[Sigia-l] re: Environment of CMS

[David Heller]

John said:
<<The maturity argument doesn't hold up for me, because around about 95
- 96 I worked with Notes for a while at a major corporation. This
corporation was using Notes to manage content, workflow, collaboration,
web publication, community discussion, email, etc...As you may know,
Notes (or Domino) is the daddy of groupware and I have to be honest, I
still look at many CMS and think - Notes did that better 8 years ago. It
probably still does and I felt that this product offered a lot out of
the box.>>

Having worked at a Lotus consulting company in '96 I can tell you that,
Lotus did none of the things you used it for above out of the box. It
was like it always has been a good platform for such things. I had to
build a CMS back then on Lotus/Domino (it was the year Domino came out),
and we had a heck of a time making it do it and finally succeeded. The
reality is that you shouldn't be "evangelizing domino" as much as the
consultants or IT staff that created the apps you were working on. Oh,
let me clarify, Notes does do e-mail and discussions out of the box. 

I have been on site at our customers over the last year and a half, and
I have to say that while I know our products are FAR from perfect, I am
amazed at what System Integrators do to our products. If they just left
it alone it would have been better than what customizations they did for
some of these customers. This is partially our fault and we know it. We
are beefing up our partnership programs to take care of our piece of it,
but as a customer you aren't just buying a product, you are contracting
a system integrator. I would make sure that you get as good if not
better references on the system integrators as you do on the products
you buy.

-- dave