Migration Tools & Recent Lotus Blog Posts

I have two items that seem significant enough to be worth another post:

1) Migration Tools — I stated in my last post that I was going to work on some migration tools. I designed what I thought a nice quite of tools would be , but then something interesting happened. I had reason to go look at the tools created by Binary Tree, which I had never actually researched until now.  I have not actually used the tools, but I have read the descriptions on the tools on their web site. It sounds like their tools are a very close match to what I would have designed. This, along with some conversations with people in the community, makes me question whether it is worth doing anything on my own.  If the tools already exist, I’m not sure I am doing the community any favors by making new versions, for which I would not be able to dedicate the same level of effort as they already have done.

2) Some recent “Goodbye, Lotus…” blog posts.

I’ve recently noticed a few “Goodbye” posts. And I want to make something very clear – just because someone starts work on Microsoft platforms (Or Google Apps, or whatever), that does NOT mean that your connection to the Lotus world ends.  I admit that I will now sometimes go a few weeks without reading Lotus-related blogs.  But I still do care about it.  I still put 15 years into my career as a Notes guy, and even in the SharePoint world, it gives me a different perspective that allows me to design apps better than someone who has only ever tasted the Microsoft Kool-Aid.

Some of the comments and posts I have seen have acted like moving to SharePoint is the equivalent of a bad break-up — time to move on,  embrace the new direction, and never look back. I think that attitude does a dis-service to both the individuals who think that way, and the community as a whole.

What has made the Notes community an interesting place is the people, the attitudes, and the differing perspectives from which we all come. It seems like few of us came from “traditional” programming backgrounds. Many of us learned on our own, and due to the nature of Notes, we often learned good practices in software design before we ever learned good practices in programming.  This makes us unique in the IT world, as most other folk learned ‘good’ code first, then later learned how to apply that to good software designs. This difference in our perspectives can make us valuable software professionals under any platform. So I suggest that we all embrace this.  No matter what underlying technology we end up working with, embrace what we have learned, and design good apps. If we do that, we may even dare to dream that someday we can make new platforms into the same positive, efficient and effective platform that we all know Notes can be.

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