Ain't those acronyms fun?
There has been resurgence of coverage in various blogs recently about why organizations believe Notes/Domino is a legacy platform and everyone should move everything to Microsoft. See for example Ed Brill's posting and the subsequent 80 comments.
I'm used to being on the defensive side of this argument within the user organization, since I also support Novell NetWare -- which really is a legacy platform but one that just keeps running so it's hard to justify a move away until something in the environment needs changing.
I recently heard a presentation from some very sharp folks at an integrator who basically lumped Notes/Domino and NetWare together as "Good in their day but they're not current and it's hard to get support."
While I think the heavy ad blitz in the IT press and the very real product improvements in R7 and R8 are great, they really don't address some of the issues in the small business marketplace:
- There is very little awareness of Notes among business decision-makers. They know Outlook and Outlook Express, they don't know Notes. I've heard "None of my clients use Notes" from senior managers but when I look through their inbox many of the senders were using Notes.
- Small business executives don't want to know about the back end. For many small businesses the competitive equation isn't Notes/Domino vs Outlook/Exchange, it's Notes/Domino vs Outlook/generic POP-SMTP server/Apache or IIS for apps.
- After all these years it's still hard to grasp what you're getting with Notes/Domino beyond the mail database. Why hasn't the slim "Getting Started with Lotus Notes" book that shipped with R4 been kept up to date?
- Despite all the competing market-share studies, it really is true that Domino expertise is pretty thin among the VARs and integrators that serve small business. That's certainly true here in the US Northeast if not everywhere.
- The benefits of the replication model and local replicas, especially for business travelers, folks working out of home offices, folks who may spend lots of time in cars, trains and airplanes, have not been properly touted by IBM as a unique advantage of Notes/Domino.
I don't want to get into the argument over what IBM is doing or should be doing. But I do want to give the small organizations I support the best solutions for their business needs -- not the ones that do the best spin. Every year it seems to be harder to win that fight. I'm worried that Notes/Domino is going to be the next in the long line of "best of breed" products from WordPerfect on down that lost out to the Microsoft blitz. Comments (0)
David N Schaffer December 25th, 2006 10:39:51 AM