Blame Lotus?

An interesting feeling has been growing in me for the past few months. I realised how much I miss using Notes/Domino and the real power that thing really has.

A few examples:

• The company I work for is pretty big in Web Content Management, and keeps on growing. A few days ago I had a training on a new solution, that, among other things, allows your web site content to be reused on a newsletter sent by e-mail.
  
  It's brilliant. But we were doing that already in 98 with Domino.
  

• This week I had a good training on C#, .Net and Visual Studio. Brilliantly easy to create a web site, put your business logic, connect to databases, bring out the site.
  
  But we were doing that already in 99 with Domino (R5 was the first version to really allow this on an easy way, though you could argue it was already possible before this version).
  

• I'm building up an "Intellectual Capital" initiative to allow us to re-use, share, peer-review our documents/code/whatever, and I have to resort to actually use a full-blown "Application Server" (be it J2EE or .Net based, that is irrelevant for now) to do this, while I could with about half the work create it in Domino.

The interesting bit is that IBM and Lotus still managed to give a bad image to this wonderful product and I can't really understand why. The fact is, everyone that does not use it is sure they don't need it...