Lotus moves with the times... not!

iTX is a Lotus distributor in Australia and I put all of my software licence sales and renewals business through them. Last Friday iTX held its annual software university and during the day Lotus reminded us Business Partners of the sales and technical resources available on their salestalk website (thanks Kathy).

I dutifully logged in there this morning to see if I could use any of the material in our upcoming free Sametime/Quickr seminar and was amazed at the antiquated help screen for enabling cookies (I don't feel embarrassed at following help screens - like most developers I work with multiple browsers and don't pretend to remember all of the menu commands).


Netscape 4? IE5? The resources on the Lotus site are useful but dear oh dear someone needs to update the help screen. I won't be reporting this to Lotus as a bug because it's not a bug. I'll just hang this washing out on the line and let Lotus pick it up and give the subject a rinse if they think it's necessary.
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IBM prefers MS Word ...

I don't like making posts like this but I figure its the most effective way of embarrassing IBM into actually doing something about fixing up its archaic and poorly maintained web site.

I recently passed my certification exams for R8.5 System Administration and Application Development and sought to claim the exam fees back from IBM under the 'You Pass - We Pay' benefit included with my annual IBM/Lotus Partner fees.

If you google IBM + 'You Pass - We Pay' and select the second document displayed "You Pass/We Pay Reimbursement Claim Form", then you wind up with a claim form and claim process valid for January 1st, 2000 to June 30th, 2001 complete with fax numbers ... what's a fax number used for again? Don't remind me!

Even worse than that is the fact that there is no way to navigate to the 2009 claim form. Having fought with IBM's web site before, I knew enough to admit defeat early in the game. I logged into Partnerworld and traced through the menus until I found the screen offering me a download of the current claim form in Lotus Wordpro or Microsoft Word format.

Sorry guys... I use Lotus Symphony. It's a great product that's been available for a couple of years now and I really think you guys at IBM should try it out sometime soon. Now since I don't have a copy of Wordpro or Microsoft Word and your document won't load in WordPad (see error below) then can someone tell me how I can claim back my exam fees?




Shame on you IBM - go and fix up your own backyard.
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