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Lotus Notes 8.5 Will Support Ubuntu 7.0

Posted by kdawson on from the desktop-in-the-enterprise dept.

E5Rebel sends in an article from Computerworld.uk article that reports: "IBM believes Linux on the enterprise desktop is finally ready for widespread adoption. To meet future demand it is preparing to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0... The Ubuntu support for Notes and Symphony were a direct response to demand from customers."

3 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Enterprise by unforkable · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Despite the facts that Lotus is or isn't a good product... let's face it, Lotus Notes is a major player in the enterprise, and this can drive some important migrations to Linux.

  2. Re:Why specifically Ubuntu? by kripkenstein · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm unable to understand the logic here. Is the word Ubuntu replacing Linux for marketing use, or is there some compelling reason to support just one distribution? In "the old days" (last year was it?) everything was SUSE. In "the REAL old days" (2 years ago was it?) it was RedHat. Linux is Linux is Linux. Ubuntu is fast becoming a powerful player in this area; as the article says, the reason for supporting it was sizable customer demand. That is the logic here. People wanted to run Ubuntu on their enterprise desktops, they wanted IBM to have Notes on that platform, IBM agreed. No mystery.

    Of course 'support for Ubuntu' doesn't mean it won't run on random distro X. It might, but IBM won't recommend it/install it/support it for you. Which is fine if you want to do it all yourself. Most enterprises, however, are used to paying IBM (/Microsoft) a lot of money and not having to worry about support issues.

    IBM, by the way, isn't supporting just one distro. They have various forms of support for various distros for their products. Their overall strategy seems quite simple; on the one hand, support the distros people ask for, on the other, keep that number a reasonable size. By which I mean, IBM doesn't want a single vendor (Microsoft sort of taught IBM a lesson there), but also IBM doesn't want too many vendors, which is hard to support and market. Simply put, that means we should expect IBM products to be supported on Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE. No surprises; these are the major distros these days (and for a few years now, too).
  3. Re:' can't tell exactly if this is good or bad new by kbg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually Lotus Notes is light years ahead of Outlook/Exchange, but of course that doesn't say much because Outlook isn't very good groupware to begin with. The thing that people don't realize is that Lotus Notes is a fantastic rapid application development product. I can make a groupware application in 30 minutes that would take 6 months to a year to do in Outlook/Exchange/.NET and it still would not have the features of the notes application, for example: Integrated search in every view, Integrated replication, Easy customization, Every application is also a web application, Integrated logging, Integrated access control down to a field level, Integrated Offline capabilites and so on.

    I'll admit that the email client that comes with Lotus Notes is not very good, but that is not because Notes is not very good, it's just that the IBM developers that create the email client are not very good developers, it would be possible to have the email client look exactly like Outlook.

    But since Notes comes with POP and IMAP support out of the box, you can always just use the email client of your choice.