Blair Armeau

What Companies Use Notes For (and What They DON’T Use it For)

Notes serves such a wide variety of applications that examples exist of it being used for nearly every application. However, there is industry consensus about types of applications work or don’t work and specific examples. In general, there are more uses for Notes than places it doesn’t work.

Companies use Notes successfully for:

• Application support request tracking
• Applications that are updated frequently
• Applications that need to be deployed on a variety of hardware or operating system clients or servers
• Applications that need to store and mix rich text, graphics, sound, video, other OLE objects
• Applications where access security is important
• Audits
• Bulletin boards*
• Business placement in brokerage firms
• Business Redesign Discussions
• Call Reporting
• Change Management
• Combining information from various sources to aid in investment
• Decision making
• Communication and work across time zones
• Company-wide announcements*
• Compensation and Benefits management
• Controlled Interchange with Internet Usenet Newsgroups
• Corporate Phone Directory
• Correspondence Management
• Customer Support
• Data Warehousing (mid-size organizations)
• Directories*
• Disaster planning and recovery
• Distributing any unstructured information that can’t be defined easily ahead of time
• Documentation/reference checkout tracking
• Electronic Forms and Forms routing
• Electronic job postings
• Electronic Mail within an Organization
• Employee reference guides*
• Empowering the mobile worker
• Executive Information Systems
• Expense Reporting
• External provider information
• Fax: Outbound/Inbound/Fax Back
• Flexible Benefits Enrollment (also done using Phone Notes)
• General discussions
• Group Information Manager
• Group Scheduling
• Help Desk
• Hotel Lists
• Human Resources/Employee Tracking
• Insurance Claim Processing
• Inter-organization Applications and Mail Exchange
• Internet Mail Gateway
• Investment Applications
• IP address tracking (easier to manage IP address than using Domain Naming Services)
• IS tip sharing
• Job requisition submission and tracking
• Knowledgebases
• Legal Case Tracking
• Library catalog
• Library Periodical Tracking
• Loan Approval
• Medical Record Imaging
• Medical/Patient Case Management
• Meeting Minutes
• New account/customer setup and tracking
• News warehouses
• Outside counsel (including direct exchange via Notes with those providers) Performance management
• Personal Information Manager
• Planning Discussions
• Police Tracking of Criminals
• Presentation databases
• Problem/Incident Tracking
• Procedures*
• Product and service catalogs
• Product Development
• Project Management
• Public Relations Tracking
• Publishing Information onto the WWW
• Purchase order systems
• Rapid delivery of applications and interactive prototypes
• RealTime desktop-desktop collaboration using Intel ProShare
• Resume and Applicant tracking
• Rolodex
• Sales and Lead Tracking
• Sales and Marketing databases
• Sales brochure ordering (Minnesota Mutual uses this to let agents order marketing materials)
• Securities Agent Licensing
• Sick leave tracking
• Simple-Moderate Workflow applications
• Skills matching and succession management
• Software documentation
• Software Inventory
• Speech tracking (The Met keeps all of the executive’s speeches in Notes)
• Standards*
• Status Reports
• Stock purchase request tracking
• Supply order tracking
• Surveys coupled with an internal discussion area
• Technology discussions
• Time Sheet Reporting
• To-Do lists
• Tracking sales activity
• Tracking staff availability
• Training management and registration
• Travel Itineraries
• Underwriter evaluation for assessing the quality of risks
• Underwriting
• Underwriting guidelines
• Underwriting inspection report requests, delivered directly to the service via Notes
• Vacation tracking

* During research, these applications were also identified as suitable for successful delivery via an Intranet.

Companies shouldn’t use Notes for:

• Accounting/Finance
• Accounts Payable
• Applications that need a lot of number crunching
• Applications that require record locking
• Applications with many data fields to fill in
• Complex contact management and scheduling
• Desktop Publishing
• Enterprise-wide billing systems
• Heavy reporting applications
• High volume transaction-based applications, which are typically done using CICS and relational databases
• Payment processing and application
• Payroll
• High volume point of sale applications
• Realtime inventory management
• Room scheduling (only true for Notes 3.x, Notes 5+ includes room and resource scheduling)
• Very advanced or complicated workflow (only true for Notes 3.x, Notes 5+ works well for complicated workflow)