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Subject:FW: Using Lotus Notes for Documentation? From:David Chisma <dchisma -at- retaildir -dot- com -dot- au> To:"TECHWR-L (E-mail)" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 11 Feb 2000 13:25:55 +1100
Dave Chisma wrote:
I've been at a couple of companies that used Notes. One is Westinghouse
Signals Australia http://www.westsig.com.au/ who use Notes to generate a
list of product data sheets (in PDF format).
By the time I left Westinghouse, some staff were using Notes to create
documents, but nothing as complicated as a manual.
Another company I worked for had taken the leap to make all of their
documents 'Notes' documents, and for them, it was a disaster. A year or so
later, by the time they abandoned the project, nobody could access the work
they had saved in Notes. As I understand it (not very well), documents get
saved in a Notes database. If you lose your resident Notes expert, or let
your license lapse, you're screwed because no-one can retrieve the
documents. (Or so they claimed.)
Lotus experts make it look easy and wonderful. But sometimes I wonder if
that's not a way to ensure their own job-security.
David Chisma
Technical Writer
Retail Directions Group
dchisma -at- retaildir -dot- com -dot- au
-----Original Message-----
From: Shari Gray [mailto:sharigray -at- yahoo -dot- com]
Sent: Friday, 11 February 2000 1:52
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Using Lotus Notes for Documentation?
OK, pick yourself up off the floor like I had to.
Yesterday, the Lotus Notes and Network guys came to
seek my input about doing this. Right now we use Notes
as sort of a document repository by attaching Word
documents to a database. I guess there is a way in
Notes to create a new Word document from inside of
Notes. The showed it to me and it looks like Word is
embedded inside of Notes. Does anyone else work like
this? Are there any pitfalls? They are willing to
listen to what I have to say so I want to be able to
give them logical reasons if this won't work. I am new
to using Notes and new to this company. They said the
reason they are so up on this is the ability to make
them web documents when they get the Intranet up (I
hope this isn't like Word's "Save as HTML" nightmare).
Anyway, I would love to hear if anyone is doing this
and your opinions. Please no discussions on why I
shouldn't be using Word. That's not the point.
