This, that and the other (may contain nuts)

Steve Castledine

Lotus Notes Domino templates and open source

Steve Castledine  11 November 2008 11:57:00
Its an age old discussion and on/off has been discussed to death within this community, however I have been thinking about "templates" again recently.

As a developer who has had the opportunity of developing applications inside and outside IBM, I have strong, probably "fan boy",  views on their upkeep and also how important they are for stimulating the use of and development of new Lotus Notes/Domino applications.

I have an opportunity, together with a few colleagues, to think about how we could possibly utilise templates (and other development components) in the future, for everyone's benefit, whilst at the same time promoting new development opportunities around XPages, composite applications etc.

Obviously I would promote a biased, spend billions on them view, and let the world see how great we all are. However passionate views are not always the correct ones (or financially sound ones) and a more balanced version is probably better. So I'm asking an open question really on people's thoughts on the current templates and how we could best improve on them, and at the same time use them to promote additional development on the Notes/Domino platform especially around the new technologies. These opinions I can then capture and see if there is any opportunities to enhance the template world we live in by using this data to present an internal report.

I have added some themes below that I am interested in, however this is not an exclusive list for discussion:

1) If template features were missing and they could be delivered quicker via unsupported or lower support level outlets would this make a difference/help adoption/be acceptable to organisations for use?

2) Do more template's translate into higher visibility for Notes/Domino and create more development opportunities within your organisations?

3) How can templates receive higher visibility within your organisation? Are users allowed to create new applications? Would a template wizard that was "one click" to create solutions make an impact instead of "File > Application > New blah blah"?

4) What's your organisations take on open source templates, say at openntf. Is it easy to gain acceptance for using them or are there hurdles - if so what are they? Is there a role IBM could play to reduce these hurdles (in terms of what level of association/guarantee from IBM for these templates would it take). Maybe a multi-tiered open source system with varying levels of quality and guarantee would help?

5) Can open source go too far and have the reverse effect by "strangling" ISV's that are trying to make a living from producing Notes/Domino solutions?

6) Commercial templates - If it was easy to get recognised, would people add their templates to a template catalogue if it provided enough exposure in terms of banners/links etc to their corporate home page? Niklas Heidloff has provided a posting similar to this question here.

If you want to add a lengthy post and feel a blog comment does not do it justice then you can use this discussion db - I will then merge the discussion together.