While that might have been in the past, today it does not have to be true. As I mentioned earlier, my company is just one of the many excellent Domino-based document management providers.

Over the years, we've spoken to many members of the Lotus community and back in 2005 released our initial document management offering, DocLogic. Based on feedback over the years, we've migrated that offering to Docova.

This isn't the place to pitch you on Docova, but I did want to share with you some of our design principles:

• Be easy to use: Ease of use is always subjective, but when people tell you it takes 15 minutes or less to train someone, now that's intuitive.
• Be flexible to customize: We know this is where you'll spend most of your time. Docova is designed to minimize this, even allowing you to re-use components across custom document elements.
• Deep functionality at an affordable price.
• Go in quick with room to expand.

One of the benefits of a Domino-based solution like Docova is that it has enabled Lotus customers to have one document collaboration and management user experience, saving thousands of dollars in hard and soft IT costs and greatly enhancing end user productivity.

I begged the editors at DominoPower and they agreed to let me end on one minor brag.

For you Domino.doc customers wondering how quick you can migrate to Docova, consider this: It's been done before, in one weekend, with one IT resource.

Imagine sending your people home on a Friday and by mid-morning Monday, everyone is trained and using Docova for their daily work. Can you name any other solution that powerful and simple to use?

Most of the feedback we've gotten supports the need for ease of use, customizability, deep functionality, and affordability, so no matter which solution you look at, keep those elements in mind.

Scott Tomlinson has made marketing+IT software his passion since 1997, working with IBM, Oracle and holding the senior marketing role at DLI.tools since 2005. Contact Scott or learn more about Docova at http://www.docova.com or scott_tomlinson@dlitools.com.