The Microsoft competitive trick of the month is to ask Lotus Notes/Domino customers to ask IBM for our "five-year roadmap" for Lotus Notes/Domino. One account was even told to go to Google and type in "Lotus Notes roadmap". I'm not sure what's so sinister about that, since one of the top ten hits will get to my Lotusphere 2009 presentation which includes a roadmap for the future. It's not like going to Bing and typing in "Microsoft Exchange roadmap" brings solid responses:
Still, I hate to give Microsoft any ammo to use their tired false logic against Lotus Notes. The facts make this easy -- IBM has shipped new feature releases or maintenance releases every single year since 2002; in the same time, they shipped two feature releases and a point release, each of which has required a fundamental rip-and-replace migration of servers, operating systems, or even data. I'll hold my track record of delivering innovation and value up against Microsoft's any day of the week -- and doing it in the only approach in the industry that allows for full customer control over when/how/if to adopt new architectural features and manage interoperability.
So I have been thinking of writing a white paper over the holiday season that addresses this concept of a five-year roadmap for the future of Lotus Notes and Domino. The reality is, some of it would be utter fiction. This industry moves too fast for anyone to put solid bets on exactly where the market is going in five years. If we look backward five years, IBM had not yet announced the "Hannover" vision for Notes -- announced in May 2005, delivered in 2007. Clearly we had some thoughts about "Hannover" in 2004, but we were able to deliver more quickly than a five-year innovation cycle would have required. Looking back reveals much more about what wasn't on the radar in 2004/2005 -- the explosion of public, worldwide social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook; new application development constructs now used in XPages; mobile devices such as, oh, the iPhone; and increasingly ubiquitous connectivity.
In other words, a five-year plan is an outmoded concept. It was invented in the 1950s and 60s in a series of nation-building exercises, at a time when the world was not hot, flat, and crowded. It's never been a successful model in the modern era of client/server, desktop, or web computing, and it makes even less sense as cloud computing increases in importance. There's always been a double-standard here -- Microsoft constantly asks customers to ask IBM about the future of products like Notes while remaining tight-lipped about the future of products like Exchange -- but I don't mind playing the game to shut down the attack vector. It'll be good timing to publish something after Lotusphere, anyway.
The question I want to ask before I start writing is, what would a roadmap white paper say to you that would matter? I'm not likely to be able to commit to version numbers or specific dates, based on IBM's interpretation of Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance thoughts (we don't want you to make a business decision that relies on our forward-looking statements, it isn't good for either party). I can certainly talk about concepts, themes, what my colleague Mr. Peters has in mind when he waxes poetic, and anticipated trends.
Beyond that, though, the future is anybody's game. That's why most "roadmap" whitepapers from vendors, including what I'd likely write, spend a lot of time emphasizing the here and now -- we know that there are always customers whose needs are met by what we ship today, and that there are more prospective customers who could use the same.
ibm.com: IBM Helps Construction Firm Boost Number of Clients by 40% Through Mobile Real-Time Trends Analysis
Wed, Sep 1st 2010 5:34p Ed Brill 250 employees, growing their number of clients by 40% through using Domino, iEnterprises' CRM solution, and Blackberry...This allows project managers to improve decision making, shorten sales cycles and significantly increased new business by making client interactions and client contact information accessible to all project managers through their smartphones. Besides an increase in new clients by 40 percent, up from the year prior, VCC has also seen an average savings of 400 employee hours per [read] Keywords: domino
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Bye bye blogroll
Tue, Aug 31st 2010 8:40p Ed Brill It's been a long time since I thought about my blogroll or, for that matter, really paid attention to anyone else's. I find blogs today through PlanetLotus (and there are a number of new ones found there), Google alerts, Twitter and Facebook links, and our internal implementation of Lotus Connections. So, rather than inadvertently offend someone not included, or consider whether the links there are still relevant, I've blown it away. I put it on a hidden page for now, and suppose I can resurf [read] Keywords: connections
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New widget on ibm.com Notes/Domino pages highlights plug-in partners
Mon, Aug 30th 2010 10:34a Ed Brill We added a small rotating widget to the ibm.com/lotus/notes and ibm.com/lotus/domino product pages to highlight our key Notes plug-in partners: Gist, Tungle, FewClix, TripIt, and OpenSpan. See here in red: The goal is to increase awareness of these value-add tools that are available to showcase the power of the Notes 8.x client. Link: ibm.com/lotus/notes > [read] Keywords: domino
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Need your help - updated Notes/Domino virtualization survey
Mon, Aug 30th 2010 10:30a Ed Brill It's been about a year since the last time we did this, and this time, we want to know about both client- and server-side virtualization technologies. This area is moving fast and not a week goes by without a request for us to support some new virtualization technology. VMWare and Citrix remain the most frequently-asked, but there are now half dozen others mentioned regularly. The survey will only take about ten minutes to fill out; you need an IBM.com ID in order to do so. Sample question [read] Keywords: domino
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Lotus Symphony 3 beta 4 now available
Fri, Aug 27th 2010 9:49a Ed Brill Yesterday, we posted Lotus Symphony 3 beta 4, what should be the last beta of the Symphony 3 cycle. You can download it from here. Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 adds some exciting new enhancements. We've focused on performance. In addition we've enabled the support for adding additional spell check dictionaries into the product and added support for VML images. We've done some additional work around installation to support a silent installation option for Windows. We've added some enhancements to t [read] Keywords: lotus
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Update on Lotus Notes Traveler for Android
Fri, Aug 27th 2010 9:37a Ed Brill Now that Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is out, a few questions have trickled in about the status of the Notes Traveler client for Android. To refresh, we announced at Lotusphere that we would build our own Notes Traveler client for the Android 2.x OS -- supporting mail, calendar, contacts. We knew that the Android OS would evolve to have some of these capabilities in the base OS, but enterprise calendaring and other features just aren't there; plus, different devices using Android use different sets o [read] Keywords: calendaring
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The Calendar of the Future | A manifesto from Tungle.me
Wed, Aug 25th 2010 9:20a Ed Brill Yesterday, Tungle debuted a site called "The Calendar of the Future | A Manifesto". The site features interviews with Tungle's team and industry experts, including Robert Scoble, Google's Don Dodge, LinkedIn's Ellen Levy, Facebook's Michael Brown, me, and others. I am honored to be in the copy of smart, visionary people on these videos. They are well worth 15 minutes of your time. Part of the reason I was so excited to participate in the Manifesto was my long ties to enterprise calendari [read] Keywords: calendaring
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Notes and Domino 8.5.2 release now available!
Tue, Aug 24th 2010 11:00a Ed Brill As announced on August 10, the new Notes and Domino 8.5.2 release arrived earlier today, along with service availability of LotusLive Notes. Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is a release primarily about reliability -- lots of fixes -- but with incremental improvements in the Notes client and significant forward progress for developers in Domino Designer. The blogs are buzzing about the release, and some of the Design Partners and beta participants have blogged over the last few months about key new featur [read] Keywords: domino
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Score one for the Lotus blogging community; ibm.com has been updated
Sat, Aug 21st 2010 11:10p Ed Brill Back before my vacation, a few bloggers were talking about the abrasive, mixed message that IBM was sending to the market by having a web page from ibm.com Global Technology Services describing their Notes to Exchange migration offering. My stance at the time was that IBM, as a portfolio business that is dedicated to every client's success, should be the best possible systems integrator for Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, or whomever else in our GTS business, even while we are competing with those co [read] Keywords: ibm
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