asset to our Lotus strategy internally, but advanced XPages knowledge is chief among them. Amazon S3 Integration, PDF Generation, using extLib, and now documenting how to use a source control solution are just a few things he’s accomplished. Last year, his XTalk application was a finalist in the Lotus awards for Best Open Source Contribution by an Individual. This year I happen to know he’s also up for some awards for his open source work on FileSendr. Declan whipped up FileSendr when I asked for the functionality to use internally at work, and we gladly donated it as an open source project to OpenNTF.org. He’s expanded it, and I know there’s more coming. In addition, he has a surprise project that you’ll learn more about at Lotusphere at the OpenNTF session. Last and definitely not least, he now manages my former baby, our Lotus Domino infrastructure.

Next is David Leedy. You may know him from NotesIn9, XPages.tv and from his appearance on the XCast podcast. He’s currently hard at work ripping apart old Lotus Notes client code and preparing the app to move to XPages, all the while supporting our current users who rely on the application on a daily basis. When he’s not podcasting, videocasting or creating XPages cheatsheets, he’s now preparing for another year presenting at Lotusphere. His session: XPages: Enter the Dojo is on Tuesday afternoon, and he’ll be a presenter at SpeedGeeking as well.

Last but not least is Mike McGarel. This year, Mike is one of the contestants on Lotusphere Idol. He’s presented to usergroups like MWLUG and Granite, the Chicago based Notes user group that he was just elected Vice President of. Internally, he’s the keeper of our customer facing Domino based extranet, and several internal tools that help our Designers and Marketing departments.

Me, I’ve morphed most recently from Notes admin and technical author to an IT Director managing our company’s infrastructure, much of which is Lotus based. This Lotusphere I’m happy to once again be part of the Lotus Blogger Program. As such, I’ll be bringing you as much news as I can from the show floor. The rest of the time, I’ll be filling my pointy hair with knowledge of what the future holds for the Lotus portfolio. As a company, we’re OpenNTF Alliance members as well as a Lotus managed beta participant. We were very early adopters of Traveler, running beta versions in production so our employee’s iPhones, iPads and Android phones could talk to our corporate systems. Lotus is integral to what we do, and I foresee that to be the case for a long time to come.

That’s not to say we’re simply fanboys. Sametime meetings have been replaced by GoToMeeting, Quickr has been replaced by Basecamp, and our sales software is Salesforce.com. I believe very strongly in the best tool for the job, and Lotus Domino is that tool for much of what we do, but NOT all. If Lotus makes changes that impact us negatively, I’ll be the first person to say so. For now however, Lotus is very much a thriving force in our daily IT lives, and will be so for the foreseeable future.

So yeah, Notes is Dead? Heard that one before…