You've likely been reading a lot about Lotus Notes R5 and wondering whether you're behind the curve in upgrading. It's not as straightforward a decision as you might imagine. In fact, for most Notes shops, it's less a technical decision than a business one. There are some real pluses to making the leap. R5 requires less server capacity than the previous release and provides more tools for creating Web applications.
End users can even customize the interface.
Still, if you're convinced you're not getting maximum value out of your current Notes installation, chances are you won't gain much by upgrading. To make the upgrade worthwhile, your company still needs a supportive corporate culture and resources to match. You need time to plan, plenty of IT staff and developers, and a clear vision of what apps you want to develop and what business problem you want to solve with those applications. Plenty of large shops agree that these tools provide everything you need to quickly write and deploy an application. But even the most carefully crafted and rapidly deployed app is useless if your people don't use it.