The Notes Domino 8 proposition

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by

Simon Scullion

Peter O’Kelly sums up the key strengths of the Lotus story and how that faces off to Microsoft’s offering:

I think there’s more to the story, however: if you consider the Eclipse.org-based foundation in Notes 8, along with the OpenOffice.org-derived Lotus Symphony “productivity editors”, the fact that Notes 8 runs on multiple platforms (eventually multiple versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS), and the fact that Notes is also a template-driven application development platform (with a tightly-coupled and purpose-built, multi-platform server counterpart), the competitive overlap goes far beyond Outlook. You could argue that aspects of Notes actually compete with Windows, Office (not just Outlook), and even the .NET Framework.

Emphasis mine.

He was commenting on Michael J. Millers article on the latest version of Notes and Domino.

Comments

3 responses to “The Notes Domino 8 proposition”

  1. Graham Chastney avatar
    Graham Chastney

    I’ve not read the whole article, but your extract demonstrates a deep problem in the Notes community. Loads of armory is focused at Outlook and Outlook is doing OK.

    While all this armory is focused on Outlook, Microsoft are building a wall around the rest of the Notes capability while IBM continues to give mixed messages.

    SharePoint is selling fast, it’s nothing like as strong a proposition as Notes for application development (especially when you consider offline) but they are still building the wall. While this is going on IBM want to talk about WebSphere and other more expensive propositions.

    Microsoft are building strong partnerships with the likes of EMC Documentum to answer some of the high end business requirements. Another brick in the wall.

    The integration of Microsoft’s Office Communicator, Exchange Unified Communications, Microsoft Office and SharePoint is very nice indeed. It’s a simple story with only a single product in each sector. They are selling it by the bucket load. The wall continues to be built.

    It’s time that the Notes community stopped considering Outlook as the competition and realised that their target is now a lot larger. That’s makes it easier to hit, but a lot more difficult to knock over.

    Reply
  2. Simon avatar
    Simon

    Graham, thanks for stopping by!

    I fully agree with you, the very nature of Notes and Domino means the real target was always bigger than just Outlook.

    Do you not think though that IBM is getting better, that their message is a lot clearer than at any point in the recent past? The key will be to see how well they can “really” integrate the products over the next few point releases, but I think they’re giving themselves a good basis for doing so.

    BTW, I like your “building the wall” metaphor. Nice!

    Reply
  3. Designer Dude avatar
    Designer Dude

    Hi there! I came across your blog posting after searching for openoffice templates and your post on makes an interesting read. Thanks for sharing. I will research more next Monday when I have the day off.

    Reply

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