I first started teaching Lotus Domino for AS/400 in the early months of 1998. While some of the more adventurous were already running Domino on the Integrated PC Server (IPCS, now known as the Integrated Netfinity Server for AS/400, or INS), the majority of my students were taking Notes for just the first time: a delightful situation that placed their impressionable minds under my admittedly biased influence. In my primary life as a software designer and integrator, working with Domino-based solutions is something I relish, and I tried to convey a sense of excitement about the many possibilities Domino presents as an infrastructure for new and valuable applications. Still, despite my zeal, I realize that many AS/400 shops, perhaps even the majority of them, are now yoking their Domino servers and running only two basic functions: email and calendaring.
Think of a typical day in the life of an Antarctic penguin: preening, waddling, chatting with friends—mundane tasks liberally peppered with social activity. Watching them mill about the ice floe, one can’t help but notice a striking similarity to the superficial activity of a mail-only Domino server: the expansive, solid foundation serving only as a communications platform, bustling with the commotion of countless others dressed in formal attire. While a solid base, whether ice or email, does provide an essential conduit for social interactions, one can’t shake the feeling that something far more substantial is imminently underfoot.
But these penguins, despite their frenetic bustling, don’t realize that there is more than just the world above the water; for below the surface lies a wealth of opportunities: the non-tip portion of the proverbial iceberg. Domino extends beyond the solid base of email and calendaring and encourages a dynamic environment where applications can be built, deployed, refined, and replaced in tempo with constantly changing requirements. The operative word here is applications—solutions. Sound familiar? It should and rightly so. After all, this is the same cornerstone on which the AS/400 itself is built. Lotus has consistently pushed Notes/Domino as a tool with which issues are addressed and problems are solved, and, much like the AS/400 with its flanking legion of software vendors offering practical solutions, Domino is surrounded by independent software vendors (ISVs) bearing weapons of stark efficiency.
In this article, I describe an assortment of products available right now to run on your AS/400e Dedicated Server for Domino (DSD) or any other regular AS/400 server running Domino. These products are only a tiny sampling of the solutions out there, but each represents new opportunities for making the most of your Domino investment, so take a dive and explore some of the possibilities beneath the waves. For more information on other vendors and products visit www.midrangecomputing.com/yellowpages
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Customer Relationship Management
One of the busiest spots on the Domino ISV berg is the fuzzy, overlapping region between customer relationship management (CRM) tools and sales force automation (SFA) tools, which also share space with customer service, support, and help desk applications. A flock of vendors, each with its own collection of products, vie to provide solutions in these areas based on Domino technology. Tracking and managing ongoing customer relationships is increasingly important in this e-competitive era, and the Domino climate is perfect for these sorts of implementations. Domino’s flexiblility in handling loosely defined and often- distributed data and its strong affinity for Web-centric interfaces (i.e., for customer self- service) are only two of the features that make it such a popular solution.
GWI Software’s Collaborative Front Office (www.gwi.com) provides a comprehensive suite of tools to manage ongoing relationships for both sales and service/support activities. The whole suite is made of various components based on business functions that can be combined to provide functionality appropriate to an organization’s needs. For example, the c.Sales and c.Marketing modules are built to support—predictably—sales and marketing activities. c.Sales tracks contacts and opportunities along with the correspondence and activities generated as part of each sales cycle. When combined with c.Marketing, c.Sales can relate sales activity with specific marketing promotions and events to provide managers with a better understanding of which activities prove the most effective sales tools. On the post-sales front, the c.Service and
c.Support modules provide incident management and resolution tools for IT help desks to help address customer requests and issues effectively. In addition to providing incident classification, tracking, and escalation capabilities, these tools integrate with the
c.Knowledge database for storing information that can aid in problem resolution. Collaborative Front Office also supports Web browser access throughout. Sales reps can update prospect information from public-access Web browsers, and current account holders can access customer service functions such as knowledge bases and online incident tracking. The entire Collaborative Front Office suite, including the GWI Application Interface Model (which allows developers to work with Collaborative Front Office data through a library of robust LotusScript classes to build custom features and additional tools), is built with extensibility in mind. The GWI Data Integrator, which allows data exchange with RDBMSs, even provides an extra degree of back-office integration.
Not all solutions favor such a generic, all-in-one approach; some focus on serving a particular need in depth, typically providing a number of advanced management or reporting features of value to larger or more specialized installations. v-TEAM, from The Vikara Group (www.vikara.com), provides advanced SFA functions and is geared to provide ongoing management of customer relationships with heavy emphasis on the ongoing sales cycle. Although organizations of all sizes can use v-TEAM, it provides several unique features of particular benefit to larger organizations. For instance, Vikara’s AssignSecure technology provides a secure mechanism for allocating accounts and account-related information to v-TEAM users. Details can be segregated by individual, department, region, etc. and are available to only those members of the organization who have been authorized to access them. In addition, TeamLink, Vikara’s technology for tracking input by individuals and groups involved in the whole process, supports complex
team sales activity. v-TEAM is a prime example of a Domino-based solution designed to serve a specific set of needs extremely well.
MarketBound’s ProductLaunch (www.marketbound.com) offers tightly focused event and product launch management tools that also run under Domino.
ProductLaunch provides work flow and management structures designed to ensure that tasks associated with successful introduction of a new product are understood and executed smoothly. Items covered include planning, budgeting, events and calendars, tracking of deliverables, and evaluation of the launch process as a whole.
General Business and Operations
CRM and SFA tools typically have an outward focus, enumerating customers past, present, and future and dealing with issues directly related to them, but a number of products are available that dive deeper and include internal business functions and daily operations in their catch. These products typically provide a gamut of databases that can be mixed and matched to meet an installation’s unique requirements.
The Tracker Enterprise Plus group of applications, from Automation Centre (www.acentre.com), is available either in several suite flavors or as individual modules. Tracker Suite for Sales, for instance, includes many of the features found in the CRM products described previously: Prospect Tracker, Customer Tracker, and Personnel Tracker for administration reps and other users. While not as comprehensive as dedicated SFA tools, the suite does provide all the key functionality through its multiple databases, which are designed to work together. But the Tracker modules extend beyond sales and service activities, providing functions designed to streamline other common business processes as well. Modules included in Tracker Suite for Projects provide tools to manage work performed once a successful sale has been recorded. Databases provided include Customer Tracker, Personnel Tracker, Expense Tracker, Purchase Tracker, Time Tracker, and the all-inclusive Project Tracker, which ties together all the pieces constituting this work management solution. Along similar lines, Automation Centre provides a Tracker Suite for HR, which includes Applicant Tracker for hiring and Evaluation Tracker for employee assessment.
Emerging Technology Solutions (www.etsgroup.com) provides a similarly multifaceted product called Business In A Box. This dynamic collection of solutions spans nearly all front-office disciplines. Its databases consist of Policies and Procedures for tracking companywide documentation (e.g., insurance policy documents, corporate minutes, and tax identification numbers); Product Information for publishing sales documents internally or on the Web; Project Management for budgeting, scheduling, and tracking work projects; Asset Tracking for managing corporate assets (possibly for tax or insurance reporting); and a slew of other sales, operations, and administration functions. (The scope of this package is impossible to convey in such a short space!) Business In A Box also includes some typically non-Notes databases, such as Inventory and Order Entry, and provides a very comprehensive solution that can be used to run many parts of a business or just to “fill in the gaps.”
JennerNet’s AIMS Recruit (www.jennernet.com) focuses solely on the process of finding, qualifying, and securing human talent. AIMS Recruit is much more than a system for collecting and organizing resumes. It provides a one-stop solution for taking advantage of the rapidly growing use of Internet-based recruiting services for finding top talent. The product has two distinct facets that work together to meet the needs of both human resources departments and potential hires. First, AIMS Recruit provides a job-posting creation and management interface, which can be used to publish job postings on the Internet. The database, delivered by a Domino Web server, allows interested applicants to browse available postings and submit resumes online. But AIMS Recruit goes one better; it submits the postings to a number of the Internet’s leading online recruiting boards, including Dice.com and Monster.com. With a single operation, a human resources staffer
can post openings to multiple locations, including the corporate site, online. Second, AIMS Recruit collects and manages resumes, starting with those submitted directly in response to postings on the user’s own site. In addition, AIMS Recruit can scan resumes submitted to any of the supported Internet services. Resumes matching certain skill set requirements can then be routed to a database and converted automatically into AIMS Recruit Candidate documents, where the AIMS Recruit’s resume organization and management features can be leveraged against the resumes as well.
Basic Business Systems (www.basic.co.uk) provides several suites of operations- related products, including its own customer and sales management tools. Also part of its product line is a very comprehensive collection of applications designed to automate common human resources procedures: the hr.WORKS suite. Built around the personnel.
WORKS database, this suite comprises a handful of useful functions. For instance, sickness. WORKS and holiday. WORKS track employees’ sick and vacation times respectively, providing interfaces both for employees to request and record off times and for managers to easily review this information to aid in planning and appraisal decisions. Vacation time booked through holiday.WORKS can be automatically added to the corporate calendar if Basic Business Systems’ appointment.WORKS database is also in use. (appointment.WORKS is not a default part of hr.WORKS.) It is this kind of integration that makes many Domino-based solutions so valuable.
No discussion of operations applications for Domino would be complete without mentioning a quality management application such as EtQ Solutions, from EtQ Management Consultants (www.etq.com). Designed to meet the rigorous demands of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) QS-9000 certification, EtQ Solutions takes advantage of Domino’s flexible data handling, security, and automated distribution capabilities to create a comprehensive solution for planning, implementing, and maintaining a certified, quality-controlled operation. EtQ Solutions also includes databases for document control, supplier development, and process tracking as well as functions for audit assistance.
E-enablement Tools
One of the reasons why Domino is such an exciting product is the grace with which it has adapted itself to e-business models of application design, and it comes as no surprise that several vendors offer Domino-based e-business applications and enablement tools. Some of these are complete solutions intended to help a company get online with minimum expenditure; others are comprehensive application development toolkits that extend the already formidable Domino Web application infrastructure for delivering Internet-based e- business and e-commerce solutions.
Binary Tree’s ezMerchant (www.binarytree.com) is an extremely popular and easy- to-use solution for quickly setting up an e-commerce presence. Using a clever combination of several technologies, ezMerchant uses a simple seven-step process to collect all the information it needs to set up a basic Web site featuring online catalog, shopper tracking, and shopping cart management functions. These functions can then be easily integrated with credit card verification and advanced tax calculation solutions from other vendors to provide a comprehensive e-commerce site. ezMerchant supports several purchase flow options that facilitate a solid range of business-to-consumer and business-to-business buying models. ezMerchant also ships with a decent assortment of visual site design templates that are used to construct the pages of the site and can be fully customized to the suite. Alternately, professional ezMerchant site design services are available from Binary Tree and its partners. ezMerchant even includes the capabilities needed to integrate with back-end office data.
Nearer the other end of the spectrum is e-businessOne, from UptimeOne (www.uptimeone.com). Although streamlined for speedy implementation, e-businessOne comprises two suites of software that let AS/400 shops build e-commerce sites and offer e-
business services. The product is supplied as a set of mix-and-match component databases handling functions such as Order Entry & Catalog, Order Management, and Return Material Authorization. These components form the basis for highly customizable and readily integrated solutions to meet the specific online requirements of midsized businesses. The addition of a Domino server to an existing AS/400 environment provides several new opportunities for extending current applications and taking advantage of this unique combination of platform and software environments. Domino itself provides many application enablement tools and opens the door to some interesting twists on existing solutions. Domino Report Server/400, from RJS Software Systems (www.rjssoft.com), is a tool designed to read spool files from standard OS/400 output queues and place them into Domino databases for user access. The extraction process runs entirely on the AS/400 and is capable of converting the spool file from its default format to plain ASCII text, HTML, or PDF. (Other options are also available.) Once these documents enter a Domino database, standard Domino features can be used to deliver, publish, or otherwise distribute reports to their appropriate recipients.
Domino’s There, So Use It!
Regardless of your organization’s size or industry, a Domino for AS/400 server presents a much greater opportunity than mail serving alone can provide. Like the AS/400, Domino provides a basis for effective solutions that can be built, purchased, and customized to meet your unique requirements. Happy swimming!
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