IBM Ships Lotus Notes/Domino 7
New version of collaboration platform moves closer to a blend with IBM's Workplace.Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service
NEW YORK-- IBM took the wraps off its Notes/Domino 7 platform today as it started shipping the latest version of its collaboration applications and development system.
The new edition includes interface tweaks intended to please users and server software changes aimed at lowering overhead costs by using hardware resources more efficiently. It also marks a step toward IBM's goal of smoothly blending its legacy Notes/Domino architecture with its newer, Java-based Workplace platform.
Changes to the Notes 7 client application include support for Microsoft Office 2003's SmartTags and smoother integration of IBM's Sametime instant messaging software.
Some of the smallest adjustments have garnered the biggest cheers from early users, according to Ken Bisconti, IBM's vice president of Workplace, portal, and collaboration products. He cited new message markers indicating whether an e-mail message has been sent only to the user or to a larger mailing list as one particularly popular addition. Another new client feature, "save window state," lets users capture all the documents they have open for viewing or modification when they shut down Notes. The software then restarts with everything displayed as it was before the software closed.
Under the Hood
One of IBM's back-end innovations is autonomic monitoring to alert administrators to performance issues; another is architectural optimization intended to let customers increase the number of users they can support per server. In IBM's internal deployments, the company saw reductions of as much as 25 percent in CPU utilization for a set workload, executives said.
Messaging and collaboration software research company Ferris Research estimates that ownership costs for Notes/Domino 7 will be 8 percent to 9 percent lower than for Notes/Domino 6, which debuted three years ago. In research funded by IBM, Ferris concluded that organizations won't see savings on their general per-user infrastructure costs from Notes/Domino 7 (as they would have from the previous release, version 6, which included new network compression technology), but they will save on direct hardware and software licensing costs--as well as benefitting from greater user productivity--thanks to improvements in areas such as search and message prioritization.
IBM is locked in a battle with Microsoft for dominance in the collaboration market: IDC's research on 2004 market share puts Microsoft in the top spot, with 51.2 percent of the market share, followed by IBM with 40.1 percent.
Transition to Hannover
IBM is doing its best to reassure Lotus loyalists about the coming transition to Workplace. IBM intends for its next Notes/Domino version, code-named Hannover, to merge the two architectures fully. IBM hasn't set a release date for Hannover, but it expects to discuss it in more detail at its January Lotusphere conference.
"I know there's a lot of speculation, mostly fueled by our competitors, that there's a major migration in the future for our Notes/Domino customers. Nothing could be further from the truth," said Mike Rhodin on a conference call today. Rhodin took over in July as general manager of IBM's Workplace, portal, and collaboration software.
"What you'll see in Hannover is a blending of Workplace technology and Notes technology that will allow our Notes customers to maintain their templates," Rhodin said. There will be no "rip-and-replace" upgrades, he pledged.