I'm glad IBM finally "gets"
Lotus Notes and has a cohesive message that keeps everyone (including big
Notes shops, Websphere shops and new users) excited and happy about the
direction IBM/Lotus technology is heading.
p.s., thanks to Ben Rose for noticing that you can't add comments to my
blog. I locked it down a bit too hard (I hate leaving databases open
w/ Author access), but it should be fixed now :-P
The Powers That Be finally realize that
Notes cannot be replaced by a fancy Websphere Portal (a.k.a., Lotus WorkPlace,
LWP, or Large Wallowing Pig
The new Workplace Client Technology (a.k.a. Eclipse w/ super plugins) will
be able to provide a unified experience between Workplace applications
and Domino applications. This new Workplace Client Technology looks
to be the replacement for the Notes 8 client, so I hope it'll still be
decently fast and not a memory hog...it'll give Mac users a full experience
finally (though there are rumors that the Notes Mac 7.02 client will get
Sametime awareness and possibly a working designer) and there's even hope
of a Linux Notes client since Eclipse runs on Linux.
The Workplace Designer for LWP 2.5 is an attempt at bringing Notes RAD
capabilities to Lotus WorkPlace and it sounds like it's more capable than
the crude "Designer" in LWP 2.0 which was, in-reality, a fancy
skin/theme editor where you ironically couldn't package skins to deploy
on other servers. I'm looking forward to checking out the Workplace
Designer in the coming year and I'm sure you'll hear my blunt analysis
of it
Activity
Explorer looks to be a pretty
cool plugin for the Workplace Client. Think a combination of Groove,
QuickPlace, wikis, discussion forums, and presence awareness. I think
companies will be a lot more accepting of this than Groove because everything
stays on the server so they can keep everything archived and secured. Richard
Schwartz blogged
about how it was missing Notes document sharing; I heartily agree that
this needs to be done to make LWP more compelling. After all, Notes
has a lot more security features than LWP or just about any J2EE app
What's a bit disappointing is Workplace Services Express, a.k.a. LWP "light",
even though anyone on Passport Maintenance gets a free license for one
server. It uses Derby for the underlying database, but Derby runs
as an embedded database which makes the server bog down after maybe 100
users according to some folks (and it still wants a machine w/ 2-3GB of
memory!). You can't plug in a new database engine nor can you run
Derby in standalone mode. You have to go all out and buy Lotus Workplace
which uses DB2 as the backend engine if you want to support more users.
Yet you still aren't allowed to use DB2 for your own apps on the
fullblown LWP server; DB2 can only be used by Workplace applications. Makes
me wish Lotus just packaged up the LWP apps and sold them to run on any
J2EE server so you could run it on any database you want; aren't J2EE apps
supposed to be sold that way? It's a blog rant for another day
We can look forward to Lotus Notes/Domino 7.0 by midyear. This gives
us a 30% speed improvement over 6.5 and lets us put 80% more users on the
same server (on Linux, it lets you put 300% more users on the same Linux
server because it finally uses the 2.6 Linux kernel's multithreading capabilities).
For that 2% of Notes customers who have massive databases with lots
of documents and views, they can use a DB2 database to store Notes data
and it will be a lot faster updating huge views. Lotus Domino 8.0
has been committed to as well, so the rumors of Notes being killed by Websphere
is, welll dead. I can only hope someone gave Steve
Mills a swift kick in the
*ss, but I'm disappointed it wasn't me
Ken's Blog
Musings on Lotusphere 200501/28/2005 06:23 PM
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