Insurer slams Lotus' worldwide support

Insurance giant Royal & Sun Alliance (R&SA) has damned Lotus' worldwide support as "unacceptable" and says it may ditch the software company's document management product, Domino.Doc, just a year after buying it.

"The level of support Lotus provides is not what we would call acceptable. Lotus usually says it will deal with bugs in the next release, but you expect some kind of service pack upgrade and Lotus is not too hot on that," said Darren Manning, information systems consultant at R&SA.

Requests for improved functionality in Domino.Doc 3 have not been addressed and this raises questions about R&SA's continued use of the product, claimed Manning.

"We had specific requirements, such as several-tier categorisation of folders and documents, and Lotus could not deliver. The back-end functionality remains much the same," he said.

R&SA uses Lotus Notes and Domino across its 50,000 desktops worldwide and plans to test Lotus' knowledge management product, Raven.

But Manning said other products are already in use, including Coreport, which uses an Autonomy search engine.

"Lotus will have to provide quite a powerful search engine to rival Autonomy and I would be surprised if it could do that," Manning said.

Lotus said its support organisation takes customer satisfaction seriously and continually reviews the needs of key customers.

"There are different support options to meet the differing needs of customers, and we are reviewing with R&SA its current level of support," said Stephen McGibbon, chief technology officer at Lotus UK.

McGibbon would not comment on specific plans for Domino.Doc and Raven within the insurance group, but said he was "aware of activity within R&SA directly to the contrary" of Manning's claims.

"This year has been something of a lost chance for Lotus, but Raven still has a lot of interest from customers," said Eric Woods, principal analyst at Ovum.

First published in Computing