The Whole Lotus Enchilada

We currently run Lotus Notes/Domino, Sametime and Quickplace in our environment.  We do not run Websphere, but we don’t have any other portal software either.  We are in the middle of a project to switch our email to Outlook/Exchange.  We have been told that “as long as we have workflow, we’ll have Notes/Domino” (with the implication that we’ll always have the product).  OTOH, Quickplace (soon to be Quickr) has been under pressure both from Sharepoint and E-Room, and there are rumours that we are going to be moving from Sametime to the Microsoft instant messenger product.

Here is my question:  from a developer perspective, how much should I worry about losing Sametime from the product lineup?  I’ve done some Quickplace work, so I worry a bit about losing that.  If I thought Microsoft had a viable workflow option for Notes, I would also be worried about that.  But while I know that Sametime is (particularly now) an extensible platform, the fact is that I (and my fellow developers) don’t do any Sametime development.  Part of me says that it is just a tool that happens to be from Lotus (like our document managment system is just a tool that happens to be from Interwoven).  Another part of me says that anytime Lotus is removed from our environment that my job as it currently stands is one step closer to vanishing.  I have every reason to believe my company would retrain me, but that is beside the point I’m wondering about.

So, what do any of you think?  In my situation, would you consider the loss of Sametime to be a threat?

Quickplace Capacity Question

I’ve had a project request about using Quickplace to store about 100 GB of data.  Has anyone used QP to store and access this much data?  I’m assuming that we’ll be able to design the structure with plenty of rooms/sub rooms to spread the data among several NSFs, but I’m wondering how the server will handle it.  We have not yet updated to QP 7.0…

So, any thoughts?

Writing to the Document Universal ID

This isn’t so much a “show-n-tell” as a description of how a feature can be used.

To me, one of the more curious aspects of the NotesDocument object is the fact that the UniversalID field is read/write. For a long time I wondered why anyone would want to write to the unique identifier. It seemed incredibly dangerous! If you weren’t careful, you could end up with duplicate IDs, and that could play all sorts of havoc. I was really shocked that Lotus had left that property writeable.

Then, one day, one of the users of a client-facing Quickplace deleted the welcome page. As you know, domino databases can generate fairly ugly URLs that include the document uniqueID. This QP was no exception, and numerous users (both internal and at the client site) had saved the site as a favorite. All of a sudden, their favorites stopped working.

You can see where this is going. I was able to get the URL that some users had saved, recreated the welcome page, and then ran an agent to give it the same universalID that the former page had. Our problem went away.

And I was very glad that Lotus had made that property writeable.