Wir sind mit den internationalen Versionen einiger Softwareprodukte schon länger in Notes App Store vertreten.

Nun ist YouAtNotes Workflow auch eine "featured app" und hat einige positive Reviews bekommen! Darüber freuen wir uns sehr und bedanken uns bei den Kunden, die uns so gute Bewertungen gegeben haben!
Seht selbst hier im App Store.

I just talked with one of our customers about a migration of the Notes infrastructure to new hardware. During the talk he revealed that he planned to use the new hardware for a migration to Exchange in the first place.

But then he calculated the costs (licenses and manpower) and decided against it. It was simply too expensive.

As much as I liked to hear that, I asked what caused the thoughts about migration. By the way, the customer has Lotus Notes 8 and our notes based CRM software.
His reasons were:

1.) He complained that everytime he has a problem with Notes, he needs a specialist for money. While with Exchange, he can do much on his own. I replied that Exchange has it's problems, too, and that he still will need specialists. He basically agreed but told me, that he administered Exchange himself for some years in another company, and therefore he thinks he can handle some things himself.

2.) His Lotus Notes infrastructure is a mess, he needs to restart his Domino server twice a day and such stuff.

The reason for 2.) is that he has an old hardware running Domino, Blackberry server and several other services. From my point of view, the hardware is simply not capable of doing all those things.
Since we got the job for the migration now, I hope we can improve things a lot to make the customer happy with Notes again.

Bottom lines here:

- people think that administering Exchange is a piece of cake while Domino is complex and "different"
- as we all know, a migration to Exchange costs tons of money and doesn't pay out

We just got three nice reviews from some customers. I'm glad to see the customers are happy with the product :-)

Have a look here at notesappstore.com.

Some years ago, we migrated a german branch of an US based company from OpenExchange to Lotus Notes. They were happy with Notes and therefore implemented a set of applications to cover business critical processes.

Then about a year ago the US mothership ordered them to migrate to Exchange and the apps to Salesforce.

Some days ago we had contact with the CTO of that german branch and he said only one thing about the migration:

"If we only would have been stayed with Lotus Notes!!"

(I hope it's translated correctly from german: "Wären doch wir bloß bei Notes geblieben!!")

So, again, we see that a migration is not that easy and leads to massive costs and business problems. But unfortunately, we all know that this is irrelevant for these kind of descisions :-(
Nevertheless it's nice to hear that we were right, whatever that's worth for.

Einer unserer Kunden ist eine deutsche Niederlassung eines US-amerikanischen Konzerns. Die Mutter in den USA hatte immer schon Exchange, die deutsche Niederlassung (einige hundert Benutzer) wurde durch uns von OpenExchange auf Lotus Notes migriert. Der Kunde hat dann auch noch diverse Anwendungen unter Notes erhalten, mit denen zentrale Prozesse abgebildet wurden.

Vor ca. einem Jahr kam dann die Anweisung aus den USA, von Lotus Notes auf Exchange zu migrieren (damit alles einheitlich ist). Das Projekt wird nicht von uns durchgeführt.
Nach einiger Zeit haben wir nun mal wieder Kontakt mit dem IT-Leiter gehabt. Er hat uns einen schönen Kommentar bezüglich der Migration mitgegeben:

Zitat: "wären wir doch bloß bei Notes geblieben!!"

Also, erwartungsgemäß geht sowas halt nicht "mal eben so" über die Bühne... aber ist natürlich jedem klar, der sich in dem Bereich auskennt. Leider werden solche Entscheidungen halt immer politisch und am grünen Tisch getroffen, und ausbaden müssen es dann andere.

YouAtNotes ServiceCommunicator is international available now.

With this new, pure Xpages based product a company is able to organize its web based customer care or online support with ease, and without investing own ressources.
ServiceCommunicator is a white label solution and provides a company with features like:

• A forum like feedback area with questions, ideas, problem reports and praises.
• A solution database so that customers can search for a solution themselves.
• News and FAQ lists.
• Online manuals for products.
• Community features.
• Search for related content.
• RSS feeds and e-Mail notifications.
• Customizable with themes, colors and images.
• ...and numerous nice features more.

all in one simple to use package which is up and running in minutes. A company does not need a server of its own, ServiceCommunicator is a hosted solution and can be rented on a montly basis.
Or, for shops having a Lotus Domino server in the web, it's available as installable product, too.

In any case, you don't need to be a specialist for the setup: simply go to servicecommunicator.com, register and create a ServiceCommunicator of your own. In only a couple of minutes you get your own ServiceCommunicator, where you can setup your products, content and visual customization.

YouAtNotes is very satisfied with IBM's Xpages technology which makes such a great product possible. If you are an IBMer and want to take ServiceCommunicator as reference, you're welcome.

If you or one of your customers needs to improve their online customer care experience, please check how simple this can be archived using ServiceCommunicator.
And, if there is anything missing, please tell us about it in our support area.

Quote from a xNamepicker user and xpageswiki.com vistor:

"Hi Julian, I downloaded your 1.1a version [of the xNamepicker] yesterday, tried it out & it works wonderfully.  Thank you for putting time & effort into providing such useful tools for the LN community.  I've also gleaned a lot of useful information from your XPages wiki.  There certainly is a lot to learn with XPages." - Judy K.

Judy, thanks for the kind words!

During an online demo for a client from Singapur we stumbled upon some missing translation the XPages demo appliction of the YouAtNotes Workflow demo package.
We fixed that right away and just released an updated demo package.

So if you just downloaded our YouAtNotes Workflow demo and want to check out the XPages demo app, you might be interested to download the updated demo package here.

Due to feedback from the community we re-engineered parts of our xNamepicker control so that it works with Internet Explorer 7, too.
While we were at it, we polished the logic to search for names, too. It's now faster and caches results, so when you search for "Alfred" twice, the second time the result is immediately there.

The new version will be released on OpenNTF in the next couple of days.

If you have a IE7 at hand, please feel free to test the new version here.
Please report bugs and suggestions in our ServiceCommunicator.

We are finalizing the signup process for our new web application. And since we do not support Internet Explorer 6 in that application, users with that ancient browser see this message when they want to signup:

"We are sorry, but you are using Internet Explorer 6, which is a very, very, VERY old browser and does not have the features needed for a modern app like (Name of Application). Please convince your administration that you really need a modern browser like Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Chrome or Opera."

We are aware that there are still many companies using IE 6, and that we may loose some potential customers. But we don't want to invest that much manpower to fix all those bugs related to that piece of history. And we want to join the efforts to reach a Internet Explorer 6 free web.