Woowar

Category lotus
Just in case, in the face of the recent aggressive press release from IBM/Lotus, the Lotus community forgets just how far we've come in the last three years, let's remind ourselves:

Mills: After this year's R6 deliverable, the next version will be a WebSphere-based version. Notes is 80 percent middleware today. It already has some WebSphere and pieces of DB2 embedded in it today. But it's fundamentally built on the Notes file system, which is a late '80s design point.

Tech Update: So you're replacing the whole underlying data store?

Mills: Throwing out the whole infrastructure and revamping the data storage. We have flexible schema-mapping capability in DB2 today, so we can map the Notes file systems and we can map XML natively. You can use alternative syntax like XML to actually access the data that sits in DB2 today. So that capability in DB2 now is allowing us to pull out the old Notes file structure and insert the DB2 infrastructure.

(From ZDNet on 04-Mar-02)

Next time somebody tries to sell you a grand architectural vision that stinks, just stand up and say that it stinks. I mean, who amongst us was actually convinced that this was the right way for IBM to be going? Four wasted years, many wasted man-years, a lot of grey hairs, a lot of lost/disillusioned/disgruntled/confused customers. A terrible shame.

But, Lotus Notes/Domino are still here, they're still being used, we're still in business, and it even looks as though IBM might be beginning to realise that a similar level of change in the marketing program to that which has already occurred to the technology program is required. Let's hope, eh?