RSSMicrosoft Targets Lotus Notes, Domino
By Ed Oswald | Published January 17, 2006, 11:36 AM
Microsoft said Tuesday it would set its sights on Lotus Notes and Domino customers, providing new tools to assist in the migration to Microsoft Office products. As a further incentive, these tools would be available on the company's Web site as a free download.
In addition to migration tools, Microsoft also announced the availability of Exchange connectors for Lotus and Domino. This would allow customers who wish to continue using IBM's suite employ Exchange Server on the backend.
"Today we are responding to the strong demand we're seeing from customers using Lotus Notes/Domino who are planning a transition to this platform," Office Server Group vice president Kurt DelBene said. "This announcement is a big step in our overall strategy toward helping these customers make the move so they can begin to take advantage of our platform's benefits."
Bill Gates recently fingered IBM as his company's biggest rival, contradicting the widespread belief that Google was Redmond's top foe. However, the two companies still work together on some projects, including the PowerPC CPU that runs the Xbox 360.
Microsoft says it recognizes a need for the ability to customize and build workflow-enabled applications for SharePoint, and it plans to address this in the coming months.
Microsoft has pointed to a list of corporations who have recently made the transition to its software in just the last six months, including Adaptec, BASE, CompUSA, SGS, and Wonderware among others.
To assist in the transition, Microsoft has employed the help of Casahl Technology, Quest Software and SourceCode, who have agreed to provide complementary solutions to assist those companies that choose to make the move.
"Today we are licensing our migration software at a rate averaging 50,000 seats per month, which we see as a strong indicator of the volume of customers moving to Microsoft's collaboration platform," Quest Software's David Waugh said.
"NOTES IS NOT AN EMAIL PLATFORM."
No kidding. As an email platform it's a dismal failure. It's a dev platform and one rife with glitches, gotchas and various weirdnesses. The bundled SmartSuite is effectively junk. The strengths of the product lie in its manipulation of freeform textual data and its collaborative tools.
That won't last long, especially with IBM at the helm - they effectively poison everything (Linux users take noet - they'll have your virginity too).
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|I am far from objective. I've done nothing but Lotus Notes/Domino for the past 12 years, but I also have Microsoft certifications "just in case". I'm anxious to see the new tools to see if there is anything there. For all the years Microsoft has promised porting Notes apps, I finally saw the first Lotus Notes app ported to .NET last year. It was ... THE CORPORATE PHONE BOOK! One form, a few fields, basic document security. Like so many other efforts, it came in behind schedule, over budget, and with bugs.
For the Notes bashers out there, the product is too easy for beginners to get in and develop applications. You can't pry a well written application away from the business, regardless of the platform.
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|Here we go again. It seems every year MS announces new Notes to Exchange migration tools. The problem is that you can not compare the products. True, both product offer email and calendaring, but that's where it stops.
NOTES IS NOT AN EMAIL PLATFORM. Notes/Domino is a complete development/collaboration/messaging environment. Lotus has done an excellent job envisioning the product but a horrid job marketing the software.
Most people think of Notes/Domino as email, but email is just another app that runs on it. The beauty of Notes is that if you don't like the bundled email you buy/build your own.
I can see why uninformed people don't like the product based on the bundled mail interface. It is very average.
Check out www.openntf.org for open source Notes projects. Including a mail interface that mimics Outlook. IMAGINE AN OUTLOOK INTERFACE WITH THE FUNCTIONALITY AND POWER OF A DOMINO SERVER! That is exciting!! IBM/Lotus could learn somthing from these people and perhaps implement thir work.
I've never been fond of the bundled apps, but I do respect Lotus for their vision. Before the www was even an idea, Lotus had a product that delivered intranets to companies. This product (Notes 2.x & beyond) let end users create "pages" and discussion forums and message boards and document libraries that could be shared everywhere. Keep in mind there was no such things as a web browser. All of this (plus email) was done in the Notes client. In 1995-6 people said the WWW would make Notes obsolete. Lotus responded by embracing the web with the Domino server which served existing Notes apps to a web browser.
I think a lot of this forward-thinking was lost during when IBM acquired the product.
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|Outlook is the only MS product I really cant think of a reason to hate. Yes...Notes totally sucks compared to Outlook. Our company moved to Outlook even before I could familiarise fully with Notes ;)
But I guess other IBM communication products are really good...Saying this since I havent seen counterparts from MS.
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|First Ed:
Don't you see some irony in this statement?:
"Microsoft says it recognizes a need for the ability to customize and build workflow-enabled applications for SharePoint, and it plans to address this in the coming months."
This means it cannot be done now, yet Notes has been doing it for years AND offers document level security (which SharePoint is not capable of doing).
maxvision and fibreiv:
Rather than just say something is a "horrible piece of technology", it would be a more useful discussion of you could expand on exactly what you mean and how it does or does not meet your needs? Otherwise these are seen as a non-value added throwaway lines. You do not indicate what version you are using, what you are using it for, and how much you are using it.
See http://www.controlscaddy....nsf/plinks/CBYE-6KW6GG
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|Microsoft has been offering Notes-to-Exchange migration tools and connectors since 1998. I know because I used them in 1998, shortly after Microsoft acquired them. The problem is that all the organizations who use Notes only for e-mail are easy to migrate and thus already migrated years ago (unless they hate MS, in which case they will never adopt Exchange anyway). The remaining hardcore Notes/Domino users have developed sophisticated custom apps which must be rewritten for Exchange, and it's not a simple matter of converting code. The Notes and Exchange platforms have too many fundamental differences which make it tough for automated migration tools to do much of the work. Exchange development technologies have also been a major moving target during the past decade, far worse than with any other Microsoft server platform, so there is both a steep learning curve as well as paradigm s*** required of long-time Notes developers.
Still, you have to admire Microsoft for never giving up. Every few years, it tries to improve its tools for Notes and re-announces them, as we see again today. One big difference is that Microsoft now employs the original creator of Notes. I'll bet a lot of the recent and current migrations are due to the extra credibility which came with Ray Ozzie.
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|Notes is a horrible piece of technology. I wish our company would make the move!
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|Me too!
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|There are actually tools that Microsoft has that will migrate code and UI objects for VS. It is then a matter of deteriming your data connection strategy, and moving the UI objects around. It requires a little extra effort, and isn't a fully automated process, but goes a long way towards getting away from Lotus N(FL)otes.
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|N(FL)Notes? What does that mean?
I invite you to read all to read Paul Mooney's evaluation of this "new" MS offering:
http://www.pmooney.net/b...sf/d6plinks/PMOY-6L2TN4
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|and Ben Rose's story of using this product in pictures:
http://www.jaffacake.net...grations-tools-my-story
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