IBM Hopes Lotus Infrastructure Streamlining Goes Quickr

Published: February 6, 2007

by Dan Burger

IBM iSeries users who are also part of the Lotus Notes/Domino installed base, particularly those where Domino applications are considered mission critical, are taking an infrastructure streamlining approach as they upgrade to newer versions of N/D and the System i. It's not a universal occurrence, but could be considered a trend according to Jean Heidelberg, an IBM executive with knowledge of both the Lotus and the System i sides of the business.

"It aligns with doing Domino release upgrades," Heidelberg says of the infrastructure streamlining. "People step back and say this would be a good time to simplify an infrastructure which has grown willy-nilly." She says server consolidation is often part of this process as organizations upgrade servers and then upgrade the clients. "The upgrades are easier when there are fewer servers," she notes.

When Heidelberg or others at IBM talk about server consolidation, the emphasis is on consolidating Microsoft Windows boxes on System i. There's no statistical evidence to quantify this, however, only anecdotal observations. The same is true when talking about consolidating older iSeries boxes on newer System i iron, which perhaps is happening with greater regularity than Windows consolidation.

Regardless of the type of servers being consolidated, another important streamlining aspect for Domino users is that the software allows partitioning. With one copy of i5/OS and one copy of Domino, there can be multiple Domino servers. It doesn't require carving the hardware and there is no relationship between the number of instances of Domino and the number of processors. It allows the Domino administrator to partition applications. For instance, a partition for the Domino mail server can be separate from a partition for application development without requiring additional servers for each application.

Partitioning comes into play with the new Lotus Quickr, which Heidelberg does not hesitate to mention. She is, after all, the senior offering manager for that product, after spending several years as the eServer business development manager for Lotus.

Quickr, which was announced at the Lotusphere conference in late January, is a content-sharing program that supports collaborative tools--such as wikis, team blogs, content libraries, and RSS feeds--and links them to desktop applications.

The purpose of embedding these communication services within collaborative applications is to allow users to spontaneously share ideas in ways that enhance the workflow and subsequently the employee and business performance.

"It is a way to easily share content with your team and collaborate," Heidelberg says. "Under the covers there are two deployment options. One is Domino-based; the other is WebSphere Portal-based. The System i customers that are Domino customers tend to use the Domino-based version," she says. "It is easiest to deploy for them."

Lotus Quickr software, which becomes available in the second quarter of 2007 in its standard edition format, integrates with the 7.x versions of Lotus Notes as well as Notes 8.0, which is scheduled for a mid-year release. It also integrates with Microsoft Office 2000, XP, and 2003 and Microsoft Windows 2000, XP and 2003. The software will also support multiple repositories including Lotus Domino and IBM WebSphere Portal.

"Quickr, from a deployment perspective, should be well received by the System i users," Heidelberg says, "because System i has advantages. Domino has partitions and it has good tools to keep the partitions separated. They are actual sub-systems when running on an iSeries and are easy to manage."

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot