Understanding client frustration

Seeing as there was a little MS bashing going on recently I thought I'd add my thoughts on reasons for Lotus bad PR, apart from the obvious and usual reasons we see time and time again, this is my take on it.........

Training....training.....training.....

The average John Doe at the desktop knows nothing about streaming replication or UNID's, and I suspect doesn't want to either ! Ever since I started with Notes some 10 years ago there has always been the constant MS v Lotus battle, at every level.

From a "users" perspective things have improved massively, but we still need to hit this at the right angles, I see this as being three fold; Business, Technical, User. Although I think IBM does the right things in many areas, we as a community need to understand the end user more, take it right back to basics, now we have something that we can show them and say "hey, looks pretty good right?". Impress on them what functions equal what benefits and also the cool stuff too.

End user training has always been an issue, normally getting buy in from them themselves and also good old cash....But, if the resources are in-house then why not use them, internal Notes people should be taking the bull by the horns and pushing the product themselves, providing the training internally and at no cost to the business apart from a few hours lost time for end users in training sessions.

This all adds to the perception in the user community, positive things will happen but it needs to come from the right place, we can't keep pushing from only one side and wonder why things aren't still going our way.

Don't get me wrong, I really think things are great right now, but we could all make a little more effort to impress on the users themselves, and in-turn start the "good" mouthing within the end user community, I've heard far too many users say they hate Notes, drives me nuts but I can see where they are coming from (on the rare occasion), they simply don't know what they have and what they can do with it.

Now really is the time to focus on this, with ND8 (and 8.5 coming soon), users will be impressed, I just hope not all of them have scars that they have pretty much created themselves that will never heal. Stupid really, but I don't want to be the Beta Max, or do I?