As always, I’m enjoying learning new things and seeing old friends (and some new ones!) at MWLUG. There have been sessions that talked about accessing and displaying data from within Notes without using Notes or XPages and sessions about accessing non-Notes data using XPages. Much of the excitement is about having data exposed via a REST service and using a good front end tool to display it. So, in some senses, we are talking about not needing Notes at all.
Earlier this summer, our company’s Vice President of the Office of Information Management and Technology announced that we’re actually moving away from the Notes client for mail. While I knew that this was a possibility, I’d thought we were still just looking at allowing folks to choose other mail applications to access their mail. Of course, allowing multiple mail applications either tosses some of your users to the wolves of ‘no support’ or complicates things immeasurably for support. So, it does make sense and was not particularly unexpected. Nonetheless, it still surprised me.
The core of our Notes use has always applications anyway. Our business relies on a lot of people working disconnected and, as such, the Notes replication model has been key to our need for Notes. So, we’ll be keeping the Notes client on machines for all those people who work disconnected, but much of our access had already moved to the browser. So, in a sense the work I do was moving in this direction as well.
So, the agnosticism is where we’re all going, it seems. I guess the mantra remains — use the best tool for the job.
Lost in Code 