BP306 - How to sell Lotus Notes within your organisation and make all those users you new best friend

Mat Newman  January 27 2010 16:00:00

OK, it wasn't my original title, but like most things Mat, the original was a little intense :-)

Let me paint the picture, my first time presenting at Lotusphere...

I went back to the Hotel after lunch on Monday for a last minute run-through and rehearsal, two goes, all good.  Shut down @ 2:00pm in Hotel, walk over to Swan, find coffee and a quiet place, fire-up laptop for one last run through.

Notes wouldn't start.

No problem, I'll just...

Nope.  Almost 20 years playing with Notes, I could get nlnotes (Notes Basic) and Symphony within Notes running separately, but I could not get "Notes Standard" to start.  Devastation.  My presentation relied upon the "full-featured" Notes client, what was I to do?

At 3:35pm, and following some outstanding advice and assistance from IBM'er Chris Wilkes, I gave up trying to fix it.  In the words of Clint Eastwood (Sgt. Highway, Heartbreak Ridge) - "Improvise, Adapt, Overcome!".   Walk into session, explain in my opening that I wasn't able to do the full demo I was intending and ... SHOW TIME!

I needn't have worried, although at the end of my session I was devastated, some reassurance from my colleagues in attendance, and some really positive evaluations (thank-you! Whoever you are) and I was ready to front up for my re-run when it was offered to me on Wednesday afternoon.  I did - however - run right up to "meet the developers" where Ryan Baxter identified after a little investigation that I had a corrupted widget.  That's one for the memory banks.

For those of you who attended, the following resources from my demo include the Outlook database I used in my presentation, along with the slides themselves, remember:

Notes is a DATABASE, Notes is VERY secure, Notes can access information from virtually ANY source, and we USE Notes because....

HOW you introduce Notes to your users, as well as how you RESPOND to the question "why do we use Notes?" are just as important as showing your users the features of the software.



The slides explain the concepts, and the following database always gets some feedback, especially when explained within context of "Notes is a Database"...

Download the Outlook 2007 demo database

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