Lotus' Domino plans disappoint customers

ORLANDO - Lotus last week stunned customers by pulling a key piece of technology from the forthcoming release of Domino, igniting a backlash by users who questioned the future of the product as a Web-based development platform.

After Lotusphere attendees first warmed to Lotus' plans for Domino to become a set of collaboration components that run on Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE), they were fed a bitter pill when the company pulled key Java technology, called Garnet, from the forthcoming Domino 6 package.

Garnet, under development for more than a year, supplied support for Java Server Pages (JSP) in Domino. Support for JSP, a simple programming mechanism for displaying dynamic content on a Web page, was to provide a bridge into the J2EE development world without having to purchase and deploy a full-blown J2EE server, such as IBM's WebSphere.

"This would have made Domino even more viable as an 'all-in-one integrated platform,' very coherent and low-cost compared to 'classic' J2EE solutions involving WebSphere and DB2 that require many different people and skills," says Pejman Parandi, a senior Web developer who asked that his company not be identified.

But IBM is no longer interested in an all-in-one platform, Parandi says, and it killed Garnet to avoid competing with J2EE support in WebSphere.

Garnet, which is in the current beta versions of Domino 6, isn't scheduled for inclusion in the next beta that ships this month.

IBM officials say they realized Garnet wasn't complete enough to be a pure standards technology and that it actually represented a risk to positioning Domino as a set of collaboration components for what Lotus and others are calling "contextual collaboration" (see The Scoop, this page) - the ability to integrate collaboration support into business-process applications.

But Lotus has been testing Garnet for nearly a year, so its demise caused surprise and disappointment.

"When they showed the JSP engine for Domino [Garnet] last year, I thought Domino is the Web platform I will go forward with," says Doug Hayden, IT project manager for furniture maker Herman Miller in Zeeland, Mich. "I'm on board with the other changes, but I am disappointed they pulled the JSP engine. I don't need WebSphere. I look at it as another platform that I would have to learn, so I thought it was great that I had what I needed in Domino."

Big Blue's strategy

IBM is signaling clearly that Domino will become a set of collaborative components for J2EE developers to add to applications that run on IBM's WebSphere server and IBM's Web services platform, which now includes the DB2 database and Tivoli Systems management wares.

"There is no question that the long-term IBM strategy is to use Domino to sell more infrastructure components like WebSphere, DB2 and Tivoli," says Matt Cain, an analyst with the Meta Group. "This is going to be a tumultuous time for IBM/Lotus as they rationalize what is Domino."

Some say the tumultuous times have already started.

"It was nice to see Lotus get the Web standards for Web application development into Domino, but now they are saying forget it," says Edward Rabinovich, associate director of planning and architecture for Ernst and Young in Cleveland. "Domino now becomes a set of classes you call from WebSphere. It all means more money, more training and more infrastructure."

Some view the elimination of Garnet as such a blow to Domino that one contributor to a discussion list on the Notes.Net Web site suggested Domino 6 be renamed "Domino Edsel." Others suggested that Domino will become just another mail server; is now on a path to irrelevance; and that they will begin shopping for another Java server platform.

Lotus officials reacted by posting an explanation of the Garnet decision and a frequently asked questions section titled "Next Generation Collaboration Strategy" after the negative tone permeated the Notes.Net site.

"Building parallel infrastructure in Domino and WebSphere doesn't make a lot of sense for us," says Ed Brill, senior manager for enterprise messaging at Lotus. He says Lotus would have to spend millions of dollars to develop and support a technology that already exists within IBM.

Brill says using IBM's existing work with WebSphere is the correct way to make Domino data available to J2EE applications.