The Executive Information System had been in place for some time, and the CIO was looking for something to get our senior executives excited about information systems. He thought that collaboration on technology issues would be a great way to accomplish this.

I started out by reviewing the marketplace and arranging for vendor demonstrations. Microsoft Exchange was still in beta, and the others seemed pale in comparison to Notes. So we set up a Notes server and got a dozen laptops for the executives.

Training the executives brought out many interesting cultural and power issues, and both the network and modem connections were balky.

Before I knew it, there were more than a thousand users, and we were stretching the capabilities of our OS/2 servers and their netbios protocol. After a pilot, I determined that NT servers were more reliable running Notes than OS/2, so we switched all of the servers. They all ended up in racks as you can see above. Many late nights were spent with the LAN administrators assembling these racks and configuring the systems!

Notes was good for my career, as the company entrusted me with a staff of administrators and allowed me to develop the procedures governing roll-out, training, application development, and usage.

Later, I worked with the legal department to draft an overall internet, voice mail, email, and video conferencing policy.

There were plenty of bugs in Notes, and I developed a first-name relationship with many of the developers and managers at Lotus. I got so fed up at one point that I visited their developers in Boston to tell them first hand how the problems were affecting us.

When the implementation was in full swing we decided to phase out our old EMC2 mainframe email system. I led the project to use the SoftSwitch mail gateway to handle the multiyear transition.

The internet became a powerful force, and I added internet and web access to the mix, causing a number of interesting network capacity and human-resources issues.

Notes was good for more than just email, so I developed a number of groupware and knowledge management applications to show it off.

At last count, there were eighty servers, ten thousand users at headquarters and twenty thousand users at sister companies.