Pity poor Domino

You don't have to wander very far in the blogosphere before you'll find someone slagging off Domino, aka Lotus Notes.

In the words of blogger Steve Thompson, a self-described Notes enthusiast: "I like having my toenails pulled out more than I like the Notes interface." Microsoft's recent release of Application Analyzer 2006 for Lotus Domino, a tool designed to help businesses work out which Domino applications they can dump, has helped to further stir the pot.

Having worked as a Domino developer and administrator, I'd be the first to admit that it can be a temperamental beast at times, and that it does have a weird interface. But I suspect that one of Domino's big problems is actually that it's a victim of its own success.

Building basic collaborative applications in Domino is very, very easy, and lots of people have done it at departmental level. However, converting those applications into something that can work effectively on a larger scale -- across an entire company or across the Web -- is much harder, especially if the original developers didn't pay attention to the fundamentals of good application development and database design -- well-commented code, carefully planned structures, the usual tedious stuff.

It becomes easy to conclude that Domino sucks, when in fact what sucks is the original project planning. But why blame yourself when you can blame IBM?