Admin Question for the masses

Even though I know the “masses” reading this blog only number in the few dozen a day, I wanted to pose an admin question:

Is there any way to verify whether or not a roaming user in Notes actually uses their roaming capabilities?

We’re down to the point that 75% of the databases on our production servers are roaming databases, and I know for a fact that the vast majority do not use roaming. But I don’t know of any way to figure out exactly which users comprise the minority that need to keep those functions…

Any ideas?

Changing Plans?

As I’m sure most Notes folks are aware, SharePoint just isn’t as mature of a platform as Domino. While it has quite a bit of potential, and you can bend it to your will, accomplishing almost whatever you want (if you toss in a generous helping of C#), it just doesn’t offer the same day-to-day job satisfaction as doing solid development work in a platform on which you have years of expertise.

As one guy who commented a long time ago guessed, I’m just not sure that working in SP matches my long-term goals. I’ve always thought that I should complete my current migration effort, then switch to a new job, or a new role within my current organization. Some recent events at work (not related to SP or Domino) have made me wonder if I should speed up my efforts and just switch.

Purely from a job satisfaction perspective, SharePoint is drudgery. Learning new techniques amounts to a little bit of time reading up on how they are supposed to work, and a lot of time working around the quirks about how it REALLY works.
I’ve been downright thrilled with my recent Domino work on the other hand — I’ve working with apps that have been around for many years, and have become heaps of mangled spaghetti code. Cleaning them up, re-designing to match the current business needs, and converting them to web interfaces… Truly enjoyable work.

It means I haven’t had much to add to this blog recently, I know. There are plenty of people already covering the Notes/Domino world as-is.

I’m sharing these feelings with all of you not because I think it will help you with your own migrations, nor as a ‘fishing’ post to see if anyone wants a consultant for a while, but just as a statement of how your average Notes guy might feel 6 months into a migration. Morale is definitely an issue to worry about on migrations, as frustration levels run high. I know if I were my own manager right now, I’d be worried a lot more about the people on the team than the status of the project.

IIS and Domino

I’ve been quiet lately, I know. The reason for this is that I’ve been concentrating on refactoring Notes apps recently, preparing them for web enablement as they get integrated with SharePoint.

But one issue we haven’t yet resolved is Single sign-on, authenticating our Notes Apps with Active Directory. I know the theory, and I’ve done it before – run IIS on your server, with the WebSphere plug-in, set some stuff on the Domino side, and everything is working. IT usually takes a little trial and error to get it running the first time, but then all is well.

But here is my question – as part of configuring the WebSphere plugin, you give the hostname and port for your Domino server. Normally, Domino folks are putting the plugin on the same box that runs Domino, but…

Has anyone instead put the plugin on their SharePoint server? Will it send the authentication cross-server to a different Domino box? If so, would that then allow us to use the SharePoint domain name to reference our domino apps, and let the server actually process the correct routing of traffic?

I’m guessing no one has tried this yet – but if it does work like that, it could be a very nice solution – we could have Domino apps thrown into our SharePoint site, and the end users would never know or care what the actual platform running behind the scenes is. This would let us maintain our investment in the Domino platform, while still reaping the benefits of a single SharePoint portal for the user interface.

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.

Soliciting Feedback

I’m looking for some answers from the community…

As I mentioned previously, the status of Lotus Notes/Domino is again under discussion. To make an educated, unbiased business decision, we are looking for data on the following questions:

1) Development Effort – In General, how does development time in SharePoint compare to development time in Domino. Assuming skilled talent in both technologies, and non-trivial apps…  does anyone have any real numbers and data comparing the level of effort to write applications on both platforms? Or even any anecdotal data?

2) Maintenance Effort – How does the level of effort compare to maintain SharePoint Applications vs. Notes Applications. (Again, in general). I’m not talking about the infrastructural support for the platform – just the application support. How many developers does it take to support a 500-app Notes platform vs. a 500-app SharePoint platform?

If anyone has any real world experience, and in particular measurable data dressing these issues, please either comment here or contact me directly at migratenotes@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Notes vs. SharePoint Analogy

After a couple days of fighting SharePoint, and spending hours getting small details into just the right place, an image came into my mind.

 Imagine Notes/Domino as a trainyard – while it has a lot of power, and definitely needs some technical knowledge, once you are set up properly, you just need to know which switches to throw to get the results you want. Your ‘train’ smoothly goes in the direction you desire.

Sharepoint is quite similar. Except that instead of a trainyard, your train is sitting in a big open parking lot, and you have lots of monkeys throwing crowbars under its wheels, and you need to see what happens and keep giving the monkeys new directions until you get the result you want.

 SharePoint is fun. Really.