/end sarcasm.

The past few days I’ve been stuck in the deep end with Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino Doc – and I’ve been less than impressed with the layer of slime it left on me.

In theory, Lotus SHOULD have an amazing product on it’s hand.  Lotus Domino is an extremely scalable, hugely extensible database application and collaboration server.  It has fantastic abilities to work both online and offline.  It’s just too bad that the product is less than amazing in practice.

Tuesday was my first day of Domino.DOC training.  I’ve worked with other document management solutions and know Microsoft Exchange Server, so I figured I should be in good shape. When the instructor’s first words are “forget everything you know, it’s useless here”, you know you should be worried.

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I’m looking at actually sitting down and doing some course work. In some ways, the idea is a bit scary as it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve done a real course. To get to the next level in my career, I think it will really help to get a couple courses under my belt and back up the experience I’ve gotten in the field.

My first go will be with some project managment courses. I’ve looked at many of the in-class courses available here in Vancouver, but their schedules just don’t fit my life. It’s insanely hard to take a week or more off as a consultant.

A little while ago I ran across a number of great-sounding online courses offered by Villanova University in the ‘states. They claim their project management courses were put together with the help of the PMI, and offer full professional development credits if I plan to go for a full PMP (the verdict’s out on that right now). The nicest thing – they offer a number of courses (and a full certification) specific to IT.

Does anyone have experience with this, or any other, online PM course?

In the future, I’m going to be looking at a number of courses through the Sauder school of business (at UBC). They offer nice 2-day courses in managment, financial analysis and other business areas that will be nice ones to add to the

One of my clients is the perfect buyer for a full featured video conferencing solution.  They are a small(ish) biotech company with their corporate head office here in Vancouver and much of their clinical/medical team in a remote office in Seattle.  

Every time I turn around, one or more of the Seattle office people are up here in Vancouver for meetings (or vice versa).  These meetings are hugely expensive – a senior medical-type person driving 3ish hours to Vancouver, often the night before, staying in a hotel, having the meeting(s), then driving home.  Direct cost for that person in the meeting ends up being 1-2 days (depending on if there’s an overnight), plus mileage, meals and hotel costs.  Add what they COULD be doing, and you end up with 2-4 days wages + costs.  INSANE. 

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With Microsoft Exchange service pack 2, Microsoft has included IMF (Intelligent Mail Filtering) to help combat the legions of SPAM that plague our poor inboxes.  With this free tool, you’re getting what you pay for.  It’s simplistic and lacks many features that I would consider critical to a spam filtering solution (whitelisting, anyone??).  But it’s free, right?

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