communicate :: collaborate :: commemorate

The end of Lotus Redbooks is near

by Volker Weber

Take a look at the list of residencies. None around Lotus technologies. And this is at a time where Lotus comes out with Notes 7, with Workplace 2.5, and customers need more guidance than ever. If you attend DNUG next week, you may want to beat up talk to Ambuj Goyal or Mike Rhodin about this.

Comments

When I stopped by the Redbooks booth at Lotusphere, they asked me to fill out a survey asking how much I like Redbooks (in general) and how useful I thought they were.

The impression I got when I asked about the survey was that the entire Redbook program needed to be justified, and they were hoping that lots of positive surveys would help out. I guess every budget needs to be justified, so in some ways it's not surprising.

But it does go to show that if the rest of us don't talk about how useful a program like that is, then IBM has no way of knowing. Like you said, talk it up when you see people. I love the Redbooks myself.

- Julian

I was on a residency at Lotus Cambridge in the summer of 2001, and even back then there seemed to be a large amount of skepticism on the part of Lotus people about the value of Redbooks. My opinion is that they always have been more of an IBM thing, and even though there have been some excellent Domino redbooks (the App Dev and Security ones were particularly strong, IMHO), the Lotus folks never were really on-board.

Two things here. One, there are a lot of Lotus customers who don't make it to LotusSphere. And two, Redbooks are a great read, BUT you need them when you need them. I'm not going to casually read Workplace books until that project boils to the top.

I don't know a bunch about the process, but I thought there was a lot of volunteering by engineers, and "donating" time by corporations.

Put my vote in to keep the process going.

I think this is unfair conjecture, and I know who started it. Outside of zOS and WBI, there is only one WebSphere 6.0 Redbook on the list...should we draw the same conclusion about the "end" for WebSphere redbooks? no. Same for DB2 -- only one that isn't hardware-driven.

It's a budget/planning cycle thing. There is a new Redbook on Domino+Workplace integration in draft form and almost done. So it's fairly unfair to say that the end is near and that they aren't being invested in.

Trust me, you don't know who started this.

Ceci n'est pas un blog

vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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