ZDNet: Old meets new: Lotus Domino and Atlassian
August 19 2007
Dennis Howlett talked with Alek Lotoczkko of NYK Logistics & Megacarrier, and learned that they have been been using Ben Poole's DominoWiki application...
With no budget to improve things, Alek cast around for an open source solution. He discovered Ben Poole's OpenNTF DominoWiki. I was skeptical about this because my experience is that anything connected with Domino is tough work. Not so according to Alek who said in conversation with me: "You're right that developing in Domino can be hard work but DominoWiki was something of a revelation. Ben Poole has done a terrific job making this simple. It was really easy to implement and intuitive right from the get go."Ultimately, NYK has implemented Atlassian's commercial wiki software, but the availability of a wiki for Domino kicked it all off. Alek explains the transition further in this post, which was prompted in part by my "why move?" question on Ben Poole's posting. The result is still positive -- some of the conclusions which Howlett reports are:
That was in January, 2007. By June, still with no budget and little more than word of mouth, intranet wiki contributors had climbed to 117.
# Open source can open the door to commercial solutionsCongratulations, Ben, on the great coverage.
# Cross functional cooperation between IT and comms staff are ensuring the project takes off
# There is no requirement to ditch incumbent applications that continue to deliver value
Link: ZDNet: Old meets new: Lotus Domino and Atlassian >
Post a Comment
- 2
Stuart McIntyre http://lotusconnectionsblog.com | 8/19/2007 11:31:56 PM
Wow, thats a great article. NYK were a customer of ours in a previous job and use Domino extensively including lots of bespoke web apps.
Well done to Alek for getting the DominoWiki app into the press, this kind of article/post is so useful in changing opinions about the Notes&Domino platform...
- 3
Dennis Howlett http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett | 8/20/2007 3:46:21 AM
I wrote that piece because Alek has a compelling story that was worth putting into the public domain. Not all hacks are looking for the negative - well, not all the time that is ;)
- 4
Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 8/20/2007 6:31:30 AM
@3 - LOL. A welcome change!
Congrats to Ben.
Even if you don't deploy it in production, DominoWiki is a great (and REALLY quick) way to introduce wiki to an audience and sharpen the spec for a production platform on Domino or elsewhere. The same is true of the various blog templates and domBulletin.
That said, DominoWiki's a fine database (especially with the TinyMCE add-in) and it's been a big help to me - for a lot of situations it may be all you need, especially if you dig into the CSS to tweak the layout a bit.