Teaching the Intern a Few Things (guest intern post)
Catherine Sanders May 18 2009 01:47:04 PM
[Note from Darren - I am editing these posts, but not to change the content just for readability. Unless she's really going to upset someone ;) ]Who I am.......
My name is Catherine and I will be interning with STS this summer in order to gain some real world experience in IT. Darren has asked if I'd be willing to post my thoughts, perceptions, etc about what using the Lotus products means to me as I spend my time here.
What I'm doing........
I am going in to my third year as a Computer Science major. So far I've studied Java, PHP, MySQL and a few other languages and I'm excited to keep that progress going.
In June, I'll be leaving STS for a few weeks to conduct a research project for developing mobile software at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Once my project is over I will be transferring to Georgia Tech and continuing my internship with STS for the rest of the summer.
On to the real first post.......
After finishing up the first week of my internship with STS, I have definitely learned a great deal about certain software and products that I previously did not know were on the market. Being a college student, I'm mostly presented with technology that is marketed through either the internet, tv, or used in my class rooms. This past week was the very first time I had seen Lotus Notes. As I learned more about the software throughout the week I kept going back to how convenient it is- specifically for networking projects and communicating with groups.
Since the final exam for one of my courses this semester was a group project where everyone was expected to contribute in similar ways (edit the same files, for example), I can't help but bring up how I wish we had just had a system like Notes. In our group we tried multiple ways of communicating:
1. email- too long to respond, ridiculously long threads
2. facebook- same problem and not everyone had a facebook
3. a survey website to schedule meetings, which you had to read email to know about
4. writing notes to each other on the white board of our lab- another failure.
I think that if we had known about Notes and what we could have easily set up for ourselves, communicating about our project and editing content would have been ridiculously easier. Personally, I walked away very frustrated about how difficult the project became because of lack of communication.
This one short week allowed me to see how amazingly simple it all could have been. Actually, I'm kind of disappointed and pretty amazed that I've never even been presented with the idea of using Notes for anything, whether it be school related or otherwise. I've also asked a few people in the corporate world if they use it or have heard of it and the typical response has been "Yea its so old!". However, all they really know about it is that is has been around for a while. I think if people knew what it actually could do for them they would have a very different perspective.
From what I've seen so far, people and businesses are just using what the hear about first. Ignorance seems to be killing sales rather than preference.
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