Re: Groove

["Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Ray Ozzie is certainly one of the founding fathers of the corporate
intranet. I worked at several places that used Lotus Notes before, during,
and after the widespread adoption of the WWW. Notes provided me with the
first glimpse of the potential of ubiquitous networking across the
enterprise. And remember, when Notes came out, web-based intranets were not
an option, so Notes really was visionary. Later, when the internet began to
gather steam, I participated in many meetings and evaluations where it was
debated whether to implement an intranet, or continue to use Notes. Usually
the staff was so addicted to Notes the decision was made to use both.

Notes has always been the networking application of choice for non-technical
organizations such as a sales force. The killer app for Notes was Word
documents attached to email messages. Notes always pretended to have
"document management," but really it was all about email attachments.

The turning point came when Notes added email and web gateways to the
Internet. I remember creating a Notes database that subscribed to this list,
and to the old WinHelp list, so everybody could read list messages in Notes.

But eventually the web-based technologies began to dominate, and more and
more resources were available over the web. I came to see Notes as just an
expensive bloated Web browser. But the large corporate Notes networks paved
the way for the techniques and mindset still used today in corporate
intranets.

Mike O.