So my first week at GSA had passed. The following week, Sally was back in the office and we began developing a strategy moving forward. It included learning a lot of new software.

As I stated in my previous post, the software situation at GSA was abysmal. While other companies were doing cool things with Java, ASP, PHP, and ColdFusion (different development technologies for the creation of Web sites) GSA was using Lotus Domino for it’s regional application development. Strictly put, Lotus was a dying breed and had been for quite some time. The vast majority of companies would never even consider it as a viable option, let alone actually use it.  Contrarily, GSA had fully embraced Lotus and their family of products years ago and continued to use it to develop new projects and applications. Lotus was a complete suite of (bad) software.  We used it for email, databases, instant messaging, online meetings, and to my chagrin, web site development.

Lotus Notes was awful for a number of reasons. It never fully supported the latest HTML standards (to this day, it still renders HTML worse than IE 6 ever did). The menus were clunky, unintuitive and chock full of icons that had no easily discernible meaning. While attempting something as simple as typing an email, commands like Cut, Copy, and Paste exhibited odd behavior or at times just wouldn’t work. The Undo command rarely worked and often deleting text was an irreversible task that destroyed many well written messages. The user interface was downright ugly. Clearly put together by engineers rather than designers, Lotus Notes was full of menus with functionality tucked away in no discernible order. If I want to change my background color, do I go under User Tools, Database Properties, Program Tools, Settings or Options? It made absolutely no sense.

Now, I was a pretty good web designer if I do say so myself. I had worked with Dreamweaver and Photoshop and I was an expert at HTML. But I knew nothing about creating Web sites with Lotus Notes and you may be asking yourself why GSA would hire me. The short answer was, because nobody knew Lotus Notes. So I was sent to a two week crash course in Lotus Notes followed by a one week professional level class on developing and designing for Lotus Notes a couple of weeks later. The classes were conducted at a training center in downtown Denver and I thoroughly enjoyed them.  I was never sold on the so called benefits of Lotus Notes, but there’s no doubt that learning this platform opened the door to programming rather than just design. However, I am convinced the only Lotus Notes jobs out there are training people to use Lotus Notes. It’s evil, stay away.

Over the next two years, I used Lotus Notes extensively. In the process, I got to know three people who provided plenty of professional guidance and became close friends of mine. It was Nicole, Staci and Dean who first altered my thinking from “I gotta get out of here” to “this isn’t so bad, and there are some really cool people here.”

Nicole, Dean and Staci were also contractors, working in a different department in the same building.  Nicole and Dean were Lotus Notes developers and Staci did system support and some Lotus Notes work as well.  Nicole in particular, spent a lot of time tutoring me in the practice of Lotus Notes development. I can’t say I ever really warmed up to working in Lotus Notes, but I really enjoyed spending time with Nicole. She was a patient teacher with a quiet demeanor and a personality both genuine and caring. Nicole and I became good friends and she regularly invited me to join Dean, Staci, and her, for happy hour.

Over the course of the first couple of years, I worked extensively on our regional Internet site (defunct circa 2004), and built a brand new regional intranet (internal only) site. Both sites were developed in Lotus Notes and both had some interesting but relatively basic functionality built into them. I enjoyed the projects I worked on, but the Lotus Notes platform irritated me more and more. Either the technology we used had to change or I was going to start looking for something else.  In early 2002, a change began that would alter my thinking for years to come.