I made a SAP killer in lotus Notes. Ok maybe not exactly, but at IBM the choice was to wait for SAP to come in and do the project management with that, or have me (intern) port existing non Y2K compliant green screen project management program to Lotus Notes. It wouldn’t be as feature rich as SAP but it would do what was needed.
Because I cost many orders of magnitude less and my Boss kinda figured rightly the SAP project would be really late, they ended up with my database application which the users liked because I added features to make their lives easier.
Custom tailored apps really can be an amazing thing. I wonder why more companies never really got on board with the Notes/FileMaker databases. My lab currently has a pretty custom management system that tracks everything, prints labels and just really is a force multiplier.
A huge number of companies developed custom internal Lotus Notes (IBM Domino) applications. It just wasn't widely publicized.
Notes was great for quick and dirty workflow applications. You could literally build and deploy some simple functionality in minutes. But it also made certain more advanced features effectively impossible to build at all; it just wasn't a general purpose platform. And the fact that source code was locked up inside binary files created huge obstacles to working in larger teams.
Because I cost many orders of magnitude less and my Boss kinda figured rightly the SAP project would be really late, they ended up with my database application which the users liked because I added features to make their lives easier.
Custom tailored apps really can be an amazing thing. I wonder why more companies never really got on board with the Notes/FileMaker databases. My lab currently has a pretty custom management system that tracks everything, prints labels and just really is a force multiplier.