Yesterday at Lotusphere 2012, IBM announced Lotus Notes and Domino Social Edition, the next feature release of Notes & Domino. This new release will enter beta this quarter and is expected to ship in 2012.
Today's announcement features elements that have been publicly discussed for some time -- such as embedded experiences in Notes and iNotes -- and new components, e.g. the product name and some of the new capabilities. Some of the loudest applause during the Lotusphere opening general session came when a key component of this release -- the Notes Application Player Plug-in -- was demonstrated.
Though we've occasionally hinted and once demonstrated the plug-in before, today is the first time we've formally announced it and done a public demo. The plug-in runs in Windows browsers -- Firefox and we'll probably do one other -- and allows Notes applications to run unmodified in the browser. The plug-in is a one-time download, much like the Adobe Acrobat model, where once installed, the browser can access Notes applications directly.
Our intent in building the plug-in is to provide an approach to a common strategic direction we hear from customers today -- the desire to utilize a browser for all custom business applications. While the installed Notes client will always provide the richest, most-integrated mail and applications experience for Domino, increasingly we are asked for help in getting away from desktop deployments. Desktop clients are, for any software -- Notes, Microsoft Office, SAP -- one of the more expensive cost-of-ownership components for IT organizations today.
The vision for Notes/Domino Social Edition is to establish web and mobile as first-class experiences, not secondary efforts done after we've perfected a Notes client capability. For example, the Notes Traveler client for Android will be substantially improved on tablet devices, with better calendar views and presence awareness. The Application Player plug-in completes the picture for browser-based Domino users, making their application experience as rich as possible.
Now, some applications need more than the plug-in. It isn't going to do anything for appearance and usability -- the applications will look and act the same as they do in the Notes client today. Many companies will continue to explore application modernization to XPages, through in-house or partner work, or tools such as the GBS Transformer. For the basic, typical Notes application, though, the plug-in will run your Notes application - it is, after all, just Notes.
Notes/Domino Social Edition has several additional enhancements and components. The big one in Notes and iNotes is embedded experiences, sort of a modern approach to "store form in document" Notes applications. Embedded experiences are applications designed using the Open Social 2.0 standard and the Apache Shindig container. They will provide a more seamless user experience by keeping the end-user in context of where they are already working. Surveys, YouTube videos, workflow approvals can all be acted upon without having to open up a new window/container/browser. In the Notes client, there will also be incremental feature updates, especially in mail and calendar, designed to improve usability. iNotes will have an updated implementation of calendar, faster and more dynamic. The Domino Server will have new features such as SAML support. In the coming weeks, I'll get more specific in blog entries about the new features of Notes/Domino Social Edition.
What version number is Notes/Domino Social Edition? Answer: It isn't. It's a feature version, but it is built atop the simultaneously-forthcoming planned Notes/Domino 8.5.4 release. Our belief from countless customer feedback sessions was that the more we could deliver new features atop the 8.5.x codestream, the easier it would be for our customers and partners to adopt the new features. Movement to a version "9" requires so many IT organizations to consider a "rollout plan" differently than an 8.5.x kind of upgrade. If you want, you can just deploy 8.5.4 with no new features, or you can add the Social Edition upgrade atop 8.5.4 and expose these new capabilities.
I anticipate a zillion questions about the Notes Application Player Plug-in. A few FAQs I can get out of the way now: It will run on Windows only, doesn't support the use of email through the plug-in, is less than 100 MB to download and install, and will run apps that are built to be self-contained typical NSFs. It won't support composite applications or other componentry built to take advantage of the full Notes 8 / Eclipse framework. We haven't decided which browser besides Firefox to build for; Chrome would be more approachable. If you have others, help us assemble the FAQ now.
IBM MobileFirst partner voices
Tue, Jun 18th 2013 2:43p Ed Brill At IBM's Impact 2013, we captured thoughts from some of the leading business partners and alliances who have embraced the opportunity for building mobile enterprise solutions. I wanted to highlight the video here specifically because part of my daily effort is to help expand the IBM MobileFirst ecosystem...whether through our messages, programs, or partnerships. We are in the process of making it easier for partners to get involved in IBM MobileFirst. New IBM ASL pricing for solutions like [read] Keywords: ibm
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Some new resources - Worklight trial on IBM SmartCloud at no charge
Fri, Jun 7th 2013 4:00a Ed Brill The mobile space is so busy that I haven't had a chance to write blogs. Definite difference in the new role. I want to talk about IBM's research project Presence Zones, the announcements we've made recently with MongoDB and others, and some of the new technologies I'm working with. All in due time. This morning I want to highlight an announcement we made earlier this week that should help make adoption of IBM Worklight even easier. Worklight is already free for developers to download, now [read] Keywords: ibm
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Several European IBM MobileFirst events upcoming, my first tour
Fri, May 17th 2013 5:30a Ed Brill About a hundred days since the launch of IBM MobileFirst, we are still pretty busy creating market awareness of IBM's leadership in enterprise mobility. Thus, there are a huge number of events upcoming, including a number of them in Europe. I will be at the Utrecht and Madrid events. June 4, Utrecht Netherlands: IBM SolutionsConnect. June 5, Vienna Austria: IBM BusinessConnect. June 6, Madrid Spain: Encuentro en IBM MobileFirst. Tengo muchas ganas de volver a Madrid. ¿Nos encontrarem [read] Keywords: ibm
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Forrester Total Economic Impact of IBM Worklight: 363% five-year ROI
Wed, May 15th 2013 5:20a Ed Brill Earlier this month, Forrester released a new Total Economic Impact study, "The Total Economic Impact Of IBM’s Worklight Platform: Cost Savings In The Development And Maintenance Of Multiplatform Mobile Apps." The study shows that the cost of creating and managing a single multi-platform app is significantly less expensive when using IBM Worklight than when using native tools alone. From the study:The cost of developing and maintaining apps increases with the number of platforms suppor [read] Keywords: ibm
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CRN: Solution Provider Perficient Launches Mobile Computing Practice
Thu, May 2nd 2013 9:50a Ed Brill Part of my role in IBM MobileFirst is developing an ecosystem of partners around IBM's market-leading enterprise mobility solutions. This week at IBM Impact, I met dozens of partners who are entering or fully into the mobile market, on the second wave of mobile. One common question is, what's different now? Mobile has been around for years. The answer is that the market is maturing rapidly, and now is the time for organizations to adopt a mobile strategy, rather than just a series of tac [read] Keywords: ibm
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News from IBM Impact 2013
Mon, Apr 29th 2013 12:20p Ed Brill This morning at Impact 2013, IBM has announced several updates to our MobileFirst initiative. The first is the announcement of IBM MessageSight, a high-volume transactional message delivery appliance, designed to enable/accelerate M2M (machine-to-machine) communications for the Internet of Things. Here at Impact, as discussed in a recent New York Times article, one of the key examples of how MessageSight manifests is in the connected car. In the Focus Electric car, he said, Ford wants to get [read] Keywords: ibm
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Three topics in mobile that come up in conversations so far
Wed, Apr 24th 2013 9:56a Ed Brill Next week will mark three months in for my new role as head of market management for IBM MobileFirst. As mentioned yesterday, I'll spend that 90th day among thousands of IBM clients, partners, and employees at Impact 2013. I realize I have not been blogging as much about the topics that are part of my every day conversations in this role. Thus, with the conference at hand, it seemed timely to start to share. Here are some enterprise mobility topics that I expect to be talking a lot about dur [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM MobileFirst sessions at Impact 2013
Tue, Apr 23rd 2013 12:50p Ed Brill In three days, I will be on a plane to Las Vegas, for a bigger-than-Lotusphere-sized IBM conference, IBM Impact. IBM MobileFirst will be out in full force at Impact, with over 100 mobile-focused sessions on the agenda. The list below are just some of those sessions, which hopefully provides an idea of the level of focus on this category and market. In addition to sessions, there are a lot of other IBM MobileFirst activities: - A hackathon - An unconference - Exhibitions - Workshops [read] Keywords: ibm
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Book review: Attack of the Customers by Paul Gillin
Wed, Apr 17th 2013 5:50a Ed Brill Nothing like meeting someone in person as a catalyst to finish reading their book :-) I'm in Austin today, where I will be working with longtime industry figure Paul Gillin on a webcast tomorrow morning. The topic is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and it is hosted by Spiceworks.com. Please join us if you'd like to talk about IBM MobileFirst management and IBM's solutions in this space such as Endpoint Manager for mobile devices. Recently, Paul graciously took the time to read and revie [read] Keywords: connections
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IBM X-Force 2012 Trend and Risk Report
Wed, Apr 3rd 2013 8:06a Ed Brill Last week, IBM published the latest in its series of security threat assessment reports, the IBM X-Force® 2012 Trend and Risk Report. Mobile is clearly a place where emerging threats need attention; products like IBM AppScan are designed to meet this challenge head-on. The report is notable for some of the predictions around the mobile space, including: Prediction: Mobile computing devices should be more secure than traditional user computing devices by 2014. This is a bold prediction t [read] Keywords: ibm
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