ORLANDO – Notes/Domino users say they feel good about the health of their chosen collaboration platform after IBM/Lotus laid out its road map at last week’s Lotusphere conference.
“Two years ago, I had a lot more doubt than I have now,” said James Wagner, vice president and IS audit manager at National City in Cleveland. “Now I have a good feeling that they have made a commitment to the platform.”
IBM/Lotus showed off Notes/Domino 7, which is slated to ship in the fall. It includes a new administrative tool, Domino Domain Manager, deeper support for Web services and the availability of the Notes 7.0 client within the new Workplace Client Technology, which allows the Notes client to operate within Workplace.
The company also previewed Notes 7.5, with promised Workplace plug-ins for Linux and Macintosh clients, and Notes 8, which will unify the client code base and bake the Notes client into the Workplace Client Technology.
“There is no longer a dual highway fear factor,” said Mike Gotta, an analyst with Meta Group. “Notes users can feel good about going down the road to Notes 7.”
That’s a positive for National City’s Wagner, who said he doesn’t want to leave the Notes platform mostly because of migration and developers expertise costs, but in part because the alternative seems half-baked.
“There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to Workplace yet,” Wagner said.
Others echoed those sentiments by saying the right thing is to strengthen Notes.
“When Workplace was first announced, there was a lot of confusion about the future of Notes,” said Steven Meeks, an IT systems architect for a soft drink bottling company in Sydney, Australia. “Now they have shown that Notes is here to stay.”
Meeks said IBM/Lotus has to show evidence of customer implementations before he will take a serious look at Workplace, although he likes the managed client that would make it easier to push out updates to desktops.
“It’s clear the two platforms could meld at some point,” he said.
Although most Notes talk focused on the client and development tools, Lotus Software General Manager Ambuj Goyal said the server is not being ignored. “Domino will be enhanced and moved forward. Notes does not work without Domino,” he said.
