The Domino Chick

Lotus Notes and me, BFF

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Apparently there's a meme going around the Lotus blogs about how we all got started with Notes, so I thought I'd share how I started with Lotus products.

In 1995 I worked as an accountant at Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, which eventually became Conexant. We used Lotus 1-2-3 with a lot of complicated formulas for certain accounting processes, and I quickly became proficient with it. The company was using MS Mail at the time and decided to migrate to Lotus Notes. I was friends with a bunch of the IT guys because I was the geek in my department and helped a lot of the others with their computer problems, so they told me they were looking for groups to do a pilot of Notes. I immediately set out to convince my department manager to let us be the pilot group, and he agreed, as long as I could train everyone to use the new mail program.

I went to some train-the-trainer sessions and taught my department how to use Notes. I helped with their everyday issues (mostly usage differences between the two mail programs) and soon moved on to developing applications for my department's use. I attended a series of onsite classes on Notes application development and realized I wanted to change careers. So, I moved to New York, of course.

After a short stint at another consulting company, during which time I continued to work on Notes development and gained my certification, I went to work for Binary Tree and learned a bunch of stuff during my tenure there. I then moved on to another company who was on 4.x but had sections of the company who were migrating off cc:mail and Notes 3.3.4 on OS/2. I'd only worked with 4.x before that, so working with 3.3.4 while I upgraded them to the latest version was another learning experience. I have worked with Notes, Domino, and related Lotus products ever since.

So, what's your story?

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 10:59:26 PM