Wednesday 21 August 2002

And now it seems you can integrate the Groove with both Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange/Sharepoint: Lotus Notes & Groove integration clarification. Judging from the large quantity of email that I've received, the press coverage for Groove V2.1 left a number of "Notes People" with questions - e.g. lots of inbound traffic to this blog from here last week. Two representative emails, abstracted/summarized, markup mine, follow - one from a customer, one from a partner. ...this left us questioning why invest in r6 if its going into os/2-like mode or worse yet pushing us further into wsphere. Our clients are 4.6, our servers are largely r5, and they both work fine, but I'm under HUGE continuing pressure inside to consider a move to exchange because the cals are already paid for. The way that I see it, your product and its notes integration helps because it lets my users get more out of their r4 clients in the near term while I consider my options, and maybe even will help with the transition if or when I decide to go ad+exchange, which looks better moving forward. make any sense? ...there is a lot of frustration out here, as you can see if you look back through the forums. We've been believers for many years (thank you and Iris!), and helped lots of customers and made a good living building and migrating apps from R3 to R4 to R4.x to Domino and the Web in R5. I want to leverage my skills and was working with rnext/R6, but in these times I see fewer and fewer of my customers rushing to upgrade. Most of my business has been at the departmental level, but IT controls the upgrades, and they're not even considering it in this economy. But the departments do have budget to solve their own problems, and a couple have been piloting Groove and are very impressed with what they can do. So am I. Now that it connects to Notes, I'm wondering if I should ... [and so on] Here's the story: There are lots of Lotus Notes users out there. Notes was and is an incredibly powerful platform for developing forms-based document sharing applications, and it has provided tremendous value for those who made investments in it: typically corporate IT for email infrastructure, and the line-of-business for applications. But times have changed, and for a variety of good business reasons - some stated above - people are looking to bridge their Notes investments - training investments, application development investments, infrastructure investments - on their way into products such as SharePoint and Exchange. Groove helps in three different dimensions: First, for Notes users, Groove offers empowerment. In real-life Notes deployments, for good security reasons, most administrators configure the product such that individual users aren't permitted to create Notes databases. And even if they were able to do it, most Notes servers live on the corporate intranet - whereas people need to work with others across enterprise boundaries. New with Groove 2.1, Notes users can click a message in most any Notes database - whether eMail or an application - and Groove "scrounges" the message thread, gathering all of the documents, all of the related attachments, and all of the related people, and dynamically creates a "shared space" where people can begin securely interacting in real-time or anytime. It's that easy. They can then add new tools, securely invite members outside the enterprise, instantly. Furthermore, they will soon be able to take advantage of our recently announced SharePoint/Groove toolset, which will enable them to make those dynamic conversations available to others on their Intranet, on their SharePoint Team Service sites. Second, for the line-of-business that generally creates custom Notes applications, it enables the ability to rapidly assemble teams, manage documents and projects, make decisions, and solve problems across enterprise boundaries - all without having to fund IT to host new Domino servers in the DMZ - a costly and time-consuming process, or to fund their external hosting - unsecure and disconnected from enterprise systems. LOB users can create new shared spaces as needed, and developers can rapidly build applications using such powerful products as VisualStudio.NET, to connect Groove shared space data to extant Notes databases as well as to other products such as SharePoint Portal Server. Third, for corporate IT groups who are entering a complex decision process related to upgrades, migrations, or new outward-facing Notes applications, Groove can provide immediate return and benefit for those within your organization who need to do secure collaboration outside the enterprise. Although surely not designed as a "migration tool", through its new integration features Groove can act as a bridge for many types of interactions that include both Notes and Outlook users - an important consideration for merged Notes+Exchange companies, or companies considering their migration options. With regard to eMail, if you've got questions about migration, Exchange, or SharePoint, then please contact your Microsoft sales rep. If you've got questions about how Groove integrates with Lotus/IBM or Microsoft products, and would like to explore using Groove within your line-of-business or enterprise, or if you're a partner exploring your alternatives, please feel free to contact me via rozzie at groove.net and I'll direct your note to one of our enterprise sales, government sales, or partner specialists. [Ray Ozzie: groove] 12:32:44 PM

The Groove website V2.1 just went live this morning.  Looks great; congrats to the team...! [Ray Ozzie: groove] The Groove is just one application which might replace Domino / Notes from it's place... it looks better, and you don't need a server. Downside: it is not web-based, though it makes heavy use of XML and (I think) HTML for configuration and display. Interesting stuff from the guy who came up with Notes in the first place... 12:30:29 PM

Welcome to the Lotus Domino pages. 12:01:46 PM