Domino "versus" SharePoint: Asking the right question?

June 4 2007

Several bloggers in the last few weeks have written on the notion of Domino versus SharePoint.  It may have started from a posting I did last month, examining the propaganda in Redmond Channel Partner Online that severely lacked for business issues.  In almost every case where I have been involved in a customer conversation like this, it's surfaced without much in the way of business issues.

Michael Sampson picked this up and said

the mere availability of a potentially strong replacement for a Notes/Domino infrastructure is causing many organizations to re-think their collaboration infrastructure strategy. The questioning and considerations aren't new--every organization should periodically review its collaboration infrastructure decision to see whether (a) the assumptions on which the original decisions were made still hold true, and (b) whether there are newer and better technologies available to meet their current definition of those needs and wants--but what's different this time is that SharePoint is increasingly up to the game.
Michael then lists out some conditions which might exist in a customer environment to prompt consideration of an alternative like SharePoint.  But that still doesn't address the need to have a set of important business reasons for considering alternatives (or, for that matter, for considering Lotus).  For example, Michael says nothing about cost factors (both in terms of migration and in terms of acquisition), yet some research I did recently yielded the astonishing discovery that MS's collaboration stack is now twice the price of IBM's at list for a 1000-user organization.  More on that another time.

Stuart Downes has picked up my comments as well as Michael's, and expounded on them:
What I have been surprised by is the Domino versus SharePoint discussions ... they are completely different beasts.  Lets talk more QuickR or Websphere Portal versus SharePoint and have the real debate ... but is the debate needed?  Surely the debate is what are my collaboration needs?
Spot on, Stuart.  In an odd sense of deja vu, SharePoint now seems to be in the place Notes was many years ago -- "SharePoint is the answer, what's the problem?"  Which results from the ease with which LOB-IT can spin up a SharePoint trial and play with it.  That doesn't mean it's enterprise-ready or meets their business objectives or is even the right price point for them, but hey, it was easy and it looks pretty.  The lack of actual evaluation has been occasionally astonishing.

In the end, Burton Group's Karen Hobert has an excellent way to look at this landscape:
It's never been a better time for the 3Cs market and the question is very timely. All enterprises with existing 3Cs solutions or those with interest in 3Cs should be asking the same questions. Given the nature of the go-to-market approach for both vendors, the decision boils down to a platform decision, and those decisions cannot be made in a vacuum. Organizations must plan ahead and deploy according to their business requirements. They should avoid using a technology (e.g., wiki, blog, workspaces) for the sake of the technology. Rather, enterprises need to examine their business requirements and apply the technology that will serve those processes the best. Customers may find that some technologies they thought they needed just aren't necessary, now or ever. Knowing these answers will help enterprises to decide which product, vendor, or solution will be best for their organization.
(I knew Karen was going to make a great analyst!)  She even eloquently takes to task a commentor who seems to be spitting back the Redmond line to her, asking them to take a realistic look at the data.

As I acknowleged in the prior posting, this competitive landscape has heated up.  I think both of the market-leading vendors have something to offer for real value in most organizations, probably now more than ever.  The battle is not about e-mail anymore -- e-mail isn't adding new value to organizations, as I've said for some time.  It's about looking at flexibility, security, roadmap and evolution, historical success, investment protection, and most importantly -- innovation.  In the IBM Lotus world, we're focused heavily on moving collaboration forward in new ways, not just sticking to better/faster/cheaper documents.  I encouage you to check out all of the analysis, do your own evaluation as some of the new Lotus products come out the door over the next 90 days, and most importantly, have your business objectives ready.  They will guide you to the right solution -- not just the right product.

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [57]

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  1. 1  Mika Heinonen http://siipi.com/mika | 6/5/2007 3:09:38 AM

    Sounds like comparing apples and oranges to me.

    Shouldn't the question be rather Quickr vs SharePoint?

    SharePoint is very dangerous at the moment, as some units in companies have already started using it, while they don't know their work is for nothing when Quickr comes out.

    I need a Quickr Beta now to show our management that it's time to stop the SharePoint invasion and get some sense into our collaboration.

    If you want to compare Domino to something, you should rather look at Domino vs "DB2/Oracle/MSSQL/MSAccess+Development Time+Development Tools+HTTP Server"

  1. 2  Hermann Ballé http://www.timetoact.de | 6/5/2007 4:12:51 AM

    It might be right, that the question should be QuickR vs. SharePoint, mainly because of the (Office-)document-centric focus. But I am pretty sure that Websphere Portal is not a competitor to Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. They've had a good reason to remove the "portal" from its name! Websphere Portal is about supporting processes through integrated applications, not about dealing with doc, xls and ppt...

  1. 3  Nick Halliwell http://www.comware.net | 6/5/2007 5:26:17 AM

    There is a really good IBM document by a chap called Craig Westney called The Microsoft Portfolio vs IBM Lotus Domino. Which which he list everything that you need and does what I consider is a fair comparison between the 2 product line.

    Of course I have searched the IBM website for it and cannot find it, but its there, I down loaded it no more than a couple of weeks ago.

  1. 4  Flemming Riis  | 6/5/2007 5:37:04 AM

    Nick , Microsoft Search to the rescue ;)

    { Link }

    { Link }

  1. 5  Craig Wiseman http://www.wiseman.la/cpw | 6/5/2007 5:51:27 AM

    @2 - Well, that's interesting. Comparing an IBM product that hasn't shipped yet to a real, shipping Microsoft product.

    Did I fall into an alternate universe?

  1. 6  Henning Heinz  | 6/5/2007 6:29:42 AM

    There is no such thing like Quickr yet so how compare against a product that has not even had a public beta?

    I think this has been called shadowboxing in the past (but the other way around).

    The feature lists I read so far of Quickr are impressive but if there is such a thing like a Sharepoint invasion (I have different observations) then one reason might be that probably IBM has not much to offer when dealing with doc, xls and ppt but there is a demand.

  1. 7  Chris  | 6/5/2007 7:24:53 AM

    Why would I need Quickr if my documents are in my Activities store?

  1. 8  Mark Dowling http://cork2toronto.blogspot.com | 6/5/2007 7:45:33 AM

    Henning - checkout quickplacetrial.lotus.com - the site is up and down but has Quickr code now.

  1. 9  Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com | 6/5/2007 8:02:38 AM

    In the BP Connections, which is public!?, I breifly discussed this question of why sharepoint is of interest when it is still limited in functional tasks like the size of an attachment.

    See this site for more "what not to do" with sharepoint from Joel Oleson's blog, a MS blogger of the official sharpeoint product group. { Link }

  1. 10  Stuart McIntyre http://quickrblog.com | 6/5/2007 8:52:30 AM

    @7 - There is certainly some crossover between Quickr and Connections/Activities, but their puproses can be differentiated.

    Quickr is ideal for longer running projects and teams, where flexible customised team workspaces are required with integral workflows and management. As the free templates from SNAPPS demonstrate it is ideal as a framework for further development by organisations and partner to cover such disparate areas as image managment, ideas discussion and basic project management.

    Activities is intended for more adhoc tasks and mini-projects, where individuals or small groups of users come together with a task in mind (such as developing a presentation) and wish to put all the related inputs in one place related to that activity.

    In some cases only one of the two products might be needed, in many organisations I know of, both would be relevant...

  1. 11  Russ Mayes http://therightnotes.wordpress.com | 6/5/2007 9:01:36 AM

    @2, @5, @6, I think it's true that the de facto comparison in many organizations is Sharepoint vs. QuickPlace (and e-room in my organization). Certainly Sharepoint vs. Domino is a poor comparison (and one I would think MS would rather avoid).

  1. 12  Christer Eklundh  | 6/5/2007 9:19:51 AM

    Can somebody make a list:

    This can you do in Domino and This can you do in Sharepoint.

  1. 13  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 6/5/2007 9:55:59 AM

    Sharepoint can be a difficult thing for Notes or Quickplace to compete against. If a customer has standardised on Office (even Linux geeks have to admit that is most of the world), the Office integration with Sharepoint is very slick. I know of companies that are Notes shops using Sharepoint for this very reason. Maybe Quickr will address this, but the way that Office users can see Sharepoint stores etc. embedded right within Word, PPT etc. is very compelling to Office users.

    It is also important to remember, many of the customers that are starting to use Sharepoint are using it for nothing more than replacing their Novell shared network drive. When they see Sharepoint storing different file types and having them categorized it blows their mind. Sure us Domino/Notes users have done this for years, perhaps if Domino/Notes had been marketed as a great Office Document store it would have more awareness in these MS accounts, but then Domino does so much more than just being a document store so people would be missing so much. Often when customers are looking for solutions, they don't have the vision to see what else something can do, they just go I'm looking for a file store, what's out there that works with office.

  1. 14  Mika Heinonen http://siipi.com/mika | 6/5/2007 10:24:21 AM

    @12 - Christer, that kind of list wouldn't make much sense, since Domino is not the kind of tool which has good ready to use applications, but it's a tool where you can make your own applications faster and easier than anywhere else.

    Compared to SharePoint which is a ready to use application, but it's impossible to modify it and make it fit your needs completely (or even sufficient, depending on your demands). Some parts can be modified and customized, and even then it needs a steep learning curve and years of programming experience using C# and C++ and knowledge .NET libraries.

  1. 15  Karl-Henry Martinsson  | 6/5/2007 10:30:11 AM

    "That doesn't mean it's enterprise-ready or meets their business objectives or is even the right price point for them, but hey, it was easy and it looks pretty."

    I think you found the important thing here: "It looks pretty." Lotus has for years/decades been considered ugly. IBM have refused to make it look more like "traditional" windows applications (i.e. Office, etc). Go out and download any shareware or freeware for the Windows platform, and they pretty much all look the same, using the same metaphores as Office/MS apps, the same toolbars, etc.

    IS managers to a certain extent, CIO:s to a greater extent, and CEO:s toa very high extent, they all look at how pretty the application is. If it is ugly, they don't want it. if it looks/work different from Office, they don't want it. If they have it, they want to get away from it. If an alternative that looks "pretty" and more like Office, they will seriously consider switching, even if it does not make sense from a business/financial standpoint.

    Have you ever had a friend that owned a car they ended up hating? Even if they were upside down, they then went out and got a car they liked better, even if the payments were higher? One of my best friends did just this. She needed to get a car at one point, went to CarMax and got a Dodge Stratus finnaced. She hated it from the beginning, but it was all she could finance then. A year later, she said "I am getting a new car, I hate this POS". She walked in at Carmax, had the old car apprised, test drove some cars and left in a Saab 9-3 Aero. Sure, payments were twice of her old car, and she paid a premium to get rid of her old car.

    But to her, it was worth the cost to get something she enjoyed driving every day.

    Same thing with computer software.

    Suggestion: Make a "Office skin" for Notes 8, make it look exactly like a Microsoft application. Sales will go through the roof. :-)

  1. 16  John Rowland  | 6/5/2007 11:48:54 AM

    @12 - Good idea... and beyond that, how about a "how to do Sharepoint in Quickr" list -- that is to say, not just a list of features, but how to get it done. I am trying to work up a "Domino for Exchange Admins" doc for some of our site administrators -- they are almost all Exchange guys whose eyes glaze over anytime we start dealing with Domino Admin issues.

    It is a good exercise for me to "know my enemy" so to speak and figure out how to make Domino "make sense" to others who are not on board.

    @15 - Ultimately, we need for Lotus products to be so compelling that one would be stupid not to use them. We can learn from MS if we are willing.

  1. 17  David Bell  | 6/5/2007 12:21:51 PM

    @5 - not quite Craig.

    For that to be true, and for the roles to truly be reversed, IBM would have to be extolling the virtues of a twinkle in someone's eye rather than actual product running in customer environments ;)

  1. 18  Reginald Treider  | 6/5/2007 12:53:49 PM

    @17 - Great explanation David.

    There are idealist out there that really believe that Sharepoint will take over the collaboration world. This could not be further from the truth. Even within my organization the far reaches of a global deployment has severe limitations for a very large infrastructure.

  1. 19  Christer Eklundh  | 6/5/2007 12:58:48 PM

    @14 Exactly, to us what kind of list does not make sence, but to people who is considering to swith from Domino to Sharepoint and think that the two products are the same, that kind of list will maybe take them out of the dark...

  1. 20  Peter de Haas http://www.peterdehaas.net | 6/5/2007 2:46:49 PM

    Fully agree with Stuarts points. I was gald we were get out of the Exchange vs ND discussion and were moving towards the value of platform.

    Anyways I do not agree with your attempt to position SharePoint as "..sticking to better/faster/cheaper documents .."" Ed. For example, MOSS 2007 is now DOD certified this means an out-of-the-box Records Management solution in SharePoint and therefor an important play in ECM solutions.

    PerformancePoint Server (BI) is another MOSS 2007 example, as is Excel Services this also is ..."moving collaboration forward in new ways"

    And then to think MOSS 2007 is only the 3rd generation of SharePoint :-)

  1. 21  Ed brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/5/2007 3:24:29 PM

    @20 actually the DOD cert is exactly still "better faster cheaper documents".

    But at least you were smart enough to drop the word "portal" from the product name.

  1. 22  Brian Benz http://www.softwaresoapbox.com | 6/5/2007 7:27:20 PM

    I've said for many years that comparing Domino directly to Exchange or Sharepoint is pointless....It's not the same thing. The Domino PLATFORM should be compared, on a cost, infrastructure, integration, and technology basis - to the .NET PLATFORM. And Domino would always do quite well.

    But Microsoft seems very good at picking it's battles and framing arguments on specific features of specific products or parts of products to make it look like they're better and cheaper......

    And as for the Sampson quote:

    "every organization should periodically review its collaboration infrastructure decision..."

    Sure. That's also true for hardware, operating systems, office suites, an just about anything else that costs money in a business and affects the bottom line. But in most cases it's just not practical, from a cost and an operations point of view, to review and switch systems and processes constantly. Especially if the current ones are working.....

  1. 23  Peter de Haas http://www.peterdehaas.net | 6/6/2007 12:49:01 AM

    @20

    "Dropping" that name as you put it makes sence. It's much more than just a portal ;-)

    To my knowledge this name was primairly used to make the distiction between Windows SharePoint Services and THe Portal product which basicly adds a lot of functionality to the solution in which Portal functionality is one.

    In the 2007 platform as I outlined earlier SharePoint has evolved ...

    Anyway I think you again do an attempt to downplay SharePoint / Microsoft vs the ND platform by remarks such as "..SharePoint now seems to be in the place Notes was many years ago -- "SharePoint is the answer, what's the problem?".." Good to see in the comments that those who have come across SharePoint / know its capabilities don't fully agree with you. I do think Microsoft deserves a little bit more credit ;-)

  1. 24  Per Andersen http://www.crossware.co.nz | 6/6/2007 2:09:09 AM

    Many good comments and points how to compare be it ND or Quickr, but the whole thread seems to me like MicroSoft has already won the war. Most of the comments are really "defence" rather than "attack". For the Notes Domino converted the comparison seems ridiculously, but the real problem is that MS has managed to spread their "magic dust" on CIO's and CEO and this is the real challenge. IBM Lotus needs to give us a similar "dust/prayer" that will cover the top management in a trust and believe that the wonders of the world lies in IBM Lotus. The existing top team of Lotus - Mike, Ken and Ed is doing a great job giving us a lot of new inventive products, but what we need now is the full power of IBM's marketing force. IBM spent a hell of lot of money on trying to confuse us about WorkPlace now is the time to repeat this but directed to the Lotus brand. MicroSoft and a lot of CIO's already knows that MS Sharepoint are inferior to Quickr and truly not comparable to ND, but the message needs to reach the CEO's and CIO's. The only way is marketing and to give the business partners the tools to go into the board rooms and spread the message.

    Lets get our act togehter

    Good luck

  1. 25  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/6/2007 2:26:15 AM

    @24 it's a fair point and one that the Lotus team is very aware of in terms of executive messages and marketing.

    but I quarrel with "IBM spent a hell of lot of money on trying to confuse us about WorkPlace". In fact, one of the things I wonder often in hindsight is that IBM marketing and "Lotus" marketing are often derided for being insufficient or ineffective...yet Workplace, good or bad, seems to have had huge market awareness. This despite a smaller number of customers ever purchasing the Workplace collab products vs. the Notes customer base. There were never any TV ads for Workplace, no superman banners, no WorkplaceSphere. How is it that there's so much awareness of the part of Lotus's past product strategy versus the perceived awareness of today and the future of Notes 8/Quickr/Sametime UCC/Connections?

  1. 26  Ian Randall  | 6/6/2007 3:28:31 AM

    @25 Ed, I think that Workplace has gotten a lot of mindshare because many many, many IBM Sales people and senior IBM Excutives have really pushed it as the "strategic direction" of IBM for several years. Even today in the IBM Web site, Lotus Domino is still very difficult to find and Workplace products outnumber the LD pages by a significant margin.

    If you want to increase the Lotus Domino mindshare, get the IBM sales AND senior IBM executives to give it the same level of push as they have gaiven Workplace over the last five years.

    Even many of your managers titles still reflect how far down the pecking order the Lotus Domino brand is within the IBM software group.

  1. 27  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 6/6/2007 5:37:35 AM

    @25 Look at the 2012 Olympics logo, it has only been out a couple of days and most people know about it, not because of effective marketing but because it's so bad. The logo is being forced down people's throats if they want it or not. Force people to take something they don't want and they get together and resist and build awareness. That was Workplace, IMHO.

  1. 28  Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com | 6/6/2007 8:28:55 AM

    Carl, I was just going to post the same answer, but I don't get up at 5:30am.

    Bad news travels well, good news lies in wait.

    If workplace is gone, so to speak, why does it still exist in name, like Lotus Workplace Forms for instance?

  1. 29  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/6/2007 8:43:01 AM

    @28 because rebranding -products- is hard and expensive. But when you go to the "Workplace" page on ibm.com, you see the Lotus logo is right there.

    { Link }

  1. 30  Erik Brooks  | 6/6/2007 11:36:49 AM

    @13 brings up some good points, particularly as they apply to the SMB market. I know of many businesses in the several-hundred to low-thousand user range that are starting to use SharePoint primarily as a Novell replacement -- the tight integration with Office is a huge step in as well. Combine that with the fact that it's easy to try (installation-wise, that is) and it's no surprise how easy it is to get snared into the product.

    There was a Lotus product (in the R5 days? R4.6? I can't recall exactly...) that was more or less a Windows fileshare that stored any files sent to it in an NSF. I can't remember the name now, but I think it was an Alphaworks project or something similar. It probably didn't scale well, but I always thought it was an interesting concept. This discussion makes me wonder where it would be now if it hadn't gotten shelved in ND6.

  1. 31  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 6/6/2007 11:51:14 AM

    227 - I was in Atlanta during their Olympics and had to endure Izzy. I feel your pain. :-p

    @30 - I just read about that network file store feature of Domino. It sounded nifty, but you're right, it didn't scale well. There is a database template that is a document library for MS Office documents. I played with it a bit a long time ago but it never got traction where I worked.

  1. 32  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/6/2007 11:57:05 AM

    @30 in essence, Quickr's "on ramps" from Office and Windows (and Notes) will do exactly what DNFS (Domino Network File Store) did and much more...and it will work/scale. DNFS was architecturally constrained from day one. The concept, though, makes sense and thus is a key aspect of Quickr.

  1. 33  Marcia  | 6/6/2007 12:36:06 PM

    { Link } is the site for the Craig Westney article about the Microsoft Portfolio vs. IBM Notes Domino.

  1. 34  Erik Brooks  | 6/6/2007 8:33:44 PM

    @32 - Thanks, Ed. I couldn't remember the name of that product! And I think your "better, faster, cheaper documents" line sums up SharePoint pretty well.

    I also agree with Mika's points @14. Fresh out of the box, SharePoint is nice, and it lets you throw together some pseudo-RAD style stuff that - for those living in the MS Office world - will make you go "wow!"

    Taking SharePoint to the next level, though, requires quite a bit of programming and experience. Subsequent deployment is a nightmare. And let's not get into the rip-and-replace stuff you'll no doubt run into with MS's upgrade path.

    Comparing SharePoint to Domino is definitely apples-to-oranges. Domino out of the box obviously doesn't do a lot of what SharePoint does. But Domino tackles all of the major problems I mentioned in the above paragraph much better than SharePoint does. Here's hoping QuickR follows suit!

  1. 35  David Bell  | 6/7/2007 12:15:24 AM

    @20 - there you go again putting the term "enterprise" (from ECM) in the same sentence as Sharepoint (or for that matter anything Microsoft).

    They just do not belong together.

    You cannot take consumer class software and stretch it to enterprise levels.

    @34 - taking the BASF commercial tack:

    "Domino out of the box obviously doesn't do a lot of what SharePoint does. It does a lot of what Sharepoint does, better."

  1. 36  David Bell  | 6/7/2007 12:20:42 AM

    And before you disagree with my statement in @35:

    "You cannot take consumer class software and stretch it to enterprise levels"

    check in with your Chief Software Architect, and Notes inventor, who said just that at the LS2005 panel session at which he spoke.

    He took the position that software cannot satisfy both consumer and corporate needs satisfactorily. MS is definitely in the consumer camp.

  1. 37  Emma  | 6/7/2007 1:02:03 AM

    One of the things that annoys me about my organisation's SharePoint push is that it's got nothing to do with user requirements.

    The people who look after our servers and corporate software licenses want us to standardise on a single brand, so they can spend less money on software and admin training. And of course they think that Microsoft is a brand that will cover everything.

    Unfortunately, nobody talked to the users about what they want to DO with the software. SharePoint is not capable of the kind of collaboration and integration we are already achieving with Lotus Domino/Quickplace/Sametime. Nothing from Microsoft will work for our highly distributed workforce, especially when we are in situations where we don't have bandwidth to waste on inefficient synchronisation technologies.

    The worst part is that nobody in our organisation has costed the migration to a new platform. We already have a platform that works well using Lotus software. Upgrading to R8/Quickr will allow our legacy apps to work more efficiently, and we can make use of the new features as part of the normal development cycle (ie widget is broken, therefore let's rebuild it using R8/Quickr features). To move to SharePoint will require a complete redevelopment of many thousands of custom apps - and nobody is putting their hand up to pay for it.

    Just Say No to the SharePoint pushers. When they can provide me with a viable alternative to Lotus software, and are willing to pay for the migration/redevelopment, then I will consider moving (note that all I said was consider... they still have to prove their alternative solution offers features that make it worth the pain of moving).

  1. 38  Roberto Boccadoro  | 6/7/2007 4:51:42 AM

    @23

    Congrats, you leapfrogged from not being a portal to "much more than just a portal ;-)". When you tried to position Sharepoint in the portal space you were nowhere near to the real portal players (us, BEA, ....), just have a look at the Gartner quadrant; so now you decided that portal is not your game and tell the world Sharepoint is "more" than a portal. Brilliant....

    I have to say you always had a good marketing department :-)

  1. 39  Erik Brooks  | 6/7/2007 7:35:00 AM

    @35 - I agree with you that Domino does do a lot of what SharePoint does, and in many cases it does it better. But there is still quite a bit that SharePoint does (again, out of the box) that would require pretty heavy dev in Domino just to get there.

    My wife just left her job as a teacher at a charter school (she's an Assistant Director now). While she was there, she was responsible for maintaining her class web page, team spaces, etc. It was essentially an out-of-the-box SharePoint deployment.

    So what you've got here is an interesting scenario. It's consumer-based software, right? She's definitely a consumer, and with one 90-minute class she was able to modify content all over the place and she was keeping the web site up-to-date week after week. And it was all integrated nicely with her Outlook web-mail.

    But it's not enterprise-level, right? It's installed for *every school in the State of Florida*. That's over 200,000 teachers (users). Sounds like enterprise-level to me.

    The sort of stuff she was doing you couldn't do in Domino - at least, not without either knowing Designer or doing some heavy dev to get it to SharePoint's capabilities. Something else bolted on to Domino might have helped, but out-of-the-box Domino wouldn't be touching her needs.

    Granted, the example I'm giving is a government-based deployment (where shooting one's self in one's foot happens all the time) but it's live and it works. Sure, heavy integration and advanced customization down the road will be tough for them. Quickr might be "the answer", but SharePoint's real, and it's here.

  1. 40  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 6/7/2007 8:51:46 AM

    @39 - Quickplace has been around for a long time doing a lot of what you just described.

  1. 41  David Bell  | 6/7/2007 10:35:32 AM

    @39 - so is that one set of infrastructure for all schools/users or a lot of individual implementations ?

    I suspect the latter. How many schools is that covering 200,000 users ?

  1. 42  Erik Brooks  | 6/7/2007 11:20:54 AM

    @41 - I would suspect the latter as well from an architectural standpoint, but from an administrative standpoint I believe it's all centralized. That makes it a bit like Domino, I would think -- e.g. many different NSFs administered across multiple servers/clusters.

    Though "load design" is probably a lot easier than "Copy 4,983,283 recompiled DLLs to a bazillion different directories."

    One of my brothers actually works in support at the major ISP/datacenter where the project is hosted (small world, huh?) I'll ask him for more details.

    On an interesting side note, the State of Florida is also rolling out a desktop-for-every-student. The goal is to make it so that students can, regardless of physical computer, log in and see their files, e-mail, etc. It's a heavy-duty piece of custom proprietary software. The main servers and support staff are going to be hosted at one major ISP, with each school having supported servers for quick access and caching of local files.

    From what I've seen it's got all of the bells and whistles you'd want, including real-time drill-down of state/county/school/classroom/student activity, remote desktop troubleshooting, etc. Cool stuff.

  1. 43  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 6/7/2007 2:05:44 PM

    @42 - Wow... I wonder where the DoE's RFP was for that?

  1. 44  Paul Robichaux http://www.robichaux.net/blog | 6/7/2007 4:07:47 PM

    @36: wow, pretty broad statement. I guess the tens of millions of enterprise seats that are powered by Windows Server, Active Directory, et al are all imaginary. I must have imagined it that companies like EADS, Ford, Boeing, and even IBM make heavy use of Microsoft products for their core infrastructure capabilities.

    You could, of course, turn this statement on its ear to help explain why Workplace flopped: it couldn't stretch to SMBs.

  1. 45  Erik Brooks  | 6/7/2007 5:11:08 PM

    Oops, small typo: @42 - "with each school having supported servers" should read "with each school having supporting local servers"

    @43 - Yeah, I would love to have seen it, too. From what I've heard it's in the 9-digit figure range.

  1. 46  David Bell  | 6/8/2007 10:13:57 PM

    @44 - I didn't say they weren't deployed in the enterprise, I said they were not enterprise-class. There is a difference.

    Having bought the MS marketing line, customers have been putting up with Windows and swallowing the costs for maintenance, patching, security exposures,etc.

    There is a good reason why the Linux Server market is growing at close to 5x the Windows one according to Gartner.

  1. 47  Peter de Haas http://www.peterdehaas.net | 6/9/2007 5:31:36 PM

    @35

    David. Interesting observation. Its either your IBM bias or your lack of knowledge of SharePoint and related references that brings you to this conclusion.

    My guess is that over 80% of the SharePoint implementations are Enterprise implementations the largest being 150.000 + companies. So let's not prentend they don't exist ;-)

  1. 48  Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com | 6/9/2007 8:49:50 PM

    Evangelism grows from within, if your IT staff can't talk to management about improving productivity or enhancing users lives then you are out of luck. Simple tasks could be engaged and published throughout your company if you know how and want it to be. Like clustering, it works well but you need the developers to code for it to begin with or its a waste of resources as far as apps go.

    My experience has been companies are not paying good money for good people and what you get is not someone with years of knowledge on how to expand Domino(or any other IT product/solution) but an admin or appdev who is just filling a desk.

  1. 49  Rick Sizemore  | 6/9/2007 8:51:43 PM

    @47 There is a pretty drastic difference between being installed in an enterprise and being enterprise SW.

    There are definitely a few enterprise Sharepoint implementations, but the architecture till 2007 really didn't lend itself to a top down implementation, i.e. enterprise. Sharepoint has had lots of group or departmental implementations that are in an enterprise, but horizontal integration was not what you'd call enterprise enabled, like a portal, small p. Connecting a Sharepoint services site to a Sharepoint portal site, with search, etc, was not exactly simple, not impossible to do, but probably impractical. Whatever a portal started out as, it's now defined as this enterprise "thing" that integrates and does all this other stuff that really isn't about collab. This sounds pretty familiar, Notes circa 1993? No, I'm not saying it's the technically the same, but the adoption profile has been similar. There are lots of things that are deployed in an enterprise that aren't "enterprise". Look at the evolution of the PDA, Palm to Blackberry, yes the new Windows Mobile too, but for years there were all these PDA's running around that people where using that weren't enterprise solutions, but people still had them and IT still had to support them. I give the MOSS team lots of credit, the evolution of the product has been quite fast, and it appears that there are lots of things that have streamlined enterprise implementations, but that doesn't make the problems of version 1 or 2 any less, it's exactly the evolution you'd expect, lots of money was spent to upgrade it, I'm sure there was a reason. That's just what SW vendors do.

    The apple's/orange's argument is quite valid, but what you do with Domino + Quickr + ST + Portal, big P, is a different thing than Exchange + LCS + Office + Sharepoint + LiveMeeting. There are probably 60-70% overlap, but the other 30% is really where all complexity lies. Domino vs. Sharepoint are not technically competitors, notice technically vs marketing/perception. With Domino, you get mail and a RAD app/dev environment with directories and other ancillary things. Sharepoint brings a different set of capabilities, its an attractive doc centric team (larger now that 2007 is out) collab tool, but the ability to do RAD to make it do "stuff" that's not out of the box is non trivial, but it's not supposed to be the .Net app/dev application server either, so that's not technically an issue. But selling new or additional infrastructure is much more difficult than saying "It replaces Domino, and it's free!!!" Uhh, no and no, but that, that's technical vs marketing. If your the CIO and you've decided that we're replacing all our Domino apps with MOSS, once you've made the decision, your married to it, whether it really makes sense or not. There's Windows Workflow Foundation dev and BizTalk that you need to do some of the functions that Domino does, there just not a simple either/or, shouldn't that be either/nor or neither/or? whatever.

    Then there is the licensing, while IBM has it's issues with licensing, it seems pretty straightforward at this point, at least if your talking about email/collab/quickr/chat, it's one answer. I just got back from Tech Ed, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that the MS guys there (to be fair, most were technical, not sales, but still) had no idea what user CAL vs Server CAL combo you need to get this stuff, probably due to the new enterprise CAL model in all it's permutations, actually that's the issue, there isn't an enterprise CAL, there's 4? or 3 or 5, then there's SQL which you need scale MOSS or LCS etc, but I'm not using SQL except under the hood so why do I need a CAL....Ahh, my heads going to explode, just give me the Galactic CAL. This has nothing to do with the technical bits of course.

    It feels kind of like the bad parts of an iPod/iTunes; successful, functional, but there's this feeling of being locked in to a specific set of IT and purchasing decisions for the foreseeable future. This is great for MS, but is it really good for the customer. To some extent, there is always going to be some bit of lock in, purely from inertia if nothing else, but MS has pretty tightly integrated from the desktop stack to the server stack, and you really need the latest and greatest at every level of the stack to take advantage of the all the cool stuff, and that is a logistical problem for the enterprise. To bring this back to topic, I think that's what David was talking about, consumer vs. enterprise. Hey, MS is doing much better, but when your trying to be all things to all people, engineering in the enterprise bits are the last things, not the first that get added. IBM's been doing the enterprise SW things since Bill was a twinkle. Both teams are taking a page out of each others playbook, IBM's getting prettier SW, MS is getting SW that works "bigger", but you don't jump from one side to the other overnight.

    That must be the longest winded comment ever, that's kind of the problem, it's not so simple as to say X replaces Y and Bob's your uncle.

  1. 50  Paul Robichaux http://www.robichaux.net/blog | 6/9/2007 9:01:03 PM

    @46: well, Microsoft's investment in improving their product security has clearly paid dividends. Check out Allan Jones' numbers on the # of days of risk for various Linux distros against Windows for an idea. As far as market growth goes, given the small market share of Linux servers, even a huge growth percentage is still going to be pretty small in absolute numbers.

  1. 51  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com | 6/10/2007 12:58:39 AM

    @46 "There is a good reason why the Linux Server market is growing at close to 5x the Windows one according to Gartner."

    Hi David - did that report happen to mention how fast Unix is growing?

  1. 52  Peter de Haas http://www.peterdehaas.net | 6/10/2007 6:13:42 AM

    @49

    Rick besides you only contradictiug yourself in your comment. Why not let developers speak ?:

    { Link }

  1. 53  David Bell  | 6/11/2007 12:04:07 AM

    @49 - you nailed it.

    @50 - the server market revenue Linux:Windows is shown as 1:3, hardly small.

    @51: Linux revenue up 40%, Windows up 9%, Unix up 1%

    Question: Do most people consider Linux <> Unix ?

  1. 54  David Bell  | 6/11/2007 12:29:00 AM

    @44,47 - the crux of the point I was making earlier, which you missed or ignored, was not about whether MS software was deployed in enterprises, but the suitability of it to those environments.

    Rick said:

    "Hey, MS is doing much better, but when your trying to be all things to all people, engineering in the enterprise bits are the last things, not the first that get added. IBM's been doing the enterprise SW things since Bill was a twinkle. Both teams are taking a page out of each others playbook, IBM's getting prettier SW, MS is getting SW that works "bigger", but you don't jump from one side to the other overnight."

    And that really gets to the heart of it. MS's heritage is writing software for standalone PC's used mainly by consumers. It is only recently (relatively speaking) that MS got into the multi-user, shared server (or services) space.

    I think it's a lot easier to pretty something up than to totally reshape your development philosophies, not to mention gaining the experience needed to do it well.

  1. 55  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 6/11/2007 12:57:17 AM

    @50 - You have no idea how many Linux servers are out there. The best you can do is count the number of support licenses sold from the big players and guess about the rest.

    @52 - I don't see where that article has anything to do with what Rick was saying.

    @53 - count me in the Linux <> Unix camp

  1. 56  Peter de Haas http://www.peterdehaas.net | 6/11/2007 1:04:38 AM

    @55

    Charles,

    Ofcourse you can look at SharePoint / MOSS2007 in isolation.

    As highlighted in many of the comments above this is a *platform* discussion not a product / feature comparison therefor I do think it has relevance to this discussion ...

  1. 57  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com | 6/11/2007 4:35:06 AM

    @53 - Thanks David, I should probably have appended j/k to the end of my question. To cite recent examples of growth rates doesn't really prove that a product has a long history of being more enterprise ready, for obvious reasons – though it could probably be argued that by definition, products that are designed for the enterprise will be unlikely to capture the majority of the market – I think you’re very familiar with WCS :-)

    I'm with Charles in thinking that Linux != Unix ... it wasn't too long ago that the charge was made by Unix vendors that Linux wasn't enterprise ready; as with Java, IBM to a large extent legitimised Linux in the enterprise. When you go down the path of determining what qualifies as being “Enterprise ready” it can become a double-edge sword as architect astronauts and purists may jump in with statements like the infamous “80s design point” gaff { Link } (sorry Ed, I'm not trying to stir the pot here)

    My view is that both MS & IBM are now creating great products for our customers - large & small - in part because of the cross-pollination of employees as both companies are made up of people from MS/IBM/SAP/SUN/ORCL/HP etc.... ( see Carl’s comment #11 at { Link } ) and from the acquisition of small firms with smart people that never set foot in any of these establishments. Who knows, maybe we’ll get to be colleagues again – and if it’s because you joined MS I hope you wouldn’t view yourself as any less enterprise ready :-)