Slate

 Information Week reports:

"Collaboration processes require rich content seamlessly integrated into the user's experience," Ken Bisconti, vice president of IBM workplace, portal and collaboration products, said in a statement. "3D collaboration is the next wave of interactive technology for knowledge workers."

 

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AMEinfo covers this launch...

Lotus Notes and Domino 7, a key component of the IBM(R) Workplace™ strategy, marks a major milestone in IBM's product roadmap for the Lotus product family. Customers have indicated that a critical factor when choosing a software platform is a reliable, long-term product plan that won't require additional software purchases or major migrations to upgrade.

IBM is helping customers plan their software purchases and deployments by delivering new versions of Lotus Notes and Domino every 12-18 months and making it simple for customers to upgrade to new versions. As a result, IBM's clear product roadmap and consistent delivery of new Lotus Notes and Domino technology has resulted in more than 90% of customers working on the most recent1 version of the product, which is an unprecedented rate of adoption in the software industry.

 

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The Lotus world is full of them. :) At any slight Lotus v/s MS centric discussion, you would find them raising their respective banners/flags. And why not, this is a very competitive area and the stakes are high for many; Product Vendors, ISV, Partners, Developers and definitely the Customers or end-users.

Two interesting blog entries @ edbrill.com where ultimately sentiments will prevail :)

Microsoft "de-emphasizing" all existing Exchange developer APIs

Steve Ballmer on blogging

 

IBM Lotus has been leader in Collaboration Software for over a decade with its widely used corporate softwares like Lotus Notes and Domino. But there is no end to innovation and with the recent launch of Notes Domino 7 you would gonna hear and see alot on this.

Like the one Ed Brill had pointed out to this eye-catching and a supercool Lotus Ad in a recent Wall Street Journal Issue.

Release 7 is a server focus, with lots of improvement to Domino for performance/scalability and reducing TCO.

Notes / Domino 7 is shipping!

Lotus News 

M$ has never understood Collaboration or Workflow. For years it has been trying to build these capabilities in its various flagship products. In past we had heard about Exchange enabled Workflow, but this was a mess. Then came Sharepoint but they are not nothing more than IBM QuickPlace-like document sharing.

Today we had an M$ Consultant who was every eager to show a POC of Sharepoint-based Workflow (we are in midst of migration (: And being gung-ho, he asked for the most complex one. I gave him a 4-sheet printout of our Lotus Workflow based process which has some 60+ activities. I would be exagarating if I say "He fainted" but thats best I can describe his state then.

Though he admitted this cannot be done in Sharepoint, but still describing it as the best collaborative platform, with check-in/check-out and document routing. (wow, now dats definitely collaboration...LOL)

Now it looks like M$ is beefing up BizTalk's "Human Workflow Services" which remindes me of Lotus "Super Human Software" campaign for R5. The planned release of BizTalk is code named V-Next, i guess a pun on RNext, the beta for Lotus Notes Release 6.

And the words are out that the same BizTalk team is building Windows Workflow Services, and you bet it would definitely provide Check-in/Check-out collaboration.

So the CEO now proclaims...

"We have Lotus Notes opportunities coming out the yin-yang. I've never seen [such] a customer base waiting to be plucked."

But I say they should focus more on Exchange 5 installations (there are still pretty many). Plus the migration success rate is much higher here than moving LN bases.

Though the CEO can get away with a laugh for all the incorrect details/rumors.

The Register: Microsoft's Ballmer tells lurvely partners to stick it to IBM

Last week announcement of Hannover - the version 8 of Lotus Notes, @ Edbrill.com has been widely appreciated by the bloggers.
This release would be a major revamp of the software to provide a paradigm shift in Collaboration & Messaging Software domain. Hannover is intended to push IBM's Activity centric collaboration model. Which is quite different from the current email/inbox and related but unconnected documents that resides in multiple Lotus NSF Databases.
IBM has also taken this opportunity to provide a highly modern look for the Software which is something the Lotus community has been missing for long.

This step from IBM for one is to halt any migration away from Lotus for usability reasons. In many such migration cases, Users have cited Lotus Notes as begin a non-standard client, primarily due to its decade old-look.

The underling platform for Lotus Notes client software is also changed with this release, and it will be based on Eclipse RPC code base. But right from version 6.5 IBM has introduce API enhancements to support prior version applications in eclipse based Hannover. This is what IBM calls as composite applications.

Though its a very encouraging move from IBM, there is a huge community of Lotus Developers and Partners, who are providing consultancy and application based on Lotus technology. So what this new interface means to them?

There are many questions that would be answered as more material is available from IBM on Hannover, but these are my understanding on Hannover release.

1. The Lotus Notes Mail/Calendaring features will be only eclipse based initially. These same interface components as we see for the email views/perspectives will not be available for Developers to use in their Notes Application.
2. Hannover is only a Client enhancement release, and Lotus Designer will continue to provide the existing interface for Views/Outlines/Forms and other Notes application components
3. Customizing of Mail/Calendaring features as possible in current Mail Templates will not be possible; or atleast they will require high understanding of eclipse classes.
4. The Hannover Mail features will be based on POP3 architecture by default like MS Outlook, connecting to Domino Server for POP3 services and will use Derby database engine for local storage of Email/Calendaring documents.

Inshort, it is a Workplace rich-client for messaging rebranded as Lotus Notes which will continue to support Lotus Notes databases as composite applications, but will not support for long the Notes programming model (Formula, LS, RAD, etc).

These are my understanding of how things are or might be, and need not be taken as something Official from the Vendor.

It was pleasant to read @ Ed Brill on IBM's plan for Lotus Notes 8 code named "Hannover".
The planned design for the version ahead are great, fabulous. It also demonstrates IBM’s strategy for Eclipse based rich client Workplace.

Can’t wait for this launch. Hats-off for Ed and the team. :)

Last so many days were spent on Code Review and Unit Testing for my current project application. I see Code Review as a very important & fruitful exercise. It helps removing many bugs by just following code and those which may not come up in testing, as Test Cases are not always exhaustive for each and every condition. By doing a code review you can mentally test each programming constructs and paths.

Testing brings to surface some very peculiar issues and which makes you hate LN (my project is still for R5). Lotus free form structure for storage is a boon as well as a bane. While it helps rapid development without the need to bother about relational constraints and data structure normalization, but this sometimes leads to issues when Data Integrity is of concern. The behavior of various NotesObjects and their methods which are based on the FT Index are unpredictable unlike RDBMS where you are assured of a consistent implementation. Index update delays or In-memory objects statuses can lead you to bang your head against the Screen figuring out the problem reasons.

So here I have lot of my code using NotesView.getDocumentByKey methods to put basic referential integrity among related data. Yeah a RDBMS would have been a best option here, but as pointed out in the earlier post - Code Works, one of the objective was to reuse the in-place setup of Lotus Workflow/Notes and thus minimize investment costs.

Now we have checks at various places to not allow data duplication if those records with matching keywords exist. This works in ideal situations, situations where after every document delete/update you give Notes sufficient time to update its Index or cache or whatever it is. But our test cases failed when we deleted document and immediately in the same session created new records. So our hidden views, used by getDocumentByKey are not getting immediately refreshed. Even closing all application windows won't work. So is this Indexing problem? Tweaking any View/DB property won't help. And when we restart Notes after deleting documents, the validation works. So is this Notes client cache problem? But these methods don't have any "Nocache" attribute.

Trial and error and we used NotesDatabase.search for these checks instead of NotesView.getDocumentByKey and this works for any kind of monkey-usage of the application. And we had no problem here with View Index or cache or whatever it is. But theres issue of App. performance using this method. Ashish suggested of using NotesView.Refresh before invoking the getDocument methods. Now this method is suppose to update your NotesView objects with the datastore image during the same code process, so any further modifications/reference has access to the current document copies/count. But in my case I am performing a process, close & restart my application and then deleting/updating some documents manually to create Test conditions and again running the code process to repeat the earlier action. This ideally means all my variables/objects are destroyed & recreated - an if recreated then they are suppose to be representing the latest datastore state.

But it worked. A combination of NotesView.refresh and NotesView.getDocumentbykey gives you the current state of data. So this was a case of in-memory objects getting cached for the session. But why can't we have application session which destroys all in-memory objects as soon as when application is out of scope without having to restart Notes or doing manual Object destroy.