Developers! Developers! Developers!
On two recent Ed Brill posts, I stated my claim that developers were the key to Lotus Notes’ world domination.
I might have even gone so far as recommending that Ed do the “developer dance” patented by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer.
I believe the Notes Designer should be available to every Lotus Notes user. Restrict their access to production/dev servers… but allow end-users to tinker with their applications locally.
My company (typically) does not provide end-users with the designer client but recently (especially with the cost-cutting measures) my group has been quite busy. After listening to the business case for one person to start modifying his group’s application, I convinced my manager to let them get the designer and modify their Notes application locally. When the user is ready, I copy the items from their database and paste them into a test copy in the test environment.
So far I have been amazed with the development skills of the end user. Except for one issue (green/bold form headers) the code looks great. He followed all of the best practices and it was well-tested by the users.
Their application was old (I built it five years ago) and it needed work. Without the extra end-user development they might have looked for a different (non-Lotus Notes) solution. Allowing the end-user to tinker with their own application was a win/win for both teams.
When the Lotus Notes email client was crappy, user development and the benefits of workflow are what made Lotus Notes strong. Why not just return the designer back to the end users and watch productivity (and sales) soar?
There are 8 Comments to "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
I hear ya, Tom.
Typical end users will not be able to work with the new 8.5 Designer client. Heck, average Notes developers will not be able to work with it either.
Isn’t the basic client installed with R8 Standard? Can’t we give them the Developer client to do “basic” applications?
@Tom – good point. I haven’t seen the basic client. Does it include the old Designer IDE? That would be a huge help.
As of 8.5 the only way to access the Designer IDE is through the Standard Client.
Giving all of my end users a Designer client would be a nightmare. However, there are some that I think could build some basic applications with it.
Eek! End user development! Playing with fire there. Letting users build databases is the fastest way to get people building stuff that looks horrible, and probably performs horribly to.. You also end up becoming a QA analyst which is still a drain on your time.
Perhaps as a proto-typing tool ONLY. But I think once you give users access to development you open a pandora’s box as they start to tell you how you should do stuff when or ask you why they shouldn’t be doing something a certain way, or ask you “how do i ….”, and in 90% of cases, they don’t know what competent development is all about. So.. urrrgh! NO!
Agile development requires fairly good developers with diligent practices otherwise you have a mess in no time.
I have seen some execs do this in the past, and you end up wasting alot of time demonstrating the folly of their ways, and also QA’ing their work to make it production safe. Sorry.. I’m a bit of purist for any serious development. And if it’s low risk stuff, it’s probably not worth doing either. So, in the end i can’t see a general justification for allowing users to do any serious development.
PS.. Lurv the Steve Ballmer Monkey dance.. “Developers, Developers, developers!”
I’m not saying end-user development is perfect… but it’s a start.
Lotus Notes jobs were at their highest when the designer was freely available to everyone. If Bob from accounting creates a Notes application instead of his usual spreadsheet… that’s a win for us. So what if we have to support his crap… it’s a job, remember?
To be honest… before I was ever given Visual Basic or Visual Studio… I was an end-user developer because I hit Alt-F11 in Microsoft products. I created some pretty good tools during end-user development.
I used to fear end-user development for the same reason you guys do… but Lotus needs a revival… and I’m not sure the “Eclipse client” is it.
[...] said it before and Neil Wainwright said it again (comment #3) today. Small application development was [...]