March 15, 2005
Analysis: The IBM Lotus Notes Roadmap Gets Clearer
There's a merge ahead for the Notes client and the IBM Workplace rich client, but that doesn't mean less running room for Notes applications -- in fact, it may mean more
The roadmap for IBM Lotus Notes has been a confused and confusing picture ever since Lotus announced its J2EE-based "NextGen" initiative in 2002. Even while NextGen became IBM Workplace IBM Lotus insisted that rumors of the death of the Notes client and Domino server were greatly exaggerated. Over the past few months it's begun to look like they were, indeed.
Ed Brill, Business Unit Executive, Worldwide Notes/Domino Sales, for IBM Lotus, pushed the product roadmap for the Notes Client, at least, a little further into the future Wednesday in a presentation for a recent New England Notes User Group in the Boston area. He ran down the list of recent IBM announcements on Notes and Workplace, especially version 2 of the Workplace rich client and Notes/Domino Version 7 and then looked ahead to version 8 and beyond.
When IBM Lotus announced Notes/Domino 7 in January it said that with this version Notes applications would be able to run natively in the Workplace rich client. What it didn't say (at least not very loudly) was that users who want to run Notes apps in Workplace will need to have the Notes 7 client installed on the same desktop PC. Brill confirmed that, but went on to say that it would be only temporary. Eventually a Workplace plug-in will handle all the functions of the Notes client. (The Workplace rich client is built on the open-source code base of Eclipse, the development environment, and shares its plug-in architecture.)
"When that happens, whether it's Notes 7.5 or 8.x, the Notes client and the Workplace client become the same thing," Brill said.
Notes: Life Or Death?
But doesn't that mean the death of Notes? Not at all, he insisted. "Then you've got the Notes client plus all this Workplace stuff wrapped around it" -- functionality that includes centralized client management, the addition of Macintosh and Linux platforms, interesting new technologies like the Activity Explorer, a graphical interface for collaborative task management, and, significantly, a suite of productivity tools based on Open Office, which is clearly intended to make the Notes/Workplace client competitive with Microsoft Office.
Challenged on IBM's own deployment of Workplace -- why should a company buy Notes/Domino from IBM when even IBM isn't running it? -- Brill protested, "But we will be running it. Companies like IBM with 50,000 Notes applications aren't going to stop running them, and we won't have to. Notes will be right there in the client."
The server side is opening up as well, he said. When Version 7 ships (expected to be in the third quarter), companies running Domino servers will have the option of storing Notes application data in DB2. "If they want to get at that data from other applications using relational queries they can." Applications on a Domino server can also be exposed as Web services more simply in Version 7, and Brill cited server performance improvements (IBM has been claiming 70% improvement in general, and an astonishing 300% on Linux) which will enable some major server consolidation and make Domino more attractive as a server for mail and applications that don't need to be connected to relational capabilities.
Full Employment For Notes Developers
Notes developers won't stop working, either, said Brill. He pointed to the Workplace Designer, a development environment that will let developers work with the familiar Notes constructs of forms and views to create J2EE Workplace applications.
At one point Brill stopped his presentation graphics to point out an arrow on a box labeled "Notes/Domino 8" on the right edge of the screen. "I didn't have that arrow there and people said, 'so Notes is dead after version 8.' I put the arrow on and now they say, 'so Notes is dead after version 9.' I don't know what to do. I can't put any more boxes on the screen, but they're out there, believe me. Notes isn't dead."
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