The long version
How did I get into Lotus Notes?
My very first real job was with a hardware manufacturer. You may or may not remember the creative PCs designed and built by Tandon in their best times. Remember the DataPac or the MCS desktop machine with exchangeable Processor boards covering everything from 386sx to 486DX2. I was working in their European HQ for the support department. The department did tech support for subsidiaries in about 7 European countries and about 20 distributors in (especially eastern) Europe and the Middle East. My job was to work with the hardware and BIOS developers in the US to develop and maintain a product support knowledgebase for our european subs. Our database had information on BIOS updates, recommended and required hardware reworks (lots of interesting soldering going on here), and anything else that would be useful for folks working in the field and facing real problems.
Our tool for the job was a product called TextBase. Basically, you fed it a marked up text file and it would produce separate "documents" and a full text index. If you remember Novell's help system for Netware - that was powered by TextBase. We would send our subs update text files via e-mail every week or two, sometimes almost daily. They would import the text file into their local copy of the database and, voila, replication. Well, almost. There were ways to add and remove documents from the database, but we sent out full copies of the database periodically since many local copies got out of sync eventually. These updates were later sent out on optical disks. Via FedEx.
Later on I also inherited the administration of the european mail hub. We ran the DOS version of cc:Mail, our own post office eventually grew to around 150 users, and our two mail routers acted as european mail hub and linking Europe to the Tandon HQ in Moorpark, CA. The monthly phone bill for the two modem lines was usually around $4.000 (in 1992 dollars).
It would have been absolutely fantastic to have Notes as a platform for our Field Support Database, as it was called. Actually, towards the end of my life at Tandon, Notes became available, but Lotus still had the strange policy of only selling in packages of 200 users for $60K Way too expensive for us. We would have needed about 60 licenses. Apparently, it seems that it would have been possible to buy only a part of one such license package from a re-seller, but that information was not available to the powers-that-were at Tandon at the time.
Eventually, in 1993, the last parts of Tandon in Europe had finally died and I was looking for a job. I found an ad in the paper from a company looking for somebody to do Notes admin and development. During the interview, I made it clear to my soon-to-be boss that I had not worked with Notes but had read a lot about it and would learn as I go. Got the job, started working with Notes in November of 1993.
My first two years with Notes
The new company was a small software company owned by one of Germany's larger hardware and consulting shops. They did a lot of Notes roll-outs and Notes application development and I quickly learned the ropes. Of course, that was a lot easier back on version 3. And we quickly knew about Wilfredo Lorenzo's sum formula and ways to make two agents call each other to build a simple loop. My boss was also responsible for selling Notes services to their customers. In a way, he was amazing. From another POV, he was your typical sales guy selling you the world and letting others worry about how to deliver. There was quite a few, let's call them incidents, when he'd be out visiting a customer and before he was back in the office the customer would call us and say "Hi! Erich was just here and told us that you guys have a Notes application ready-to-go to do something-or-other. About 10 minutes later he'd come running into the office saying, "Guys, we need to build this-application to do something-or-other. Fast!"
The hardware and services market was somewhat crazy back then and companies sometimes behaved strangely towards their employees. Unfortunately, ugly stuff eventually transpired both here and at the next employer who was in the same business. What exactly happened is not really something to be disclosed here, but if you meet me at ILUG or Lotusphere or via e-mail, just ask. Both stories are actually rather funny now.
After the second bad experience with an employer in the Notes business and having a long-term gig with a client already lined up, I quit and went freelance.
The last 12 years
January 1, 1996 was my first day of the freelance life. Since then, I have found myself building, re-designing, splitting, merging, security-optimizing or otherwise working on Lotus Notes domains between, literally, 2 and 130.000 users. Most have been in the 1.000 - 5.000 user range. Development projects started outThere have been many very interesting customers and projects. One was with a somewhat unique financial institution. Very interesting. I eventually learned a really important policy in place there. It went like "When procuring a Notes add-on product, we will always choose the most complex and expensive option, even if it does not work right. If it does, we will customize and install it our-own-way until we've made sure that it doesn't."
The most challenging project in terms of security requirements was one where very unique questions were raised and answered in the process. Turns out that you can do quite a bit in terms of security using out-of-the-box thinking, top-notch add-on products, a couple of open source firewalls, and seemingly absurd hardware recipes (think Lowe's or Home Depot here, not IBM, HP or Dell).
Obviously, work in an environment supporting well over 100.000 Notes users can be fascinating in many, many ways. If you haven't worked for a truly world-wide organization, you probably still think that night time is when heavy maintenance stuff can be done on a server. Think that issue over when users in the USA or China start complaining about server performance when maintenance is running. The bad news is: There is no night time for your application anymore. Deal with it ;-) All of a sudden, there is not one or two or five Notes domains, there are a larger two-digit number of domains. Makes user and group management much more interesting than at smaller shops.
- to be continued -