Tools for Moving to a Microsoft Collaboration Platform

With a long history of specializing in MS Exchange it will be interesting to see the improvements that you make to the available toolset.  I agree that these tools in the past seemed to lend themselves to a focus on 'just migrate faster'.  This in many cases isn't all bad as many clients need the carrot AND the stick oftentimes.  With that said many companies remain on Notes (for business critical apps) well after even completing what might already be a lengthy migration to Exchange ... having tools that integrate AD, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc. with this Notes infrastructure will be fantastic.  Looking forward to working with your toolset in the future!

Hi Todd, good to see some thought going in to the Notes collaboration work.  Are you planning to publish a roadmap some time in the future?

Steve Balmer talks of the notes customer base "Ripe for Plucking".

So forgive me if I take your comments with a pinch of salt. I'm not ready to be "Plucked".

Secondly - 50+ years Notes development experience! Cool. But this doesnt explain the Application Analyser tool does it ? That didnt look as though it had a huge amount of experience or technology invested in it ?

---* Bill
http://www.billbuchan.com

(Sheesh, you make it sound like I know everyone there. Not at all. My personality cult - "The Kilt! My Eyes! They Burn!" (flicr, keyword lotusphere2006) hasnt extended to the west coast. Yet.. :-) )

I think your mis-representing Mr Balmers remarks about "plucking", and conveniently forgetting about the MS Business Partner conference in the Boston area last summer, where MS flew a large number of IBM Business partners across, and stated that MS's aim was to go for the Notes Market share. Not co-existence. Plucking in every sense of the word.

I completely agree that you should go for a co-existence model. After all, when the MS PR machine states that its "won" a customer (such as a very large bank in the UK) from Notes to Exchange, we find that only the eMail has been migrated. In the background, the Lotus Domino servers are still servicing large numbers of applications that cannot be migrated.

Wasnt the MS aquisition of Great Plains software similar ? (If they're still running that Domino v4.5 server, they should *really* upgrade. Soon)

So what do the MS customers get from an Exchange "upgrade" ? They now have to run two infrastructures instead of one, two sets of servers instead of one (with all that administrator training), and they have to downgrade their DR and resilience expectations with Exchange (no active/active clustering, no wide area clustering), and they have to try and keep the wheels on that rather unstable truck - the Jet Engine - whilst it tries to cope with 16gb partitions.  (Oh, whatever happened to Kodiak ?)

Just forget about "big tin" such as pSeries, iSeries, Solaris, HPUX, zSeries. Or other cool trends such as Linux. (Had to get that in somehow, didnt I? ). Can Exchange/sharepoint run mail and apps for 110,000 users on 12 physical machines ? Domino *does*.

The only scalability alternative will be the very new, very untested Windows server in 64-bit mode. No choice. Ouch.

And of course the very same customers who "upgrade" from Notes to Exchange find that there's going to be more than three years between Exchange 2003 and E12, and some features (as well as a lot of API's) are going to get ripped out.

It doesnt look like a good value proposition, does it? Even if they get Exchange for "free" to protect those windows licenses and office licenses.

Then we look at the Sharepoint opportunity. How can a large corporate customer invest in this MS collaborative technologies when there isnt a long term public roadmap for this product. When developing Sharepoint apps requires intimate knowlege of the large number of servers required and high-level knowlege of the large number of programming languages required.  And the next version will rely on the Vista/Longhorn server. So customers will have to wait for *that* to become stable first.

[A small aside. The "tight binding" that exists between the MS operating system and the MS application suite can only cause you real pain and suffering. Having to wait another three years because of Vista "reset" has got to be murder.

"Loose" binding, where the application can run on just about any plaform - (Domino even runs on an xBox (an original - not the three core room heater) - relieves so much tension.]

Hell, I thought being *good* in Lotus Notes was hard. Nada. Not even in the same league, apparently.

Which then brings me to Red Bull. How do you take a 20-year old stable product with huge capability and pour that into a much smaller, less rich container (assuming we're going with my definition of "plucking" here) ?

Will this new MS collaborative platform support 1024-bit built in PKI (such as Domino 7) ? Replication ? Reader/Author fields ? User generatable and deployable encryption keys ? *Java* ? Lotusscript (fairly easy) ? @formula ? (A quick list off the top of my head)

So you can see why we're all waiting with baited breath for this to appear. Given the low expectations set by the last tool (are you really just reading design template names and form names ? Surely not! How on earth do you deal with standard template databases that have been extended - as they all do ?) - it'll be interesting to see what will be delivered by March 31st. Just 36 working days away.

Sorry if this seems a little like "drinking from the firehose", but we're all really energised by IBM visible commitment to notes/domino after a long, hard struggle. It'll be an interesting few years ahead.

If MS couldnt catch up when Notes/Domino was "dead in the water" a few years back, how can you possibly catch up, let alone innovate, when there's more and more clear blue water between you and the rapidly accelerating Notes/Domino application platform ?

---* Bill