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Lotus Domino for Linux -- but not NetWare
technophile writes "This article indicates that Lotus is dropping support for NetWare in favor of Linux support. They expect to have a Linux Domino server out by end-of-year. " This came from comments from the CEO of
Lotus this morning in an interview. They are "bullish" about having a version for Linux out by end of year. Excellent.
Yes, it should be pointed out that Domino for NetWare was not very well supported or very popular (or very stable). Most NetWare shops run Domino on something else (NT, OS/2, Unix).
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Somewhat off topic, but Linus is set to give the keynote address at Lotus DevCon in June.
The Lotus page for the conferecne
I've been using Notes at my place of employment for about 6 months now, and I must say it's one of the worst programs I have ever had the misfortune to use.
That is, when I am able to use it, due to poor setup, I am able to read my proprietarily stored email, on which access depends on the uptime of the server (about 1.5 days), and the phase of the moon. I can't go in using a decent emailer to read some of this email which periodically disappears or goes unread for months. And doing any external interfacing to the Domino server is next to impossible unless all the Domino techies know what they're doing (which is rare).
I'd much rather use a bunch of smaller apps that do the individual parts better (mailer and database client) than one large program that feigns functionality by attempting to look nice. But I guess that's just the unix coming out in me.
And it isn't really that nice to use anyway. The menus and toolbar buttons are non-intuitive (yes i realise i'm now talking about the client, but that's what you need to interface to the proprietary server, linux or not)
jamesw
I work in an office completely regimented by Domino and Notes... a more clunky excuse for a groupware framework I have never encountered. Notes spends more time giving people problems than it does solving them.
The idea was that great lumps of information would be shared by groups through Notes databases and Domino pages. The reality is that it's one more thing for notech lusers and PHB's to ignore and fail to learn. It's just a glorified email system at this point, and far less elegant than simple POP and SMTP. ah well.
"It's OK, my sheet's got a hole in it!"
IBM happens to make all of their money on mid-to-high range stuff. Think of their PC division as a loss-leader to keep the user base from forgetting about them.
If IBM is going to push Linux as a midrange solution, I think that's phenominal news, but it's going to have a very small impact on the end user/small business. Having IBM push Linux as a desktop OS is hardly going to make much difference.
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I'm glad that more stuff is coming out for Linux, but I used to administer a Netware network and it's sad it struggling. For what it does Netware is fantastic and NDS _IS_ the greatest thing since sliced bread. Linux (and even NT) will have something like NDS some day, but I think it'll be quite a few years.
Nobody has mentioned that committing to a Linux port is really a no-brainer for Lotus. They've got Unix versions already and Linux will be EASY. What they're really saying is: "Novell has lots of users but the huge development effort required for the port doesn't justify the risk. A Linux port, however, will cost next to nothing and people seem to want it, so we'll go ahead with it."
This shouldn't be seen as a Novell vs. Linux thing, because Linux doesn't really require any effort. The news here is that Novell is losing vendor support.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
It's one thing to sell products based on linux, it's another all together to run your business on it. Generally it makes more sense to go to NT from OS/2 _right now_ since there's an easier transition between the two. Also you can probably run all the same server/client apps from os/2 on NT, and for user desktops, you'ld require less training. In the long term however, I'm confident that Linux will fill these app holes as both a client and a server. Also starting a new computing environment, you could easily go with linux today. It's just when you're dealing with legacy PC apps that you'll probably have NT be the stronger canidate.
Of course you're gonna lose out on stability and scalability with NT, but frankly, you still can't run alot of wintel type apps on linux _today_. Next year... well that's another story.
-earl
So Lotus has finally decided to "jump on the Linux bandwagon" has it? My
take? Shrug. Who cares?
What vendors like to have is customer/brand loyalty. Repeat business is
*good* business. (And relatively easy business, too. Providing you
*take* *care* of your customers!)
Shouldn't you look for the compliment in a vendor? If you believe so, I
would argue that Lotus is *not* a company on which you want to hang your
future. Lotus strikes me as a company very fond of heading in whatever
direction the latest band-wagon might happen to be headed. And they'll
apparently cavalierly ignore the needs of existing customer base in the
process.
Why do I say this? A few years ago they dropped Unix support for all but
Notes. Recently, they dropped Unix support for all but the Domino server.
*Now* they're supporting Linux? And dropping NetWare?
Is this *really* a company you want to bet *your* company on?
Go for it. But when (notice I said *when*, not *if*, for IMO it's only
a matter of time) Lotus burns you, remember: I told you so!
(The really remarkable thing in all this is the complete cluelessness
displayed by Lotus. One would think that the recently clueful IBM
would've dropped the hammer on Lotus' management by now. As is obvious to
most: you can not win the game by allowing Microsoft to set the rules!
Nobody ever wins those games but Microsoft. Has Lotus figured this out
yet? All indications are, as a Dilbert character once noted, that the
"clue meter is reading zero.")
As some people pointed out, this was not, "to add Linux, we need to drop something, let's drop NetWare." When the R5 project started, Lotus decided to drop the following Notes/Domino platforms:
Domino -- NetWare, OS/2
Notes -- all *nix-based versions
Linux was *not* considered at this point. It was decided that OS/2 and NetWare's future were questionable (this was before NetWare 5 became such a huge success, and before NDS 8 was announced), and so few people were using the *nix clients it didn't seem important to continue them. Even a Mac version of Notes was apparently not considered until late in development.
The Domino port to Linux most certainly comes from Lotus's experience porting Domino 4.6 to OS/400. In order to accomplish this, Lotus attempted to compile the Domino for Solaris source code on an AS/400. The error percentage was small and apparently fixed easily. Lotus's previous experience with porting Domino, combined with others' successful ports of software to Linux from other *nixes, and IBM's newfound support of a Microsoft fighter..err, Linux, made Domino for Linux a logical progression, Jeff Papows and his fake Marine career notwithstanding.
If we can get all the major environment players to ship their software for Linux and an appropriate OSS web server, ecommerce issues will suddenly snap to hardware performance and OS reliability - and we all know where Linux stands on those issues.
Domino isn't really an "NT app", since it started on OS/2 and has run on Unix for years.
(Evaluation downloads are at http://notes.net)
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Just before Christmas I made a bet with a colleague that SAP would port their R3 system to Linux within a year. The bet was made in the heat of the moment and I worried a tiny bit about appearing foolish if I turned out to be wrong, but as we all know SAP made the announcement only three months later.
Shortly after that I was discussing the same thing with someone on the net. I was explaining how this type of bet - if it comes off - is the easiest and most effective way to silence people sceptical about open source when you are trying to get Linux deployed in your organization.
When pressed for another example prediction - to see if I could do it again - I chose Lotus Notes, again to happen by the end of this year, principally because Lotus had unequivocally said they had no interest in doing so. I must admit I did worry a bit more about that one. But here we are less than three months on from that point and Lotus have made the announcement.
Are there any bastions left yet to fall? I'm really stumped. I can't think of any other major ISV's or software products that ought to and haven't, short of Micros~1 themselves - and there are already rumours about that...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You can bet that Lotus is not ignoring Linux either, as shown from this tidbit on Lotus' Developers site
- Lotus DevCon99 June 21-23, San Francisco...Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, will deliver a keynote address. And when you get there, be sure to visit the Application Development/Enterprise Integration Lab....
BTW, the reason that SmartSuite users want it for Linux is that it contains a full set of tools (database, spreadsheet, word processor, presentation graphics, Personal info MGR, etc.) which is strong enough to allow us to dump M$ from our systems permanently....Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
While I'm really happy to see more support for Linux from the general software community, it distresses me to see Domino being ported over to Linux. I recently had the misfortune of having to develop a website using Domino. Let me tell you, it was the most inane, bloated piece of micromanaging crap I've yet seen. Maybe the 5.0 version (which I'm assuming is the one being ported) is better, but the 4.5 version ate into my productivity like nothing I've ever seen. Poor CGI support, poor java support, poor interfacing, I couldn't FTP my webpages into and out of the server, it all had to be done one by one (images too!) in the Lotus Notes enviroment. No extended find and replace. I could go on and on about missing features and poorly implimented ones.
If you actually want to create pages outside of the Lotus Notes enviroment (as I did because the development tools sucked), then you are just setting yourself up for pain, suffering, and heartbreak. Granted, most of my experience was with client application and not the server, but I never saw any reason to use Domino unless you just happen to have a few thousand Lotus Notes documents laying around that need to be posted to the web, or if you have someone that wants to get into web development but only knows how to use Lotus Notes.
In short, I tried for three months to learn to use and love the Domino server, and finally hightailed it out of there for a better job. They kept telling me that top Domino administrator / developers make $100k+/year, but there's a reason for it. First, it fights you if you try to do anything that's not the "Lotus Way", and second, there's not that many people who want to fool with it. You'd have to pay me 100k just to think about going back to work on a Domino system.
Already announced it:
9 053.html
http://www.novell.com/press/archive/1999/05/pr9
NICE, France (BrainShare Europe '99) -- May 18, 1999 -- Novell®, Inc. today announced Novell Directory Services® (NDS[tm]) for Linux, the next milestone in its strategy to extend its next-generation, scalable Internet directory service, NDS 8, across the major computing platforms of the enterprise and the World Wide Web.
Domino servers do not go down when the disk gets full. At least not when your swap is on another partition.
(Linux apparently does lock when the disk fills. At least it did for me with RedHat 5.1.)
Note that in some senses the database capacities are worse than DBase III. Notes is *not* a relational database at all. It's a "unstructured document store", which means it's nothting more than a collection of arbitrarily structured data which you can access through pre-defined queries (views). If your query isn't pre-defined, the full text search is damn excellent.
The document-oriented data store aspects are really the only reason to use Domino instead of a bunch of perl scripts or CGI or ASP. Any of those technologies can probably handle the display aspect much better than the proprietry scripting languages that Notes has. The big "But" is that you necessarily have to build a relational database and jump through a bunch of hoops to get your data out on the page. On Domino, your structured data is the page so this is somewhat easier. On the other hand, if you are querying structured data, Domino is a bit kludgy
The mail features (when you aren't building mail-based workflow apps) are really not top-of-the-line and should be considered as more of a free add-on. Many shops use Domino/Notes with another mail system. (Although, Notes is the most widely deployed corporate mail system, excluding ccMail which is no longer in development.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.