LinOra Corporation Switches From Microsoft Windows to Linux Desktops Using Ximian Evolution

Posted Sep 16, 2002 17:51 UTC (Mon) by rmdirms (guest, #2659) [Link]

The mants go arching ne by one , (to the tune of the song "The Ants Go Marching"). Where is the LotLin (LotusLinux) with Lotus Approach? I wonder if Lotus thinks the Approach GUI is TOO friendly and likely to cannibalize their Notes/Domino potential sales. Hence, since IBM took over Lotus, we see LITTLE to no meaningful "innovations" in Approach, just bug and maintenance fixes for the most part (Approach could use more granular security, such as that found in FileMaker/Pro). Afterall, we cannot have the troops in their cubicles making their own forms, can we? No, that might either compete with or just make more work for less innovative, browser-crazed developers who occasionally have a no-degree, no-developer diletante throw stumbling blocks into their path or inadvertently embarrass them... I was such an "instigator" or "undesirable".

Where I once werked, we used to use Vantive in Customer Support and the RMA area, and after two years or so of using it we all mostly loved it. (Because I left IT and went to C/S, and because I had much user experience and diletane forms-designing with Lotus Approach, I got lucky and was ble to sit in on some Vantive meetings and I submitted some 30-40+ Customization Requests, with about 40% of mine being implemented. Thanks to my exposure to Lotus Approach, I had some convenience and useability suggestions to offer.) Our new parent company wanted to nix it with a vengeance, or maybe the Oracle and Oracle contractor developers team was bent on purging Vantive (a competing product). I was so horrified by the Oracle contractor (the people representing or misrepresenting Oracle) forms I wanted to jump off a roof. How DARE they campaign to remove our working, in-house developed, sensibly-lain out, feed-back accepting as well as data-entry forms and tabbed sections. The contractors making the interface to the Oracle back end didn't even want to give us a tabbed form for us to enter Must Have and Nice-to-have Customization Request sheet. The wretched bean counters don't really know how the Data Entry or Customer Support Rep keystrokes, tabs, or flips through forms when dealing with a Customer call for an RMA or whatever was needed. IN Vantive, our CSR could hear the phone ring, get the Customer to give their ID & support contract number, and be done with an RMA in under 3.5 minutes (if no yak and such occurred), often just around 2 minutes. Yet, the Oracal contractor's forms cost an extra 3 -5 minutes, and jarring introduction to their "forms" with all the separate access forms made some RMA calls take an average of 6-8 minutes. Yes, I realize that ORACLE didn't make these forms. They mostly make the back ends, I gather. I find fault mostly with our corporate leaders who didn't give us troops the support we needed. I fault the developers who stubbornly and heatedly interacted with us and on occasion got into battles (yep, battles. I missed that exciting meeting, but heard ALL about the table pounding, pen-gripping and scathing profanities, BOY I wish I'd been in on THAT, of all, meetings....)

It was ghastly. If you have ANY in-house databases and front ends that are to be changed, DON'T let ANY contractors make radical departures from your visual approach to your Customer Support, manufacturing, or other departmental use of the information. It was so ghastly that I was somewhat pleased that Oracle had tried (probably from other scathing input before our company was hooked/roped by the developers) that Oracle bought a company that had very-Lotus Approach-like interfacing. I forget the name, but it allowed cross tabs and chart creations. It was not browser-based. It was pleasingly more client/server-like. It was MUCH more intuitive. It was a working tool. It would have been cheaper had we seen or used this thing FIRST. (I went to the training course at Park Center Plaze in San Jose back in 2000, and gave them some suggestions about Lotus Approach. Maybe Oracle sould snatch the languishing Lotus division from IBM... Linux-aimed databases NEED front ends/standalones like LOTUS APPROACH, native to Linux. )

Thus, I have the attitude that more developers need to be forced to acknowledge and disclose ANY known competing tools and justify to the prospective new Customer why the Customer should spend so much money on a more expensive, less intuitive, more time-consume process.

As long as these (hopefully a different type of) consultants for the Ora side don't grab the pocketbooks of the Lin side, this might be a very good team-up. If they grab or get greedy, it'll be held up as a failure, and politics as usual will make Linux look incable of accepting the team-up. If that occurs, then just point to PostgresQL and MySQL (for back ends...)

Anyway, those horrible web-based GUIs that forced our employees to do TWICE as much work compared to using our home-brewed database. Yes, some of it was due to "old habits being hard to break", but a LOT had to do with kludgy, UGLY, "a different page for almost every distinct type of product category entry" forms. In other words, some normalization seemed too security/isolation-bent rather than ease of data entry and retrieval. Wose, they did away with our tabbed sections. Things had to be pulled down my menus. No jump buttons were coming anytime soon, and Finance put a lid on customizations. Wretched bean counters need to at LEAST demand the contractors mimic what we HAD (visually) and map it to the new back end in order to quell the troops inclination do demand sensible mimics or changes that the developers ended up labeling as "customizations", yet the work was taking WAYYYY too much time and MILLIONS of MILLIONS of dollars. Yep, a boondoggle. We could probably have cared less about the back end as long as the front end was useful and sensible. Heck, the leak kept our change requests in a paper jounal, when in Vantive, we could just click a "Customization Requests" tab, enter the info, check up on the progress of other C/Rs and give feed back to those we didn't even submit ourselves. (About a year or less after I left the company, I heard they scrapped or disbanded the Oracle project, probably (who knows) because of costs, increasing contractor head count, the dot-bomb meltdown dragging down more established companies (like mine), and general marked slowdowns on orders, especially with some larger firms having outright (downwrong) cancelling orders in progress...)

Maybe this was ok with manufacturing, but the Customer Support side went through pure HELL hopping around in the slow interface, the too-many-forms interface, and the near total rearrangement of data presentation, much of which seeming to be to avoid looking like they could have done the work cheaper if they'd mimicked what we had reather than chew up our floor space with close to 20-30 contractors.

I'm just saying NO company has the money or the time to lose control of the contractors. The contractors are supposed to make the CUSTOMERS' dreams come true, not MAKE dreams for the Customer. Otherwise, the contractors need to be a provider of a product and not claim to be "flexible".

Also, if your developers cause, egg-on, or instigate (via insensitivity or callousness) any animosities that steal productivity and raise the bill and the developer on-site body count/cubicle displacement, then FIRE them or warn them...

Regards,

David Syes

Posted Sep 17, 2002 14:13 UTC (Tue) by ecureuil (subscriber, #3507) [Link]

The press release 'forgets' to say that LinOra is a company specializing in integrating Oracle on Linux. You would certainly expect from a company full of Linux geeks to use Linux on the desktop.