Herman Duyker: Lotus Domino

Thu, 10 Jul 2003 10:54:07 GMT

Now this sounds interesting:

Proposion ASPEN is an add-in for IBM Lotus Domino servers that allows them to run ASP.NET applications. ASPEN eliminates the need for Domino shops to install Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) or any other web server in order to build and deploy a wide range of ASP.NET-based applications. Furthermore, applications deployed with ASPEN can now leverage the world-class security and robustness that the Domino server provides.

See the proposition site for more details

[Found through VOWE.net and Wissel.net]

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 06:51:56 GMT

Been doing a bit of research lately on IBM's WebSphere Portal - Express server (lots of capitals). Part of the reason is that there might be some interest for this at work.

I did more than just look at the marketing blurb, though. For example, IBM is merging its Lotus and portal divisions [march 3 2003, CNet news.com].

And not all portlets mentioned on the IBM website are readily found anymore. I explicitly looked for the integration of Oracle Applications with WebSphere Portal Server (WSPS in short). All announcements and news about that solution are from 2001, and it is (was?) made by SAP Portals, a subsidiary of SAP... which has now been absorbed by the SAP mother company, and its products are nowhere to be found. Which is not all that surprising, as SAP offers the mySAP Enterprise Portal, which competes head-on with IBM WSPS. Oracle has its own offering: Oracle9iAS Portal.

According to research company Jupiter, Oracle has the largest market share (in a highly fragmented market), while IBM and PlumTree Software have the strongest products.

A final comment for now: needs more research ":-)".

Fri, 04 Oct 2002 07:21:17 GMT

It seems to me that the world of mail and collaboration software is getting interesting. Of course, last tuesday IBM / Lotus finally delivered the new release of Lotus Domino and Notes, R6.

Microsoft, of course, is also moving ahead:

Microsoft to detail new Exchange, Outlook. The company will announce plans to add new features to the Web-based version of the Outlook e-mail program that will make it as comprehensive as the regular PC version.
CNET News.com, 03/10/02

And a new / old player in the messaging field is also offering some options.

Oracle renews battle with Lotus, Exchange. The company's new Collaboration Suite lets businesses manage e-mail, voice mail and scheduling, as well as hold Web-based meetings and allow employees to sync data.
CNET News.com, 03/10/02

I, for one, would suggest that Oracle stay at what it is good at. That is, creating database software.

Sun, 29 Sep 2002 17:23:08 GMT

IBM is taking its first major step in integrating WebSphere and Domino into what the company is calling its next-generation platform, in which Domino takes on a supporting role as collaboration component provider for applications built on WebSphere.
[Network World, 09/16/02]

Is this where IBM is taking Domino? The more I hear about it, the more I tend to think being just proficient in Lotus Domino is not the way to go. And you almost have to know Java nowadays, which is a totally different thing from being able to build Domino forms and views, and writing @Formula language and some LotusScript.

Perhaps moving to .NET is not such a bad idea after all ":-)"

Sun, 29 Sep 2002 08:14:22 GMT

Stuff to try out: found some "undocumented LotusScript".

Might be usefull... if it works.

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 14:36:08 GMT

Microsoft eases Lotus to Exchange migration. Application Analyzer enable users to assess which apps to migrate
[InfoWorld: Top News]

Question is: which way to go? Microsoft seems to be going strong concerning new developments, while IBM/Lotus is slowing down. Domino R6 is (by now) quite close on the horizon, but what next? WebSphere Domino? WebSphere Collaboration Server (sounds colourfull)?

My medium-to-long term bets are still on Microsoft.

Sat, 21 Sep 2002 21:04:40 GMT

Had someone at work say that using pixels to size your fonts in CSS is not the way to go. Found some reference to an article by Jeffrey Zeldman, who tells us "just give up and use pixels even though it's the wrong way to do it." At least, until everyone is using IE6 or Mozilla. Inside a company that is an option (though some people are still using IE5 or older browsers); "out on the web" that is not an option. Read the article and see why you must be carefull.

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 22:47:36 GMT

Lotus ponders KM future. Collaboration drives upgrade path as knowledge management fades

SEEKING TO BOLSTER its position in the deflated KM (knowledge management) segment, IBM's Lotus Software is going back to its collaboration roots.
[InfoWorld: Top News]

A few notes about where things seem to be going:

Microsoft is building support for collaboration into it's .Net capabilities, and connecting with (amongst others) Groove Networks. This might prove something of a threat to Lotus in the long run.
Notes/Domino 6.0 ship next month, after a long beta. Question is, are people waiting for the next version of what has essentially become a proprietary application server?
At least, Microsoft seems to be offering "us developers" more of a choice in programming language (already tried out Perl.Net ?)
Al Zollar (Lotus CEO) claims that Lotus Discovery Server is delivering the kind of content management customers are seeking. It is a shame, then, that it seems to be competing with the (aptly named) IBM Content Manager family of products.
And of course, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose the right (IBM) tool for the job... should we be using Lotus Domino.Doc to store our documents, or is Content Manager CommonStore the right solution? Extended Search of Discovery Server? Will we keep on using the Lotus .nsf database format, or should we choose DB2? It is not getting any clearer.
Especially when separate products get combined... K-Station portal with WebSphere Portal, for example.
And I could go on...

The good news is, everyone seems to agree it is a good idea to use Web Services to offer all this funtionality. Even IBM and Microsoft seem to agree on that. Now just hope those services are compatible with one another.

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 09:37:05 GMT

Useit.Com: Ten Best Intranets of 2002. Even though the full process can take about two years, our winning projects did not hold off until everything was perfect before releasing the new intranets to an unsuspecting public. Some companies had been burned before by "big bang" development projects that took forever to create a hoped-for solution to all problems in a single, delayed release.
[Tomalak's Realm]

Inspiration for a new intranet design for the company I work for?

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 10:21:12 GMT

From Infoworld : Notes is dead

NOTES IS DEAD. Kaput, pushing up daisies, canceled, an ex-application (apologies to Monty Python and Hollywood intellectual property gatekeeper Jack Valenti for appropriating material from the classic "Dead Parrot" sketch).

According to police reports, Notes was killed by inventor Ray Ozzie, 45. Ozzie entered the Notes space on the Ides of August -- Aug. 15, 2002 -- armed with Version 2.1 of the Groove collaboration platform and its new peer-to-peer e-mail functionality. Notes, already weakened by years of assault by Microsoft and its Exchange/Outlook team, was finished off in recent days by Ozzie's commandeering of another growing collaboration model: Weblogs.

So, should you consider moving to a completely Notes-based environment, or should you keep your options open? I would go for the last option, and not go for a single solution. Groove is pretty mature by now, and weblogging software is also getting there. And yes, you can base it all on Domino... the only point is the rest of the world is moving in different directions, and the word from IBM is not all positive. And of course, the move to R6 is an option to consider: should you upgrade, or shouldn't you? The advantages are not yet clear: for now it seems more like a "minor" upgrade, especially since IBM pulled the integral JSP support.

I, for one, am going to counsel the company I work for to wait at least until the first "point" release comes out. Sounds like using a Microsoft product...

Wed, 21 Aug 2002 11:32:44 GMT

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]

Wed, 21 Aug 2002 11:30:29 GMT

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...

Wed, 21 Aug 2002 11:01:46 GMT

Welcome to the Lotus Domino pages.