Revisiting the Nifty Fifty

Thirteen years ago - the year after we rolled out our first company wide LAN, my boss asked me into his office to discuss the idea of adding an email system to the mix to join the file and print services we were providing our users. This was before Exchange existed but he had heard of cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail and Eudora. I told him I'd read about something different something Lotus Software was selling called Notes that they described as groupware.

I explained that Notes was a system that combined email, document and discussion databases and development tools in one package. I had read about the product when it was first released and was affordable for very large organizations like GM or GE or IBM...but they'd just changed their licensing so we could now afford to buy and run Notes in our organization.

In a few weeks we received a shipment of bright yellow boxes of Lotus Notes R3 for OS/2. We set up our first server on a spare workstation running OS/2. We discovered not only did we have email and the standard database templates... there was also a set of sample applications called the "Nifty Fifty". We quickly began playing with these applications and used them to initially learn to develop our own databases.

A slightly modified version of the absense approval database wound up in use in one department and there are still users here using it today... It's just as but ugly as it was twelve years ago but it works.

Many others in the blogging community have argued over the past five years for a resurection of the Nifty Fifty. I'd like to propose something similar. IBM/Lotus is focusing anew on the SMB market - it's the right time for a Lotus Notes Small Business Bundle.

One constant problem at a smaller businesses is lack of resources for custom development. If Lotus (or the openNTF community) were to put together a set of well designed, functional starter templates for Notes that focused on the needs of smaller firms it could be a great selling tool for small businesses. Even better - if the templates were designed to work as a teaching tool with all design elements open to view - well documented in help documents with well documented structured object oriented Lotusscript code, they could serve as building blocks for new small business developers like the nifty fifty did for us long ago.

I can think of several ideas - an HR intranet template - or even a generic department intranet template, a basic purchase request template, a basic help desk ticketing template, a company survey template - to name a few. What about you? What templates would you like to see in a Small Business Bundle?