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.
Techworld: Home grown eMed app gets Web 2.0 refresh
Tue, Mar 16th 2010 7:54a Ed Brill A story that will surprise from down under...The University of NSW Faculty of Medicine has developed an in-house student management system, dubbed eMed, which has remained cost competitive with commercial software for seven years and is now being extended into the Web 2.0 paradigm. As the core internal undergraduate application for some 1500 students across six years, eMed has iterated through several major releases. IT manager Luc Betbeder said there was nothing that "spoke our language [read] Keywords: admin
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Upcoming Lotus Education online training webinars: XPages, composite apps, upgrading
Sun, Mar 14th 2010 10:50p Ed Brill Lotus Education is trying something new -- in-depth, detailed training classes delivered as live online webinars. The cost to attend is fairly inexpensive, yet the benefit is direct access to the experts and practitioners from across IBM Lotus to capture their real-world experiences. Four such webinars are scheduled, follow the links for details: STM01 -- Demystifying Sametime 8.5 Webinar â¨When : Thursday March 25th, 11am -- 2:30pm EST â¨Speakers : Wes Morgan, Michael Herring, [read] Keywords: domino
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My week in Spain for LCTY
Sat, Mar 13th 2010 6:52p Ed Brill It's all over but the frequent flyer mile posting -- I'm back from a very quick tour of Lotusphere Comes to You in Madrid and Barcelona. Family commitments drove me to rush right back from Barcelona, one of my favorite cities in the world, but it was still a great week and only makes me want to return sooner rather than later. The IBM Spain team put together two excellent LCTY events this past week. Both were well-organized, professionally-run, and had great food and venues. More important [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Check out a new developerWorks article about Notes Traveler 8.5.1 performance
Sat, Mar 13th 2010 6:46p Ed Brill Some useful tips on configuring Lotus Notes Traveler in your 8.5.1 environment, and how well it works...This article reports IBM® Lotus® Notes® Traveler 8.5.1 performance results for Microsoft® Windows® 64-bit operating systems. In addition, it compares the performances of Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5 (64-bit) server and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 (64-bit) server. Link: ibm.com developerWorks: IBM Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 performance > (Thanks, Jan) [read] Keywords: ibm
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Alistair Rennie podcast on LotusUserGroup.org
Mon, Mar 8th 2010 4:30p Ed Brill Alistair Rennie has been the general manager of Lotus software for about sixty days. In this podcast, recorded last week, Alistair debriefs on Lotusphere, talks about Project Vulcan, and looks ahead in the collaboration and productivity market. Well worth a 20 minute listen.LotusUserGroup.org caught up with Alistair Rennie, General Manager of Lotus Software at IBM, and we recorded the whole conversation for you to hear. Listen in to hear what he finds matters most in his new position and what [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Off to Spain
Sun, Mar 7th 2010 3:00p Ed Brill Near as I can tell, it has been more than seven years since I was last in Spain. Madrid, more like ten years. I barely had discovered blogging at the time of my last visit. As such, I can't wait to get there tomorrow morning and start the day with some churros y chocolate. The Lotusphere Comes to You events are on Tuesday in Madrid and Thursday in Barcelona. I agreed, as blogged earlier, to deliver my presentation en español. While I studied Spanish in high school and college, it has b [read] Keywords: ibm
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