Never Say Never
Never Say Never
“Ok, so let me see if Ive got this straight.”
I was on the phone with my friend Bob. Ive known Bob for years. Hes a former Navy guy who now does electrician work at Disneyworld. Hes seriously bright, but doesnt know squat about computers. And he was trying, once again, to figure out what the heck I was doing with my life.
“Youre starting another Notes publication?”
He stretched out the word “another” so it seemed that he was entirely incredulous of my actions.
“Well, yeah,” I responded with some enthusiasm. “But this ones on both Notes and Domino.”
“I think I understand Notes. Its this kinda email, database, group-think thing from IBM, right?” I hadnt heard it described exactly like that, but he was certainly in the ballpark. “But what the heck is Domino? Didnt Kim Basinger play Domino in Never Say Never Again? Youre writing about a Bond girl?”
I shook my head. Of course, he couldnt see that through the phone. “Uh, no Bob. Were not doing a journal on James Bond, as cool as that might seem. Were doing a journal on Lotus Domino, a very cool server technology, and on Notes. They work together.”
“So youre not writing about Claudine Auger, who plays Domino Derval in Thunderball. And youre not writing about Kim Basinger, who pretty much remakes the character as Domino Petachi in Never Say Never Again,” Bob was spouting Bond flick facts with a scary degree of finesse. “Youre just doing another techy journal on this Lotus Domino thing?”
“Yep.”
“But havent you done this before?”
Bob was right. We had done this before. In fact, wed created no less than four Lotus journals, and a book. Back in 1993, I wrote a book called Lotus Notes 3 Revealed! It was the second book ever on Notes and was quite popular. Based on the success of the book, we did our first journal, Workspace for Lotus Notes. Since we were new to the whole journal publishing business, we partnered with The Cobb Group division of Ziff Davis. Ziff, as you probably know, is the largest independent publisher of computer magazines, and Cobb is their division that produces journals and newsletters.
The other part of the “we” in this, by the way, is Managing Editor and Vice President of Publishing, Denise Amrich. While Ive been responsible for the overall direction and technical vision of the publications (the editor-in-chief), Denise has been responsible for making it all happen. She wrangles the authors, sometimes coaxing, sometimes threatening, to get articles in on time. Shes responsible for making everything come together on deadline each month. Together, she and I have made a pretty hot little journal-running team.
Making Workspace work was a challenge. Ziff liked reaching mass readership, so we aimed Workspace at all Notes users, not just administrators. The problem was, it was tough reaching end-users because most Notes installations of the time were installed through business partners and Lotus. There just wasnt a master list of Notes end-users. And, of course, the Web wasnt really there yet.
So while Workspace was a critical success and an incredibly high quality publication, it wasnt really a commercial success. Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that cc:Mail was an enormous market force. Wed been approached by the cc:Mail people in Mountain View to do a new journal aimed squarely at cc:Mail. Cobb approved the idea and we were away. The Insider for Lotus cc:Mail was launched. It became pretty successful. So successful, in fact, that compared to Workspace, it was a screamer. Cobb decided to shut down Workspace and migrate the readers to cc:Mail.
We thought we were out of the Notes publishing game for good. We were wrong.
Two interesting things happened. First, Lotus had this funky little CD-ROM publication called The Notes Enthusiast. It was a quarterly CD-ROM with tips, techniques, and a bunch of databases. Theyd done a deal with another division of massive Ziff-Davis to jointly publish the thing. But they had nobody to run it.
Who, they asked, inside the Ziff organization knows how to do Notes publications? Well, they found us. Strictly speaking, we werent in the Ziff organization, since were an independent company. But wed partnered with Ziff on the other journals and we signed up to manage the