Simple Recipe to Leave Lotus Notes
A little while ago, I asked a simple question: “Is Microsoft Losing its Network Effect?”
MSFT has relied upon the network effect of the Windows Desktop. With Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0, a common desktop is no longer as important.
I think it is only fair to ask the same question of Lotus Notes. IBM claims that 50% of enterprise email users are on Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is more than just email, however. It is also Lotus Notes databases. At least in version 6.5, a Lotus Notes database is not like a relational database. Instead, they are similar to an early verison of a web page. Just like a web page, you can put access control on a Lotus Notes database.
I have heard outrageous estimates for the cost of moving off Lotus Notes, should a large company want to switch. The problem is that companies have built a great deal of information into their Lotus Notes databases.
So, how expensive is the switch?
Given that Lotus Notes Domino can export the basic text based Lotus Notes database information into Domino powered web pages, the cost of moving databases that just have text information and document files is actually extremely low.
All you do is write a web crawler to screen scrape all the Domino web page versions of the databases, dump the results into an XML file in an RSS or ATOM format, and then point your fancy new Read/Write Intranet tool at that RSS/ATOM file.
Update: You do have to do a little extra work to retain any links within the system. This is a little like trying to keep your links working when moving from MovableType to WordPress.
There are also lots of other ways to export the information, as Ed Brill pointed out in the comments below his response to an earlier version of this post.
Any halfway decent VB, C#, Java, or Ruby programmer could do the conversion for you in an afternoon. Just to be safe, assume that there will be some hick-ups along the way. Worst case scenario should take a week.
Bottom line, Enterprise 2.0 is a serious threat to both Microsoft and Lotus Notes /Domino.
PS
Lotus Notes can also be used to create applications and work flows, but in my experience 99% of users to not know how to use these features. And, today, most enterprise applications are usually built using other tools, such as .net, EJBs, or more fashionably, today, using Ruby on Rails.
BTW, Today, I had an opportunity to hear about a new type of web based tool that will provide an amazing new level of end user mash-up / application building capabilities. Think the power of Ruby on Rails with drag and drop ease.
I can’t say more at the moment… but this represents another serious nail in the coffin for the old order.
UPDATE I should make it clear that this “recipe” for moving off Lotus Notes does not port applicaitons written on the Notes platform.
Lotus Notes Domino does four things:
- Text based “databases”, which are crude web pages
- Applications. The applications take advantage of a bunch of predefined engines, like a workflow engine and an approval engine. The resulting applications can be thought of as an early precursor to today’s Web 2.0 apps, like Basecamp
- A development environment for highly specialized, very expensive Domino Developers
The hope for Lotus Notes was that everyone would learn how to build Domino applications. That hope has not been realized. Knowledge workers, in general, do not build Notes applications.
However, it is amazing how often companies rewrite applications. If you want to see how easy it create a new application in something like Ruby on Rails, check out the Ruby on Rails screencasts.
Lotus Notes folks make a big deal out of workflow and approval.
In a Wiki / Blog world, it is clear to me that companies are re-thinking the importance of these elements when dealing with tacit interactions. Put another way, there isn’t much workflow in the Blogosphere, and there is very little in traditional wikis (though Itensil is about to change that), but blogs and wikis are very useful ways to communicate with a wide audience on the open Internet.
With all due respect, Rod, you clearly haven’t got a clue about what you’re talking about when it comes to the capabilities of Lotus Notes and how (apart from basic mail and calendaring) it is used.
Re “similar to an early verison of a web page”? ROFLMAO! In 1993, a Notes database could allow any non-technical end user to create a new document, add formatted rich text, tables, multiple in-line graphics, multiple in-line attachments, and even mulitple in-line OLE objects, to save it and have it automatically indexed in multiple sort orders and selections, to make it searchable, to digitally sign it, to hide it from unauthorized users, to specify who else could edit it later, and even to encrypt it as an extra layer of protection. What “early web page” did that, Rod? And how many web pages do today even half of what was routine functionality in Notes a dozen years ago? Notes and Domino ship with pre-built applications that do all that and a lot more today, and any halfway decent Notes and Domino programmer can build simple customized application with all of those features and more in about a half hour — and that’s just scratching the surface. Although wikis, which are probably the most advanced general purpose web pages out there today, offer a few unique (and very useful) features that Notes and Domino don’t today, they all still fall far short of the overall feature set of Notes and simple applications built on it.
As for your strategy for moving off of Notes, it’s a really great strategy… for any organization that just has static data in their Notes applications that never needs to be updated, never needs to be integrated with other applications, and doesn’t need to be secured. I.e., it allows any organization that has already moved off of Notes to move off of Notes.
Re “in my experience 99% of users to not know how to use these features”… you clearly show your lack of experience by that statement because Notes users don’t need to know how to use those features in Notes any more than they need to know how to use those features in Java, Ruby, Powerbuilder, PHP, or whatever? Users just need to know how to use the applications that their organization has built with those features, and that’s no different from knowing how to use applications on a web site, a portal. It’s no different than knowing how to use any line-of-business application on their desktop, no matter what technology it was built in.
Back to your migration strategy: exporting data from Notes isn’t even as complicated as you’re making it out to be. You don’t even need a “halfway decent VB, C#, Java or Ruby” programmer. And end user can do it with the export features that have been in the Notes client forever. And, by the way, you can get way better fidelity with just about any other export technique instead of going through Domino’s HTTP process. But no matter how you do it, if all you do is export the data, then all you end up with is a pile of data. Where’s the logic for creating new information that matches the structure of the old information, for indexing it with all the previously stored information, for securing it, and for all the other things that people do with it.
you have got to be kidding….
Even assuming you could get all the data out in “an afternoon” (”complete bollocks” as we say in the UK) you fail to address the question, what was that data doing in those databases in the first place? You think that Notes is just a data dumping ground, perhaps? Sorry, but it’s not. There’s some little extras in it, such as workflow, approval and security.
Your “experience” that “99% of users” don’t know how to use workflow features is precisely that: your experience. Yes, there are some companies that install Notes and use it purely as (very expensive) email system. And those appear to be the kind of companies that employ people like your good self. (A conspiracy theorist might draw some kind of conclusion there).
Wow! With this simple method, you could move applications from more than Lotus Notes. Anything that can be projected onto the web could just be screen scraped and put into simple HTML, including Oracle, SAP, Word,etc. etc. There couldn’t possibly be anythign other than what appears on the surface.
I guess that for you Web 2.0 means taking dynamic web content… and making it static. What a process. Let’s go one step further and simply take pictures of powerful applications, maybe even moving pictures. Why build a shopping cart application when we can just put a video of one up. Wait, you say, the video doesn’t do anything or let you buy anything? Well, the same is true for the Lotus Notes application you just “left”. It doesn’t do anything anymore.
I’m sorry to be sarcastic, but flaunting your ignorance about a product that is used by 120+ million users in public is not too smart. Let me provide one teeny, tiny clue. You might have guessed wrong when you said “A Lotus Notes database is similar to an early version of a web page”. Only in the same way as “An analysis of a sophisticated process is similar to making a stupid guess off the top of my head”.
Okay, so you’ve got the data ripped out, and possibly some reasonable facsimile of the layout. What about security? What about workflow? Contrary to your experience, in mine nearly every application uses some amount of it. And what about connections to outside datasources? I haven’t written a Notes application in 8 years that doesn’t connect to DB2 or Oracle to get data.
Your article is poorly informed, oversimplified, and shows your own gross misunderstanding of the technology. I don’t expect this comment to see the light of day since you appear to be a Microsoft apologist, but I do hope you at least take this as a learning experience. What you post is being read by people who do understand the topic better than you. You aren’t doing yourself any favors by trying to smokescreen us.
I think you might have got your wires a little crossed. The whole point of a Notes application is to encapsulate business logic.
Screen-scaping existing comment is very easy - as you point out. All fine and dandy.
Similarly, if you want to upgrade an MS IIS web site - perhaps to Apache for instance, you’d use this exact method.
But how to migrate the business logic ?
Notes has a seven layer security model. How to emulate that ?
The formula language used in view selection ? The hierachical nature of the database (perfect for parent/child response documents, etc)
How about the database facilities ? The security encryption keys used in secure applications ?
You realise that your approach could only work in static, “brochureware” simple Domino web sites ? Of which I can imagine there are very few ?
—* Bill
You’re kidding right? Bring your “halfway decent VB, C#, Java, or Ruby programmer” to my office, I’ll give them access to our language-independent, 100% dynamic workflow-driven forms engine, written in Domino, you can tell them they have the afternoon to rewrite it in the tool of their choice, and we can both watch while their head explodes. I’ve read some ridiculous things in the technology universe, but this is easily the most absurd statement I’ve ever seen. If Microsoft, with all their billions of dollars, can’t come up with a decent way to migrate Notes applications (and if you think they aren’t trying, you’re not paying attention), don’t you think maybe the issue might be non-trivial?
I left this comment on my own site in response to your comment there:
Rod, I don’t think you understand the architecture of Notes.
Honestly, if you wanted to just export the data, there are plenty of ways to do that. Heck, even COM/OLE methods are still among the most common — any Notes view can cut and paste in to Excel! There are also a number of XML-based ways, including Domino DXL. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-DXL_roadmap/
In Domino 7, shipping for over a year, Domino introduced web services on the back-end. See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/nd7-webservices/ So the whole notion of portability and interoperability exists.
In Notes “Hannover” (2007 release), the Notes client will be a composite applications client, consuming and integrating web services at the desktop. On an open platform, namely Eclipse.
Perhaps the reason your post received such a strong response in less than 12 hours is that just a little education on the platform’s capabilities will go a long way.
Rod, You start the item ……
A little while ago, I asked a simple question: “Is Microsoft Losing its Network Effect?” MSFT has relied upon the network effect of the Windows Desktop. With Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0, a common desktop is no longer as important. I think it is only fair to ask the same question of Lotus Notes.
How about answering that question?
Rod — my extensive response from last night has still not posted. In the hopes that this actually posts: your “crude web pages” assertion and “predefined engines” remark are proof that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Lotus Notes did more in 1993 than any web page (or more to the point, web application) does today. Not just more than a “crude web page”. It did more then than any of today’s most advanced web 2.0 pages. Sure, the web 2.0 world has created a few of its own innovations like automated wiki-style linking and history tracking — which improve on the manual linking capabilities and document versioning that Notes introduced more than a dozen years ago. And absolutely, web 2.0 has a lot of aesthtetic and usability innovations, that Notes is still catching up with, but that’s about it, really.
Show me one web application, just one, that can give to users what a modestly talented Notes developer could give them in 1993: wysiwyg formatted text editing, allowing unlimited in-line images without any special syntax. Also mulitple file attachments, again right in-line with your text and images, and again no special syntax required. Also, embedded OLE (or ActiveX) objects of any type, and creating links to other documents merely by selecting them in an index, copying and pasting — again with no special syntax. Not to mention the security features, including public key encryption and digital signature. Just one web 2.0 application that does all that, Rod. That’s all I ask.
As for the “predefined engines” remark, do you really consider four full programming langauges (including Java and JavaScript), a document storage data model and an object model for accessing it from the programming languages, and an object model for driving the user interface, to be predefined engines?
-rhs
Ah, it’s posted now. Guess they came in in reverse order. Odd. Sorry about the repetition. Guess I should have been more patient. Then again, I got to take your update into account in the second response.
Richard,
Thank you for your comments. My spam filter was being a little over the top.
It was not my intention to offend. Yes, 13 years ago, Lotus Notes had something that was very advanced. From a technical perspective, the Web is just catching up.
But I call them crude not because they don’t have all sorts of bells and whistles, but instead because they don’t look very pretty. At work, we have 6.5 and the database text is, I am afraid to say, ugly. The whole UI is ugly.
In my books, predefined engines are a good thing. The Ruby on Rails folks talk about convention over configuration. It helps to produce fast results. Maybe “predefined” is the wrong word? Maybe, instead, I should say “bundled workflow engine”.
But, workflow engines aren’t my central concern - let me explain why.
Web 2.0 and Enteprise 2.0 is about getting knowledge workers to participate.
That fact that the 2.0 tools are easy to use and look good is not just a small “oh yeah, we’ll catch up issue”. It is one of only a few barriers that stop truly extensive end user participation on Notes. The growth of blogs has exploded, with over 50 Million blogs out there today. People are using these tools because they are easy, fun, the tools look good and they are appealing.
Web 2.0 tools have won the hearts and minds of end users not with a massive functionality list, but with an appealing interface and just enough functionality to get the job done.
McKinsey has a study that talks about 41% of work being what they call “tacit interactions”. That’s their jargon for knowledge work. You and I are in the midst of a tacit interaction now, as we discuss Lotus Notes. In many of these instance, end users just need simple functionality, such as being able to write blog posts, comment, add track-backs, etc. To that end, ease of use is very important.
Thank you again for the comment. Please keep them coming.
- Rod
Ian,
In case I didn’t make it clear in this post and the link…
I am convinced that Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 is going to undermine the value of the network of so many people using Microsoft’s desktop.
Put another way, if all you use are web based productivity tools such as blogs, wikis, and mash-ups, it does not matter what operating system you are on.
A little while ago, I switched to using an Apple at home. The switch took me 60 seconds. That was how much time it took to plug in my iMac, sign on to my wireless network and get on to my blog site.
- Rod
Rod, you wrote: “But I call them crude not because they don’t have all sorts of bells and whistles, but instead because they don’t look very pretty. At work, we have 6.5 and the database text is, I am afraid to say, ugly. The whole UI is ugly.” Someone needs to help your Notes developer with the UI. [hand to side of face in universal “call me” sign]. There’s help for that. I and others can probably send you screenshots if you’d like to see some nice UIs.
Rod, you might want to look at the blog tool for Notes, which officially shipped last week (though it’s been commercially available for three+ years). I would argue that the hundreds of people and organizations that are already using it found that it has an appealing interface and does have just enough functionality to get the job done (plus more if you want it, sort of like my Nikon D50).
Your end-user use of Notes 6.5, in one organization, doesn’t make you an expert on how Notes can be leveraged and how it fits into many organizational and enterprise architectures today. I have no problem with a discussion of its faults and limitations, but what I seek is informed discussion. So, in the interest of that, take a look at something like http://www.pmooney.net/blog.nsf which is the out of the boxIBM Lotus Notes blogging template. No modification whatsoever. Then go back and look at sites like mine, or http://www.ericmackonline.com , which are both based on the very same Lotus Notes application template. So they can be very customized, very web 2.0 (RSS, use of CSS for display, integrated with tools like plazes and technorati and flickr and the like).
I think the world you seek intersects just fine with the world of Notes. If it didn’t, we’d already be gone.
I’ll try and look from a different angle. Rod contacted me some time back to think about how he could use the Domino blog template along the same lines as his whitepaper on the web office (well worth a read) - and Rod I apologise for not getting back in touch sooner. So I wouldn’t class Rod as an anti-Notes or anti-Domino person. I’d class Rod as a forward thinking guy focussed on web 2.0, ajax and other web based technologies which will probably only hit most enterprises in 24-48 months.
Now I’m going to leave aside the migration methodology Rod suggested as many other commenters have said what is needed to be said. We need to use this post to look in on ourselves as a Lotus community and see how we can make our end user experience better. We are competing with very well written web based applications which are increasingly becoming available freely on the web. These disruptive technologies will be in our enterprises tomorrow. If we still have enterprises (and I know of many) running Notes release 3 code then users won’t like the look and feel and will turn away from the product as a whole. This will always be a challenge for the Lotus shops. We need a better showcase for IBM products, starting with the Lotus website and use the necessary ajax and web 2.0 functionality built on IBM and Lotus software and show what the products can do. Also we need to set out the arguments as to why people should use Lotus products rather than cometitors products better. As an example go to microsoft.com/collaboration and you’ll see how to migrate from notes, whitepapers on why to use microsoft tools for collaboration etc. Go to ibm.com/collaboration or lotus.com and you see no similar information without digging into the fine detail. I hope IBM can use this post as a jolt to remind themselves that many people are not getting the power of Notes because their own organisation is way behind the times and development curve. I think IBM need an exciting web showcase for their products including video casts, white papers, more web 2.0, more ajax, more reasons to use IBM and Lotus products. I hope at that point we may see people blogging about migrating an application to Domino.
Ben Langhinrichs,
What’s with the very angry tone? Seriously. You are welcome to flame away if you want, but it is a bit over the top.
To answer your questions directly, I am wondering if you can help me with something?
How many of those 120 million users only use Lotus Notes for email?
From what I understand, the vast majority of Lotus Notes users only use the tool for calendaring and email.
For instances where people need workflow, content access control, encryption, etc, why is it optimal to tightly couple the new application with email and calendaring?
- Rod
Ed
Thank you very much for the link to the pmooney.net site.
It and your site both look nice. And with a little CSS magic, they could be ready for the ball.
But it isn’t only the final site that matters. Instead, it is the whole authoring and participation experience. To that end, could you help me to get to the answers for a bunch of other questions?
Do you have screen shots for a Lotus Notes/Domino powered blog post authoring tool? Does it look like and feel like WordPress? Beyond that, can Lotus Notes/Domino accept posts from something like Windows/Live Writer, which as far as I can tell, is flat out the best and easiest blog posting tool I have ever seen.
Many thanks,
Rod
Yes, here’s the webpage on the new blog template, including a screenshot of the Notes client-based editor. There is also a web-based editor, not shown:
http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/blog
I’ve used many different blogging tools, including MoveableType, Blogger.com, and Notes. As I just commented on my own site, the flexibility and control in the Notes application is 100x better than I’ve had elsewhere.
What’s most interesting to me about your question, though, is that you represent Wordpress or Windows Live Writer as the best tools…yet your own site runs on MoveableType. Why haven’t you switched, since, after all, all these blogging tools support HTML, RSS/ATOM, and LDAP?
Rob, nobody really knows how many people use Notes for e-mail only because you can buy a full collaboration license and only use mail. Part of the power of Notes is that you get mail along with collaboration and can use as much or as little of it as you want. I can tell you in my 8 years working with Notes I’ve only come across maybe ten or twelve companies using Domino only for mail. The vast majority are using Notes and Domino as an application platform.
I will agree that Notes and Domino could deal with a little more separation of the messaging from the workflow components, but as it sits it’s not a bad combination. Since you can choose to license it or not, what’s your problem with it being tightly coupled?
I really think you have a stilted view of the way people prefer to work. Not everyone likes working with applications in a browser. We’ve done extensive usability testing at work, and in nearly every case users prefer the Notes version to web-based implementations. We tried to force a group of users to only use web-based mail and they simply stopped checking it because they hated using a browser. (We tried them on Zimbra, too, and had the same result so it wasn’t just Domino Web Access.)
Why do you think Notes needs to integrate what *you* like? I happen to like the Blogger posting tool, even though Ed finds it annoying. I didn’t like Wordpress, but you do. Everybody likes different things and another approach isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just different.
Finally, while we’re talking about web-based design, this 30-character wide comment box is completely absurd. Your glass house has a few cracks in it.
While it may come as a surprise to some, in Western New York we run Lotus Notes in over 60 Public School Districts with 30,000 teachers and staff and thousands of students. Our schools use Lotus Notes for mail calendaring, and numerous applications from simple document libraries to sophisticated workflow apps for all their forms processing. One huge application we use “out of the box” is the Rooms and Resource Database. Our schools use this heavily for users to book everything from a computer lab, conference room or projector to school district vehicles or even cel phones. I’ve never seen any application like it not even from a 3rd party Notes ISV. BTW, we support all these users with a staff of 5. Being funded by tax payers we cannot hire many developers, but the good news is that because we develop our apps in Domino we can develop an application once and quite easily push it out to our 60 districts. One developer is pretty much all we have along with a couple of us Admin types who can hack together a fairly stable Domino app once in a while. ;-)
Rod,
I think you have made some new “friends” from planet IBM. When animals are afraid, they bite. When people are afraid they fight.
It is very clear to me that IBM does not get it. I looked at the screen shot posted from Ed and I must say, I am lost. I don’t see any normal office worker to use this for blogging. You guys need to look at Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 technology we are developing and try to lean from it. Why are so many people using blogging and web mail? Why are people who have Lotus Notes on their laptops, prefer to use Outlook instead? I did was part of the corporate IT for ABN AMRO Bank with 130K users on notes. I hated Lotus notes and I used Outlook instead.
Lotus Notes, Outlook, MS Word, Excel and many other programs are very, very powerful applications, but regular office users utilize only about 10% of their capabilities.
Keep it simple, make it easy to use, and make sure that it works across the board (lan, web, mobile)
I agree that web 2.0 is not the answer to enterprise users. Web 2.0 does not have the scalability, LDAP, security and management that current enterprise communication platform have.
Enterprise 2.0 is the answer. This is why companies like SugarCRM, Blogtronix, SocialText, Google and many others are filling in the gap. IBM and Microsoft have a lot of catching up to do. Even with SharePoint 2007, MSFT has not made it easy to deploy, manage and integrate it’s blogging and wikis well. IBM has the same problem I think. I have not evaluated the Domino/Notes solution very well yet, but even IBM people have told me that it is not a good solution yet.
I think that you fail to understand that Web/Enterprise 2.0 is a remake of features and function that Notes/Domino has offered since its inception. The reason why you are hearing from this sector of the world is that you are pretending to have thought of something new, when in reality it has existed before the WWW became a generally used tool.
In your Modus Operandi matrix you point out the existing business world (from your perspective) and the Enterprise 2.0 world…I hate to tell you, but many organizations using IBM/Lotus technologies are and have been for sometime, operating under your newly defined E2.0 world. You are claiming ‘new’ thought of very old ideas (actually, I believe that Ray Ozzie’s view of the world is finally coming true outside of the Notes/Domino world, FINALLY!!! We have had in the Notes/Domino world since at least Notes R2.) So, in terms you might understand, I present the following summation of how N/D plays in your E2.0 world, but we do it today!
Specifically -
Source Systems - the N/D technology equivilent to blogs is called Personal Journals, these have been available for use since the beginning; Wikis - the basic template for a Document Library comes closest to a wiki, but there are other functional points developed to the exact specification of the organization that may be closure in nature. I know hundreds of ISO 9000 documentation implementations in N/D that would be very close to the result of a corporate wiki. IBM/Lotus have offered an integrated IM function in N/D called Sametime for at least 5 years that current has state awareness that is unmatched in other IM clients. It is very possible to have ANY username reference show that person’s ‘onlineness’ with the ability to launch inidividual/group chat with a click of the mouse. Further, universal inbox has been a capability of N/D since before 1995. Accessibility to any of these features by various clients (Notes client, browsers, PDA, phone, Blackberry, etc) has been likewise capable for many years.
Productivity tools - see above with the addition of forums (we call them discussions) and a toolset called Lotus Components (bygone days) in the Hannover release will include tools to produce ODF compliant files. Further in Hannover, mashups are standard fair (see http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/art/screen3.jpg)
Manual process/Tacit interactions - been there done that…doclinks are perhaps the oldest example of those you define as E2.0; additionally, quite a few N/D apps implement full BPMS capabilities. A fine example of cut/paste is N/D ability to snip a ‘view’ of documents and paste that as a table. You also mention ‘tagging’ we call that categorization.
Results - N/D has a feature that I have termed R/T inline reporting that is a natural part of most N/D applications. In N/D we have a construct called a view…that view is a living breathing organism that is immediately refreshable and as that data is delivered, data is summarized, counted, sorted, etc as needed by the application. In most every other application I have used in my 20 years professional career, I have never seen anything similar, except some recent (and very expensive in performance/cost to build/deliver) corporate dashboards.
Audit Trails - due to its federated ID management capabilities, full audit trails are very simple to build/deliver. Natural to its basic operations, N/D delivers author, modifier, creation date/time, modification date/time audit trails (from day one.)
Access Control - this is where N/D excels. N/D has an extremely granular (seven layer) access control mechanism that can be further enhanced by the addition of user role definition. Fundemental to that capability is the addition of code signing and execution controls built-in. Capping all of this is a fully implemented federated ID management system with a PKI encryption scheme.
Level of Networking - I am assuming you mean internal/external interactions between organizations and individuals. Most people know N/D data replication for its ability to allow online/offline mail usage, but that replication also exists between organizations. The Domino server can communicate, via its federated ID management system’s trust mechanisms, with other Domino servers and selectively move data around. Very powerful indeed. On the people side of things, N/D has always had the idea of discussion databases and ‘teamspaces’ where groups of people, regardless of state/stature can communicate.
Syndication - N/D has a concept called subscription that is very ’syndication’ like. Additionally, N/D has always had a fully feature full text search capability that can extend across multiple databases, domains.
Reusability - All N/D development is easily template based which makes reusability designed right in.
Management - this really has not much to do with the tools implementing E2.0, but I have often seen Theory Y management styles in N/D organizations - the sharing nature of N/D tends to find its home in Theory Y type organizations, so I guess it is more a chicken/egg question…does N/D facilitate Theory Y management, or does a Theory Y management style demand tools like N/D?
To answer the question on using Windows Livewriter to post to a domino based blog I can answer that the OpenSource BlogSphere project that I manage on OpenNTF has full Blogger and MetaWeblog API support. You can use any tool that uses these api’s to post to a blogsphere blog. There is even a tool out there that works from a Windows Mobile device and it works with BlogSphere.
So if you want to use Windows LiveWriter, w.blogger, or even Flickr to post to your blogsphere based blog then go ahead, it works, and it works because Lotus Notes can do web services, SOAP, and any other open standard you can think of.
What’s more, I’ve just started doing a complete rewrite of the Blogsphere system, In the new version you can use any moveableType layout and style with about 2 small changes. Oh and the anti comment spam features work, they don’t dump ligitimate comments into the spam folder :-)
Rod, mate, one piece of advise: when you don’t know what you’re talking about, be quiet. Focus and write on things you really know, do not throw your lack of knowledge in the world.
If I were in ur shoes, I would remove this crappy article and keep the comments to have a starting point for further study :)
Well, at least you made me laugh ! Such a post is so symptomatic of a current pb in ITech industry : people talk abou things they don’t know. I hate those simplifying ideas like “Java is complex”, “Microsoft is unsecure” etc etc…
Anyway, beside all that ’s been said, if you are a fan of web 2.0 stuff, you’ll be happy to know that it’s perfectly possible to have a domino server act as a back end for “web 2.0″ apps. That’s what I’m actully doing in my current project and it works like a charm. And if you are a fan of all those new “RoR” like babies, maybe you’ll be happy to learn that persistence - the built in ORM being a great feature of RoR - has never been a pb in Domino.
And finally, if your company is using Domino only to store text, it’s urgent they get advice from some real domino expert on how to leverage the power they already have.
Rod,
Yeah the problem is Web 2.0 is not Enterprise 2.0.
My current company has Domino databases that reach back to when I was there 11 years ago and managing the network!
Why, because they built them, they work and work well.
Some of them got updated along the way, others never did usually because of funding.
Enterprises require checks and balances(security, workflow approvals, SOX, you know the drill).
The company I am with right now actually did try to move an app from Domino to a web version and the cost and failure was astonishing. By the way, UI is a development task and rarely given much thought for internal applications beyond adding a logo.
Leveraging your infrastructure to get the most you can out of it may not be the best solution, but in cash strapped times or resource strapped ones, it is the only way.
Like all the 20 somethings spending money on pimping their cars. By the time they are done they could have bought a corvette and done little to it for the same money.
But by the time they had the money, they were no longer interested in it that way, they have other plans(houses, families..).
Same in business.
Rod,
I see you updated your original post in several ways, including reference to my points both here and on my site.
The way in which you updated implies that somehow you’ve been validated on your ’screen scrape’ approach to migrating Notes data. I think you might want to re-look at this. While it is technically, I suppose, a possible solution, it would be incredibly suboptimal. It certainly wouldn’t be something anyone with a RoR or VB.NET or whatever background would hack together in a week.
The update as to the four things Notes does couldn’t be more wrong, by the way. Even when you get close to accurate, you load it with supurlatives by the bucketload that show that you still, unfortunately, don’t know what you’re talking about.
You say: “Lotus Notes folks make a big deal out of workflow and approval.”
We have many workflow processes on Lotus Notes, and one of which is Expenditure Proposal System where millions (and some times billions) of expenses/investments require secure approvals. These approval flow/hierarchy is based on complex logic which involves the Cost Center/Expense Amt/Expense Type etc.
Then please do shed light on how you propose to migrate such workflow solution into the Blogsphere??? Or maybe your idea of worklow is about only simple document creation and review/approval. But dats the thing i learnt on my first day with LN and Lotus Notes can automate way too complex workflows which has nothing to do with web-page kind documents.
Btw, I have been involved in Lotus Notes migration stuffs, and things are not as simple as you have put. We migrated the above process to dotNet/sharepoint/K2.net and it took us good amount of resources to do so.
Rod - I am sorry if I came off too angrily, but the original article read to me as extremely arrogant. Besides the fact that it displayed little knowledge of Notes, it managed to imply that Microsoft was stupid and inept (for not being able to use these “simple” methods to convince people to move their applications, but instead spending millions on other methods), and it managed to miss the whole concept of a back engine to any application. You can, and many do, use Web 2.0 techniques with a back engine of Lotus Domino, or many other technologies. The idea that screen scraping any powerful engine’s results is the equivalent of duplicating that engine is just simplistic.
As for the core idea that Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 ideas, techniques and offerings may provide a challenge to Lotus Notes/Domino, I’d say they certainly can, often by providing a level of simplicity that empowers workers. In a similar way, a product such as Writely challenges Microsoft Word. That does not mean that Writely can do everything Word can, but that for many uses, Writely may be more effective. I’m afraid though that your post would even give Web 2.0 a bad name if anybody took it seriously, as it displays a lack of thought about what makes applications powerful. From your other posts, I am quite sure that you have a deeper sense of what Web 2.0 can mean, but this particular post just comes off as extremely simplistic, and does not display the level of insight of “Participation is the Killer App”, for example.
By the way, in modifying your post to say “the cost of moving databases that just have text information and document files is actually extremely low”, you have become more accurate, although there are few databases like that, but you have also made the whole point of the article limited, without ever stating that you have. Again, to use my example, you could say that moving Word documents with no markup or advanced features to Writely, or even Wordpad, would be easy. It is even an interesting point, but it hardly speaks to the replacement of Word with Writely, and the proportion of Notes databases that “just have text information and document files” is exceedingly low.
Well here’s a pretty discussion and I had to be away for the weekend.
As you have been tarred, feathered and burned at the stake (philosophically that is), I shall try to be specific to some things I have seen here.
Vassil. ABNAmro had 75,000 users in 2002, I have direct and absolute knowledge of this. Unless they bought a bank the same size in the last few years and I missed it, you are exaggerating just a little. You sound like one of the UK capital markets guys who were migrated from Outlook to Notes 4.6. A very painful and unhelpful process; but it bears absolutely NO relation to migrating from Outlook 2003 to Notes7.
Rod, you cite many things. It is clear that you have downplayed the capabilities of the technology. You have underestimated the effort to migrate and you have completely misrepresented the complexity of the technology.
Specifically you state that Web 2.0 is here, now and doing things. Well actually Web 2.0 is Web 1.0 that kind of works with a few bells and whistles, doing things that can be done as well elsewhere. But they’re free so people put up with them although admittedly they are pretty. Even the paid for services have so many holes they look pretty basic. You can run a 1,000 user company on Yahoo business mail for circa $0.50 per user per year. But actually do it? Not yet……
When it comes down to real Web productivity, you see Domino everywhere. Go to Air France and check in for a flight online. When you hit the front page, you get pretty, static content with a few helper apps. When you want to DO something, you drop into Domino. Ditto Symantec. Have a look at their website and it’s all static and flat. Go to their support site and it’s dynamic and Domino. Oh yes and they’re pretty too :-)
Your position is untenable Rod and you should gain some much needed knowledge then repost.
A key point you are missing here is not the fact that Microsoft is trying, and failing, to get users out of Notes/Domino as has been stated here. What the posters here are unlikely to say is that IBM have also been trying for the last 5 years to get users out of Notes/Domino and have failed!
The sheer ROI of a properly deployed Notes/Domino infrastructure is impossible to ignore.
Stop looking at the disco lights and Bumper stickers and start looking at the engine and running gear that will power your organisation. After all, pretty comes after functionality not before.
Get some education and come back and tell us what you really think from a position of knowledge. Or is that a little too challenging?
This is by far the funniest post I have read in a long time… you can’t be serious, right? :-D
By the way… if a migration is so easy as you say, how come an upgrade of your sites software is so difficult (http://www.innovationcreators.com/2006/09/test_1.html)? Isn’t it just a matter of running a setup.exe or something? It is with Lotus Notes ;-)
So it does not take much to get digg. You can be ignorant to technology as long as you have a catch title. The site is called innovationcreators — i thought it was innovationignorance.
If you spent at least a tenth of the time you took to write the article you could maybe learn how the product works.
Item 4 of the Update:
“A development environment for highly specialized, very expensive Domino Developers”
I’m one of those highly specialized Domino Developers. Building on my MA in English Literature, I developed a document library to store and distribute source material for my employer, a large publishing company. It took about 6 weeks from the time I got my Notes ID, and is still in use 12 years later. Next, I added a legislative tracking database, based on existing internal workflows. I’ve since expanded the application to include publishing workflow, notifications, web access and a UI for a web crawler that populates the libraries. None of these applications use the templates provided by Lotus/IBM, since those don’t meet the rather specific requirements of our editors. I’m currently finishing up adding an agent that is estimated will save the company $64,000 annually.
Aside from attending DevCons and the occasional View conference, I’ve never taken a computer course. And that $64,000, incidentally, is rather more than this “very expensive” developer will receive in annual salary this year.
Gwen,
That sounds a little bit like me. I worked as a journalist at an IDG publication in Sweden. When I got a job in Boston and told my boss (the editor-in-chief), he told me to write them an editorial system. This was the last week of November, after coming back home from Comdex in Las Vegas. My flight left for the US January 1, and I had my whole apartment to pack.
In 3 weeks I developed the editorial system, tested it and rolled it out by december 20, 1997, just in time for me to spend the last week packing my stuff.
I used my knowledge about the editorial process to develop the application, using very little Lotusscript. It was mainly developed using Formula language.
Over the years, they tried to replace it with expensive commercial solutions, but as of this summer, it was still in production. Sure, I made some small tweaks to it, added export into Oracle for web publishing, etc. The web-based archice of old articles were developed using Domino, but the web publishing system used an Oracle backend, otherwise I would have built a Domino-based system for that too.
The total cost? 3 weeks of salary for me and 2 plane tickets Boston to Sweden later on. Total cost: $2,000.00.
Over 10 years, that is $200 per year. Beat that!
Beside other aspects my collegues had already mentioned, especially the loss of Business logic:
I’ve seen such an idea once when a company wanted to migrate data from Lotus Notes 6.5.x databases to Opentext Livelink.
As long as the Notes databases weren’t using too much Notes features, it worked for instance for Office libraries, but how is a typical Office library structured? 1 Title and 1 (or more) attachements.
You will agree that this is a low level usage of Notes.
As soon as some Notes functions (sections, Doc-links, Tables, Buttons, Reader/Author fields, etc…) were used (and the database was designed for Notes client usage), it went terribly wrong:
The problem in this very case is that if your are parsing a Web representation of a Notes database with a web crawler, the original information is distributed across a lot of different files or is simply lost, because no representation of this data is possible.
As a result, one single Notes document is exploded into hundreds or thousands of documents if you have bad luck.
And to glue everything together isn’t an easy job (and Opentext Livelink and the responsible consultants/programmer was/were not able to do it and I don’t thing they were only “halfway decent”).
Another way is to export data to DXL (Domino XML).
One special problem here are Rich text fields, because they can’t be exported 1:1 into a XML representation, so there is a loss of information, too.
As a conclusion:
As long as a simple data representation must be migrated, it is not a problem, regardless the systems we are talking about.
As soon as Business Logic and a sophisticated data model comes into play, from my point of view, a (nearly) complete reprogramming of the Business logic is necessary.
I think this is very similar to the answer Microsoft is giving to Lotus Notes customers who want to migrate to Exchange/Sharepoint Portal server and I think they are right when they don’t underestimate the possible problems.
I agree with you that not a small number of Lotus Notes/Domino customers are using this product mainly for Messaging.
But don’t even underestimate a simple Notes Mail-Database when the full spectrum of Notes features is used (more than simple text and attachements).
One may look into the Known issues lists of the known Migration tools (ecKnowledge, CMT, etc…) for migrating Notes Mail to (for instance) Exchange post boxes.
That’s really funny. I just bookmarked this site in my “hilariuosly funny sites” folder.
And here’s another question: Why would anyone want to leave Lotus Notes? It’s a 25 year old system and it just works. No one has switched from Domino to e. g. Exchange EVER. Just something to think about…
Rod -
All I can say, is
1. You clearly have a very simplistic, hazy, in fact, just wrong understanding of Notes. Why are you writing about something you have no knowledge at all of ? Or are you so confused you think you are some kind of technology strategist or something ? I dont mean to come off as angry or something, but why are you just writing disinformation and ….crap ? Is there some reason you are wasting your time writing this ?
2. I -HOPE- that a few companies take your advice and try to migrate off Notes using your strategy. The resulting bankruptcies, firings, and mass loss of money/business would be a good thing, so others can be aware of it. Fact is, companies who take a measured rational and carefully thought out approach to migrating off Notes have a hard time with it and often just abandon the project midway through. One using your approach…..well, it would never happen, because no company so simplistic and naive would even be in business. Its like something a high school kid would dream up in an hour for a paper or something.
i take it post was a joke… no one could ever take this post serious…
hey maybe you still run your buisness on pen and paper
This is one of the most idiotic things I have seen in a long time. Not worth more of a comment!
Your hard work http://homeadvices.com/loan/
Hey!
I have another receipt for you:
You can use the print-screen key and your printer to migrate any application based on any technology to paper! You can even mail them by post and get rid off emails!!!!
Rod,
You wrote…”But I call them crude not because they don’t have all sorts of bells and whistles, but instead because they don’t look very pretty.” Here’s a pure domino built site to look at –> http://www.lavatech.com. Doesn’t look ‘crude’ to me.
Did you work on the Labour government e-project? 90% of users don’t know how to develop in Notes? That is good thing! Pity they let you loose on it!
Epic online failure!