Stu Downes

First aid information is now downloadable in various audio formats from the St. John Ambulance iFirst Aid Site.

Well at the moment even I’m still slightly confused as to where Lotus are going ….. so I’ve put my reading head on and tried to summarise here what I have found, or guessed. At the moment we have two streams:

• Lotus Notes and Domino (and in their I include Quickplace for teamrooms and Sametime for instant messaging and conferencing)
  Lotus Workplace for Collaboration

So where are the 2 product streams going and what do i understand of the roadmap:

Notes and Domino run on proprietry protocols (with the exception of some browser based tools which run on open standards). The Domino server uses its own database format, the NSF. The products have evolved from the late 1980′s into the Notes and Domino we know today. Some love them, some hate them. However there is nothing else out there that can beat it in terms of integrating applications with email, combining this with a poweful, customisable application and email environment and allow such freedom in offline working (even from the browser).

However it is long in the tooth and must take a huge ammount of development effort to update each time a new release is required, and lets face it you evolve or die in IT.

Lets look at its new cousin. IBM Workplace, and note the word Lotus is dropped, is built on a framework of products already produced by IBM. Those being:

• Websphere Application Server
  Websphere Portal
  DB2 or Cloudscape

The actual Workplace elements are developed on top of this framework using J2EE, a nice open standard environment. The service is scalable from the Express offering all through to thefull offering with options as to which of the elements you install so you can build a workplace to suit. The key here though is J2EE. This will allow not just IBM, but vendors and partners, to build elements of Workplace quickly and at less expense. I heard one partner say this would allow product lifecycles of 2-6 months compared to 12-20 months with Notes and Domino. So effectively as many advancements as IBM can cram into Notes Domino in 18 months down to around 6 months with Workplace. The basic architecture is shown below:

Thats great but there are still many thousands of databases on Domino and many many thousands of users on Notes clients. Well IBM have been quite canny here too. They presently have a Workplace client, which is richer than the browser interface and includes some nice peer to peer activity centric collaboration tools. This client plugs into the present Notes 7 client and allows you through the Workplace client to access NSFs and Workplace applicaitons. This won’t make anyone jump for joy – thats another application on my desktop!

From release 8 of Notes, Hannover, the clients merge. There is one client for Notes and Workplace. It will be interesting to see how it is branded.

I would then argue that despite all IBM’s statements that there is a future in both products that focus will begin to shift to the shorter lifecycle product. They have already addressed the developers needs and produced a workplace designer client which should be very familiar to your Notes developers. From the point where one client accesses both environments, both environments support a DB2 backend, it is only a matter of time before the workplace applications take over from Notes and Domino applications. Given the 6 month half life of most collaborative applications (i.e. the application matches the average life of your projects) then the number of NSFs would decrease and the number of Workplace applications would increase.

The trouble comes in this interim period – no-one will want to pay to run 2 systems (even if they can leverage existing Websphere and DB2 infrastructure). I think it will be difficult for IBM to sell the workplace platform until the Hannover client is released. Then I think they will also need some good tools to migrate NSFs into te J2EE workplace applications. Someone from IBM will argue against what I have written here. The future is Workplace in my view – but the big migration won’t start for 2 years.

My employers have decided that they are going to block access to the Domino servers to users with the Notes 7 client. I’ve just downgraded to Notes 6.5.4. The first job I needed to do is open a huge view. My client has been locked up for 10 minutes so far. It just made me realise how useful Notes 7 is in allowing you to continue to work on other jobs in your Notes client while opening views. Rant over!

Today was the ND7 launch event in Manchester. IBM and a one of their partner’s Versko put on a good day (including a tour of the venue – Manchester United’s Old Trafford Ground). There isn’t much that I haven’t posted already about the client in post 8 and post 18.

One thing that was really interesting but skipped over was Sametime 7.1 (due Q2-Q3 2006). I’ve commented to collegues that there wasn’t anything in the Sametime 7.0 client. Well 7.1 is a step change. There is a completely refined user interface, better integration with whatever directory Sametime is using (Domino or LDAP), VOIP features (didn’t discuss this). But the VOIP element is great news. Lotus have already announced the server side API is available to integrate the Sametime server with telephony and audio conferencing. Now this client end integration seems like excllent news. There will also be smilie support (great….spot my sarcasm). I’ll try and post some screenshots here (after checking they aren’t covered under non-disclosure).

One other interesting element is the tighter integration between the Lotus Notes client calendar and scheduling and the Sametime Meeting service. At last the link will be there in 7.0 which will allow you to book a sametime meeting room when arranging your meeting (none of the hastle of going through the present web GUI) ….. however a plea to anyone from IBM reading this ….. many large corporates seperate their Sametime chat and Sametime meeting servers. Please ensure that the sametime client and Notes client can recognise this fact so that meetings can be launched on the fly or scheduled through the Notes client.

I think the only other interesting point to note was that half of the ND7 launch event was spent talking about workplace and Hannover (combined Notes and Workplace client) and roadmaps. Nice to see the future being broadcast to the user base.

IMG_2996

Originally uploaded by sdownes1972.

Well Ryan is now almost 7 months old. This weekend saw us purchase a backpack. We have always enjoyed walking in the countryside, I wouldn’t call us ardent fell walkers but we certainly enjoy the Lake District and West Pennine Moors a lot. The great news is that our 2 foot terrorist loves the backpack (I can’t wait for his arms to grow long enough to hit me!).

Morgue File offer a royalty free, high resolution image library which can be used for personal or commercial purposes. It contains a lot of good images, and a lot of very average images.

The following are self-paced tutorials highlight the key functions and features of IBM Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5:

Using IBM Workplace Collaborative Services 2.5
Learn how to use IBM Workplace messaging, calendar, contacts, web conferencing, team space, and document management features.

Getting Started with IBM Lotus Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5: Collaborative Learning.
Learn how to manage courses, attend/complete courses, and use the collaborative learning tools.

Conceptsfor IBM Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5
Learn some of the fundamental concepts of IBM Workplace Collaboration Services with an overview of the architecture and structure.

Introducing
IBM Workplace Documents 2.5
Learn about benefits, features, available editing tools, and the various document management related tasks you can perform in a document library.

The Workplace strea of software appears to be the future from IBM. From the next release of Notes and Domino it looks like that client will merge with the Workplace client. I’ll stick my neck out (probably get shot down) but it looks like the humble NSF will get a much reduced role and in my view probably become a feature of the new client for backwards compatibility.

Workplace itself, like most modern collaboration products, is a combination of integrated technology so to demo it and look at it yourself can be difficult. IBM have a good site here with screenshows demonstrating the new products (link). There is also a 3 day online demonstration for Workplace available here.

This presentation (link) gives a good overview of collaboration within Microsoft. The webcast is aimed at business managers but has some good information on the integration between Outlook, Office Communicator, LCS and Sharepoint.

Hopefully things are now in place to move house. We have a completed chain (which is about as simple a chain as you can have). So all being well the legal beagles will do their stuff and we’ll be in the new place (200 yards down the road) within a couple of months ….. here fingers crossed !!