Burton Group's Bill Pray has an interesting, first-hand observation on Google's Tuesday announcement of "Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook":
[H]aving been part of a team that built a connector for Outlook, it is not as simple as it sounds. Google's approach may doom the effort. ...Few noticed a technote IBM published recently announcing the end of Domino Access for MS-Outlook. I even let the funeral pass without comment at the time, despite being the marketing manager who brought DAMO into the world (as "Bluejay") ten years ago.
As Microsoft alters Outlook in releases, service packs, and patches, it becomes very difficult to maintain this kind of integration. A lot of the heavy lifting happens client side in Outlook, so even small tweaks can create engineering nightmares for an integration. Microsoft definitely isn't incented to be helpful to these kinds of integrations like they are with partner application integrations to Outlook. The result is that customers trying to use the connectors become frustrated with frequent "breaks" and loss of functionality as their vendor tries to catch up to the latest changes in the Outlook client. ...
Google seems to be approaching it like IBM and Novell have... building a connector to make Gmail work in Outlook. It will be interesting to see if they can really make it successful. As Guy [Creese, also of Burton Group] pointed out, the initial release will be missing features -- such as task management, rules, and delegation. This makes it questionable as to whether or not the connector can really permit enterprises to replace their Exchange servers on the backend. Having experienced it first hand, I believe users will be frustrated by the missing functionality.
DAMO was, as Bill Pray correctly observes, a huge challenge. We initially did exactly as he states (you'll need to read the full entry, I didn't quote it all) -- start by trying to make Outlook work like Notes. When we set out to rebuild DAMO in Domino 7, we instead shifted the development mindset to have DAMO work like an Outlook user would expect. Unfortunately, there were always too many edge conditions -- things that just work a bit differently in the Outlook world than in the Notes/Domino world. This wasn't even a matter of whether/if Microsoft published the right APIs or specs -- Exchange and Domino are not 100% homogenous identical back-ends, and, especially in areas like calendar workflow, just couldn't line up.
The reasons we built DAMO in the first place were to go after the market that Google now aspires to sell to. Drop in replacement for Exchange, yada yada, let users keep Outlook. Since that time ten years ago, we've dramatically improved the Notes user interface, delivered a great web user interface, and opened up Domino to a whole range of mobile clients where the desktop client doesn't even matter. I don't doubt that there is a market here -- and it is a market that almost every non-Exchange e-mail vendor in the market has gone after at some point. Outlook, or Outlook users, don't want to go there, en masse. Good luck to Google, chasing old ground. I would rather we invest in a great client story for the Notes/Domino portfolio, and skate where the puck is going.
Link: Burton Collaboration and Content Blog: Google's Approach May Doom the Effort >
Post a Comment
- 2
Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 6/11/2009 3:24:37 PM
@1 - DAMO was a connector from Outlook to Domino, not Notes. Where did you get that?
- 3
Adam Osborne http://www.preemptive.com.au | 6/11/2009 5:21:13 PM
Hi Ed,
I recently watched the Apple keynote on Snow Leopard and how they plan to integrated with Exchange. From what I can tell it is all done with Exchange Web Services and it got me thinking. What would happen if IBM released web Services for Domino and how practical would it be to adopt the Exchange Web Services calls ?
- 4
Palmi | 6/11/2009 5:29:58 PM
@1 it must be a typo - Nathan is right. But am glade the DAMO lifetime is over. let focus on "New" LN Client - Anyone seen the Google Wave ? Now that is what i call Sosial networking - Nathan - Great job on your new product - see u in LS10
- 5
Peter Wilson | 6/12/2009 6:19:46 AM
To be honest, Google seem to have done a much nicer job with their plugin vs. DAMO. With the Google plug you download it and it's automatically syncs in the background to their service which seems so easy.
In any case, Notes needs to continue on developing it's web mail functionality... as there's plenty of competition (and increasing) in this market.
Pete
- 6
Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/12/2009 7:18:03 AM
@5 what leads you to say they've done a nicer job? They don't even support Outlook tasks or notes. There's no analysis you can do right now to say whether the same issues around mis-matched features exist (Google's back end doesn't have a deferred delivery feature or a retraction feature...so those kind of bugaboos will hit them as much as they did us).
- 7
Deleted | 6/12/2009 8:05:30 AM
Deleted and IP address blocked -- enough trolling already.
- 8
Peter Wilson | 6/12/2009 9:08:22 AM
No ID file management (Notes of course), inbuilt data migration feature (local client to Google) so users can continue to use Outlook and Gmail side by side... either ongoing, or until they feel comfortable giving up Outlook.
From memory when DAMO was released the Office team were very supportive of the whole concept (different from the Exchange guys) of working with Lotus.. and I guess would help with compatibility going forward. I guess maybe not..
Pete
- 9
Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 6/12/2009 9:31:44 AM
DAMO was/is a good product. What was always interesting was to see someone use DAMO and then try the MS Outlook connector for Notes (which was free I believe). Either case it was a challenge. DAMO especially in 8.0x I think really got a lot right vs. back in the 6.x days it would work great and then some mail got stuck.
As far as what to put time and money into, I'm sure the market would rather see those resources poured into client improvements and stability vs. an Outlook connector.
However it would be interesting if you could take that technology and whatever code that's used with nupgrade.exe and make a better migration tool, especially for calendar and contacts...
- 10
Charles A. Reid http://www.crassoc.biz | 6/13/2009 12:45:52 PM
This is really bad news for Lotus Foundations resellers. That is one of the sales points is that users could use outlook. It's not good to have a product being rolled out and then features that have been promoted are discontinued when your still on version 1.x
- 11
Henning Heinz | 6/13/2009 4:07:07 PM
Maybe DAMO didn't work because Exchange shops were not really looking at IBM Lotus but they might look at Google. At least Google does not have proprietary stuff that they need to match with Outlook.
- 12
Johannes Madsen http://www.teamsoft.dk | 6/14/2009 10:42:50 AM
I'm very sorry to learn that DAMO is a dead end. My company have just began to promote it to some of our customers who use Outlook+Exchange for mail and Notes+Domino for applications. We want them to save the money they use for Exchange.
- 13
Keith Brooks http://www.vanessabrooks.com | 6/14/2009 8:23:52 PM
When I heard about 'Mo I didn't ask who pulled the trigger or gave the order, I just let it go.
- 14
Popein | 6/15/2009 1:08:01 AM
I fully agree with Peter Wilson - We also tried DAMO and got a lot of issues, there is the ID file (recertifications/renamings, etc), the migration which anyway had to be made, "passthru" / connection docs we needed which could not be updated, etc.
On the other hand, Gmail is fast and many users are used to it already, so many users will switch to the Gmail web client quickly.
- 15
Sjef Bosman | 6/15/2009 8:09:46 AM
Now DAMO is gone, I think the time is right for LAME:
Lotus Access for Microsoft Exchange
Oops, no need, built-in :-))
- 16
Chris Pepin http://www.chrispepin.com | 6/15/2009 7:34:02 PM
I like what Google is doing with this announcement. There are many SMBs that are hosting their own Exchange infrastructure today. With the new Google service, customers can keep the familiar client (Outlook) and move the backend to the Google cloud for free and sunset their Exchange servers.
- 17
Bob Balaban http://www.bobzblog.com | 6/16/2009 7:08:50 PM
Maybe Google haven't realized that if you enable an Outlook connector to make it easier to get people to shift to GAPE, you have ALSO (inadvertently, one assumes) made it easier for people to move from GAPE to Outlook!
D'oh!
- 18
Barry Rosen | 6/17/2009 3:52:01 PM
The problem with DAMO was that end users expected it to function exactly like Outlook/Exchange. It just doesn't and that is very frustrating. The local replication architecture just held it back. If google can add the missing features in later releases, it could be interesting. This is where Lotus Live is competing in the SMB market.
Uhmm..
As far as I see... is not a different thing ? DAMO was a connector from NOTES to Domino...
Notes, agree is "diferent" to Oulook.
But this is a connector from OUTLOOK to Google. This should be easier.... no? Moreover, Google has not his own email client, so he can "acommodate" his Google Mail server more easily to outlook.......