Domino & Sharepoint Coexistence

I got talking to the nice chaps over at CASAHL today about how to make Domino applications and Sharepoint applications available to disparate sets of users. They have some really interesting tools that could allow us to 'replicate' the content of Notes/Sharepoint/Other applications onto different platforms (so we wouldn't need to license everyone for everything!).

In theory we could replicate all the WWY Sharepoint systems onto the Mars Domino platform, while also replicating most of the Mars Domino Applications to a WWY Sharepoint platform. We'll need to do some work to see if the theory would hold for our environment though!

What really got me thinking was their recent work with 3M, who apparently had 350,000 Notes applications (no, that's not a typo!) Apparently 60% of those applications were no longer used, and of the remaining apps 'only' 15,000 were actually unique templates!

We're not so bad after all ;-)

Lotusphere Keynote Announcements

We had the traditional keynote speech this morning with the Blue Man Group performing the start/finish (and randomly helping with a demo in the middle), and Dan Akroyd as the special guest talking about collaboration as part of a film crew.

Lotus announced strong growth (12,236 new customers since launch of Notes 8, and 16 consecutive quarters of revenue growth), so they must be doing something right!

I definitely don't have space here to cover all the technologies, demonstrations and customer testimonials that Lotus went through, so here is a quick review of the bigger announcements:

Lotus have been working with RIM to deliver Connections, Sametime and Domino apps (through X Pages) on Blackberry devices. IBM have also worked on making those apps accessible on other popular mobile devices. Bluehouse has been renamed and expanded and is now called LotusLive (and yes, it includes the email piece that Karoona is so smug about). The SAP integration project (Atlantic) is now a product that will ship in March under the brand name "Alloy". Connections 2.5 is due in Q3 2009 and we are promised it will "continue to make the competition pale in comparison". Sametime Unified Telephony will ship mid 2009.

ID201 - Lotus Domino 8.5 and beyond

Dai will probably have more to add to this, but I was quite impressed. A few key features upcoming are:

Notes shared login: The initial login prompt can be removed from the Notes sign-on, and the ID file will be unlocked using the Windows login password.

ID vault: This is a server based repository for ID files, and can be used to automatically provision them to the desktop. It can also handle password changes, by helpdesk or self-service

Storage: This is the biggie. DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Storage) works by pulling attachments out and storing them as individual files on the file system (optionally encrypted) of the notes server. It will also handle de-duplication. IBM have seen between 40-82% reduction is disk usage by doing this. Because mail files are smaller, it's more I/O friendly too, and reduces database compaction/reindexing/defragmenting times considerably. Also, because attachments are reasonably static, incremental and differential backups are considerably smaller and faster.

ID401 - What's new in Sametime 8.5

There are four main areas of improvement in the new version of Sametime:

Sametime meetings - is vastly improved. It was demoed at the keynote this morning, but the meeting room functionality, meeting recording, discussions, questions and minute taking features look very nice indeed.

Sametime client - not that much change between 8.0.2, but coming along is a DHTML based web client which can be provided on an extranet basis, which is reasonably feature-complete. Under the hood is a set of web-based REST APIs, which means customised clients can also connect in to this interface to. It does require a Sametime web proxy server, though.

Mobile clients - There are enhanced mobile clients for Blackberry & Windows mobile, as well as those clients also being able to use the web browser version too

Audio-Visual - AV performance has been improved, with new codecs provided to double the video/audio quality for the same bandwidth. There is also better bandwidth allocation/management provided. Also coming is interoperability with external video conference systems, including Polycom and Tandberg.

Intergration with Microsoft OCS will be there, but that's also being backported to 8.0.2 via a hot fix that will be available next week. (Can someone please make sure Alan sees this???)

Sametime 8.5 is expected to ship in Q3 2009

Introducing Mashups

A ‘Mashup’, in essence, is a lightweight web application created by combining information from more than one source to deliver new functions and insights.

The session on: IBM Websphere Portal & Mashup Centre highlighted how these tools can be used to develop powerful applications quickly from information that already exists.

The aim of a mashup is not to solve a business critical problem for thousands of people or even be a long term strategy. Instead it focuses on the other side of the ‘longtail’ spectrum; transferring the development of simple tactical applications from a few core developers into a community of users.

AD513 - Making mashups successful in the Enterprise

The first part of this presentation covered off much of the same material as in the keynote this morning using the Lotus Mashup Manager, but with a few more real-world examples of what some companies were using mashups for.

The second part looked in more detail on how to help to make them more effective, and more secure, in the enterprise.

On the effectiveness part, they discussed the IT central vs self-service vs hybrid models. For Mars, probably the hybrid model would work best: have a Centre of Excellence team to deisgn, build and document the widgets, then make them available for users to mash as they see fit.

For security, the Mashup Manager allows admins to set permissions on a "per feed" and "per field" basis, to ensure sensitive data can be excluded from mashups. It is also possible to track usage for auditing as well as utilisation purposes. The tracking/logging is in a very raw format, which might seem odd but it's acutally deliberate - you can pull the tracking data into a mash-up. ;-)

I'm sure there's definitely a place for mashups with us - bares much closer investigation.

Do sea gulls like liquorice ?

Because today, in one of the breaks, I went to sit outside in the glorious sunlight by the water for a bit and a huge innocent looking (except for the beak) sea gull soon waddled over cackling shamelessly into my personal space. Generous as I am, I fed him - I know it's a him because his voice was big and loud - a piece of pink-and-black-and-pink liquorice (the ones I don't like in the assorted packs) which it gobbled up like a greedy pig - although I'm not sure how because it suddenly occurred to me that birds cannot chew. Anyhow, Mr Sea Gull swallowed the liquorice and then, believe it or not, the ungrateful little glutton started making threatening little runs at me and odd noises (in a changed voice) too and I had to run away (well, get up and move away as fast as I could without making it look like I was scared of a bird!).

So I'm thinking, does anyone know if sea gulls like liquorice ? And if they don't, why don't they politely refuse?

Blog Admin Mat just had to add >

Cloud Computing : Is it for us ?

I attended a very good session on cloud computing today. In the light of the Google POC that we might run this year, this was THE session to be in. Incidentally, the presenter, Bob Balaban, was from Binary Tree, a company which assists in migration of email, IM et al and to whom we have been talking about the Google POC!

After a high level introduction to cloud computing, we had an overview of the modus operandi of the major vendors "in this space"(*). Bob The Presenter was refreshingly non-Microsoft/IBM/Google biased but did drop numerous hints on what his company could do to help with migrations. We will be talking to them on vendor showcase day.

We also had a demo of a cool piece of code that migrated emails from Lotus Notes to Gmail - very satisfying for my inner geek - highlighting along the way this interesting fact : Google apparently throttles data input @ 1 transaction per second, which means that if we want to migrate 1,000,000 things (emails/pictures/attachments/... ), it will take us 278 days, ie 11.5 days!! In a public consumer context, this makes complete sense - around the world users upload single objects at a time so it makes sense to build the queue "horizontally" - go Democracy! In an enterprise migration, however, uploads will need to be done in batches for thousands of bursting inboxes. Defo needs some clarification from our Google friends when we meet them this Friday in New York, but in the meantime, can you please start cleaning your inboxes ;-)

The benefits of moving into the cloud are numerous and I'm sure you know them by heart - no kit inhouse, no cumbersome rich clients on users' machines if it's all browser-based, reduction in inhouse support headcount (ie errmmm the staff could be "re-deployed to perform other more value-added activities"), dead-easy scale-up or down on user base, etc. etc. The downsides are less numerous : migration costs have been known to outweigh any reductions in TCO, loss of control of the environment, co-existence costs and issues during the migration period, legal risks relating to the location of the data in the cloud deserves a whole blog by itself (http://www.gregonsecurity.mars/? ;-) and perhaps more importantly, quality of support service can (will!) suffer.

So - would Cloud Computing work for us? My initial feel is that it would, but only if we do it for our whole user base. Yes we might have a lower Quality of Service, Support & Availability, but would this not be insignificant enough to be an acceptable compromise given the savings per user involved? This is part of what we intend to find out more about with the Google POC. On the other hand, I think having part of our user population serviced on premise and the other part in the cloud will only drive costs up because we don't operate on a large enough scale to have a very flexibly scalable environment. We would very likely end up having a full-fledged premium environment inhouse anyway and pay extra for the lesser tiers of service!

Or is the question - if the world is heading to the clouds (and it definitely seems to be!), when is the right time for us to join the flow? So far there have been few large companies that have taken the leap, although a very well-known black-caffeine-filled-bubbly-liquid-that-comes-in-zero-or-full-fat-versions brewer recently moved onto MS Online. The question comes down to whether we want to be pioneers or followers, and if we want to be pioneers, can we afford to do so in the current economic climate?

The Google POC should hopefully allow us to answer some of these questions. Watch this space!


(*) As a side note, I'm pleased to report that I was not completely mad in my thinking in LoLA that IBM have left a gaping hole in BlueHouse - IBM's SaaS offering for online collaboration via web conferencing, social networking, IM, Shared Documents, ... - by not having any email functionality incorporated in it. They have now announced the acquisition of OutBlaze.com, whose messaging functionality will become an integral part of BH. I did mention this to anyone who would listen at LoLA, I'm sure the acquisition has nothing to do with what I said, but the whole thing does make me feel warmly smug ;-)