Ed Brill

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1. 1  David Bell  | 10/9/2006 12:39:03 AM

   Not sure if this was in the original entry, or updated some time over the weekend, but it is definitely there:

   "UPDATE I should make it clear that this "recipe" for moving off Lotus Notes does not port applicaitons written on the Notes platform."

   Good recipe, if you're looking for a disaster !

1. 2  David Bell  | 10/9/2006 12:44:17 AM

   Hey - sounds like the recipe for Red Bull !

   We can analyze what you've got, classify it however we see fit and *tell* you how easy it would be to move, but at the end of the day, when it matters most, we still have no idea how to move anything of any value to you to another solution.

1. 3  Steve Castledine http://www.stevecastledine.com | 10/9/2006 2:55:02 AM

   I live by the rule of keeping my mouth shut unless I really know what I am talking about - yeh it leaves me a little quiet!

   Rod's web0.5 blog application does not even have spell check - ("port applicaitons"?). An entry on the 30th September highlights a security problem as well, so needed a patch (titled "An ugly upgrade").

   Glasshouses? Maybe he should look at Notes a little more closely.

   I don't even need to go there on the contradictions on things like Workflow and Approval. Ok maybe I will - how can "we" make a "big deal" out of Worklow and Approval, but with Itensil about to introduce it into their wiki software it makes it cool and new?

   Rod - did you also know that we were writing web2.0 applications with Domino before the term even existed 5years+ ago? Domino provided us with built in commands that could be used over the web to provide us with data and data structure via xml - so as always ahead of the game.

1. 4  Justin Ord  | 10/9/2006 5:11:50 AM

   At the risk of sounding philosophical,

   Ignorance leads to arrogance... (or it is the other way around)

   Are their any CLI's out there that could assist mr Boothby with an “eye opener” training session?

   I am of the opinion that people should not disrespect or pass judgment on that which they do not know anything about.

1. 5  Stu Downes http://www.sdownes.co.uk | 10/9/2006 5:20:26 AM

   Could we reflect on this a little, I'll pose some questions. Why does an intelligent chap want to think about moving his applications? Can we take a step back and a step upwards and look down on the situation, should we ask whether the message about what Lotus software can do is getting down to people like Rod? People like Rod are influencers in organisations even if they are not the IT function in that organisation. Its a shame there isn't a public IBM showcase we can point Rod to and say look, here is the power of Lotus Software in "Zetabank" go see what it can do, perhaps that would mitigate against similar postings in the future.

1. 6  Kerr  | 10/9/2006 5:21:41 AM

   There is a great deal of difference between using an off the shelf package and using a line of business tool that performs a specific task. I'm sure that most of the developers here are very familiar with building tools that replicate an existing business process, automating it and making it more efficient.

   Generic tools like blogs and wikis certainly have their place. They are providing new ways to exchange, store and retrieve knowledge (in a non-technical sense), and as users become familiar with using them, they stop being seen as a tool being used, but rather slip into the background, like using a knife and fork, as email has.

   However, generic tools cannot replace bespoke line of business tools any more than a fully kitted out automotive workshop can replace a car factory. Both may contain many of the same components and you may be able to build a car in the workshop, but it's not an automated production line.

   Line of business tools aim to take a business function and automate it as much of it as possible. This leaves the users of the tool to concentrate on what their actual job, usually a creative, decision making or oversight function. We can seek to automate out all other functions from that business process.

   Giving the business generic tools can only achieve some efficiency. In some job functions those generic tools are all you really need. In others they give very little and could never replace a bespoke the line of business tools. Of course you could take a line of business tool and migrate it to a different platform. That platform could be open source. It could have as much ajax, json, rss, atom, rest, web 2.0 buzz word bingo as you like. It would still need to be a bespoke line of business tool. And you'd have to build it. The question would be why? There are reasons for doing so. (I'm working on a project that is migrating a line of business tool from pure domino to a hybrid Domino / WebSphere platform that will eventually move to a pure WebSphere platform. There are good reasons for doing so; some of them technical, some of them environmental, some of them political. (Grumble, grumble, garnet, grumble.) But this is far for cheap and far from easy and certainly couldn't be done with a few blogs and a wiki.)

   What Rod seems to have missed in all this is that a great deal of Domino apps are line of business tools that cannot be replaced without rebuilding them. If you want to do that you can, and extracting the data is not that hard, certainly trivial compared to replicating the business function. Domino provides an excellent platform that provides developers with a huge amount out of the box. A skilled developer can turn those features into valuable line of business tools quickly and efficiently with enterprise class features like clustering, single sign on world class security. Now, if I have the platform, why not use it to deploy the blogs and wikis that function perfectly well on it?

   Let me hear a compelling argument and I'll take it seriously. Do I expect people to go and buy Domino so they can deploy blogs and wikis? No. If you already have Domino is there a good reason not to use it for blogs and wikis? No.

1. 7  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/9/2006 7:18:40 AM

   @5 Stu, I've read your comments here and on Rod's site (and btw, they were picked up by some of Mr. Boothby's regular readers on their own sites), and I know you've met him at CTC. In this case, the real issue is that his employer certainly does have applications that would show the power of Notes. Note in the comments that he acknowledged that my blog and the out-of-box-blog-template site looked pretty good -- oh, but it's notes? Sort of that reaction.

   So I get that IBM has a responsibility to do more to influence the LOB (line of business). I actually believe that the blogging template can help. In one organization in Japan, they are considering migrating to Notes simply because it is now an inclusive mail/calendar/document sharing/blogging system. Those kinds of implementations will certainly influence LOB thinking. But there is a lot more we could/should be doing. I am not sure that it has to be consumer-oriented (as was suggested on another blog { Link } ), but certainly anything that makes the technology more accessible will help.

1. 8  Stu Downes http://www.sdownes.co.uk | 10/9/2006 7:50:41 AM

   @7 Ed, Thanks. Stu

1. 9  Chris Doig http://chrisdoig.net | 10/9/2006 8:56:34 AM

   You can read an excellent analysis of how people like Rod Boothgy's approach these types of problems in the book: "Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not". The fact that he is a manager with one of the big-4 audit/consulting firms is a 100% fit with the book's thesis.

   From Amazon.com: { Link }

   Management consulting is big business. Consultants often make very good money, and the good ones throw intriguing ideas on the table and get people excited about their work. But is any of their advice actually useful? Does it get implemented and lead to more productive workplaces? Chris Argyris thinks that most of it doesn't work, because it has too many "abstract claims, inconsistencies, and logical gaps to be useful as a concrete basis for concrete actions in concrete settings." No matter what managers hear from consultants, they ultimately resort to these five behaviors, according to Argyris: State a message that's inconsistent ("You're in charge of this, but check in with Steve"); act as if it's not inconsistent; make the inconsistency undiscussable; make the undiscussability undiscussable; act as if you're not doing any of the above. Flawed Advice and the Management Trap shows managers how to break out. He shows that a choice is sound when the emphasis is on facts and accumulated data and isn't influenced by the relative power positions of the people involved.

   Top company managers and human-resources professionals will probably find this book most interesting. For them, the ideas in Flawed Advice and the Management Trap show the path away from a management style that breeds resentment and internecine warfare and points toward one that allows the facts to speak for themselves. --Lou Schuler

   Mark Hendricks, American Airlines Magazine, January 2000

   Argyris' premise is that virtually all the consultants are wrong, whatever their credos. They give advice too vague to be useful, make promises that can't be tested, and don't explain the theories behind it all....It's a rigorous thesis that leaves behind a feeling that few things are certain--except that Chris Argyris writers very entertainingly and wisely about management and business.

1. 10  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 10/9/2006 9:11:02 AM

   This guy is the ultimate stereotypical example of an "MBA type": long on ideas, short on actual knowledge, unwilling to back down in the face of overwhelming facts.

   Prior to this incident I never really understood why you got so upset about people taking pot shots at Notes and Domino. Now I understand your frustration. You've got crackpots like this running around spreading not only FUD but outright lies, and you have very limited recourse since it's not illegal. There ought to be a law against this behavior, but unfortunately anybody can post whatever they want, truth and accuracy be damned. Hopefully the technical staffs of his employer's clients have a clue. Rod sure doesn't.

1. 11  Brian Benz http://www.softwaresoapbox.com | 10/9/2006 1:07:25 PM

   I've seen this so many times before....Boothby doesn't have the IT background or experience to know the difference between consumer apps and enterprise apps, and he has no strong voices in the office opposing and/or educating him.

   I've sat in many a boardroom with these guys. He sees consumer apps that can be independent, low on security and administrative control, and bought off the shelf or developed in a few man-days, that his kids can use. He wonders why he need all this other stuff at work.

   I assume he's the kind of guy who asks his IT guys why their enterprise email system can't be replaced with individual Google mail accounts.

   Sadly, many of these guys have influence with the business decision makers. They usually go away if they get their way a few times. Or they are sent away. In the meantime, the IT department, and ultimately the company, pays and pays for their mistakes in lost weekends and squandered budgets.

1. 12  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net/ | 10/9/2006 1:48:19 PM

   I've tried twice now to post this on Rob's blog, but so far the comments have not shown up, so I'll share it with everyone here instead.

   I have issues with the classification "Text based "databases", which are crude web pages". Rob (and others) please take a look at the following consumer, corporate, government, military, consulting, educational, and charitable organization web sites, all run via Domino.

   http://www.mizunousa.com/

   http://www.millenniumhotels.com

   http://www.icrc.org/

   http://www.pwc.com/

   http://www.idg.com

   http://www.facinghistory.org

   http://www.govhs.org/

   http://www.marines.mil

   http://www.sing365.com/

   http://www.mindwatering.com/

   http://www.bobevans.com/

   http://nae.edu

   http://emory.hr.emory.edu

   I don't think any of these would be happy to be referred to as crude text based web pages.

   If you want more examples, Google search for:

   filetype:nsf site:com, or filetype:nsf site:edu, or filetype:nsf site:gov, or filetype:nsf site:net, etc.

1. 13  Nathan T. Freeman http://www.openntf.org/nathan/escape.nsf | 10/9/2006 3:02:56 PM

   From { Link }

   "I am a Manager with Ernst & Young's Financial Services Advisory practice. I focus on helping our clients deal with:

   *

   Pricing and trading Credit Derivatives, CDOs, CDS indices, bespoke tranches & Fixed Income Derivatives.

   *

   Organization design and strategy issues related to risk management and derivatives trading operations.

   *

   Technology infrastructure design, vendor selection and build out.

   Thanks to a kind introduction from Dr. Robbie Jones, I was able to start my career out of grad school at Wells Fargo’s famed Management Sciences Dept. Notable alumni of the department include Oldrich Vasicek, who went on to become the V in KMV.

   In a stroke of luck, I arrived just as a new fixed income derivatives trading desk was being set up. I was a member of the founding team that set up the Financial Products group, and spent 2 years working as an assistant trader and building out trading and VaR systems. In 1999, I left Wells to work for Integral Development Corp., and then spent a year working on my own start-up. Then went back to Wells Fargo to work in Credit Risk Architecture before joining Ernst & Young's Financial Services Advisory practice in 2004. "

1. 14  Mike Lazar  | 10/9/2006 4:23:13 PM

   @Nathan -- The least he could do is check the spelling of his post. Misspelling in an IM or even a blog comment is acceptable every once in a while, but to have a misspelling in your main topic/home page (enry instead of entry) is completely unacceptable. It just shows a lack of attention to detail, which Mr. Boothby has been quite good at showing us all over the past few days.

1. 15  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/9/2006 8:32:21 PM

   Mike Gotta from Burton Group has a good analysis of this whole thing at { Link }

   "What is somewhat scary in this post is that Web 2,0 enthusiasts show a serious lack of knowledge into the complexity of enterprise environments. It reminds me of the Netscape days when people said Microsoft and IBM were dead. Everything was solved with a browser. It reminds me of the client-server days when people said the mainframe was dead. It reminds me of the PC days when people said end-users did not need IT anymore."

1. 16  Simon Hendry  | 10/10/2006 12:49:44 AM

   I found the original post by Rod quite ironic, given that I am currently trying to do exactly what he is suggesting.

   And that is trying to recreate some of what Domino provides in another environment. ( Through no fault or choice of my own ).

   There are actually two steps to what he is suggesting:

   1 ) Get the notes data out into a format that is usable by something else. - 2% of the work

   2 ) Completely re-create the domino application environment in your new envinroment - 98% of the work.

   The data extraction is difficult enough ( see a post here { Link } ) about some of that work.

   But then you have to build an entire workflow framework back around the data. Domino has some many great built-in features that simply are not in other products. If you

   need to these functions you have to write them yourself. And that takes a lot of time. Domino has a built in,secure programmable workflow engine and web oject store.

   You have to write that yourself in most other environments; or at least get a number of different third party products and try to string them together.

   What is also not mentioned is that to re-create domino applications requires about 5 times the number of products in most other environments.

   Tools like MS Visual studio 2005 has come a long way in trying to pull alot of different technologies into a single dev environment, but it goes nowhere near

   the integration and "out-of-the-box" feature sets you get with domino and notes designer.

1. 17  Hynek Kobelka http://www.pylonware.com | 10/10/2006 7:01:56 AM

   OK, as already said many times, what Rod Boothby writes about easily switching is nonsense. If you want to port an application, you actually have tor rewrite it.(If you have lot of applications well ...))

   However i found one sentence from him in this whole discussion that would be worth thinking about:

   Rod said: ... "For instances where people need workflow, content access control, encryption, etc, why is it optimal to tightly couple the new application with email and calendaring ?" ...

   Huh ...

   There is some truth in this. Wouldn't it be better to have two separate clients. One specialised for e-mail/calendaring and one for Notes-applications ? This would solve quite a lot of problmes/compromises in the current client. Or wouldn't it ?

1. 18  Kerr  | 10/10/2006 8:09:30 AM

   I've often thought that a specific mail client would be interesting to see in the Notes/Domino world. This would be a general purpose pop / imap / smtp mail client, that would also be able to deal natively with a notes mailbox. It would be able to deal with a local replica for offline work. The user interface would be geared specifically to dealing with mail and calendar & scheduling. The mailbox template used would be specifically designed to provide services for this client. You would not be able to use the client for any other applications.

   For some organisations this could work well. For them it would be similar proposition to using Outlook clients with a Domino server using Domino Access for Outlook. There are pros and cons to this proposition. Some are technical and some are strategic / political.

   I'd love to hear if this has ever been proposed within IBM/Lotus and what the response was. Ed? I suspect that it would be seen to dilute the Notes/Domino proposition and would therefore be a no go.

1. 19  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 10/10/2006 9:01:54 AM

   @15 - I had the exact same experience, and came back to just using Domino.

1. 20  Andy B http://andy.the-broyles.com | 10/10/2006 9:23:10 AM

   16) there is nothing in the license that says you have to use the mail features of N/D. It is quite simple to strip any reference to Notes mail from the client and use the client to only run Notes applications.

   17) There used to be (maybe there still is) a Notes Mail only client license that worked in the exact way you mention...but nobody bought it since the value of the Notes infrastructure was so compelling that nearly everyone wanted to build apps on top.

   16&17) You can buy a collaboration express license for $133/user (up to 1000 users) and the server is included in the price (including SameTime LE). For a small company, this is an incredible deal.

1. 21  Hynek Kobelka http://www.pylonware.com | 10/10/2006 11:00:01 AM

   @20 Well of coures you can use the full client only for one task or the other.

   And there even is a licence option that makes this more affordable.

   Thats nice. But it is not the point.

   The question is: Wouldn't it be BETTER to have a specialized light weight client for EMail+Calendaring

   and a separate client for secure Notes applications ?

   There is actually now a problem for users who use Notes for E-Mail only that

   they suffer from all the additional functions of the client which they never use.

   (Replication, Abstract general naming (ex. database,document...) and more.)

1. 22  Kerr  | 10/10/2006 11:22:59 AM

   @Andy B,

   I'm well aware of the mail only license options. The point is that if they only want mail and C&S then the Notes client can seem "clunky" to many users. The question asked was "Wouldn't it be better to have two separate clients. One specialised for e-mail/calendaring and one for Notes-applications ?"

   A client that was specifically built to just do mail and C&S with a Domino server may be an interesting proposition to some clients, especially new ones. It's something people with no exposure to Notes/Domino could "get".

   I understand why IBM/Lotus wants full Notes clients installed. Once the client is there it's much easier to say, "Now you can use it for all these apps too." It may also confuse the market, "What are the two different clients for?" "Why do I need a full Notes client?"

1. 23  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/11/2006 7:33:15 AM

   @22 etc. -- how would a specialized mail client compete against the Outlook bundled in Office and Outlook Express bundled in the OS? It would make that kind of Notes access a pure commodity, one that has economically more-attractive alternatives. Not the way I'd want to compete in market, and I can't really change the way that MS takes those products to market.

1. 24  Kerr  | 10/11/2006 12:28:20 PM

   @23 - How does Domino Access for Outlook fit into the picture? Is it purely an integration / stepping stone product (We have some users that use Outlook that we want to migrate to Notes, but it'll take time so we'll use Domino Access for Outlook in the meantime)?

   Domino is the best mail platform out there. Exchange is a joke in comparison. But users prefer Outlook, or so we keep hearing. Users don't see the server though; they don't care if it's the best thing since sliced bread. Oh they care when it all goes belly up, but that doesn't happen every day, even with Exchange. Is Domino Access for Outlook not trying to capture some server market without worrying about the client?

   How many people want to use Outlook at work because they use Outlook at home?

   How do you compete against Outlook being bundled with Office and the OS? Give it away. Require a CAL for accessing Domino, but otherwise, it's free. Make it the best mail client available. Make it secure. Make people want to download it. Make magazines want to put it on there cover disks and give it 5 stars in reviews.

   Email IS a commodity. People just want it to work.

   So here are the reasons not to do it.

   - Cost; of development, support, marketing.

   - Dilution of the Notes thick client proposition.

   So for the segment of the market that isn't convinced by the Notes thick client proposition, what do you do? Give up? Keep trying to convince them? Give them something else?

   Just to be clear, I'm just toying with an idea here. I've no strongly held position. The cost would be significant and the dilution of the Notes proposition could be a disaster. After the all the Workplace shenanigans, something that diluted the current strong and focused Notes/Domino message, Here To Stay, Better Than Ever, would probably not be a good thing. I just think it would be interesting. Potentially suicidal, but interesting ;)