MayFlower Software was an early adopter of Notes and has developed several commercial Notes applications for clients including several Notes Help Desk Applications, a Notes Sales Force Automation Application, a Notes Disaster Recovery Application and a Notes Global Profitability Executive Information System.
We noticed a disturbing pattern in each of the Notes projects we worked on. The Notes application development phase of the projects went very smoothly and development in the Notes environment was as fast as advertised. All of the applications we developed in Notes were brought to life with real data and end users would get very excited when they could use their application with real information. Every project suffered delays in the data loading phase. The data loading task was difficult, time consuming, and, at times, mind boggling.
Each client we worked with needed data from different sources fed into different Notes applications. They also needed to synchronize the data in Notes when the source data changed.
One client had AS/400, RDB, and Paradox data they needed to use in a single Notes application. They needed the application initialized and then updated on a continuous basis. We quickly found out it wasn't easy to get there from where we were.
Our first approach was to use the COL File Import Function in Notes. While this worked as far as getting initial data into Notes, it was completely manual and updates were impossible without overwriting the entire data set. This worked in opposition to the Notes Replication strategy.
We then purchased and used a popular, but expensive, Middleware product that performed well but involved working with a script language that resembled Basic. While this solved the problem of loading and updating data, our clients wondered how they were going to maintain the scripts and were also uncomfortable with the large number that needed to be developed to get the job done.
We then turned to the Notes API Tool Kit. Working with a low level language has its advantages in terms of ultimate control, but clients seemed unwilling to tolerate the downside of working in C. Lengthy development time, high costs, and long-term maintenance all worked against using the native Notes API Tool Kit.
At this point, we felt that there was a bona fide opportunity to develop a low cost product that would take advantage of the easy-to-use Notes interface while keeping the Notes API in the background. An idea we called Sentinel was born. It would keep watch over all data loading tasks and remove the grunt work. It would be easy-to-use and affordable.
A great amount of effort has been spent to get the product commercialized. We've tested Sentinel and enhanced our original idea significantly. The product has been successful because it saves time and money.
MayFlower is proud to confirm our success by being the recipient of the BEACON AWARD for BestApplication Development Tool awarded at Lotusphere in January of 1996.