Friday, October 14, 2005

Change in the blog title and content

Lots of early morning thoughts made me wake up again from the bed which leads to a title change for my blog. Yes, i am renaming my blog to "The Power of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino".

This decision is made keeping few things in mind. Earlier i thought of writing of whatever i feel but mostly on Lotus Notes and my own personal feelings, thoughts etc and hence named as Mirror Image.

Now i have decided to get a step ahead by keeping myself positive and focus more on positive side of me rather than just this is not good, that is not good. May be i am finding a bit hard to explain it but i do hope i would do better in the times to come.

So from now, i would write on Notes/Domino of whatever i know, i understood, i experience, i read for the benefit of myself and largely to my customers, friends, colleagues et all.

I hope i am going to enjoy of whatever i have chosen to and i sincerely hope other too will feel the same.

After a long time

I am writing this after a long time. Its about 1:15 AM here and i was not able to sleep.. i thought i would read some thing good about my platform before going to bed again.

I wanted to read the article in the developer works web site on How to manage mail boxes in Notes/Domino but till now i haven't opened that at all.. I have been browsing for the last 1.5hrs. That is the drawback when i sit in front of my Laptop.

I will see something and start reading forgetting about the one originally i had in mind. I somehow feel like reading many Lotus geeks writings on whatever they write about Lotus technologies. There is whole lot of people whom i watch. In particular Ed, Nathan, Stan, Alan, Rocky, Tom, Ben Rose, Ben Poole, Jake, Julian, Jon, Joe, Mike, Bob to name a few.

I have been working in this technology for the last 7 years but i still feel that somewhere am lacking. I don't know whether that feeling is only a mind set or something else. One possible reason could be here in Singapore not much applications are built around Notes/Domino. So what am doing now is to maintain the old age apps built in 90's.

Its interesting at times and challenging too because of the production related issues. As the application data grows, because of the way the application was developed it would have all kind of issues.

Poorly architectured, poorly written code Domino apps are running in my customer places.. Not to say i would do a 100% good job but am sure that i would have taken lot more points in to account before i do something.

I should say not many people would know Notes/Domino to that extent. Even an experienced Notes programmer knows just to write an some Lotus Script code to solve the problem. Absolutely no thoughts what is the impact when its rolled out to say 1000 users at a time.

The customers are also not willing to share clearly how many users are going to use this application. They would say some small number or in many cases the vendors are not even asking for actual no. of users who use the application.

Vendors think that they might lose the deal if they quote high and they quote less.

And i should say when it comes to Domino, people take everything for granted here. They just deploy the applicaiton in the server and that's all, they assume the app would run for ever and in many cases there would not be a Domino administrator. Even if they claim they are, they are at best their network administrators or mail administrators and not real Domino admins.

When it comes to Domino, there is this next thing - they want everything at a very little cost cause somewhere they would have heard this jargon RAD.

So all in all it frustrates me what to do on all this.. I wouldn't have constructed things nicely here but i hope that i'll improve in the days to come..