I am not Amish…

Earlier this week, Peter Presnell compared Notes/Domino developers who are not embracing Xpages as being Amish.

I don´t agree. Sure, Xpages have been around for about 2 years, but it was not until recently (8.5.2 released back in September) that they were supported in the client and actually useful. I think that most enterprise customers who are using Notes/Domino actually use the Notes client to a large extent. At least my network admin and CIO want to wait about 4-6 months from a release until even thinking about putting it in production. Especially now with the 8.0 and 8.5 code streams, where we seen all kinds of strange bugs. Code that used to work is suddenly not returning the expected information, etc.

 

My company is currently migrating the last few users off Notes 5.0.12 and onto 7.0.2. Yes, you read it right. It was not until about a year ago I was allowed to install Domino Designer 7.0 and start using any new functionality from that version. All our servers are on 7.0.2 now, and we have one 8.5 server, and that only because of Traveller.
I think the plan is to move the servers to 8.5 sometime during the first half of next year, and the users perhaps towards the end of 2011.

So why not install 8.5.2 everywhere? Because the standard machine only got 512 MB memory. Two memory slots, with now two 256 MB memory sticks. And they are not going to upgrade the memory on 400 computers. So what we do is migrating all users to Citrix, and then it will be easy to upgrade and run 8.5. But it won’t happen overnight.
 

All our applications are for the Notes client, so until Notes 8.5.2 is installed everywhere, Xpages is not useful to me (at work). I have enough other things to do at work, I don´t have the time to play with Xpages there. I don´t even have Domino Designer 8.5 installed there.
At home I have the latest version installed, but I have had limited time to play around and learn Xpages. That does not make me "Domish", as Peter calls it. I focus on technologies I currently can use. I will look at Xpages if I have the spare time, but it is not high priority.

 

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