40,000 applications can´t be wrong

November 22 2005

A recent case study on ibm.com just crossed my desk...

The environment is so valuable that today DaimlerChrysler deploys 40,000 Lotus Notes and Domino applications spread over nearly every aspect of its operations. These range from standardized applications such as group discussion databases and document libraries to custom-developed applications covering complex business processes such as change management, quality control and technical specifications.

For competitive reasons, DaimlerChrysler generally refrains from discussing specific processes and return on investment figures, but executives report that many of the applications are "intensively used and a huge success."
40,000 users -- 40,000 applications.  The ROI of being able to deploy one product to tackle messaging, sharing, and workflow is clearly how DaimlerChrysler benefits from Notes/Domino today.

Link: ibm.com: A standardized, global system for communication and collaboration helps DaimlerChrysler compete >

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [17]

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  1. 1  Wild Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 11/22/2005 11:24:08 AM

    I've worked for two large domino customers in the last three years, who both had over 18,000 active domino applications. In one case, almost one app per mail account, in the other case 1 app per five users... The Big account I used to work at is far more tightly managed, yet still has tends of thousands (a 1:2 ratio).

    You see, this is where MS misses the point somewhat. Its an application infrastructure. And when/if one of theirs gets to the richness of notes, they might actually be able to compete on a level playing field.

    But I cant envisage someone buying into an MS application infrastructure for a long-term bet, given their "rip and replace" attitude, and their lack of bug fixes..

    In fact, I'd go as far as to say that if a medium to large company needs an application infrastrcuture - they have to go J2EE (Portal, etc) or Domino.

    ---* Bill

  1. 2  Peter de Haas http://www.peterdehaas.com | 11/22/2005 11:44:40 AM

    I am truely missing the point. 40.000 applications how can that be good news to any company ?

  1. 3  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 11/22/2005 11:54:20 AM

    Peter, count the number of spreadsheets on your machine and multiply by the number of employees in your company. How big is that number?

  1. 4  Tony S Lee  | 11/22/2005 12:52:57 PM

    @3 : Vowe - LOL!!

  1. 5  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 11/22/2005 1:09:52 PM

    Tony, I do not mean this as a joke. This is a very serious question.

    Excel is used in many companies, including those who have Notes, as a data collection tool. Aggregation of that data is often manual labor. Microsoft is trying to overcome this problem with Sharepoint lists.

    There are also interesting solutions like the Worksheet server, developed by German company Jedox { Link } . This is an application type that can easily be done with Notes and often accounts for many of those "40.000" applications.

    I have already suggested to IBM management to either build a Worksheet server or to work with Jedox to build one. This should be <i>very</i> easy with Workplace actually, now that IBM has opened up to PHP.

  1. 6  Peter de Haas http://www.peterdehaas.com | 11/22/2005 1:31:35 PM

    Volker, your right.

    There's also an Excel server coming in O12

    Don't think however Excel spreadsheets in a Sharepoint list are the same as Notes Applications ...

  1. 7  Tim Brown  | 11/22/2005 2:12:14 PM

    Isn't Chrysler the company who claimed $1B in savings back in the Denis Leary Domino commercial days (with a Notes-based supplier system)?

  1. 8  Chris Whisonant http://cwhisonant.blogspot.com | 11/22/2005 2:32:58 PM

    @5 - You make a great point. We're trying to move a lot of our Excel/Access shared files over to Notes applications. We see that a LOT here at my company. We're constantly working on "little" projects converting what one workgroup does in Excel over to Notes. It's generally pretty simple. We've even converted some 3rd-Party apps that use Access as a backend over to fairly robust Notes apps and have been able to import most, if not all, of the existing data! Tweak the ACL some and you have great working applications that are very secure and accessible anywhere. Talk about productivity...

  1. 9  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 11/22/2005 2:34:14 PM

    Peter, I know that Excel sheets IN a Sharepoint list are not the same as Notes apps. I am talking about Sharepoint lists INSTEAD of spreadsheets.

    What did you say, how high was that number (# of XLS) * (# of employees)?

  1. 10  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 11/22/2005 2:35:52 PM

    @7 - yes.

  1. 11  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 11/22/2005 5:42:24 PM

    On spreadsheets and applications...

    Sometimes, spreadsheets are just part of a solution that shouldn't be there. The idea of a list server only goes so far... Here's a case in point that I'll be working on next week (time permitting).

    My organisation has inspectors out in the field, working remotely and independently. They dial up once a week, if we're lucky. And they complain about the time mail takes to transfer when they do dial up.

    In the office, their support staff are using Excel as a business solution for logging & tracking physical correspondence (letters).

    What's actually happening here 90% of the time is this:

    A letter arrives, which a member of our field staff may need to see. All letters are logged in the Excel spreadsheet for this month, and their status updated manually.

    This is less than perfect - only one person can update it at a time, and each month's spreadsheet (with one sheet per day, and a specific format) must be created manually - taking an hour or so of someone's time.

    If it meets certain criteria, they take the letter to a very expensive intelligent photocopier, which can also scan and email documents. They email it to the remote worker from there.

    This is why the remote workers' mail takes ages to replicate, of course - lots of large PDFs in their email. Worse, the remote workers are almost always over quota, because they forget about these large documents after a while and they linger in their mail Dbs.

    The solution? Don't use Excel and a scanner as a solution, of course!

    I'm probably going to let them continue to scan & email, because that part is at least convenient. But the mail will go into a mail-in database, where the office support staff can then transfer it into a small application.

    That small application records all the correspondence, and will assign readers fields to them as it does it - partly for security, partly to ensure low replication times for the remote staff. The office staff will have a role which allows them to see everything, the remote staff will lack that role. Perfect for my needs as it means that remote workers only transfer what's relevant to them.

    As well as tracking, we can now have an agent which asks them to confirm they still need that letter/file that was transferred. That mail will probably go out every month or so. If you don't mark the transferred item as active, it'll get automatically archived, and then deleted after a while in the archive section. That's to keep the size of the Db down on both the server and the remote worker's laptops, and therefore increase performance.

    (The archiving operation is just a field toggle which moves it to different views, so with field-level replication it has a very low impact anyway. A dedicated archive Db would just complicate things...)

    This solution isn't too difficult to arrange in Notes. I'm sure half the readers of this comment have probably already got a list of fieldnames in their head, and are thinking of how they can do this themselves.

    And since deciding to do this, at least one other department has expressed interest in a variant of the same solution. So that'll be two apps, potentially. And only two departments even know it's planned - not a single byte of template has been created for this yet. I stopped talking about it to people, because I figured anyone I talk to about it will just get expectations that I might not be able to meet given the time I have available to me for this first version...

    So this solution could snowball. Heck, if I was dealing with over 350,000 employees worldwide (like DaimlerChrysler), I reckon I'd be lucky to keep the variants of this one solution down to just four of five - people always want a "small change" that will suit their work practices better.

    Spreadsheets and simple list servers don't make good solutions. And good solutions tend to get co-opted to subtly different uses, many of them eventually becoming an application in its own right. So I think 40,000 is perfectly believable, and may even represent remarkable restraint and control in a company which truly USES Lotus Notes.

  1. 12  Ed Fisher  | 11/22/2005 11:22:33 PM

    @5 : Vowe - LOL!!

  1. 13  Axel  | 11/23/2005 4:28:44 AM

    Lets not forget: with the new open-every-office format as a publicly accesible and even will-be-ecma-standardized .xsd (xml schema, not dtd used by dxl) approach by Microsoft, even Excel files become much more accesible for programming from every xml enabled platform.

    Even so, Excel isn't very promising component for integrated solution.

    Nevertheless instead of wasting the time with Excel bashing, IBM/Lotus should strive for catching up MS-Office in issue of making their xml representation of Domino elements a fully (100%) reliable representation of Notes Data especially the fonky RichText stuff like tables and the like.

    thanks

    Axel

  1. 14  Nathan T. Freeman  | 11/23/2005 8:36:10 AM

    "will-be-ecma-standardized .xsd (xml schema, not dtd used by dxl)"

    I've got to get around to writing a GreaseMonkey script to erase your constant misinformation. Notes 7 has been shipping with .xsd files since the early betas.

    IBM Westford has publically solicited direction from interested customers on the next priorities for the DXL team. Full round-trip fidelity was high on several lists, and is taken seriously by that team.

    I cannot possibly imagine how you think IBM customers talking about Excel would have any slow-down on their efforts whatsoever.

    Your welcome

    Nathan

  1. 15  Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net | 11/23/2005 8:49:58 AM

    Ed - Slight correction:

    40,000 applications, 400,000 staff of which there are 200,000 white collar workers using Notes.

    So, 40,000 apps, 200,000 users.

  1. 16  vowe http://vowe.net | 11/23/2005 9:35:52 AM

    Nathan, it's best to ignore trolls.

  1. 17  Axel Janssen  | 11/25/2005 9:50:19 AM

    @16: just because s.o. has a different pov as you doesn't qualify him to call him a "troll".

    I am certainly not.

    Thanks Nathan for the information.

    A lot of people does not know about the round trip fidelity issues around dxl.

    For me its an important information that ibm appears to be working on it.

    And attacking personally just isn't fair.

    kind regards

    Axel