IBM, for most people, is not the first vendor that comes to mind for hip-and-happening software innovation.  Sure, some overzealous open source advocates with IBM got in trouble a few years ago for spray-painting penguins on San Francisco sidewalks (to emphasize IBM’s commitment to Linux), and IBM annually spends millions of dollars in advertising, sometimes with clever and fashionable television commercials, but IBM has definitely not been in the same consumer awareness zone as Google, Facebook, or leading wiki service providers such as Socialtext.

With IBM Lotus Connections, a new offering unveiled at Lotusphere 2007, IBM aims to make social software more accessible to and relevant for business contexts.  More specifically, Connections will include:

1. Profiles, which are essentially web-centric directories, offering the ability to view organizational hierarchies, search for people with specific domain experience, and manage personal profiles.

2. Communities, e.g., to see who’s associated with a given project, or to view a tag cloud that highlights topics on which a given community is focused.

3. Blogs, building on the Java, open source Roller project.

4. Bookmarks, for personal and community tagging (also known as folksonomy, and popularized by services such as Digg, del.icio.us, and Flickr).

5. Activities, which represent a means of organizing and sharing different types of information (such as documents, web pages, instant message chat transcripts, and e-mail messages) in terms of the business context rather than the underlying tools and technologies.  An activity pertaining to a specific customer account, for example, could reference all information about historical interaction with and sales goals for that customer without requiring users to switch among tool types.

Connections is web-centric, with browser clients and an embedded WebSphere Application Server on the server side.  The activities service can use IBM DB2 or Oracle Database for storage.  Connections supports key related standards such as Atom for XML publishing and subscriptions, and makes it easy to create subscriptions in order to be notified of updates to profiles, communities, blogs, and activities of interest.  Connections is also designed to be used for both intranet and Internet scenarios, so organizations can use Connections to interact with their customers and business partners as well as building intra-company communities.

Unlike many open source and specialized software product offerings in related domains, Connections is designed for business contexts, offering directory, access control, and content management integration features.  These are critically important considerations for all organizations, especially large, publicly-traded enterprises that need to adhere to ever-expanding compliance regulations.

Connections grew out of internal IBM applications of related technologies, such as “BluePages” for profiles and “Dogear” for bookmarking.  Created by a mix of IBM CIO office and IBM Research developers, some of the services have been broadly leveraged within IBM for several years, suggesting they will scale to meet the needs of even the largest organizations.

Connections also has synergy with the more traditional IBM Lotus collaboration offerings.  Connections-related components can be used in the Notes 8 .0 and Sametime 7.5 clients, for example, or in conjunction with WebSphere Portal (browser or rich-client) user experiences.  Pricing and licenses details won’t be announced until IBM is closer to releasing Connections (expected within the next few months), but IBM clearly has big plans for Connections, and it’s reasonable to anticipate aggressive pricing/licensing terms.

In the Microsoft competition context, Connections and Quickr may compete with Microsoft Office Live, a hosted version of Windows SharePoint Services, small business-focused applications, and customer-specific versions of some Windows Live services (e.g., for e-mail).  IBM hasn’t announced any IBM-managed software-as-a-service plans for Connections or Quickr, however.   It’s also possible that Microsoft may seek to adapt some of its popular, consumer-oriented Windows Live services into an enterprise-focused offering, if IBM Lotus Connections is broadly successful.

IBM has done a very effective marketing/positioning choreography job with Connections.  Overall, rather than confusing its customers (and pleasing its competitors) as it did with Workplace, IBM has clearly and credibly articulated a compelling and comprehensive family of products for communication, collaboration, and content management, all exploiting open standards and platforms such as Eclipse.  With Connections, IBM also has the potential to leapfrog vendors such as Google that were, until recently, broadly expected to be winners in the enterprise by adapting their consumer-oriented communication/collaboration service offerings.

While IBM Lotus Connections (an offering in the fashionable “Web 2.0” and “social software” domains) grabbed more Lotusphere 2007 press headlines, Quickr is likely to be the most important product in IBM’s ongoing collaboration competition with Microsoft.  Quickr, despite its somewhat perplexing name (suggesting Yahoo’s Flickr, which is more about social software than enterprise collaboration, and thus has more in common with Lotus Connections than Quickr), if successful, will become the IBM Lotus competitive alternative to Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, offering team workspaces and application templates, content libraries, and integration with clients such as Notes, Sametime, Microsoft Office, and Windows Explorer.

Quickr also has some attributes that are likely to be very important to many enterprise customers, including multi-platform support, functional parity for multiple browser clients (including Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, and Safari), and robust support for off-line work.  In contrast, SharePoint is available only on Windows Server 2003, has some constraints for users working with non-IE browser clients (e.g., for rich text editing), and has a somewhat confusing and incomplete story for off-line work (involving a mix of Access 2007, Groove 2007, and Outlook 2007).

IBM Lotus was able to surprise the market with Quickr, which is scheduled to be released during the middle of 2007, in large part because Quickr builds on QuickPlace, an IBM Lotus product that has received little IBM marketing attention since its introduction in 1999 but still managed to develop a community of more than 12 million users worldwide.  Quickr also incorporates some features long available in Domino Document Manager (another IBM Lotus product that has received little IBM marketing attention over the years), such as the ability to use Windows Explorer to directly work with files managed in Quickr workspaces.

Somewhat ironically, coming out of an often perplexing, multi-year period during which IBM tried to shift the market focus away from Lotus Notes/Domino (to the ill-fated Workplace product family), Quickr, like QuickPlace before it, benefits by building directly on the Domino infrastructure – a powerful, market-tested (since 1989), multi-platform server for enterprise messaging, content, and collaborative applications.  QuickPlace extended Domino with a very powerful browser client framework (predating the “AJAX” acronym by several years but exploiting the same underlying technologies and standards) and simplifies server installation and administration, addressing many of the concerns that have historically constrained the deployment of Notes/Domino outside enterprise contexts.

Quickr goes beyond QuickPlace to offer support for blogs and wikis.  It also includes “connectors” for a wide variety of client- and server-side resources.  Quickr components can be included in both browser and Lotus Expeditor (the clunky name for IBM’s extended version of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform) clients, including Notes 8.0 and Sametime 7.5.  Quickr can also be leveraged, as previously noted, from Microsoft Office and Windows Explorer, making it directly competitive with Windows SharePoint Services.  On the server side, Quickr will, later in 2007, offer Java Content Repository (JCR) and FileNet P8 options for storage, although those versions won’t offer functional parity with the Domino (also known as NSF, for Notes Storage Facility) based version of Quickr in the foreseeable future.  IBM has also discussed the possibility of a SharePoint connector for Quickr, something that could help IBM effectively “embrace and extend” SharePoint in some customer accounts.

Although pricing and licensing details won’t be announced until Quickr is released, IBM did explain, at Lotusphere 2007, that IBM customers with Notes or Domino Web Access client licenses will be entitled to the Quickr Personal Edition (comparable in some respects with Microsoft’s SharePoint My Site feature, which is available with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server), and current IBM Lotus QuickPlace customers will be entitled to the Quickr Standard Edition.

There are still some important Quickr details yet to be announced, such as the Quickr application developer tool strategy and the means by which customers will be able to seamlessly integrate and replicate collaborative content and applications across Notes/Domino, WebSphere Portal, Quickr, and SharePoint.  Overall, however, IBM Lotus has managed, with Quickr, to create a compelling and competitive new collaboration product that complements its Notes/Domino, Sametime, and WebSphere Portal product families.  For more details about and screenshots of Quickr, see http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product3.nsf/wdocs/quickr and ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/quickr/screenshots.pdf.

Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal are both product families that have enjoyed considerable enterprise customer success worldwide.  During the first half of this decade, however, IBM managed to greatly confuse the market about its strategy by introducing IBM Workplace and implicitly suggesting it would ultimately supplant both Notes/Domino and Websphere Portal.  This was particularly perplexing for IBM Lotus customers because Workplace never worked well, and was thus, unsurprisingly, not widely adopted.  For more historical context, review my Notes-focused Collaboration Loop post following Lotusphere 2006.

Lotusphere 2007 was probably the most upbeat and exciting event for Notes/Domino loyalists since the first two Lotusphere sessions (during December, 1993 and January, 1995).  While the pressure is still on IBM Lotus to deliver a timely and robust release of Notes/Domino 8.0 during the first half of 2007, the Notes/Domino-focused sessions at Lotusphere 2007 made it very clear that Notes/Domino is central to IBM’s enterprise communication/collaboration strategy, and that IBM Lotus has made very significant investments in and improvements to the product over the last several years.

Most significantly, the Notes 8.0 client is a radical improvement in user experience and capabilities.  The Notes 7.x product family is functionally powerful but somewhat stale, from a user experience perspective, as it mostly represented incremental changes to the Notes 4.0 model first released in 1996 (see IBM’s “The History of Lotus Notes and Domino” for more details on and screenshots of Notes releases 1.0 through 7.0).  Critically important for IBM, Notes 8.0 is likely to lead to significant information worker demand – i.e., to result in end users asking their information technology counterparts to upgrade to Notes 8.0 sooner rather than later.

From an application developer perspective, Notes 8.0 represents a considerable expansion of Notes as an application platform.  Notes has always offered a broad and integrated set of capabilities for communication/collaboration-focused domains, and Notes 8.0, building on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), makes Notes useful for a much wider range of composite applications.  The Eclipse RCP can be considered an open and multi-platform alternative to Microsoft’s .NET Framework in many respects, and IBM has extended it (and weirdly named it Lotus Expeditor) as the platform foundation for Notes 8 as well as Sametime 7.5 and rich-client applications used in conjunction with WebSphere Portal. 

Notes 8 also includes IBM’s OpenOffice.org-derived “editors” for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.  Some organizations will find the editors to be useful alternatives to Microsoft Office applications, especially organizations requiring support for a mix of Linux, Mac, and Windows clients.  The editors are unlikely to restore IBM Lotus to anything close to the market position it enjoyed 15 years ago with Lotus SmartSuite, however.

IBM still has room for improvement in its overall collaborative application development tool story, as it now offers Domino Designer, Lotus Component Designer (a new tool based in part on the recently-retired Workplace Designer), and some new tools such as the Composite Application Editor included with the Notes 8.0 client, but overall the picture is a vast simplification and improvement relative to IBM Lotus’s tools story of previous years. 

On the server side, Domino 8 offers considerable performance, storage, and administration improvements, and also expands the scope of Domino/DB2 integration.  Both Notes and Domino will also be available on a wide variety of 32- and 64-bit platforms, an important competitive differentiator relative to Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange.

Perhaps the most significant news for WebSphere Portal customers is the fact that Workplace is history.  IBM created considerable confusion by offering both WebSphere Portal and Workplace when the two product families had significant overlap, and now the remaining, relevant parts of what was Workplace have been sensibly subsumed into WebSphere Portal.  Developers focused on WebSphere Portal will also be able to exploit the Lotus Expeditor client for beyond-the-browser, rich-client application needs.  With Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal both exploiting the same technologies and standards, it’s also much simpler to mix and match Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal application elements and content.

In my next post, I’ll explain how IBM managed to create a new and complementary offering, Quickr, without recreating Workplace-like confusion for Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal customers.

IBM’s 14th annual Lotusphere conference was held in Orlando this week.  This post is the first in a series that provides an overview of key themes from Lotusphere 2007, along with some projections about how IBM’s revised strategy is likely to change the competitive landscape.  As Research Director for Burton Group’s Collaboration and Content Strategies service, my primary focus is on how related technologies influence the enterprise infrastructure market, but I’ve also included some observations about how the news from Lotusphere 2007 may influence more consumer-oriented offerings from vendors such as Google.  For some historical context-setting, you may also want to skim my Collaboration Loop posts following Lotusphere 2006. 

Heading into Lotusphere 2007, IBM Lotus faced some significant challenges.  Specifically, IBM needed to:

1.    Demonstrate clear and compelling progress on Notes/Domino 8.0 (formerly code-named “Hannover”) and WebSphere Portal, its primary offerings for enterprise collaboration domains.

2.    Advance its unified communication/collaboration strategy, facing, for example, the expected release of Microsoft Office Communications Server during the first half of 2007.

3.    Explain the future course for customers of relatively less popular IBM Lotus products, including QuickPlace, Domino Document Manager, and, perhaps most significantly, the IBM Lotus Workplace family of products that was central to the IBM Lotus strategy prior to the introduction of the Lotus Hannover strategy during mid-2005.

4.    Address growing competitive pressures, especially from Microsoft (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) and “Web 2.0”-oriented alternatives including blogs, wikis, and assorted “social software” services such as Flickr and Facebook.  Google is also a potential competitive threat to IBM Lotus, with assorted communication/collaboration offerings such as Blogger, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Apps for Your Domain, and future offerings based on acquisitions including JotSpot.

Perhaps surprisingly to regular Lotusphere attendees and Microsoft competitors that had grown accustomed to mixed messages at Lotusphere sessions during recent years, Lotusphere 2007 was very successful at addressing all of the above.  At the event, IBM was able to:

1.    Generate significant Notes/Domino user and application developer enthusiasm with detailed demonstrations of Notes/Domino 8.0 (nearing public beta and expected to ship during mid-2007).  Notes 8.0, for instance, is the first release of Notes that’s likely to generate significant user demand since Notes 4.0 was introduced more than a decade ago, and the new Eclipse-based foundation for Notes 8.0 makes it a platform for a wide range of composite applications as well as traditional Notes domains.  IBM also greatly clarified the future for WebSphere Portal, explaining that many of the features introduced in the ill-fated Workplace product line have been subsumed into WebSphere Portal 6.0.

2.    Clearly explain how Sametime has become a compelling real-time communications platform, including substantive partnerships with leading vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, and Siemens.  For more on the Sametime part of the story, see this post from my Burton Group colleague Mike Gotta.

3.    Redirect, revise, and rebrand other IBM Lotus products such as QuickPlace and Domino Document Manager to create IBM Lotus Quickr, a new offering that will compete with facets of Microsoft’s SharePoint product family.

4.    Introduce a new product aimed at making social software more productive for businesses.  Lotus Connections, based in part on services that have been productively applied within IBM for several years, will include profiles, communities, blogs, bookmarks (tagging/folksonomy), and activities.  The activities component is a significant advance based in part on IBM’s earlier Activity Explorer, which was a market failure but apparently also a very useful learning vehicle for IBM architects.

The first chapter of collaboration competition between IBM and Microsoft was dominated by Lotus Notes/Domino.  While enterprise messaging competition was much more intense, Microsoft wasn’t able to effectively respond to Notes/Domino for collaboration until it delivered recent releases of SharePoint.  IBM Lotus also benefitted Microsoft by confusing the market about its strategy for Notes, Domino, Sametime, and Workplace during the first half of this decade, leading many to wonder if Microsoft would leapfrog IBM for enterprise collaboration as well as enterprise messaging.  With the success of Lotusphere 2007, however, IBM Lotus has started the second chapter, with a product strategy and family that successfully exploit historical strengths such as Notes/Domino and WebSphere Portal while also introducing new offerings that are likely to make IBM Lotus a leader in emerging as well as traditional enterprise collaboration contexts.

In my next few posts, I’ll share some impressions about how IBM’s new offerings and simplified strategy are likely to reshape the competitive landscape, especially between IBM and Microsoft. 

This post completes my Lotusphere impression series.  Topics addressed earlier in the series include:

1. Notes/Domino/Sametime Redux
2. The Future of Notes is…Notes
3. The Future of Domino is…Domino
4  The Future of Sametime is…Sametime

Readers who have followed IBM’s communication/collaboration evolution over the last few years may be wondering where IBM’s recently renewed focus on traditional Lotus products leaves the more recently-unveiled Workplace product family.  In this post, I’ll share my assessment of where IBM is heading with all things Notes/Domino/Sametime and Workplace.

IBM Workplace has gone through quite a few transitions for a relatively young product family.  It started with Workplace Messaging, a “good enough” messaging system, built on DB2 and LDAP, that targeted browser clients (first released in early 2003).  Workplace Messaging was focused on email usage contexts for which systems such as Lotus Notes (or Microsoft Exchange) were either functionally or financially overkill, such as workers without dedicated PCs.  Workplace Messaging was distinctly underwhelming to anyone accustomed to using Notes email, but it was positioned as the first step in a much grander Workplace product vision.

By late 2004, IBM introduced other Workplace family members including:

• IBM Lotus Workplace (later renamed Workplace Collaboration Services), which was defined as a “family of collaborative products…designed to be used in combination or separately to provide a unified collaborative workplace environment to meet changing business needs”.

• IBM Workplace Services Express, a collaborative portal solution for small- to medium-sized businesses (bundling several of the IBM Lotus Workplace products, and essentially IBM’s competitive response to Microsoft SharePoint, for small- to medium-sized organizations).

• IBM Lotus Web Conferencing Service, an IBM Global Services-hosted suite of instant messaging (IM), Web conferencing, and other real-time services (designed to compete with Microsoft Office Live Meeting and other services such as WebEx, and built on Sametime rather than the newer IBM Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration suite,  because of Sametime’s track record for scalable deployments).

IBM explained, during 2003 – 2005, that Workplace would eventually evolve to support many key Notes capabilities, such as broad support for occasionally connected users and a robust application model for document- and messaging-centric collaborative applications.  IBM also introduced Workplace Client Technology, based on the Eclipse.org framework, which was designed to support beyond-the-browser rich client support across multiple operating system platforms.  The Workplace rich client also incorporated OpenOffice.org-based “editors” (spreadsheet, word processing, and presentation applications, for example) likely to appeal to organizations considering non-Windows client options and/or seeking to reduce Microsoft Office licensing expenses.

A review of today’s at-a-glance list of Lotus, WebSphere Portal, and IBM Workplace products can be conceptually daunting, as it lists dozens of products and doesn’t currently provide much guidance on which products should be considered for particular customer requirements.  IBM also offers several Workplace Solutions (from IBM and its partners) and some additional solutions, such as IBM Workplace for Business Strategy Execution, which build on the Workplace Managed Client and related technologies.

If this list isn’t yet sufficiently confusing, you should also consider several Workplace-related acquisitions during recent years, including:

• Aptrix, which was revised and reintroduced as IBM Lotus Workplace Web Content Management.
• Bowstreet, for WebSphere Portal portlet builder technology and frameworks.
• PureEdge, a leading e-forms vendor and W3C XForms pioneer, which is now called Workplace Forms.
• Technology to bootstrap Workplace Designer, the Workplace counterpart to Domino Designer. (Although, perplexingly, Workplace Designer won’t support Workplace Managed Client – beyond-the-browser user experiences – until a 2007 release.)

Overall, IBM has something of an embarrassment of Workplace riches at this point, and we can expect IBM to simplify and more crisply articulate its Workplace product family in the near future. 

In the meantime, here’s my assessment of how all of the recent IBM Lotus developments can be sorted out:

1.  IBM’s strategic communication/collaboration initiatives include Notes/Domino/Sametime and WebSphere Portal.  Notes/Domino/Sametime has a massive installed base (IBM claims 125 million Notes licenses and many millions of Sametime licenses), as does WebSphere Portal (with more than 4,000 customers; IBM also indicated at Lotusphere 2006 that less than 50% of the WebSphere Portal customer base uses Notes/Domino), while the fledgling Workplace-branded IBM offerings currently have relatively tiny installed bases.

2.  Workplace should be considered an umbrella brand and set of standards- and/or Open Source initiative-based technologies (including Apache Derby, Eclipse.org, OpenOffice.org, SIP/SIMPLE, W3C XForms, etc.), along with myriad IBM software products/technologies (e.g., DB2, MQ, Rational, Tivoli, and WebSphere) that are used throughout the IBM Software Group, including (directly or through assorted integration options) Notes/Domino/Sametime.  The next version of Sametime (version 7.5, due mid-2006) and Notes (currently known as Hannover, which is expected in 2007) clients, for example, will build on the Eclipse framework.  In addition, Workplace Forms (née PureEdge) has strong synergy with both Notes/Domino/Sametime and WebSphere Portal.

3.  Workplace Collaboration Services, Workplace Services Express, and other IBM Workplace products introduced over the last few years should be considered extensions to WebSphere Portal (focused on communication/collaboration services) rather than a new or distinct IBM product set.

4.  In terms of competitive positioning, Notes/Domino is still IBM’s focus in competing with Microsoft Outlook/Exchange; WebSphere-based Workplace offerings are most directly competitive with Microsoft SharePoint; Sametime competes with facets of Microsoft Live Communication Server and Live Meeting; and Notes/Domino capabilities for collaborative applications don’t currently have a direct counterpart in the Microsoft product family (although application developers can use SharePoint and Groove to address some similar collaborative application requirements).

5.  Other important competitive differentiators for IBM include its support for multiple client environments (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, as well as many browser and device-based client types) and options for developers to use non-IBM products, such as Oracle Database instead of DB2.  These commitments, along with strategic bets on key standards and/or Open Source initiatives, are pivotal for IBM’s competitive stance relative to Microsoft.

IBM obviously still has a lot of work to do, in terms of reconciling and marshalling its extensive set of communication/collaboration products and technologies, but its renewed focus on Notes/Domino/Sametime and simplified strategy for a WebSphere Portal-focused Workplace product line are major advances relative to the bewildering messages IBM Lotus presented a few years ago.  The communication/collaboration competitive landscape, especially between IBM and Microsoft, will continue to relentlessly advance for the foreseeable future, a market dynamic that’s ideal for customers (and stark for other communication/collaboration competitors).

Continuing my Lotusphere 2006 series (see part 1, part 2, and part 3), this post explains more about my perspective on the past, present, and likely future of IBM Lotus Sametime. 

Sametime was created from IBM’s 1998 acquisitions of DataBeam and Ubique.  DataBeam specialized in data conferencing and multimedia conferencing technologies, creating technologies used in products such as Microsoft NetMeeting.  Ubique was a start-up with an innovative approach for (and patents on) place-based presence awareness.  IBM Lotus integrated and extended the acquired technologies into IBM Lotus Sametime, establishing leadership in the then nascent market for enterprise-oriented, secure instant messaging (IM) and web conferencing products.  Sametime incorporated a specialized version of the Domino server for directory and other services, but didn’t require a full Notes/Domino deployment.  Windows and browser clients were provided, and IBM also partnered with AOL for enterprise/consumer IM interoperability with AIM.

IBM later integrated Sametime with Notes, providing seamless, in-context real-time presence awareness and communication tools.  Each Notes license now includes a license to the instant messaging capabilities of Sametime.  Sametime has over 15 million licenses, not including the millions of Notes and WebSphere Portal users deploying its IM capabilities. IBM also produced a software development kit (SDK) for application developers who want to exploit Sametime services in custom applications.

IBM appeared to lose focus on Sametime, however, during the same period in which it focused more on Workplace than Notes.  The Sametime brand was retired and IBM introduced a new product, IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing, based on the former Sametime technology.  The products’ user interfaces were also allowed to get a bit stale, reflecting a shift in emphasis to newer IBM Workplace alternatives.

As such, many Sametime customers were probably concerned, prior to Lotusphere 2006, about the future of their Sametime investments.   As was the case with Notes and Domino, however, IBM Lotus presented a very compelling and reassuring strategy for Sametime customers at the event.

IBM has clearly redoubled its focus on the Sametime product and related technologies.  It has reintroduced the Sametime brand, and plans to release Sametime 7.5, a major new release, during mid-2006.  Sametime 7.5 will introduce a new user experience model, building on the Eclipse.org-derived rich client technology that IBM will also exploit for Notes Hannover and future Workplace Managed Client releases.  Screen shots on Ed Brill’s blog such as the image below depict a distinctly post-90s user interface model:

The Sametime 7.5 client will be readily accessible to application developers working with Notes/Domino, WebSphere Portal, and Workplace products.  It will also be extendible, making it possible to, for example, customize the Sametime client with tools for reserving rooms and other conferencing-related resources.  On the server side, IBM Lotus will introduce a new Sametime gateway for enterprise-class interoperability with consumer-oriented IM offerings from AOL, Google, and Yahoo!.  Given the significant number of enterprises with mixed IBM/Microsoft deployments and the very large population of people using Microsoft’s consumer-oriented IM service (MSN Messenger, soon to be re-branded as part of the Windows Live family of services), it’s likely IBM and Microsoft will also work to ensure smooth real-time interoperability.

To recap, the future of Sametime, especially amid the confusing IBM real-time marketing and branding changes during recent years, was until recently very far from clear.  With the refined and updated IBM Lotus real time plan unveiled at Lotusphere 2006, however, it’s clear that Sametime is once again the center of IBM’s real-time communication/collaboration strategy.

Continuing my Lotusphere 2006 series (see part 1 and part 2), this post explains more about my perspective on the past, present, and likely future of IBM Lotus Domino. 

Domino started as the web-ificiation of the Notes server.  When introduced (as Domino 4.5, in conjunction with Notes 4.5) during late 1996, Domino expanded the Notes server to address web applications and clients (i.e., browsers).  More precisely, the Domino brand was introduced then; the web-ification capability was released earlier in 1996 as a server add-in extension for Notes; the server add-in was code-named Domino, and the Notes team marketing decided, in part due to concerns that Notes was stigmatized as a pre-web product, to create a new and distinct Domino brand for what had previously been known as the Notes server.  That might seem like a questionable decision, nearly a decade later, but the software market was in a radically different phase, ten years ago; it was near the peak of Netscape’s ascent, for example. 

IBM’s summary, The History of Notes and Domino, provides more details on release-specific feature/function additions.  Fast-forwarding to today, many attendees were probably concerned, prior to the Lotusphere 2006 keynote, about Domino’s future.  While much had been said during 2005 about the plans for Hannover, the next major release of the Notes client, IBM hadn’t yet said much about the future of Domino.  IBM’s ability to use DB2 as the underlying storage engine for a subset of Notes/Domino applications, new in Notes/Domino 7.0, was another source of concern about IBM’s strategy for Domino’s future.  The 2005 introduction of Workplace Designer, a application development tool for IBM’s Workplace offering, was also disconcerting to some developers who focused on Domino Designer (the tool used by application developers creating Notes/Domino applications; Domino Designer grew out of the Notes application development model that was, until Notes/Domino 5.0, included with the Notes client), as it appeared IBM was shifting its emphasis from Domino to the newer, WebSphere- and DB2-based Workplace server.

Domino-focused developers and administrators were relieved to learn, at Lotusphere 2006, that the Domino server is still getting as much attention as the Notes client.  The next Domino release, currently referred to as “Domino Next”, and timed to coincide with the Notes Hannover client (due in 2007, after broad beta testing in 2006), will incorporate the following additions:

1.  Server-side support for IBM’s activity-oriented capabilities, such as the Activity Explorer included with Workplace Collaboration Services; Notes Hannover will include a superset of the current Activity Explorer features.

2.  Support for team workspaces, making general-purpose workspace capabilities (discussion forums, wiki-like collaborative content management, and so on) available to both Notes Hannover and browser-based clients.

3.  Document library services, again providing the ability for organizations to use a single server infrastructure for Notes and non-Notes client environments.

4.  Server support for the new composite application model planned for Notes Hannover.

5.  Server-side, dynamic component provisioning for managed clients, including the Notes Hannover client.

6.  Extensive portal capabilities, through the integration of key WebSphere Portal technologies.

Domino also continues to run on a wide range of platforms, including (for Domino 7) IBM AIX, IBM i5/OS (formerly OS/400), IBM z/OS (IBM’s flagship mainframe operating sytem), Linux (for Intel and IBM zSeries systems), Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Sun Solaris (see this IBM data sheet for more details). IBM’s ongoing commitment to multiple platforms is often a pivotal criterion for organizations deciding between IBM and Microsoft communication/collaboration products.

To recap, IBM Lotus Domino, starting as the Notes server, has been the engine behind an incredible variety of communication/collaboration applications since late 1989.  Domino Next, due in 2007, will represent a major milestone for IBM Lotus, as Domino reasserts and expands its role at the center of the IBM Lotus server product family.

Continuing my thoughts from yesterday’s entry about Lotusphere 2006, this post explains more about my perspective on the past, present, and likely future of IBM Lotus Notes. 

The last decade, especially the period between 1998 and 2004, was very difficult for Notes users, developers, and business partners.  Notes 4.0, released in January, 1996, was arguably the last major release of Notes for which IBM Lotus had a clear, crisply articulated, and compelling strategy for Notes.  Notes R5, released during early 1999, was a selectively bloated and buggy release, and it also reflected some of IBM’s uncertainty about the extent to which Notes/Domino was to be recast as a primarily Internet-centric offering.  The Notes 6.x line, starting with the release of Notes 6.0 during early 2002, was a much stronger release, but it coincided with the peak of IBM’s focus on non-Notes communication/collaboration offerings, a situation manifested in confusing messages in IBM’s sales and marketing efforts.

Notes 7.0, released in August, 2005, was welcomed by Notes customers in large part for performance and server consolidation advantages.  Many expected Notes 7.0 to be the last major release, to be subsequently supplanted by the IBM Workplace family, but IBM clearly stated, during Lotusphere 2005, that the “dual-lane highway” (which had been used to characterize earlier IBM Lotus strategy, and which implicitly suggested the end of the road was near for Notes, in favor of the new Workplace product line) was a mistake that had been recognized and corrected.

By mid-2005, when IBM introduced plans for the next major release of Notes, code-named “Hannover,” it was clear that the future for IBM Lotus products was going to be more focused on Notes than the newer Workplace client environment (although, confusingly, Notes is also officially part of the Workplace product family; unless otherwise noted, I’m referring to the non-Notes/Domino/Sametime Workplace IBM offerings when I mention Workplace).  The Notes community, having endured many years of shrinking Notes emphasis in IBM’s communication/collaboration plans, was cautiously optimistic that IBM again had a long-term strategy for Notes.

With Lotusphere 2006, IBM made it resoundingly clear that the future of Notes is indeed Notes.  The Hannover version of Notes, expected during 2007 (after wide beta testing in 2006) will have complete application compatibility with earlier releases of Notes (going back to late 1989, when Notes 1.0 was released) as well as a familiar experience for both users and developers, but it will be built on Eclipse.org-derived rich client technology (as will Sametime 7.5, expected during mid-2006), giving Notes its most significant user interface update in a decade.  I’ve included an early Notes mail client screen shot (from IBMer Ed Brill’s blog) below.

The Hannover client will have a similar, post-90s user experience for Notes applications as well, and will support “composite” applications (applications composed from tools, services, and portlets, essentially) as well as pervasive communication capabilities such as contextual presence and real-time channels including instant messaging and audio/video (through Sametime integration).  Hannover will also incorporate the activity management advances pioneered by IBM Research during recent years.  Built on the Eclipse.org-based Workplace Managed Client architecture, Notes Hannover will consistently offer its rich client user experience on platforms including Linux, Mac OS (Intel and PowerPC), and Windows.

To recap, the future of Notes, as recently as three years ago, was a fairly dismal projection, essentially relegated to a plug-in shim to enable limited Notes application integration for the Workplace client (Notes forms and views, to be precise).  With Lotusphere 2006, IBM has made it very clear that the Notes client is still its central focus for communication/collaboration, and that IBM is investing accordingly in development, marketing, and sales.

IBM’s annual Lotusphere event in Orlando, Florida provides an unparalleled opportunity to assess the vitality of the IBM Lotus customer and partner communities.  Lotusphere 2006 was a watershed event for many reasons, and I’ll share my impressions on the major news and implications in my next few Collaboration Loop posts.

The January 21 - 26, 2006 event was the 13th Lotusphere session.  I had the opportunity to attend the first three events as a Lotus (and then IBM, starting in mid-1995) employee, and returned, as an industry analyst, starting in 2005.  Many people have told I missed some bewildering days for IBM customers/partners in Orlando, during my eight-year Lotusphere hiatus (I didn’t attend during 1997 – 2004), but this year’s event was exceptionally upbeat, with attendee and exhibitor energy levels reminiscent of the first, wildly successful Lotusphere in December, 1993 (FYI for Lotus trivial pursuit enthusiasts, Lotus skipped 1994 and switched to the annual January routine in 1995).

To summarize my impressions from this year’s Lotusphere, and the reasons why the Orlando energy levels were so positive:

1.  The future of Notes is … Notes

2.  The future of Domino is … Domino

3.  The future of Sametime is … Sametime

4.  The future of IBM Workplace is now both comprehensible and fairly compelling

5.  The future of other traditional IBM Lotus products not in the list above is not so clear, but that’s probably good news for IBM Lotus customers who want IBM to have a sustainable, focused, and vibrant software product business — even when confronted with increasingly credible communication/collaboration competition from Microsoft over the next few years.

The first three list items may seem a bit paradoxical to readers unfamiliar with recent IBM Lotus history, so I’ll start by explaining why I chose “Notes/Domino/Sametime Redux” as the title for this post.  To compress a complex and circuitous decade of Notes history into a single sentence, IBM didn’t appear to be entirely clear about what it wanted to do with Notes for much of the 1995 – 2005 period, and the lack of a clear Notes strategy resulted in some mixed and decidedly counterintuitive IBM Lotus business tactics.

IBM product planners started shifting their focus from the traditional Notes/Domino/Sametime products to a largely Java server- and browser client-based communication/collaboration vision during the late 1990s, emphasizing non-Lotus IBM software products — especially DB2, Java-based integrated development environments (culminating in Rational Application Developer), Tivoli, WebSphere Application Server, and WebSphere Portal.  IBM also made significant commitments to industry standards and open source initiatives during this period, most notably including Eclipse.org (which IBM initiated), OpenOffice.org, and myriad web services- and XML-related standards efforts.

This shift was disruptive and deeply disconcerting for many long-standing Lotus customers, in part because it implicitly suggested the Notes/Domino/Sametime product franchises were considered “legacy,” and thus unlikely to see significant, ongoing product development or marketing investments.  It was also troubling to many in the Lotus community because the products being touted as next-generation alternatives, eventually known as the IBM Workplace product family, were not viable substitutes for the traditional Lotus products.  The early Workplace offerings weren’t unreasonable; they simply didn’t do everything the traditional products did, including some features that have proved mission-critical for many people, such as pervasive and robust support for disconnected users (e.g., working with both collaborative content and applications while un-networked, and then seamlessly re-synchronizing when next connected).

People who attended Lotusphere 2006, in any case, have no doubt about the current IBM Lotus strategy.  Notes, Domino, and Sametime are back at the center of the IBM Lotus strategy, and that reality was clearly reflected in the amount of time dedicated to the products during the Lotusphere 2006 keynote and breakout sessions.  IBM Workplace is no longer perceived as something vaguely defined and to which IBM seemed to want to cajole its traditional IBM Lotus customers; instead, Workplace is an umbrella brand and a set of technologies that will be exploited throughout the IBM Software Group, including the next releases of Notes, Domino, and Sametime.  In general, Workplace should be considered more an extension to the WebSphere Portal product family than any type of internecine sibling rivalry threat to the traditional IBM Lotus products.  I’ll continue my assessment of the details and implications of this shift in my next post.

My previous post focused on some historical challenges, highlighting several causes of communication/collaboration complexity and chaos. With this and my next couple posts, I’ll explain market trends that are helping to usher in a new, simpler, and more effective framework that includes channels for communication, workspaces for collaboration, and more contextual communication/collaboration.

The first trend, depicted in the diagram below, is increasing convergence among tools used for communication, collaboration, and content management.

In the past, it was routine for organizations to have specialized tools and support teams for different communication, collaboration, and content management needs.  It also wasn’t unusual for the people focused on the different specialized areas to not spend much time communicating and collaborating with one another.  This was exceptionally counterproductive, as work activities often cycle through many communication/collaboration/content phases.

If we receive a communication update (via email, RSS, or some other type of communication channel) about a competitive acquisition, for example, it’d be natural to gather the people responsible for determining a response in a workspace, brainstorm (collaborate) on next steps, and publish (communicate) the results via assorted communication channels.  As part of the collaborative work, we’re also likely to produce content designed to help sales people and others articulate the response. 

If participants are required to switch among different tools for different facets of the communication/collaboration/content work, they’re more likely to disregard or misuse one or more of the tools, reverting to the tools they’re most comfortable with even if those tools aren’t ideal for the tasks at hand.  If instead the tools are well integrated, facilitating in-context interaction, participants are more likely to be productive and responsive.

A second key trend is a shift to database management system (DBMS) foundations.  In the past, products focused on facets of communication/collaboration/content management have generally relied on proprietary storage engines.  This was done in part because DBMSs were traditionally focused on highly structured data and simple data types, an approach that was effective for data processing but not as useful for semi-structured or unstructured information management.

DBMSs are now much more useful for communication/collaboration/content domains, however, as recent releases of leading DBMSs offer strong support for document-structured information using XML, XML Schema, and XQuery.  XQuery, now a W3C Candidate Recommendation, is especially powerful, representing a data manipulation language that accommodates more of the richness of the XML data model than earlier approaches focused on supporting a subset of XML data manipulation operations using SQL.

Several vendors are now exploiting DBMSs for communication/collaboration/content-focused products.  IBM’s Workplace, for example, builds on IBM’s Cloudscape and DB2 DBMSs for client and server storage needs.  Similarly, Microsoft has moved to a DBMS (SQL Server) foundation for many of its communication/collaboration products, including Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server, and (some of the data managed by) Live Communications Server.

Oracle, unsurprisingly, has gone much further with Oracle Collaboration Suite, using its Oracle Database for nearly all facets of its communication/collaboration/content management storage needs.  Oracle’s broader DBMS foundation is a leading indicator of what’s likely to follow from IBM, Microsoft, and other vendors, and it can be a key criterion for organizations that face stringent regulatory compliance requirements.

While these trends are producing new opportunities for organizations, they also have profound implications for vendors focused on communication/collaboration/content product categories.  My next couple posts will address some related issues including the emergence of superplatform competitors and the advent of low- and no-cost alternatives such as blogs and wikis.