Friday, March 03, 2006

 

Introduction

I am a Notes/Domino engineer in Japan. I sometimes had a chance to feel the cultural difference for using Notes/Domino between Japan and other areas, and happened to create this blog to show the current Japanese technical trends for Notes/Domino.
Entries might include Notes/Domino Administration, System design, Web application development, and etc. I would also like to introduce some of the Japanese something which is not related to Notes/Domino.

Comments:
I did not realize Lotus Notes/Domino was big in Japan. Are a lot of big companies running it? What is the ratio of Domino vs. Exchange? Which build is the most common? A lot of applications or mostly used for mail?
 
@andreas
I'm not a marketing person, but it's quite sure that Japan is a very big market for Lotus Notes/Domino. As far as I know, almost all the huge companies are using Notes/Domino in some way.

I don't know about the ratio of Domino vs Exchange, but Domino is still quite a major groupware and will be.
In Japan, cybozu is also a big competitor.

Most of the Japanese companies are famous for its carefulness. They usually try to have a very carefull migration path, and it's still common to use R5 and 6.

And a lot of applications, since they love to have customization. They even customize mail template a lot to have a better Kanji interface. (On the other hand, those are a big barrier for upgrade)

Thanks for the interest.
 
I know Notes/Domino is big in the US and Germany. Japan is probably using it with a localized language version, similar to the one that I used to run in France (but it's not as popular there)

Unfortunately, I am not familiar with Cybozu, just with sendmail, domino and exchange.

As far as deploying new builds carefully goes, we used to upgrade more aggresively, but as business impact can be fatal and clustering is not in place yet, we went through extensive testing before we started with our 7.02 upgrades.
(Admin server, dev servers, hub servers, mail servers and some day app servers)

We are one of the few (crazy) companies to run domino not only on Windows, but also AIX and AS400, which makes upgrading even more difficult.
So far, 7.02 has been much more stable than previous 7 builds, especially http bugs.

Applications are big here as well, but are now being developed with more web-friendliness.
I'm afraid my Japanese is not very good, but I imagine that even though we're having problems with Mail template customizations, it must be a lot more difficult for you.

I'll be at Lotusphere next week. I hope it will be interesting.

Take care
 
@andy,
Yes, we are using localized version. From 6 or 7, we apply language pack to the international version.
Thanks for your interests.

AIX is a quite common operationg system for Domino in Japan. And of course, i5 is also sometimes used. It's true that multiple platforms makes the upgrade a little bit complex, but you can manage it with delicate and sensitive attention.

Mail template customization is a big problem. Based on the cultural background, we can not stop customizing templates to display Kanji, organizations, etc...
 
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