I have been running Note 8 Beta both M4/M5 versions. I must say, it's a vast improvement. It is indeed built on Eclipse.

I think with many of the new Outlook style features, Notes will continue to have a strong presence in the market. In addition, many companies have become entrenched with the databases.

posted August 10, 2007

Disclaimer: I am currently involved in migrating a fairly large intranet from Lotus Notes to Oracle Portal.

My impression is that companies are slowly but definitely leaving Lotus Notes. (I think Gartner said more or less the same in one of their reports).

The trend is slow, because Notes applications tend to be pretty pervasive in a company and usually deeply customized, so migrating them (and especially their content) is far from trivial.

Also, the only credible replacement for the email part of Domino/Notes is Exchange, and not all companies are keen to move there.

Paolo M also suggests this expert on this topic:

• Ferdinando P

posted August 10, 2007

When the developers finally figure out the following, I may start to like using the product:
1) F5 should NOT be used to log off
2) Give me the option to cancel whatever I'm doing (such as responding to invitations)
3) The default behavior when replying to a message should be to NOT include the attachments
4) The default behavior when replying to a message should be to include the message history
5) When I hit the "End" key, take me to the bottom of the list of messages, don't scroll to the right

etc.

posted August 10, 2007

I am not a Notes developer, but I have been a Notes user. One thing I liked, and the devs. I dealt with liked, was once past the steep learning curve, Notes was a very powerful development platform. (Also, hype to the contrary, not everything can or should be 'web based'.) We used it as a QA database and tracking tool, and it did an excellent job when the app. was properly designed and engineered.

I'm looking forward to seeing how Notes on open-source platforms works out, especially if that move is only the beginning of a larger move into OSS space for IBM - which judging by theie recent actions, it may be.

posted August 10, 2007

The future of Lotus Notes as well as any desktop based email client seems bleak. We are becoming more and more mobile everyday and need access to all of our information -- wherever we are. Web based applications like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, and GMail are going to lead the Web 3.0 revolution.

posted August 10, 2007

Lotus Notes is my favorite software from IBM. It's making much more my professional and private tasks. I think it will stay only better.

posted August 10, 2007

I've been using Lotus Notes ever since they first released Lotus Domino R5 for Linux. I moved to it because of their adoption of Linux as a viable platform and also because it offers airtight security out of the box.

Long gone are the days when I was at the mercy of the unreliability of Mediocresoft Servmaybe 2000-Bugs-Per-Day.

My company's main Domino server has been running continuously for well over a year now. No reboots, no lock-ups, no-nonsense.

What's the future? Well, that depends on IBM's willingness to continue to move Lotus Notes and Domino in the open source support direction.

I saw several users comment on web-based-application support... I agree that its important, but there's more than enough support for All-That-Is-Web along with the kind of reliable, replicating, desktop client applications that I'll ever need.

posted August 10, 2007

I've been using notes(6) for more than 3 years.I keep testing new version although dont use it, UI has drastically improved and trying to catch up with outlook. I would expect ajax based web application in future release.

It is not going to die as switching cost is going to be issue. From user perspective most of the users are using it because its mandate and there is no optiona avaialable.

posted August 10, 2007

Trends are like fashion they come and they go.

Notes has had a longevity far beyond what most 'experts' have predicted, in the US and here in the UK the bases has taken a bit of a battering from MS however in the new European countries and far east IBM continue with success.

It is becoming more and more open and with Lotus' new products (Quickr and Connections) will have a large niche for a long time to come.

Of course IBM could screw] it up completely but MS are unlikely to out-techie it (it runs pretty well on all platforms)

Ian W also suggests these experts on this topic:

• Darren A
• Ed B
• Alan L

posted August 10, 2007

The main problem with Notes (and I'm talking e-mail here) is that it is an incredibly ugly and counterintuitive client on top of an excellent, scalable, enterprise-grade server that runs on just about any OS.
I would rather advise IBM to ditch the client entirely and rather rely on something open source, such as Thunderbird or Evolution, as a base to build on top of. Notes will gradually be replaced with someone more user-centered because the user base will request it. E-mail did indeed become a commodity application and the user base is voting with their boots when it comes to Notes. I know this from first hand experience ;). As per the server platform, Domino is miles better than Exchange (at least Exchange 2003 which is the latest release I've seen in action), I have seen more than one customer using it as backend with MS Outlook as the frontend (mail only, of course).

Tony

posted August 10, 2007

While representing a proven mail-driven development platform, the future for Lotus Notes doesn’t look promising unless the product undergoes some major change.
First in term of information retrieval, because of the modularity of the notes databases, you can’t to the information you need unless you know were it is. In addition to that, the lack of intuitiveness from the client is another major factor hindering the success of Notes.
But the future belongs to companies such as Google and all the other who see enterprise application delivery more as a utility than a service.
Applications are just a mean to get to a goal in our case data or content, they no longer represent this idyllic sphere in which we conduct business.

posted August 10, 2007

I am working with a consultancy who have lots of work on and proposals out for lots more work. The Lotus Notes future is bright at the moment. Please contact me if you are looking....!!

Sam Evans - sam@flex-associates.com - 01273 827856

posted August 10, 2007

I've been an enthusiastic Notes user and I am still lacking many functions in MS/Thunderbird that I took for granted in Lotus Notes. However taking into the account the market reality the future looks somewhat bleak for the moment.

I believe that Big Blue is able to reshape its future - the only question is whether they will put enough effort to do it, just like they did with Visual Age line of products creating Eclipse - de-facto standard IDE nowadays.

Links:

• http://econsulting.pl

posted August 10, 2007

I spent 10 years at Lotus, pre- and post-IBM...the vast majority of the people who had the gray matter around Lotus Notes...the people who built that product...left. They left not because they didn't want to work at IBM, but because IBM didn't want to continue Notes. All the hype notwithstanding, Notes 8 is not your grandfather's Notes, and moreover, is not becoming more "open". It's an Eclipse plug-in that runs atop Lotus Expeditor, the technology formerly known as the IBM Workplace Managed Client. That's either good or bad, depending on your perspective, but it's done absolutely nothing to make Notes more "open". Look where IBM spends their money...is the Notes PKI the default PKI for WebSphere and the rest of the IBM Software platform? Is the NSF the new database for IBM software? Or have they even tried to model the NSF in DB2? Is the Domino Directory IBM's strategic directory product?

Notes 8 represents an effort by IBM to do what they could not do with their adventure in the wilderness called Workplace...and that is to bind Notes customers to WebSphere, DB2, and Tivoli. Again, that's either good or bad, depending on your point of view, but if you're trying to figure out what the future of Notes is, that's the future...

IBM Software's biggest assets, and stickiest technologies, are those built around the WebSphere family of products...believing otherwise is naive at best. Notes is a fully depreciated asset inside of IBM, and not the most significant driver of IBM's profitability. And yet, they cannot afford to lose those customers, and they cannot afford to lose that desktop asset, which is an area where IBM has failed repeatedly in the past...

posted August 10, 2007

IBM/Lotus are committed to moving to open source based versions - clearly that will take time to propagate in the market place.
It is already possible to access and use Notes and associated collaboration tools via the web.

Whether everyone will move to using external totally web based services such as Google et al is a moot point. Plenty of corporates would have security and other concerns about that and as long as they do there is a market for Notes/Exchange and their ilk. Choice between them is somewhat a matter of "religious conviction" since all have strengths and weaknesses and their supporters seem to polarise somewhat!

Personally I think the next move needs to be away from e-mail to true use of collaborative environments instead of the "e-mail trail" we seem to live through now. But that is going to take some major cultural change in most organisations. IBM (and Msoft) seem to "get" this from the look of what they are creating in future releases.

IBM has managed to continue to grow the Notes customer base consistently since acquiring Lotus, so they are doing something right!
(Declaration of interest - ex-IBMer, but I liked Notes before IBM bought it! Wish I'd had the wit to buy some shares at that point and make a few $ when IBM paid up!)

posted August 10, 2007

The answer is not about the technology. Obviously, Microsoft Exchange and/or any open source solution will have a leg up. The real question is whether any corporate management structure will simply move off of this "legacy" application (ie. several years of investment, backed by the mighty IBM empire, ...). In my opinion, Notes is here to stay. Large Fortune 500 companies will not move off especially if so much depends on it. It would be an even bigger risk to move off this platform. As much as we talk about J2EE, .NET and Web 2.0, we still see CICS, COBOL and Notes. Businesses need to be assured that there will be no risk to the business first, then think about new & improved technologies second. Nobody wants a liability.

posted August 10, 2007

Disclaimer : this is a end-user feedback
I now have to use an other DB and email embedded system (or better said many different apps) to replace a single Notes application that I used for 10 years that made all (except coffee...); you can't believe how miserable can be the life with different apps that are maybe connecting easier together but that lack the power of what Notes is able to do like :

- replicating and networking dozens if not hundreds of db's worldwide and enabling a single user to force a replication if truly necessary from the other side of the planet

- many people below are speaking of the mail system, which is imho the most powerful system I have ever seen (i am loosing such a time in the various other systems), but what seems the vantage point to me is the management and replication of db's indeed and the Domino side

- the kind of gigantic behemoth perception of Notes was probably true when large bandwidth to enable all features was only "band", aka costed so much money, that is sad, any app these days is gigantic

- that being said, as user, if the application is based on a web like template with many outlook style pages, I will feel worry if e.g the result of an action like to jump from a feature, change function, change page, create email or replicate db will drive me through a serie of cryptic panels where I need to click on yes/no, next, cancel, save etc.. and not be sure that if I hit the return button of my browser the app will crash because I needed to use the back button in the page...

I did not see the beta version, let's hope the usability gurus have done a great job there;

Bad point for me : the help file : I truly hope they improved it, this is very cryptic and terrible to look for infos inside this giant document

Finally : yes there is a future, no hesitation.

posted August 10, 2007

I think the future looks good and the eclipse based framework is an excellent choice for companies to roll out client applications. The idea that you can do everything from spreadsheets to word processors in a web site is not really true and client applications still have their place. If you need a client application and want to have a really neat deployment and integration story, going with Lotus Notes makes a lot of sense.

posted August 10, 2007

Hi, as E-Learning company we are involved, in 2 different ways, to migration FROM Lotus Notes to:

- Our e-learning system to manage classroom learning activity in a big italian industrial company
- Online trainining to use outlook instead lotus as mail client

Best regards
Claudio Erba
www.docebo.com
The open source e-learning suite

posted August 10, 2007

Having been forced to use LotusNotes for years, I hope it will quietly fade away. I found it cumbersome at best.

It was picked up as a standard part of CMM for my company and the process associated with it became so intricate that programmers were creating their own version of software tracking, at least one of which was superior to Notes.

posted August 10, 2007

Disclaimer, I have worked for Lotus since 1993, love Lotus Notes and run a web site dedicated to it, but certainly understand the issues around it, I am not a "blind IBMer".

That said, since I see that MS reps have dedicated to provide quite a provocative response, I feel I should provide a response as well.

> "the vast majority of the people who had the gray matter around Lotus Notes...the people who built that product...left."
Vast majority? Does that mean 51+%? Can you provide some type of methodology for such a unsubstantiated claim? Anyway, even if 99% left, who cares? There are thousands of IBM developers dedicated to building Lotus Notes/Domino and other related Lotus technologies today. Who is building the product is irrelevant to Eric's original question.

> "Notes 8 is not your grandfather's Notes"
You are 100% correct! It is so much more.

> "is not becoming more "open".
Can you please explain what you mean. Last time I checked Eclipse is an open community, not something controlled by Lotus. Don't confuse open source with open standards. Do you not agree that developers will be able to extend Lotus Notes 8 in more ways than they could previous versions? What is your definition of Open?

> "bind Notes customers to WebSphere, DB2, and Tivoli"
There is nothing about Lotus Notes/Domino 8 that requires WebSphere, DB2, or Tivoli. Would you say MS is not trying to bind customers to SQL server, Active Directory, SharePoint, and .Net?

Anyway, Jim has a right to speak his mind just like anyone else, but to answer Eric's actual question...

"What is the future of Lotus Notes?"

Eric, Lotus Notes/Domino 8 is about to be released this month, so the timing or your question is excellent. Years of work have gone into this release. One of the primary goals was to address many of the UI issues people above have mentioned about older versions of the client. Extensibility is another major area. Lotus Notes no longer is a client for just NSF based applications, but it can also now access J2EE applications as well. You can add features to the Sidebar, to the Tookbars, and build composite applications (business mashps) that link together data from multiple systems. For example, Lotus Notes data plus Sieble data.

Sorry, I don't want to turn this thread into a product pitch, so I will try and simply answer your question. IBM is HIGHLY committed to Lotus Notes/Domino, with no end in site. I will leave it up to you to believe information from someone that works at Lotus, or someone who works at Microsoft.

Links:

• http://www.alanlepofsky.net/
• http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/marybeth
• http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/overvi...

posted August 10, 2007

Hi Eric,

I believe that the future of Lotus Notes is indeed quite bright. Although in the past IBM may have made a couple of missteps that put that future in doubt, my personal experience is that the opportunities out there and business solutions that are being developed rival the "pinnacle" of Notes' popularity (late 90s). I have yet to find a product or series of products that can rival Lotus Notes in the depth and breadth of business problems that can be solved by correctly using the technology. An important caveat here is the word "correctly". Notes is a unique platform that requires (as many complex systems do) expert developers and system architects to build true world-class solutions. Without a proper understanding of the underlying architecture of Notes, it is possible (and perhaps too easy) to develop poor applications. With a professional team well-versed in the ways of Notes, I think you'll find the speed to develop apps, coupled with the world-class security and additional benefits that the platform brings will position your company very well now and in to the future. As an added benefit, check out the the new products coming from Lotus like Quickr and Lotus Connections to see the innovation and passion that are coming out of the Lotus/IBM camp. Yes, I think the future is quite bright indeed.

Links:

• http://interfacematters.com

posted August 10, 2007

The future of Lotus Notes as a viable technology platform is strong. New releases are forthcoming, and they have dedicated resources to constant improvement of the platform.

That being said, there seem to be a 3-way split in platform choices -- Notes, Microsoft, and Open Source. (With varying market shares.)

In making a choice of which platform to dedicate my future to, I tend to look less to the technology, and more to the people. Good people will make any technology work, and bad people... well, they can kill anything.

Where I live, there are a lot of good open source people, and Microsoft people. Notes people are more rare. In other towns, you might have a different demographic. So while I firmly believe a Lotus Notes/Domino platform can work wonders, I do not pursue it due to lack of local talent.

And this, ultimately, will determine its future in business -- do enough of us programming geeks stick with it to maintain the quality of it business implementations?

I notice a vocal minority online who will live and die by Notes. I also notice that most Notes people have been in the industry for over 10 years. So while I can show you tons of strong support and resources for the platform, the demographics of that support speak to an overall weakening of the talent pool as time progresses.

If IBM can resolve that problem, Notes will remain strong. Time will tell.

posted August 10, 2007

Eric,
Notes as a client is closed, but so is Google toolbar under this theory, as is AOL IM or any other desktop or application.
Domino, as a server is VERY open as others have explained working across all forms of java, Operating systems, various past, present and future open source and coding.
The new R8 notes client which runs on eclipse just blows away Outlook and almost every other email client in how much you can drag and drop pieces, manipulate the whole "mail world" to be your perspective, not precoded to look like cc:Mail which is how Outlook and Notes have looked in the past.

The future is indeed bright and contrary to those above, you can get move your apps off Dominoi but never get the complete functionality you can find from within the Domino architecture, because unlike Exchange which ONLY does email, Domino integrates email and iM into your working world in addition to its application environment.
It is no more closed than Java really.
Now will IBM open source it like Sun did to Java, that would be a better question.

posted August 10, 2007

As a company we are predominantly engaged in creating Notes/Domino based custom applications. We have been growing 100% year on year over the last 3 years - doing predominantly new application development on Notes. This indicates the momentum in the market to us. I've seen some customers moving away from Notes when they wanted to minimize the amount of heterogeneous systems in their environment. I've seen some customers switch over to Notes from Exchange and from other unmanaged Open Source platforms. I've seen many customers stick to and swear by Lotus Notes, in spite of criticisms of UI - the reason has always been the same: the damn thing works! If you have seen a well designed Notes application enabling the smooth running of a collaborative business process, you'll know what I mean. I find senior management who see the tool enabling their business are among the biggest fans, and folks who care less about the business utility and more for the bells and whistles are the biggest critics. For example take David Allen of Getting Things Done .. see his remarks about Lotus Notes in his book. The tool is rock solid and is far more open than much of what the competition offers - particularly when you look at commercially supported and enterprise grade software. We continue to see a very bright future for Notes .. we are betting on this with our business focus!

posted August 10, 2007

Disclaimer, I am the founder of an IT Services company and one of our core strengths is Lotus and I have personally been developing and supporting Lotus Notes and Domino for over 12 years. Our entire business is ran off three platforms: Notes, OpenOffice and QuickBooks.

That said, your question almost answers itself. IBM has committed to open web (and non-web) frameworks for years. Who employs the lead architect behind Struts (well, Struts 1.0)? IBM does. Who created the Eclipse Foundation? IBM did. I could go on and on, but you get the point. It has just taken a while to reinvent the admittedly stagnant Lotus Notes user experience and for IBM to understand what it should do with Lotus Notes. Over the past several years I would argue all IBM did with Notes was marginalize it. That has now changed and the lights are well and truly back on.

Now, how does this play for Lotus Notes? Well, with the imminent release of R8, expected some time before the end of August, the entire Lotus Notes client platform (as mentioned elsewhere) is based on the Eclipse RCP platform, or more correctly IBM's Lotus Expiditor product, that is in turn based on Eclipse. This is an immense multi-year project that is nearing completion that IBM must have spent a fortune on although I don't have exact figures. A complete rewrite of the Lotus Notes client from the ground up with client software available for Windows, Mac and Linux users.

To put this into context Notes has always had a somewhat unintuitive user interface, and hence steep learning curve for both end users and developers. To say this is about to change in R8 is probably the understatement of the year. IBM Lotus completed over 2,000 end user interface sessions with end users over the development period. They have also been very open via Mary Beth Raven's blog and other Lotus “dignitaries” like Ed Brill about garnering feedback from the community and utilizing our feedback. You did read this correctly, IBM Lotus solicited feedback from everyday users. The email client is a very polished, easy to use application.

“What is the future”? Well IBM Lotus are already talking about R9+ and are moving the Domino Designer client to Eclipse for release at some point after 8.0. The real reason Notes hasn't been “open” was the reliance on LotusScript and other esoteric languages. But now the client can basically be Java and XML. Can you get more open? I seriously doubt it. Now, there is another debate to be had over web vs “client” but you didn't ask that. Just because a technology is not web DOES NOT mean it is not open.

The future is almost here and it is called R8. Open, extensible and secure. The most important release since R4 period.

Links:

• http://www.simplified-tech.com/website/webapp.nsf/webpages/ArticlesR8TechBr...
• http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product1.nsf/wdocs/expedi...
• http://www.eclipse.org/

Darren D also suggests this expert on this topic:

• Jeff T

posted August 10, 2007

You speak of Notes and not of Domino. I have used Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino for about 4 years from 5.x to 7.x. We had migrated off of Outlook/Exchange across the entire Enterprise (>10,000 users internationally) after yet another major failure of yet another Exchange server.

I have used Notes as a stand-alone mail client and it really doesn't offer much there. There is more to the notes client than e-mail (as its name suggest) in that in addition to the usual e-mail, contacts, calendar, to-do, etc., but the Journal (similar but better than Outlook's Notes) is extremely versatile and its other databases such as Document db (MSO, Lotus Smart Suite and Other), Library (database of databases), News (NNTP, separate from regular e-mail although can be viewable together), Discussion (like forums), several mail dbs all compatible with each other, applications (Domino developed) and files for other apps distributed via Domino, etc.

Some of these features are only useful with a Domino server (such as Discussion, applications) and some are more useful with Domino (such as document DBs and Calendar). Quite frankly, without Domino, I'd rather use another e-mail client and find another way to do everything else but sometimes, keeping things together in one app is a good thing.

Advantages of Domino:

*Lotus Domino recover gracefully from any single server failure. With Exchange, we had one corrupt server corrupt all others.

*Separate user databases means that one users corrupt database does not corrupt the DB used by all users.

*Domino & Notes can use a proprietary transport protocol that uses less bandwidth than POP3/SMTP. Can use POP3/SMTP and MAPI if necessary to support other e-mail clients.

*Access control can be based on one or more of e-Directory, Active Directory, RADIUS, LDAP, Local ACLs, LM, SMB, other Domino Address books, etc.

*Sarbanes-Oxley compliance was extremely easy with Domino. I think it took all of 29 days; 28 days to clarify exactly what needed to be done and one day to do it.

Suffice it to say, Lotus Domino has been widely adopted because of its huge usefulness as a collaboration tool, CRM platform, Resource manager, Time management tool, etc. as well as an application development environment.

The new question is: what of the trend to move towards open web-based frameworks?

Domino Web-Access can allow most Notes DBs to be accessible through any W3C compliant browser. On Windows systems and IE, even more DBs can be accessed using ActiveX plug-ins. IBM is moving away from ActiveX to other cross-platform technologies to give wider support Web-Access.

I do not think however that many large corporations are going to rely entirely on Web based apps for all applications as Internet Access is not always available even if you have a Laptop, a GPRS/Edge/3G Cellular PCMCIA card, built-in 802.11a/b/g/n, MaxWiFi and a Blackberry.

Someone pointed you to http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/index.html but for balance, here is http://www.openntf.org/

The former is one users rant. Although some of his rants are justified, you will get the same rants from people used to MSO, a Windows only app, to OOo, a cross-platform app. The latter shows that the user community is very dedicated to using the platform.

IBM is dedicated to continued development as they do have a roadmap to versions 8-10 and have started to support Linux even more.

Notes/Domino will not be dying soon unless Exchange makes some changes or some killer app Groupware/collaboration tool comes along with the best of both worlds. (GroupWise/OpenExchange/other???) I don't think so.

Links:

• http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/index.html
• http://www.openntf.org/

posted August 10, 2007

Disclaimer: I worked for Lotus from 1999-2002, and was an independent IBM business partner from 2002-2006.

We have to be careful how we describe Notes. I started working with Lotus Notes 4.5/4.6 back in the mid 1990's. I absolutely hated it. It was vermin. It was ugly. And it was too counter-intuitive to use. It was not until a light bulb went off in my head during a programming class that I finally "got it". Even so, I hated the fact that I had to write two totally different sets of code if i wanted to expose an application to the web.

Then came the promise of Notes R5: Build once for the client and the web. Well not really, there was (and is) still to much kludging you have to do if you want a web-based application that looks decent and performs worth a hoot. I am amazed every time I come across Domino web application that is right out of the box (and even IBM has some of them).

ND6 made some cosmetic improvements, and ND7 was primarily a server release. And yes, in all cases the UI was less than desirable, lagging behind many others.

Notwithstanding the Workplace debacle (and let's not forget about Discovery server), ND8 is a radical leap forward in usability. I have been using the beta client for months and can never, ever go back. It is that good. This does not mean that Notes will still not suck for many users in their view. To get the full benefits of the ND8 eclipse experience, the desktops will have to have at least a GB of RAM to run smoothly.

For those that do the smooth upgrade to ND8 (and for the Microsoft people out there, note that I said upgrade, not "rip and replace"), training will be required. And any old Notes applications that were built and look ugly and perform poorly, the experience will still "suck". But that is not the fault of the software/platform, it is the fault of the developers.

Think of this list of applications, built on Notes, that I have built or been part of the build team. Look at what we did with a SINGLE platform:

1. Web-based payroll entry system for over 1,500 units using Notes, JavaScript and Java, integrated with SAP. The customer tried to build other applications on .Net and gave up because it was too hard. To quote the customer, "it is one of only two applications that work here worth a hoot" (and they are both built on Domino.

2. A web and faxed based benefits enrollment system for the same company. The architecture is hard tpo describe here, but Notes is the core and ended up saving the company $US2.5M a year. Did I mention that they use Exchange for mail?

3. A self-service customer extranet for a global manufacturer that integrated the Web, the Notes Client, Quickplace and Sametime (instant messaging). 100% built on Lotus software.

4. A security crisis management system for a global corporation that required the application be replicated out to 60+ locations. Ironically, the application was originally built on Websphere, but had huge performance issues. So we brought it back into Notes.

etc etc One of my favorite moments came last summer when I built a web-based training registration system for a government agency. I built in in Domino and leveraged AJAX. Aas an experiment, I named my forms with a ".ASP" extension (yes you can do this). I then showed the application to a manager that despised Notes and Domino. He was blown away by what some simple coding could accomplish. I told him it was built in Domino and all he could say was "no way." He thought is was built using ASP.

Now, I know Notes/Domino cannot be used for everything and curse those developers who try to get it to behave like a relational database. I also know it has warts and I suffer through them like everyone else. But I have YET to see anybody show me a single development platform that can do all it does.

The enterprise has to use the tools that are right for them. There is no right or wrong answer. But the answer should come from rational thought and analysis, not emotion.

posted August 10, 2007

I think the future of Notes & Domino is really solid - it's still by far the best collaboration platform bar none. The next release includes some tools that make it a serious contender to own the desktop. Contrary to popular wisdom - we're not all going to work from web browser based applications...I'm too mobile for that to be practical, and I will not be typing out documents or spreadsheets via my phone browser...that's silly. Notes is the right fit for a mobile professional, or an enterprise of mobile professionals. The real question will be whether or not IBM can market the product cleverly enough to take back the initiative from MS and Google.

posted August 10, 2007