Wednesday 21 January 2009

How cool is that?***

You may or may not know that I am the world's biggest fan of Lotus Notes* -- the world's most efficient and bestest email client. I am also the world's biggest fan of SAP** -- the world's most efficient and bestest business software. So imagine my delight when I read this:

IBM kicked off its annual Lotusphere event dedicated to its Lotus Notes and Domino groupware and collaboration environment this weekend, having already launched Notes and Domino 8.5 at the recent Macworld.

First up at the Orlando, Florida, event was a peanut butter-and-chocolate combination of the Notes and Domino groupware software from IBM with mySAP Business Suite, SAP's flagship business-applications suite.

IBM said the resulting code, called Alloy, is the first jointly developed program created by the two companies.

Rather than use the application screens that come by default with Business Suite, the Alloy add-on deploys the SAP screens inside of Lotus Notes and makes use of the collaboration features in Domino. That means, for instance, executives don't have to learn two systems - one for getting data about the business and one for collaborating with employees.

Domino, being an application development and runtime environment in its own right, has its own workflow software, but Alloy makes use of workflow, reporting, and analytic modules inside Business Suite, which can then be customized with Notes and Domino or the SAP development tools.


All I can say to this is "w00t!".

* This might be a lie.
** This too.
*** Not at fucking all.

9 comments:

RobW said...

Lotus Notes is pure evil.

Hacked Off said...

SAP, like all such systems, depends how well it is set up and installed and run.

I have seen both good and bad implementations, with the inevitable results.

The Penguin

DavidNcl said...

Notes makes Exchange seem good, it's that bad.

John Pickworth said...

No idea what you're talking about Obo... but if it comes with airbags and automatic transmission, I'd buy it.

;-)

Anonymous said...

Notes is a fairly good email system, but I have to say the Outlook mail client beats the Notes client hands down.

And with the most recent versions of Exchange (2003 and 2007), I am not even sure the Notes backend is all that great for mail. Notes servers are seriously spooky things...

otoh it's a fantastic development environment for the things it's good at (workflow, document collections). Linking it up with SAP might just give you the best of both worlds. One thing you can be absolutely sure of is that it will be expensive.

In a former life we used to say that SAP stood for "Sucks up All your Profits".

Happily I am now working in a company that's too small even to consider SAP (only about £700m turnover last year - not in the league, thank God).

Anonymous said...

I'd rather pull a rusty blade up my cock and out of my arse, than use either. In the last company I worked for they deployed SAP so people wouldn't bother claiming their expenses so as to avoid the utter travesty that SAP is. It worked. As for Notes, it's the most idiot misdeployment of a database there has ever been.

Angry Steve said...

It's not called Bloatus Goats for nothing.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Gates, Notes is not exactly a database.

They call their collections of unstructured documents "databases", but it's a total misnomer really.

Try connecting to a Notes "database" using odbc and you'll see what I mean.

Anonymous said...

Jesus Christ Obo you fucking cock sniffer. We have to use SAP at work and frankly it's the bigget pile of fucking junk I have ever had the misfortune to use.

Cobbled together by a room full of fucking retarded monkeys by the looks of our implementation of it.