Lotusphere 2005

Wednesday 26th January 2005

More technology insights and some hands-on sessions, which I really enjoyed. I got the last seat in "Installing and Setting up Domino with IBM DB2".

This included full a nice proceedure to set the default database format to be either NSF or DB2, but unfortunately there was no way of determining this on a database by database, as it was during the server build configuration. I would really like the ability to determine it according to which would be the most suitable.

In any case, it was very cool and will allow several different architecture and development options with regard to applications.

My earlier point regarding performance holds true at this time. It was confirmed that you might not see any major performance gains, due to the newness of the DB2 integration and also, due to good performance gains relating to Domino NSF. Some performance figures were talked about, that IBM Lotus were aiming at 30% performance improvements, which are now over 80% and on Linux - 300% for the domino bench marks. IBM Lotus is claiming 25% less cpu usage too.

In several sessions IBM Lotus said that release 7 is aiming at reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for Notes Domino

I heard from both presentations and direct conversations with a couple of IBM'ers that IBM have maybe 10,000 - 15,000 people already on ND7 beta 3 and are aiming at getting up to 30,000 to 35,000 users (10% of the IBM workforce) onto Notes Domino 7 by the time ND7 is release live. Lotus talked about a recent survey from people who ring the Lotus support lines in quarter 4, 2004. Apparantly 94% of callers had completed upgrades to V6.x.

Here are some more quick ND7 feature highlights...

• Domino 7 new feature where Administrators can centrally set message disclaimers.
• Domino 7 will have the ability to add DNS Whitelists, Private Blacklists and private Whitelists...Whitelist functions are the opposite to blacklists, which explicity "allow" known good email into your organisation. Admins may log, tag or reject Spam also.
• ND7 Administration will be further enhanced with new policy lockdowns where Administrators can set certain preferences which can't be changed by the user.
• Unfortunately I missed the session on Smart Upgrade. I downloaded the slides and talked with someone who had been to the session.... Lotus has had plenty of feedback on Smart Upgrade in R6 and have vastly improved how it will work in 7.0. There was a note that they have also added new features in the 6.5.4 release, which may be worth looking at as part of upgrade preparations for ND7...
• I heard there are improvements to Domino Web access (iNotes) (( Email via your web-browser))

Other Aspects of Lotusphere...

Another important aspect of Lotusphere is that allows us to meet with IBM Lotus, via 1-1 meetings and also current and potential new partners. These are partners who offer compatible add-on products that will benefit our customers and meet needs. I am excited to say that this time was particularly interesting and I met with several potential new partners who will compliment our offerings for the Domino platform. Some of my research was related to the several mobile options that are available for accessing email, both from IBM and also 3rd parties.