Showing up with the right tools

“W   hen you call an electrician, you hope that he shows up to your home with good tools,” explains Thomas Lang, Managing Director of Domino consultancy
at once GmbH and avid Ytria tools user.

“And as someone who often visits a customer when they’re in trouble—when the customer really needs someone who knows what they’re talking about—it’s nice that I can open my Lotus Notes toolbox and say, ‘look here are some tools that that will let me work faster and do things that even your administrators can’t do.’”

Banking on Notes

Before getting to how Mr Lang discovered Ytria tools, we asked how he ended up as a Notes professional in the first place; it turns out he arrived at his métier by chance:

“It was with my first employer, a bank here in Germany, where I learned the shop as a Banker,” he recalls. “Eventually they asked me if I’d like to work with IT. After that, we built up a Notes environment so that’s how I got started with the platform; it was Notes R4.6 at the time.”

Squaring the circle

“After three years of working in IT, I realized I missed one of the things that led me to banking in the first place: the customer contact, talking to people, which is something I didn’t do so much of in the IT department,” he recalls. “So I started looking for something new.” Soon enough, he did find a job with IBM consulting company in Germany where he could have it both ways: “It was a really nice opportunity to combine IT knowledge with talking to people,” he explains. Then about a year later, he decided to start his own Lotus Notes consultancy which is still going strong today.

A chance encounter with scanEZ

About five years ago, he would learn about Ytria tools while on a tough job:

“I was in the midst of a project with a really large customer here in Germany where we had to do a migration for a merger between two companies,” he recalls. “We tried to switch one Domino environment from the smaller company to the Domino environment of the larger company and there were a lot of problems—horrible things to fix. We had to go through steps again and again and again for every mail database and every application database.” Another consultant on the job was already using the tools. “He told me ‘you need to use Ytria scanEZ,’” Mr Lang recalls. “And I thought ‘yeah it looks great, I can do all these things that normally take hours and hours in maybe 20 minutes.”

Competing with your tools?

But was scanEZ maybe a bit too good?

“I needed to ask myself if should really buy a tool to make things faster,” he says with a laugh. “I’d pay for the tool with my own money and the customer would save money because he doesn’t need to pay for as many hours of my time.” In the end, he concluded that this project was so tedious that he couldn’t bear it. “At first I was resistant but then I thought, it doesn’t make any sense to do this kind of work without the tools,” he remembers. “The work just wasn’t any fun and it was taking ages to do. So I bought scanEZ. That was back in July 2007.”