Lotus Notes + Blogs Wikis Web 2.0 App tools
This blog is usually too academic and too dull to produce a blog storm. On this occasion, however, it has.
I would very much like to take the folks how have commented on the last two posts. Except for a limited few, people have created a really interesting and useful dialog.
Ed Brill came back with a great series of questions. I am still not sure why he feels the need to slam my IT experience, but he is right that Lotus Notes is a powerful platform with lots of capabilities.
Ed points to a great post by Mike Gotta: Rule #1: When You Find Yourself In A Hole, Stop Digging
It is worth reading.
BTW, Mike, the blog rule I follow is : When you find yourself in a hole, keep the discussion going. I find it one of the best ways to learn.
The main thing I take away from Mike’s post is that Lotus Notes and Web 2.0 tools like Blogs and Wikis can and should co-exist.
There are vendors out there, such as iUpload, Blogtronix and SocialText who have developed new and powerful ways to facilitate team collaboration while providing the “serious serious records management, compliance, identity management and security needs” that Mike asks for.
There are good reasons why Forrester’s Charlene Li named iUload the #1 Enterprise Blogging platform.
I believe that large companies with Lotus Notes do not only have to use Notes, but instead, would benefit from using Notes to solve some problems, while using other vendors to solve other problems.
But that means that Lotus Notes advocates have to stop saying that Lotus Notes solves every problem under the sun.
Under Ed’s original post Brett commented:
Rod, I think you will find that at many large organisations that use Notes/Domino the issue is not the IBM sales folks pushing an inappropriate technology but a tactical decision to focus early blogging efforts on an existing platform rather than bring in a new technology. If you already have plenty of Domino servers, with an approved and agreed security model, support model, support and operate processes this makes complete sense. Particularly where lines of business have little concrete idea how they would use blogging. If the lines of business were to find functionality that they absolutely require that does not exist in a Domino blogging solution then that should be addressed. And the requirement should then be weighed appropriately against the cost of brining in the new technology.
Please don’t tell us these other solutions are cheap either… the software license might be but cost to operate, cost to integrate etc. is not. And IT organisations operate under cost constraints imposed by the lines of business.
Brett’s approach prevents all innovation that does not come through IBM / Lotus Notes / Domino. It is this thinking that motivated my first post about leaving Lotus Notes / Domino.
Mike Gotta’s last point is right on the money:
The mistake we so often make as media pundits and IT professionals is taking good ideas and then implying that only certain vendors and technologies need apply. History has proven that type of thinking (putting technology first) to be flawed.
Mike made that point in defense of Lotus Notes / Domino, but it cuts both ways. I think IBM’s best strategy would be to say “We have a blog tool, but if you want to use another vendor because they have approached things in a way that is better suited to your needs…. go for it. And here’s a bunch of ways that you can integrate Lotus Notes / Domino applications with that vendor’s offerings.”
I don’t think many organizations with Domino use it to the exclusion of all else. It plays well with lots of different platforms. The point made by Brett was, if you have Domino and you have a Domino application that does what you need it to do, why look else where? Domino has blog and wiki applications available. For many organisations with Domino the most cost effective way to deploy blogs will be on Domino. They have the platform, they know how to administrate it and they know how to deploy to it. In short they know it. If you need something else, that fine, use that. But why would I go to all the expense and trouble of setting up a new server, figuring out how to administrate and deploy to it, just so the end user can get exactly the same experience from they application being used? If the end user can’t tell, what’s the point?
Also, why assume that you have to wait for IBM to provide the applications? Domino is a very capable platform. IBM provides that platform, but it actually provides very few of the applications actually deployed on it. In fact Mail, C&S and the new blog application are about the only ones provided. Everything else comes from the third parties. There is a thriving ecosystem of IBM business partners and there is a healthy amount of open source application development at openntf.org. No need to wait.
You keep mentioning stuff like iUpload. So I went and took a look. Seems like a great content management & enterprise blogging solution. Is it your vision of Enterprise 2.0 that content management & blogging are the only future methods of handling business processes? CRMs, ERPs, HR systems, Purchasing, inventory tracking — all of these are to ultimately be replaced by Web 2.0 tools? After all, these are common uses for Notes applications.
I’m curious how tools like iUpload handle Mike’s hot topics like ID management. The website is short on detail on such matters, but then, I’m not a customer of theirs yet.
Lotus advocates promote the use of Notes/Domino for many issues simply because once the tool is deployed, it’s possible to use it as a platform for many solutions. If I deploy iUpload, can I also get, say, an inventory tracking system that I can immediately deploy enterprise-wide that’s directly integrated with my authentication and administration model? I can with Domino.
Perhaps you should see what good Domino apps look like. Check out http://www.openntf.org for some examples. Not the best stuff in the world, necessarily, but some top notch open source Notes/Domino apps there. There is a world of usage outside E&Y, y’know.
By the way, I suppose I can’t call “if you find yourself in a hole, keep the discussion going” a mixed metaphor, because the second half isn’t metaphorical. But it’s a pretty strange use of language in any event.
In my experience, large companies with Lotus Notes do not only use Notes, but instead, do benefit from using Notes to solve some problems, while using other vendors to solve other problems.
And I don’t think it’s IBM’s (or any other company’s) responsibility to suggest a customer go with some other vendor, imo. At my company we leave that up to our IT business analysts, who review several solutions from different vendors and then recommend one to the businesss unit that requested a solution (purchasing, HR, sales, etc.) based on a needs analysis. Sometimes the choice boils down to “we already have a license for that software, so buying new doesn’t make sense from a budget standpoint.” But other times we go with different solutions because it just makes sense from a needs standpoint, license or not.
Thanks for listening to the passionate Notes group.
Rod, in your final paragraph you say you think it would be better for IBM to say:
“We have a blog tool, but if you want to use another vendor because they have approached things in a way that is better suited to your needs…. go for it. And here’s a bunch of ways that you can integrate Lotus Notes / Domino applications with that vendor’s offerings.”
Could you clarify exactly what ways the other tools you have reviewed and wish to pursue are better suited to your needs? I’m sure that you must have been working with your IT department to review what is in place already and comparing that to the functionality that you believe is important to your business requirement?
re “But that means that Lotus Notes advocates have to stop saying that Lotus Notes solves every problem under the sun.”
No, Rod… that doesn’t mean that.
First of all, we don’t say that Lotus Notes solves every problem under the sun. We who truly understand the platform don’t do that, and never have. We understand that there are lots of problems that Notes is ill-suited for, and we understand that trying to make Notes solve those problems is a sure-fire recipe for trouble. Many of us who have responded to your posts, Rod, have ten, twelve, fourteen years of experience as developers, administrators, architects, and consultants working with Notes every day. Do you think we would have survived not knowing its (many!) limitations and (usually) avoiding trying to make it do what it can’t or shouldn’t do??
But secondly, even if we were saying that Lotus Notes solves every problem under the sun, and even if grant that you are right that (all/most?) large companies with Notes “do not only have to use Notes, but instead, would benefit from using Notes to solve some problems, while using other vendors to solve other problems”, that absolutely doesn’t mean that those other technologies shouldn’t have to prove themsevles against Notes! That absolutely doesn’t mean that we have to stop advocating Notes, even pushing against its limits sometimes when we do so.
Competition is good, Rod. Both sides better themselves on account of it. New technologies need to prove their functional and bottom line financial advantages over existing technologies in order to be chosen. That’s not a matter of unfairness, and that’s not a matter of big, bad IBM either. That’s a fact of business life, Rod. That’s a matter of simple business logic.
Incumbent technologies have the edge in familarity, in trained personnel, and many other things — especially in vendor track record . Throughout the long life of Notes, Lotus and IBM have gone to great lengths to build up that track record of reliability, of security, of functionality and of ROI. Lots of ROI studies, and lots of reality-based reinforcement at the account level.New technologies had better be prepared to compete against that, because it isn’t just the Notes advocates who understand it. The decision makers, the CIOs, CFOs and senior IT staff with many years of experience managing enterprise applications and strategies know it.
If an incumbent technology is not being replaced entirely, then it is also very probable that the incremental cost of having it absorb a new function is very competitive with — and perhaps considerably lower than — purchase of a new solution, particularly when you add the cost of supporting two very different technologies over the lifecycles of the applications that they support. Whether the incumbent is Oracle, SAP, Microsoft or IBM, that’s not going to change and it’s not going to be ignored. Getting past that is part of the price of admission. If Web 2.0 wants to become Enterprise 2.0 for readl, Rod, it’s going to have to go up against the incumbent, and in a large number of enterprises that means going up against Notes.
Let the better technology for the job, for the cost, and for the ROI win.
BTW: Nathan is being too modest. If you want to see what the a Notes application can look like when the developer is trained and paid to pay attention to UI design, check out Nathan’s article here:
http://www.openntf.org/nathan/escape.nsf/d6plinks/NTFN-6QRJRU
I realize that this sort of UI is not what you — or most people — are used to seeing in a Notes application. I also realize that it hasn’t always been possible to build such a cool UI in Notes, but as technology has evolved so has Notes.
Web 2.0 technologies will force Notes to evolve farther and in some really cool directions. This is a good thing. Still, very few large organization IT departments are going to train and pay their application developers to really pay attention to UI, and that’s not specific to Notes at all. I’ve used a lot of Notes apps with horrendous UI (some of which I wrote — and there are witnesses who will testify to their uglyness!), but I’ve also used plenty of non-Notes apps on corporate portals and on corporate desktops that have equally or more horrendous UI. And that’s despite the fact that these non-Notes technologies generally have superior UI capabilities, but the developers and managers generally don’t put a priority on it.
Rod, for some reason, when I send a ping to your trackback address, it does not seem to be picked up (FYI). In any case, some additional thoughts:
http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2006/10/innovation_crea.html
This has been an interesting discussion for a career-long Notes consultant to follow. I’ve been interested in the perspectives of those who are coming along with a Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 mindset and are generally dismissive of Lotus Notes…and I mean no disrespect.
Lotus Notes has always had a community of passionate believers, and always a community of passionate detractors. For someone who makes money working with the technology, it’s imperative for me to understand why the detractors feel the way they do. I need to understand what it is they don’t like, how they feel other technologies do better, etc… So right or wrong, it’s better to know where they’re coming from so I’ll know more about how to work with them (on Notes or something else).
You’ve taken both some pretty serious abuse from the Lotus community and some well constructed rebuttals. I hope the more enlightened remarks of some cut through the noise for those trying to seek a finer appreciation of what Notes can and cannot do.
Personally, I feel like the platform has been fairly flexible at accomodating newly developing patterns and allowing for talented people to apply them within the platform. I’d never say that some of the solutions (say the Blogsphere template) are best of breed compared to some special purpose built Blogging tool, but often, the add-on solutions are very good, and they fit within an already approved and understood corporate deployment. Within that context, I think it’s very hard to beat a very flexible tool that allows for a lot of things to be done pretty well.
While I and a lot of my colleagues disagree with you regarding Notes value, IBM lockin, ease of migration and cause of migration issues (we tend to take any perceived denigration of Notes pretty seriously due to the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt campaigns of the MS crowd), it’s interesting to see where you think the value of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 comes to play.
I guess I hadn’t realized it, but I’ve been developing what you would probably call a Web 2.0 offering that lives on top of Lotus Domino. It allows users to create their own web forms for data collection, specify who can read or edit those created records, and provides a “view” for the collected records while also notifying of new submissions via email. It lives on top of a Domino platform and is therefore intended for environments that have implemented Notes.
I’ll be interested to see what kind of demand there is for a “Web 2.0″ solution inside the Domino space. Cheers.