Re: Office Vision

On 03/10/99 07:41:40 PM Pat Barber  wrote:

>Buck Calabro/commsoft wrote:
>
>> We're using Notes here right now, and I love it.  Most of us are using 
it
>> only for email
>
>All the rags seem to rave on and on about this product, but I don't
>get a clear reading from all the raving....

You have a very legitimate question: nobody can explain what Notes does, 
because it doesn't *do* much of anything besides provide replication and a 
document-centric paradigm.  Gibberish, isn't it?  :-)

What I love Notes for is that I have a shared document database that 
contains the travails of my ongoing development/installation projects.  I 
have it set up so that it's multi-threaded (like a newsgroup, with 
Topic/response links).  Each response document is a different format.  Some 
are plain text (Heading: Timeline, Text: Get hardware ordered by 1 Apr 99); 
some are tables (Heading: Current development stages: Contents: table 
describing the customer and the dates that various milestones were 
reached); some are links to email notes to/from the customers; some are 
documentation/setup notes; some are a combination of all the above!

When my documentation folks need to find out about my latest changes, they 
can pull up the database (while I'm in it!) and check.  They can modify it 
(I gave them system permission to modify) and add notes/questions/points to 
be clarified.  When they do, I get an email telling me that they've been in 
there.  When I respond to their embedded notes/questions, I can directly 
modify the part they're asking about and provide a hot link so they can go 
right there and see if I'm making any sense (I rarely do...)  This provides 
me with a running history of my projects: every question, every answer in 
an easy to search database.  I can easily combine any data (and data type) 
I want into a single "document."

Email is tightly integrated with the document database, so I can email 
links to a database where they can click on the link and open the document. 
 This differs from sending a Word document to a dozen people to review, in 
that all dozen people will make their own notes that you will have to 
somehow collate and integrate.  Notes uses one document, so everybody's 
notes get collated by the system, not by you.  This is one of the functions 
of the replicator: to merge documents across the network and keep all 
copies in sync.  I keep one copy on my PC (for those times when the network 
is down) and when the network comes back up, Notes automatically replicates 
my changes to the server.

The main thing about Notes is that you get to really work together as a 
team: you don't have to do lots of mechanical steps or enforced access 
rules to keep everybody in sync.  You *could* insist that a Word document 
be left on the server, but then only one person at a time could update it. 
In addition, you can't easily manipulate the different types of documents 
in Word.  The Microsoft Business Suite (or whatever they call it) sort of 
allows multiple documents to be cobbled together as a "project", but try to 
search something across those multiple documents!  OLE has a long way to go 
before it catches up with the Notes replicator!

I am not an experienced Notes user; I've only been on Notes about 8 months. 
 It is truly an enabler.  The Notes technology basically gets out of your 
way: Have you installed Word 97 yet?  Are your Word 95 users able to read 
your documents?  With the MS stuff, you really have to be aware of the 
technology and fit your life into the way it works. 

Notes doesn't come without a price: if you want to develop real cool 
applications for end-users you should get a Notes book or some training, 
but it's rather remarkable what I've been able to do with the online help 
and a little tinkering!

Buck Calabro
Billing Concepts Inc (formerly CommSoft), Albany, NY
mailto:mcalabro@commsoft.net
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