However, browsers, to my mind, aren't the only solution. In fact, if we really come down to it, browsers stink, from both developer and user points of view, when compared to rich clients like Notes (note I said rich, not thick: IE these days is no thinner than a Notes client). Even with Domino 6, it takes a lot longer to develop a Web application than it does to deliver the same function to a Notes client. However hard you try, and however much you reuse existing libraries of code, you still have to write and debug a whole lot more code with poorer debugging tools, and the whole thing is generally rather more unwieldy.

That means people make less use of what Notes is really good at, simple applications that deliver instant benefit. This is a bit of a personal rant of mine, but I'll do it anyway. When Notes was first on the market in Notes 2 and Notes 3 days, it was sold as collaborative software and email, all tied together to enable customers to create simple workflow applications as well as to use the templates out of the box. My employer, Unipart Group, created literally hundreds of these applications and derived huge amounts of benefits from them.

They were not cutting edge Web applications and they weren't often line of business applications. They were simple business administration applications, the kind of processes that employees of large companies spend inordinate amounts of time doing--room booking, visitor notification, dissemination and control of standard operating procedures, the phone book. We found that in some cases people spent more than half their time doing stuff that they had to do as employees of the company, but which did not directly, or even indirectly in many cases, contribute to Unipart's business. We used simple Notes applications to deal with many of these issues, giving people back the time to do the job we actually paid them to do and do it more effectively.

Some of these applications are mail-enabled, with stored forms, which won't work in iNotes. All these applications helped us to reduce the number of overhead people, giving those people a chance to contribute more directly to Unipart. For example, we haven't printed and distributed quarterly phone book updates for at least eight years, so the whole effort of doing that has gone. This contributes directly to a reduction in the costs of doing business, which enabled us to do more with the same number of people. And it still does. Those Notes applications are still there, still doing the business, and some of them are now more than ten years old.

But Notes isn't marketed that way any more. It's pushed first as best of breed email, which it is. It's also pushed as a Web Application Server, aimed at line of business, intranet, and extranet applications. It's that too, no question. But it still does all the things that attracted Unipart to it more than 10 years ago, and, with the functionality that's been added since those days, it does them better than ever. And the best way to deliver these easily and quickly is to develop them as Notes Client applications, which means having the clients out there on users' desktops. Such applications can often be developed and delivered in hours, and there's no way you can do that with Domino Web applications to the same level of completeness and quality.