Collaboration Loop/Peter O’Kelly: Lotusphere 2007 Impressions: IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal

February 1 2007

More from Burton Group's Peter O'Kelly on Lotusphere...

Lotusphere 2007 was probably the most upbeat and exciting event for Notes/Domino loyalists since the first two Lotusphere sessions (during December, 1993 and January, 1995).  While the pressure is still on IBM Lotus to deliver a timely and robust release of Notes/Domino 8.0 during the first half of 2007, the Notes/Domino-focused sessions at Lotusphere 2007 made it very clear that Notes/Domino is central to IBM's enterprise communication/collaboration strategy, and that IBM Lotus has made very significant investments in and improvements to the product over the last several years.

Most significantly, the Notes 8.0 client is a radical improvement in user experience and capabilities.  The Notes 7.x product family is functionally powerful but somewhat stale, from a user experience perspective, as it mostly represented incremental changes to the Notes 4.0 model first released in 1996 (see IBM's "The History of Lotus Notes and Domino" for more details on and screenshots of Notes releases 1.0 through 7.0).  Critically important for IBM, Notes 8.0 is likely to lead to significant information worker demand -- i.e., to result in end users asking their information technology counterparts to upgrade to Notes 8.0 sooner rather than later.
Link: Collaboration Loop/Peter O'Kelly: Lotusphere 2007 Impressions: IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotusphere2007  Add/View Comments [18]

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  1. 1  Kevin Mort  | 2/1/2007 10:45:16 AM

    "...end users asking their information technology counterparts to upgrade to Notes 8.0 sooner rather than later."

    This assumes they know about it, which honestly the average person won't.

    I talked to an IT director just the other day who was fieldng questions from his user base of "everyone uses Outlook, when are we upgrading to that?" *sigh*

    'Upgrading' how nice. Needless to say, we will be looking to get ND8 in front of these folks ASAP. They are also a QuickPlace customer, so we'll be having the Quickr discussion too.

    Kevin.

  1. 2  Marc Scheffel  | 2/1/2007 11:52:18 AM

    I have to say, I recommend that anyone who can should catch one of Peter O'Kelly's talks. His Lotusphere session about the current state and future of the collaboration market was insightful and informative. It also helped illustrate for me how on target some of the new Lotus offerings are and how , I think, Lotus is in a great place to dominate the new Enterprise 2.0 space.

    Might be time to move back to the business partner side from the "consumer" side. I smell opportunity.

  1. 3  Peter Wilson  | 2/1/2007 2:49:27 PM

    @1 A really slick Notes 8 GUI will help, but probably won't be enough to move those companies who have left Notes/Domino to Outlook to come back. Even a bunch of thrown in (free) applications either.

    I think the only way to move them would be something attractive to the hip pocket...ie. A very attractive license deal for those companies that migrate to Notes/Domino. It's such a good deal they have to consider it!

    But I guess "seats wars" is so last decade... :-)

    Pete

  1. 4  Roger Hintz  | 2/1/2007 2:55:45 PM

    @3 - I think @1 was referring to the marketing issue of actually getting the message (that ND8 is there and it's different than past versions) to the end users and getting them to really look at it.

  1. 5  Peter Wilson  | 2/1/2007 3:08:52 PM

    @4 Yes, I agree with customers who already have Notes, there will need to be even more marketing to let them know of the new version.

    Pete

  1. 6  Deleted  | 2/1/2007 7:19:45 PM

    Deleted - per blog policy, please provide your real e-mail address (and name) when commenting.

  1. 7  Laurie Desautels http://www.kryos.com | 2/1/2007 8:34:23 PM

    @2. Agree that Peter's presentation on the future of enterprise collaboration was very insightful. For me, it highlighted what we've been telling our clients for years, that while collaboration technology can really help a company work more effectively, without proper governance and guidelines in place, it will fail, no matter how slick the tool.

  1. 8  Rob http://www.storagestuff.net | 2/1/2007 9:39:18 PM

    @1

    Don't forget the question:

    "Why is my free gmail account faster, quicker, easier to use and has more waay more space than this?"

    I'm sure there are still plenty of users using outlook at home - but surely the gmail/hotmail/yahoo crowd is much larger.

  1. 9  Dennis  | 2/2/2007 9:21:32 AM

    We're a SMB, I can only imagine enterprise version of this...

    $25,000 in upgrades for MS Office users so they can have Outlook 2007

    $10,000 in new server hardware (two required - one for edge transport and the Exchange server itself)

    $1,000 for standard 2003 server license for edge transport (mail router) - good

    $3,500 2003 Enterprise Server license (mail server itself) - better

    $3,999 - Exchange Enterprise Server - best :-b

    $5,500 for Outlook CALS

    $4,000 for Terminal Server CALS (XP client to 2003 server) forced by upgrade from MS 2000 terminal server

    Migration costs for mail, applications, and user training - totally ignored

    Look on manager's face after initial look at total - PRICELESS

    Cost of Notes/Domino 8 at less than any of the above line items - lookin' good

  1. 10  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 2/2/2007 9:52:22 AM

    Awesome post Dennis. And don't forget, with Lotus Notes* you get embedded chat for free, and later this year Lotus Quickr Personal Edition. So add the MS equaivalents required for that to your pricing equation.

    * For users with active maintenance.

  1. 11  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 2/2/2007 11:30:23 AM

    @9 - How many users?

  1. 12  Dennis  | 2/2/2007 1:52:58 PM

    @10 - Thanks, we use/depend Sametime and like it a lot.

    @11 - A mix of 100 users on Office Pro/SBE/plus a few "add new" users

  1. 13  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 2/2/2007 2:54:57 PM

    It's good to find another small company that uses Notes and Domino. :) We're 200 users, and for us the costs to move to a Microsoft ICE were about 3 times what you listed, but we did include migration costs for mail and user training. It was quickly determined that migrating applications simply wasn't possible (but I'm still working on it for my own edification).

  1. 14  Peter Wilson  | 2/2/2007 2:59:40 PM

    @9 Dennis, that's amazing news. I nice TCO calculator on IBM's web site b/w Notes/Domino and Micro$oft would be nice...

    I don't think Microsoft could give 'competitive' discounts to everyone...haha

    Pete

  1. 15  Duffbert http://www.twduff.com | 2/2/2007 3:21:19 PM

    @13... So, Charles... have you tried screen scraping? I hear it's that easy... :)

  1. 16  Rob McDonagh http://www.CaptainOblivious.com | 2/2/2007 4:56:54 PM

    @15 Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

  1. 17  Kevin Mort  | 2/2/2007 8:41:24 PM

    @4 - Correct. Even as much as name recognition. The average Joe (right or wrong) isn't necessarily going to know that a new release is out there.

    @8 - Yep, I think you are right on with that. I do believe the trend is to webmail at home vs an installed client.

    I have to say I really am bullish on ND8 and how it could perform. Perhaps more than ever before the overall value prop for Notes/Domino is falling into place vs competitors.

    Kevin.

  1. 18  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 2/3/2007 1:06:06 PM

    @15 - Yeah, I tried that route but there was this stuff someone called "business logic" that I couldn't find in the HTML. ;-)

    Rather than drag this thread off topic, I'll blog some about my proof-of-concept work in migrating a medium complexity Notes application to C#.