5. Lotus Notes (Commercial Problem Management Tools)
Description
This article is from the Problem Management Tools FAQ, by Dave Eaton dwe@arde.com with numerous contributions by others.
5. Lotus Notes (Commercial Problem Management Tools)
Not surprisingly, a Lotus representative replied that they use Lotus
Notes for Tech Support Calls. All customer incidents are tracked from
phone call through world-wide escalation. (Although Lotus claimed to
market the application and customization they use, there was no
response to an email request for more information.)
Others using Lotus Notes admitted they had not tried a commercial
system built specifically for problem management. Most used email
and/or automatic email from Lotus Notes as part of their
implementation. Depending upon how each site builds the database and
forms, a Lotus Notes form may include version, client, module,
priority, status, additional text, and more. Prioritization and review
can be handled, though the descriptions of some implementations
sounded awkward.
Advantages
* tailored to local process and style
* better than lots of Post-It notes and yelling
* tool already in use for other communication reasons
* good means for wide area distribution and replication
Disadvantages
* difficult to extract metrics reports
* performance issues (see below)
* lack of integration with rest of development system
Although reliability and up-time seems adequate, performance and
scalability tended to be a problem when using Lotus Notes as a problem
tracking system. Even on 50 MHz 486 machines, several users reported
situations such as:
* 20 second searches with fewer than 2000 records
* over 5 minutes with 65000 records and two users
* search time doubling with each new user added
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