Four months after Lotus abandoned future development of its Domino Web application and messaging server on Novell's NetWare operating system, customers and experts continue to criticize the decision as shortsighted.
The critics predict the move will soon haunt IBM subsidiary Lotus in its ongoing struggle to stem a rising tide of support for Microsoft's Exchange Server.
The issue sparked a flurry of comments recently in a Network World Fusion online forum, including:
Mistake in Minnesota
Notes may be the future, but Lotus' 'No Novell' policy has locked it out of much of the state of Minnesota. Many state organizations, including Minnesota state colleges and universities, have a vested interest in Novell. NetWare is usually the only network operating system used by an agency. These organizations now utilize GroupWise for e-mail, scheduling and document control.
The Lotus technology may be superior and more extensible, but it is harder to justify the conversion when a platform changes to an inferior server NOS or support for two operating systems is required.
- Jim Martinson, instructor, Ridgewater College, Hutchinson, Minn.
Forget about Notes now
We are not as of yet a Notes customer. We are a Novell shop. Due to the marketplace, we are forced to use NT but only in isolated application-specific support scenarios. We do not intend to migrate to NT across the enterprise.
It appears, at this point, that a Notes 5.0 implementation throughout the enterprise requires a migration to NT throughout the enterprise. That being the case, Notes is eliminated from consideration for our organization. It seems ex-tremely shortsighted of Lotus/ IBM to abandon what seems to be a very large and, as regards to us, quite satisfied Novell-based community.
- Joel Sweatte, chief technical architect, Wake County public schools, Raleigh, N.C.
Not being heard
I currently have close to 60 servers running the notessrv. nlm. I have been very happy up to this point running on this platform. I do not feel the companies that are using Notes on NetWare are being heard because they are primarily smaller installations, so they most likely do not have Lotus or Novell representatives working with them directly.
Also, I know that there are a lot of cc:Mail post offices currently running on NetWare servers. Because Lotus is dis-continuing cc:Mail and attempting to pull those users to Notes, that would be another large number of NetWare servers that would likely convert to NT.
- James Hassall, LAN systems analyst, Johnson Controls, Plymouth, Mich.
A vote for GroupWise
A better groupware application to have for NetWare is Novell's GroupWise 5.5. It has most of the features of Lotus Notes and some features that Notes 5.0 does not have. It integrates much better with NetWare and requires less administration and a lot less programming. So let Notes 5.0 go away.
- Michael Vamper, senior network engineer, e-Commerce Technologies, Sunrise, Fla.
Advice for Lotus
Notes/Domino has three advantages over Exchange: a bigger installed base, richer development tools and cross-platform support. Exchange's advantages include a better client, better ease of use, Microsoft marketing and better hooks into the Microsoft development environment.
Next year, Exchange will have an additional and very important advantage over Notes: direct ties to Active Directory, meaning it will be fully directory-enabled and won't rely on synchronization.
I would make the following suggestions to IBM/Lotus: Reverse the decision to drop development efforts on NetWare. To not do so would mean losing its cross-platform advantage over Exchange and would mean competing almost exclusively on Microsoft's turf - NT.
IBM should consider leveraging the 40 million installed seats of Novell Directory Services and tying Notes directly to NDS in the same way Microsoft will be tying Exchange to Active Directory in the Platinum release.
Pay more attention to the customers that have made Lotus a success.
- Tom Ferris, IT manager at a major financial institution in Washington, D.C.
RELATED LINKS
Lotus exec explains decision
To not port Domino 5.0 to NetWare. Network World, 11/30/98.
Forum: Domino and NetWare
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