The Lotus Crypt : Plink

Being my first blog entry, the mood seems right for a bit of a disjointed history lesson. Lets go back to the roots. Lotus Notes is a computer program which can be simply used for email. Some clever cookie also blessed Lotus Notes with some wonderfully smart mechanisms for building custom applications. Lotus Notes however, has always been the black sheep of application development. Barely recognised as an application development platform by many, it did what most downtrodden 'entities' tend to do. It flourished! Out of all application development platforms, I reckon Lotus Notes has some of the most passionate purveyors going for it, some almost would resort to violence to defent it's honor. I do frequently. Some years ago I came under the employment of Qenos Pty Ltd, a large plastics manufacturer here in Melbourne, Australia. Thanks to the open minds of Management (yes you Ray!), the re-usability mantra and a heck of a lot of time, I came up with QAF. The free workflow engine for Notes.

QAF is the result of a basic philosophy, if I can use that word without sounding like a jerk. Well OK lets strike that out and just say I'm lazy. I want computers to do the work for me. I mean what's the point otherwise? QAF lets you build collaborative applications without having to do mundane things like write code to send emails, code to do common stuff (lets just leave it at 'stuff' for now). Is it the codeless solution to bulding collaborative workflow applications? Hell no! There are big fat expensive programs for that! You really want a background in Notes programming to really make QAF dance. QAF is for Lotus Notes coders surfing the web, avoiding boring work, clicking around on OpenNTF.org in search of danger, intrigue, thrills and spills. But fear not my dear business analyst reader, I've been thinking about you for a long time. You can build basic workflow processes with notifications, full tracking and security without any coding.

Stay tuned for the blogtastic elaboration on clever collaboration...