Getting Started With Notes

A number of bloggers have recently written their stories of how they got started with Notes. I didn’t read them all, but the ones I did read share a common thread, and it is a thread that is applicable to the reasons people are migrating to SharePoint.

Every Notes person I know has been doing it for many, many, many years. I was in a room with about 50 Notes folks on morning, and the presenter asked every who had more than 10 years experience with Notes to raise their hands.
Everyone had a hand raised.

We are an “old” pool of talent. We are highly skilled, but expensive. Young developers don’t usually gravitate to Notes. I say “usually” because there certainly are younger, hipper, people who do Notes work. But they don’t seem to stick with it, and they don’t seem to become the die-hard evangelists that the online community presents.

So its great that we have this well-developed talent. My last few years of work have been with wonderful teams, where any member of the team could have led the team, managed the projects, etc. It made for great working relationships, and we put out great work. I think those teams were worth every penny the customers paid.

But that is exactly the issue – without young, inexperienced, cheap talent… the hiring process for Notes folks tend to be unfriendly to budgets.

So what’s my story?

I started as an end user of Notes, when I got a job at IBM research doing desktop support in… must have been 1994.  That job was just a temp contract, so I moved on to an analyst firm, where I did Notes admin for a while. sending their research to customers via Notes replication. (via modems to 300 servers. Ouch.)

Again, that was a short term job, but I then moved to a hospital that was converting from green screen apps to Windows-based apps, and I was able to build up a small Notes environment to track the hardware assets, projects, and helpdesk work.

I then moved back to IBM, helping them roll out Notes internally, and becoming a development team lead for one division. That led to senior develop positions in startup companies for many years, until I got back into the corporate world, being asked to help remove the platform.

The on consistent pattern through all my career has been one of underlying changes in technology platforms. I’ve (almost) always been either build a Notes platform, or removing one.  It is a technology that enables change on a very fundamental level.