CRN: Lotus To Unveil Host Of Workplace Offerings This Month
September 3 2003
Some details on the Notes/Domino 6.5 release
and its position in the Lotus Workplace story.
Lotus considers its forthcoming Lotus Notes 6.5 client to be part of its Workplace line, Lepofsky said.Now I realize that not many have seen the "Workplace" capability in the Notes 6.5 welcome page (since it is in M3 and M3 hasn't been a public beta). Notes 6.5 delivers a Workplace user experience in the welcome page. You'll see....
Executives acknowledged that Notes/Domino and Lotus Workplace Messaging will become one offering over time, but said the company intends to keep developing the Notes and Domino products separately from Workplace for now to allow for broad corporate choices. The next release, Notes/Domino 7.0, will give customers the option of using the Notes file system (NFS) in Notes or IBM's DB2 database.What does that mean? "One offering over time" is about packaging, licensing, delivery, and pricing, not about code (hence "intends to keep developing the Notes and Domino products separately" [emphasis mine]). You also again are seeing a commitment to "7.0" in writing here.
Read the whole story here >
and watch for more press coverage in the next few days/weeks about Notes/Domino 6.5 and the Lotus Workplace story.
Post a Comment
- 2
jonvon http://jonvon.net/ | 9/4/2003 12:00:11 AM
i was in a meeting a while back with some ibm folk who mentioned that a version 7.5 is already planned / in the works. no details or anything, but anyway i thought that was good news.
- 3
Ben Langhinrichs http://www.GeniiSoft.com | 9/4/2003 1:05:44 AM
As I have blogged about before, I am increasingly excited about the new strategy, and relieved when Notes 6.5 is seen as part of it. I am also intrigued with the increasing talk about "rich clients" by Microsoft and others (as I think you have blogged about recently).
- 4
Thomas Gumz | 9/4/2003 1:20:42 AM
It's not called "Notes file system (NFS)", it's called "Note Storage Facility (NSF)".
NFS is a UNIX thing...
- 5
Rob McDonagh | 9/4/2003 9:00:14 AM
Isn't anyone going to bust Ed's cajones over the fact that the words he chose to emphasize ("intends to keep developing the products separately") are followed immediately by the words "for now"?!?
On a side note, no wonder Steve Mills thought Notes was legacy technology - IBM thinks the storage facility is a flat-file shared drive! *snicker*
- 6
Tony C http://www.tonycocks.com | 9/4/2003 9:27:02 AM
...going to say a word. It means only one thing but I don't want to have to repeat myself all over again. This is just the type of spinning EB accuses MS of. 'broad corporate choice'.....oh how I laughed!!
- 7
Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 9/4/2003 9:36:19 AM
If indeed the market is moving to a componentized, service-oriented approach, then the current product architecture obviously can't stay still. "for now" means committing to building a 7.x codestream... nobody in software makes public commitments five years out or whatever.
As for the NFS vs. NSF reference, that's obviously a misquote... let's not get all excited over it.
- 8
Neil Gower | 9/4/2003 10:59:52 AM
"If indeed the market is moving to a componentized, service-oriented approach", i wonder if the market is, or companies like IBM are driving the market in that direction?
"Rich Clients", I wonder why IBM is building another Rich Client, when it has one of the most widely deployed Rich Clients (Notes Client)there is. Surely re-packaging/enhancing the Notes client would be the way to go.. This would really maximise/protect people investments in Domino.
- 9
Ed Brill | 9/4/2003 11:18:44 AM
Lotus is doing both enhancements to Notes and building a rich client for the componentized, contextual-collaboration world. The new client is not a 1-for-1 replacement for Lotus Notes...it is targetted at a certain class of users who need a more useful way of working than we do today.
- 10
Simon | 9/4/2003 12:39:39 PM
code talks!
C'mon get that Notes 6.5 & Workplace... stuff out the door (or at least make it a public beta - ouch!)
- 11
Tony C http://www.tonycocks.com | 9/4/2003 1:51:51 PM
..if anyone else took the 'dual strategy' approach IBM would be all over them like an ill fitting suit claiming 'confusion' and 'muddled thinking'. I agree IBM already has a perfectly good rich client why try and reinvent the wheel...
- 12
Neil Gower | 9/5/2003 4:52:47 AM
I understand that IBM has a dual strategy, but why?
Why spend time and money maintaining 2 rich clients, why muddle the market? Surely renaming the Notes client to the IBM Rich Client, and just enhancing that would be a better idea.
It would be easier to sell, 1 rich client for both environments, might make migration to NextGen easier, is there is no desktop change ( I would have thought that alone would be worth it for IBM as they are soooo keen for us all to move to Next Gen), and desktop changes in large companies cost a fortune.
- 13
Neil Gower | 9/5/2003 5:02:52 AM
I also find it funny in general that so many companies are talking again about thick clients (Rich Clients).
I went to so many presentations saying that thick clients are dead, and thinking to myself that this would not happen until browsers provided far more features,or seeing a browser behave like a rich client only beacuse you have to download 30meg of appletts or activex controls(which means the browsr is a thick client anyway).
So a option for Next Gen will be an application server, with rich clients, that will in time have offline capabilities...
That sounds really familiar, I think part of IBM may be offering some similar at the moment, and has been since 1989 !
- 14
Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 9/5/2003 7:43:19 AM
The "Rich client" is being designed to do things fundimentally different from the Notes client. It is not a direct replacement nor is it intended to be. It solves a specific set of knowledge worker requirements and thus, isn't a 1-for-1 upgrade. So it's not a matter of renaming Notes as "IBM Rich Client" because they do different things (Notes can't do -everything-, you know, as much as I like it!).
Second, the point about desktop deployments/upgrades being a big challenge hasn't gone unnoticed. Can't say too much more yet, but there's a lot of thought going into this issue. It's certainly something learned from cc:Mail, and why cc:Mail 6.3 was given the ability to work natively with the Domino backend.
- 15 | 9/5/2003 7:55:10 AM
- 16 Ed Brill | 9/5/2003 9:04:48 AM
- 17
Neil Gower | 9/5/2003 11:27:07 AM
Youll tell me theres no tooth fairy next.
Bet if we went around the Domino community we would find it has been used for some surprising things !!
On a serious note, I noticed that there are some 2 day seminars on Portal Express. Are we going to get these in the UK?
- 18
Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 9/5/2003 12:07:39 PM
Here's the URL of what I could find:
https://www.developer.ibm.com/spc/events/collaborative_portal.html?ca=dsp-3qlts1wsce
Paris, Stuttgart, but not UK.
- 19
Neil Gower | 9/5/2003 7:21:55 PM
Ohh well, maybe later in the year..
once 6.5 ships, I'm looking for the commitment to a "next major release beyond 7.0" --- I for one was very excited and pleased to hear a committment at Lotusphere last year to "at least 2 more major releases" but have so far been a little taken aback by what 'new functionality' in 6.5 is, and how that qualifies as a major release. Perhaps I'll be surprised. In 7.0 I'm looking for a LOT more than just a db2 backend option. I'm going to want to see a LOT more web services support both as client and as server, and a lot better integration with a locally running small business servlet engine, be it WAS or a slot to plug in a Tomcat style appliance.