New Domino and Blue Domino: A Little of Both At Lotusphere

Lotusphere has not been short on drama the past two years. It’s not so much the drama of new product releases and announcements, or glimpses of concept products being demo’d live with the opportunity for user interaction. Lately it’s the drama surrounding the Domino faithful’s uneasiness with open source initiatives and IBM‘s attempts to explain its roadmap and assure the crowd that no one is being left behind. It’s a little bit like reality TV brought to the convention center.

On the new products front, the annual Lotusphere extravaganza put Domino 6.5.1 and the companion products, like QuickPlace and Sametime, in the bright lights. According to Lotus officials, the availability of 6.5.1 for all platforms will come in early February–probably not all on the same day, but within a week of one another.

Although IBM officials say the overall adoption rate from Domino 5 to Domino 6 is advancing twice as fast as conversion from Domino 4.6 to Domino 5, the best guesstimates have roughly 20 percent of Domino customers using Domino 6.0 or later. If you count those in the process of moving to Domino 6 along with those who are there, IBM says, approximately half of the customer base will be on Domino 6, 6.5, or 6.5.1 in the near future.

As for iSeries customers, the fact that the next release of OS/400, V5R3, will not support Domino 5 is a serious prod for those who are dragging their feet to start upgrading their Domino servers as they prepare to upgrade their iSeries platform. At this point, the bulk of iSeries customers are upgrading from Domino 5 to Domino 6.5, says Jelan Heidelberg, IBM’s eServer business development manager for Lotus products. Because of the current trend in Domino upgrades, she says 2004 will be a good year for the iSeries as far as Domino is concerned. That forecast is based on historical trends that show that when a significant operating system or Domino release comes out, companies take a look at their infrastructure and see how they can streamline it. It is reasonable that any time you are looking at new infrastructure is also a good time to look at server consolidation, and as we know, server consolidation on the iSeries continues to be an important sales tool. Multiple Domino servers running on physical Windows servers can, and are, consolidated down to logical partitions or subsystems running on a single iSeries, often with demonstrable total cost of ownership savings at shops already familiar with the OS/400 platform. (No matter what IBM says, any shop not familiar with OS/400 cannot see the same savings until it learns OS/400.)

A few of the enhancements in Domino 6.5.1 have made this an easier story to tell. Primarily this relates to the compatibility of major collaborative features such as Sametime, QuickPlace, Domino Web Access, LotusWorkflow, Domino Document Manager, and Lotus Workplace Web Content Management. Although the compatibility issue was not uniquely an iSeries issue, it was sort of a fly-in-the-soup annoyance for the server consolidation strategy. The above-mentioned collaborative tools will all share the 6.5.1 designation with the latest Domino version. Their availability has been set back until approximately March 15.

We need to take a moment here to interject some IBM-speak to clarify product terminology. Although almost everyone refers to the product as Sametime, IBM insists that it be called IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing. The same awkward renaming instance is true with QuickPlace, which the “Office of Corporate Doublespeak” prefers to call IBM Lotus Teamwork Place.

Another important Domino 6.5.1 enhancement is the improved support for Microsoft Outlook clients. Although this support began during the summer of 2003, this step polishes the calendaring features, and moves the Outlook client closer to transparency within Domino.

Instant Messaging gets wider play in Domino 6.5.1, too, and the need for users to have a separate IM client disappears. One cool feature is that when receiving e-mail, an indicator signifies whether the sender is currently online and available to chat.

IBM’s “NexGen” Workplace products were also a big topic of discussion at Lotusphere. Workplace is, as its code-name suggests, the next generation of messaging and collaboration products from IBM that it has created to run on top of its WebSphere J2EE application server and to provide many of the same functions as the Notes/Domino combination. Workplace 1.1 includes Workplace Messaging for e-mail, Workplace Team Collaboration for online meetings, Workplace Collaborative Learning (which provides a format for e-learning), and Workplace Web Content Management (to manage the portals that reach into the Workplace server that supports theses features). Workplace 1.1 requires IBM’s WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal as well as its DB2 database. The Lotus Workplace server runs on SuSE Linux 7.2 and 7.3 and Windows 2000 for 32-bit Intel servers and AIX Version 5.2 for IBM’s pSeries Unix servers.

Although IBM officials predicted Workplace 1.1 would be available for the iSeries by this Lotusphere show, that did not happen. The word now is that the iSeries will get Workplace 2.0 when it ships in about four months. When Workplace 2.0 hits the streets, it will be available for Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Linux on 32-bit Intel servers, AIX on the pSeries, and OS/400 on the iSeries. The possibility of adding Solaris to that list remains unconfirmed. The details of licensing agreements and pricing for Workplace will come to light as the general availability date draws nearer.

Incidentally, IBM calls the new user interface with the Notes client in 6.5.1 “Workplace-like” because it bares a likeness to the true Workplace portal. If you are familiar with portals, Domino 6.5.1 has what looks to be multiple portlets. It’s still a Notes client, but it includes e-mail, a calendar, instant messaging, a buddy list, and a launcher for other applications. Obviously Lotus is trying to bring some Workplace technology to the Domino customer. There is interoperability between the products, but this is not Workplace. These are unquestionably different products making use of separate technologies.

Workplace really a layer of application software that sits on top of the WebSphere portal. It delivers collaborative capabilities in a portal interface. At this stage it is essentially a platform for ISVs to develop applications for business integration. As it evolves, and additional function is added later this year and next, its components will combine with existing Domino applications in an open standards environment that Lotus officials say will create a building-block environment.

For now, it needs to mature and gain the support of more independent software vendors (ISVs) before it will have an impact outside of some very large enterprise IT departments, which are for all intents and purposes their own software suppliers. The complexity and cost of Workplace is a lot for a SMB customer to digest at this point. Because of the complexity and the cost of the Workplace stack, and given IBM’s interest in developing its Express line of low-feature, low-cost products for the SMB space, it is reasonable to believe that IBM will eventually deliver a trimmed-down Workplace Express version of the software to go after SMBs and the ISVs that supply application software to them. Those leading-edge ISVs will provide the technical expertise required to guide implementations that involve integrating it with DB2, WebSphere, LDAP, and portal. IBM will not confirm that Workplace Express is in the works, but if it isn’t, then it should be.

When you look at the boatload of applications that exist in Domino, you can understand why IBM is pushing to bring them to an open source environment. It also brings to mind the Domino application design process, the role of the Domino Designer tool, and Lotus’ reputation for rapid application development.

Bringing these things to the forefront during Lotusphere was the demonstration of a new portal design tool called Workplace Builder, which moves a little further toward application development without technical expertise. Although IBM will not say when this tool will be ready for market, it is clearly aimed at SMB customers whose application development skills, generally speaking, are not as strong as those at the enterprise level.

An important tool in IBM’s portal strategy for OS/400 customers, Portal Express, just became available two weeks ago. Read about it, and its sibling product, Portal Express Plus, by going to “WebSphere Portal Express Comes to OS/400” in the November 24 issue of this newsletter.

IBM is walking a tightrope between Domino products and the Java-oriented Workplace products. In the opening session, IBM executives repeated the party line that support for Domino is not going away and that Domino customers can stay with Domino forever if they choose to do that. IBM says it is committed to the continued enhancement of Domino and that fears of abandonment are chiefly the result of competitors spreading rumors.

However, Lotus is not shy about stating its preference toward open source, Java, WebSphere, and portal technology. The compatibility issue rolled off the tongue of one speaker after another. And if anyone left Orlando without knowing users could access Domino applications through portal interfaces, that person must have never escaped Disney World. Maybe the Portal for Domino Developers sessions were in conflict with shows at the Magic Kingdom. But even if that were the case, it would almost be believable that Mickey would have said his good-byes and added, “You know, you can maintain Domino skills and still do portals, boys and girls!”