Sometimes you forget how cool this stuff can be

Over the last couple of weeks I've been building a little database for one of my customers. The reason I was doing it is that they were running a system in MS Access that wasn't suiting their needs, nor the requirements of their security and governance standards.

Anyway, I took a look at the app and thought about just upsizing it to SQL Server and rewriting the front end in VB or something, and that probably would have worked fine. I suppose it's a bit of my bias coming through, or even perhaps just because I'm more comfortable doing it, but after looking at what they were doing, and figuring out the data, the relationships and the workflow, I couldn't see any real reason not to do it in Notes.

1 week after making that decision, I've got the application up, it's far more functional than it's Access predecessor, it's more secure, it's more stable, it integrates with Excel (thanks to some XML), it contains all of the data from the old system (thanks to some ODBC to do the migration), and it's undergone almost daily iterations with the customer, with changes sometimes even being made on the fly in the meetings.

Now, I'm certainly not advocating this as a new software design methodology, and I also am neither saying that all Access apps should be in Notes, nor that I couldn't have done the same things in Access or VB/SQL, I'm sure that I could have. What I'm trying to say is that there is an awful lot of really powerful stuff in Notes that we sometimes just take for granted.

Once in a while it's good to go back to just an old school - non web based - stock standard Notes client based application to give you an appreciation of exactly what it is you have in your toolbelt. Sometimes you can even make the customers happy :-)