I hope and trust the estimable Prime Minister will forgive my taking liberties with his memorable phrase and tribute.

Now in a no doubt vain effort to stave off the inevitable hate mail, permit me to first clarify what I am not referring to: the truly exceptional expertise I have seen and benefited from via the various videos, articles, code snippets and applications on the Internet. Most of you developers out there are clearly much more intelligent than I am. Thank you. [Not for being more intelligent – for that I forgive you.]

With that out of the way, I simply cannot continue writing about IBM Notes and Domino without calling a spade a spade. 

Rinky-dink. It’s the only word that comes to mind after seeing the literally hundreds of applications installed over the years on countless company servers. And the context has not been little “Mom and Pop” shops which might be understandable – we’re talking here about large multinationals.

Why has that been?! Is it because developing applications in Notes is so easy that people - probably in most cases nonprofessional developers - are content to “slap something together that works”? From where I’m standing, that’s how it looks. Unfortunately.

What in the world can you port over to that environment? That was my initial reaction once I took a moment to look at what companies were migrating to and the development framework they were being offered. Seriously?! But then all the rinky-dink applications came back to mind. Right. Rinky-dink.