I have been working with Lotus Notes since R4, not as long as others but longer than some. I spent 12 years working with commercial customers for big blue and am now working for a software company which specializes in managing your Lotus Notes desktops as well as upgrading them from one version to another.
An issue that I see consistently come up is that the Notes Engineering team does not have control over the Notes client and that the Desktop team holds that responsibility. When companies make these decisions they in effect tie the hands of the experts that they pay to manage their Lotus Notes infrastructure. I am not demeaning the value of your Desktop team, they are a crucial part of your IT Engineering team, however they have a very broad focus and are not the experts when it comes to Lotus Notes.
The business I am in today is supporting Cooperteam products. With Desktop Manager you can audit not only the Notes clients in your environment but also the machines they run on. You can use Desktop Manager to make corrections on the fly or create profiles to configure and enforce settings and preferences on your client machines. With Desktop Upgrader you can upgrade your Lotus Notes clients from one version to another with minimal impact to your end user and complete control from a central database.
Often times when I am speaking with customers there is confusion in figuring out who the key players are when it comes to testing our tools or making a decision on whether to test or purchase the products. What I see from time to time is that the Domino Engineering team will try to engage the Desktop team in order to make these decisions. I agree that in most cases it's the Desktop team who installs and in some cases upgrades the Notes client on the end user machines. But is the Desktop team the best team to make the decisions on how to configure the Notes client? Would the Domino Engineer who has worked with Lotus Notes for years not be the best resource within an organization to make those decisions?
Installing the Notes client on a machine could definitely fall into the realm of the Desktop team but in my humble opinion there are decisions about configuration that should be made by the team that is responsible for the Domino infrastructure overall. After all is said and done when the user calls the Helpdesk and a ticket is assigned to a support team which team is going to get that ticket? Is the Desktop team going to take the time to ensure that the Notes client is configured to run efficiently for the end user? Is the Desktop team going to ensure that the correct icons are loaded on the workspace, that the user has created a local mail replica and replication is setup correctly?
The point I am trying to make is that the Domino Engineering team knows what applications exist in the environment, they know what common issues an end user encounters. This is the team that is aware of the new client versions coming out and what preferences can be set to make the Notes client more efficient and in turn the end user more efficient. I agree that the Desktop team has an important role, they support the actual machine that the user has in front of them. A Domino Administrator is not going to tell the Desktop team how to configure Windows or how to setup the paging file because that is not their area of expertise. That being said, why don't companies let the Domino experts that they pay manage the setup and configuration of their Lotus Notes clients?
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Huey
