The Contrarian Technologist

I have argued for many years that while Iris/Lotus created what I think is still the greatest software product ever, it has never recognized its full potential for collaboration because of issues around who controls databases and ACLs. In the V1/early V2 timeframe Notes was an marketed and sold as a company wide purchase and was implemented only at a few large organizations. The product really took off when the licensing changed and it became a departmental product and proliferated through organizations in a grassroots method. Typically, IT was only peripherally involved with the implementation and in many cases wanted nothing to do with the product. This all changed when management started recognizing Notes applications as being "mission critical". IT departments became engaged and the implementations became part of the corporate infrastructure. I’d argue that this was the greatest inhibitor to realizing the full value of these templates, and in particular the discussion database. Once Notes became a corporate resource, the lockdown that most organizations imposed on the creation of new databases greatly reduced the usefulness of these templates. In the early days of Notes, Lotus touted the discussion database as one of the main features, and it was the one application that most people seemed to “get” right away. As a result, discussion databases proliferated like wild fire, and soon clients were complaining that they had 10,000 discussion databases 95% of which were unused. The bean counters saw this as a waste of precious disk space and wasted resources. This perception along with other organizational entities that were challenged by the ability of discussions to bypass longstanding hierarchical business methods lobbied for better control of the situation. As a result, IT departments were charged with controlling the creation and management of the databases and within a short time so much bureaucracy was interjected in the process that most customers stopped using discussions databases. While there are probably some examples of discussion databases that have served organizations for many years, the real power of the discussion template was the ability to create a repository for a short lived issue that could be openly debated and vetted. So what if after a month it was no longer being used? – it was real collaboration and it worked. People still do the same things today – it’s just all contained inside of email messages, or IM chats. This is some of the functionality that Groove tried to recreate by moving to a peer-to-peer model, and that the Activity Explorer is attempting to return to WCS. It is no surprise that these templates haven’t been updated since R5. Who really wants to propose using a discussion database when it takes two weeks and a ream of paperwork to get one created? Lotus/IBM certainly recognized this problem and during the R3-R5 timeframe, discussions were a "dirty word" at Lotus - I can remember being chastised by a Lotus sales rep for including a discussion database in a presentation. "Customers no longer see any value in discussion databases - they want to hear about mission critical applications". Ed's entry is the first time I can remember someone from Lotus even admitting that the templates exist in some time. Perhaps with some of the changes to the way pages and applications can be managed in WCS, there is now recognition within IBM that user created and controlled applications can once more be part of the product?