OGS - Part 8
So, while portal guy drones on, what do we think of it so far?
There's definitely an element of consolidation this year. The last 2 years have seen a lot of announcements: Connections, Quickr, Notes/Domino 8, 801 and 8.5, Protector, Foundations. There are probably more I've forgotten about! This year it's more about maturing those products, and bringing incremental upgrades to market. This is probably what was needed. Some of the releases of the upgraded products have been, let's face it, less than 100% ready for primetime deployment. A year of relative quiet would be good, to allow the development teams, UI people, etc to polish things, iron out glitches, and improve reliability, performance, integration options, configuration, quality, etc.
Having said that, actually there's a lot of incremental stuff happening this year, some of which is quite significant. Connections 2.5 for example is a big upgrade from 2.0: probably bigger than the change from 1.0 to 2.0. Great to see, and it definitely becomes more compelling with each version.
Good to see a bit of focus on Quickr too. After an initial bit of energy, that seemed to go off the rails somewhat. The integration with xpages (talking about the Domino version here - does anybody use the J2EE flavour?) will make it many many times easier to customise and extend Quickr. I'm assuming, of course, that the execution of the idea is good: let's give the benefit of the doubt for now.
Symphony 1.3 was mentioned, but I would have liked to know a few more details about that, about timing, and about what's coming in future versions. I suppose that means I need to find the right session to attend to find out this stuff.
We've seen conspicuously nothing at all about the future of Notes/Domino in this session. One knows that time is short, but I would have thought they could spend a few minutes talking about what's coming down the pipe. There are separate sessions covering the future plans for Notes/Domino, but it would be beneficial - for the press & analysts if nothing else - to showcase some ideas for the next major version (which may or may not be called "9", of course).
The closeness of the working relationship with RIM is interesting to see. Again, one hopes that the delivery can be as good as the promise.
Now portal guy has gone ....
