At Lotusphere 2009 IBM announced they will be discontinuing Lotus Document Manager  (aka Domino.Doc).  No surprise really, as the word has been on the street for some time now.  IBM is providing a couple of options.

• If you do not need full featured document management, migrate to Quickr
• If you need the advanced features and capability of a EDMS, migrate to Quickr with the connector to either FileNet or IBM Content manager

At this time the Quickr connector is only available on the J2EE version of Quickr.  The Domino version is coming, but so far there is no published delivery date. That means you need to install a Websphere infrasture if you want to take advantage of the one to one license swap.  You also have knowledge skills on the IT and user side to deal with, and the challenge of migrating between software that runs on different platforms.

So lets say you are a small or medium sized shop running DomDoc, you need the advanced document managment features of DomDoc, but you cannot afford the infrastructure costs, training and migration services that will be required to move to one of the alternatives above.

There is an alternative.  DOCOVA

• Docova is a pure Domino application, so you can keep your Domino infrastructure
• Data is spread across multiple libraries (NSFs) for scalability
• The Docova Web based User Interface feels like a Windows app even though it runs in a browser to reduce end user training requirements
• Docova's functionality is full featured with customizable workflow, advanced version control...many of the features in Domino.Doc that are not in Quickr
• You will be migrating from a Domino application to a Domino application. That means the migration of data is going to be quicker and cleaner.
• You may be able to recycle some of your Domino.Doc customization
• Customization of Docova is via Domino Designer, not an API
• Docova supports VISTA, Office 2003 and 2007, and Domino R 8
• We have done this migration before and have some migration tools available
• The Docova code base is open, and you can get at script libraries to automatically create folders and documents, so you can customize it without having to work through and API

Docova is NOT a silver bullet.  It does not run in the Notes client. It will not automatically spawn new NSF files when thresholds are reached (although we may add this feature in the future).  The migration tool we have is basic, and is only a starting point.  This is, however, a viable alternative...something that deserves investigation.

We are not trying to compete against IBM. In this case, we see a hole in their portfollio, one that we fill nicely with an alternative that will keep Lotus customers with Lotus rather than have them explore products from other vendors.

Check it out.

Posted by: Gary Walsh | Add / Read Comments (0)
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Technically anything after 12 midnight goes into the Thursday file.  Kumonos was the hang out for most of the LS Geeks after the trip to Universal. I was surprised to see the new leader of the Lotus brand, Bob Picciano, drinking, singing and dancing with the rest of the Lotus community.  Not something I remember seeing Mike Rodin do.   His drink of choice that night seemed to be the Lotus Koolaid, not the blueish batch produced over the last last couple of years but the vintage yellow stuff with a higher percentage of NSF.   He talked to just about every partner in the room, and was pretty open and easy to engage.

Lotusphere has its own vibe.  I met two people who took vacation and paid their own way down because their employers could not justify the cost. It can be a hellish week, but there is something about the Lotus Notes Community that brings you back.

I visited the developer lab, and talked to the IBM'ers about Quickr.  There was talk that Quickr Next was going to have workflow and version control similar to DomDoc and be out by the end of the year.  Not the feedback I got from the developers.  They gave the impression that Quickr was going to remain lightweight in terms of document mgt functionality, and it was up to Filenet and IBM Content Manager via the Quickr connector to do the heavy lifting. I asked about the Quickr connector for Domino for these two products and I got a mish mash of responses in terms of when that would happen. It is looking more like Doc Mgt with Quickr is going to require  Websphere plumbing if you want to do it this year.

Traveller looked cool. Gives you functionality similar to what you can get with the Blackberry and BES combination, but on non-Blackberry devices such as cell phones.  

At lunch I sat with yet another DomDoc customer.  Huge implementation with thousands of users and several terabytes of data.  Although he agreed the UI was terrible, you could see in his eyes the loyalty in the brand.   I told him about Docova and how we saw it as a good fit for organizations that had DomDoc, needed more functionality than Quickr but did not have the massive storage requirements or the desire to move to Filenet or Content Manger due to cost and complexity.  He offered to have a look at the UI we have come up with and offer some feedback once he digs out after the show.

I flew to Detroit then took a Northwest flight into Kitchener rather than going through Toronto.  It was 10 minutes from the time I deplaned to when I was digging my car out for the drive home.  

Posted by: Gary Walsh | Add / Read Comments (0)
Categories:  Lotusphere2009 

Everytime I would leave the show floor for the washrooms, going out the back doors, I would pass an IBM pedestal with a young lady who never seemed to have any traffic at her booth. She would always flash me this killer smile as I sauntered by.  I made the mistake of mentioning that to Arif, who said "follow me" and proceeded to head in that direction before I could think it through.  With the diplomacy of a seven year old he told her I thought she was cute and I felt sorry she had nobody to talk to so we came over to see what she was selling.  She looked me right in the eye and said "oh goody, a pity demo".  I found a different route to the loo after that.

Found an interesting tool by a Canadian company called Indellient.  It is called Asset Conversion Inspector  (not to be confused with DLI Inspector), and it will crawl a customer's environment to detect and report on the MS Office products that are in use. The data is not returned, but it does show who is using what, and identifies where a customer could use free office suites such as Symphony or Open Office and save on license fees.  IBM is pretty hot on this, as you can well imagine.

Went to the Lotus Foundations lab today and had a demo of the tool for packaging Notes apps. The idea is to put the self healing, low/no maintenance LF appliance into SMB companies that have few if any IT resources. ISV's can package their apps and have them distributed off the SmartMarket web site, where they are automatically downloaded and configured...again with no IT skills required. Presentation was not the best, and the lab was like trying to hold a meeting in the middle of a auction hall, but I ended up with what I needed. I wanted to compare the tool to the one we had writtent for Docova when we worked with Nitix prior to the aquisition by IBM.  

Another interesting tool is Ephox, which is a rich text editor that you embed in web pages.  The one we use in Docova has some fidelity issues with MS Word, so we will be having a look at this one.

The show floor closed down at 5 pm today, and tomorrow is a day for some last minute meetings and sessions before catching the plane back to the great white north. Hopefully the small battery that keeps my Prius Hybrid alive survived a week in the cold, as I will be landing around midnight at the KW airport, which is likely to be deserted at that time.  

Posted by: Gary Walsh | Add / Read Comments (0)
Categories:  Lotusphere2009 

9-5 on the show floor today.  Traffic lighter than last year but still had some quality conversations with potential customers.  Lotusphere is as much about connecting with the community of partners as it is  with customers. Still lots of chatter about R 8.5 Designer and X Pages. Stephen of DominoYesNoMaybe fame has some good comments if you want to tune in.

Had a couple of Domino.Doc (Lotus Document Manager) customers come by check us out.  The migration path for them by IBM is Quickr and the Connector to Filenet or IBM Content manager.  Although DomDoc has some UI challenges, it did have some pretty impressive functionality and some customers were using to as an EDMS system.  Going to Quickr and the connectors at this time means a J2EE infrastructure as the Domino connectors are not available yet.  For the SMB guys, that is a huge investment and they have been looking around for a pure Domino solution.  Quickr on its own lacks functionality that even smaller companies require if they want to do more than collaboration and file sharing. Docova is a pretty good fit in this case.

Tuesday night there were several social events scheduled.  I went to Canada night, and was surprised to see a live band, excellent buffet and open bar  (aka no drink tickets required).  You could see the chamber music the band was putting out was even getting to them, and when I suggested some Canadian content they were quick to pound out a decent version of Taking Care of Business.  

I forgot about the Symphony Kareeokke , which I understand was a blast. They would put a topic up on the screen and you had to present to it with no advanced prep time.  Sort of "Whose Line Is It Anyways" style.  Jelly Rolls was hopping, as usual, with IBM Austrailia forgetting who was who and giving out drink passes to hot Vince Vaughn look-alikes.  For once common sense prevailed and I bailed early. You could tell Wednesday morning on the show floor was going to be a nasty experience for some.

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Categories:  Lotusphere2009 

The General Session was pretty much full. They did not have the overflow into the Swan that they did last year, mostly because IBMers were encouraged not to attend.  

The Blue Head Group did a musical number with ABS plumbing pipe that was pretty impressive.  Lots of cell phones captured the action in poor quality and posted it to Youtube. Dan Akroyd was the keynote.  Not so impressive as he was obviously reading from the teleprompters.

The focus really seems to be back on Domino.  Websphere portal was hardly mentioned, and you do not see it listed as much in the session index as in previous years.  Mike Rodin's replacement, Bob Picciano, is married to a Notes developer, and he kidded that has had an impact.

They announced that attendance was up this year by 2%.  Considering last year was a sellout, I cannot see how that could be the case.  The traffic in the showcase seems down a bit from last year, but it is hard to tell.

They announced a lot.  Some I covered in the last post from Business Development days.  Here are some additional points from the general session.

Domino 8.5 is getting a lot of air play.  It has the new Eclypse based Domino Designer, and there is a lot of talk about X Pages.  This is a design element that allows you to quickly deploy Domino web apps.  It gets around many of the issues with Domino Web development, giving you a toolkit filled with ajax lookups, controls, dialog and prompt boxes, RT Editor, cloud tags...etc.  I did NOT see a multi file upload control in the mix.  Everyone seemed pretty impressed, but the Geeks in the crowd were pretty quick to point out that this ability to separate the design and presentation layers is something Microsoft and other development environments have had for years.  

The new designer has support for Blackberry development. That was covered off by Jim Balsillie himself.  He showed how you can easily deploy an application on the Blackberry using the same skills that you use to develop other applications in the new Domino Designer.  

More functionality is coming for Quickr, what they are calling Quickr next.  In my opinion it still fails in the UI department, being built on the old Quickplace. There was some talk about X Pages for Quickr but it was unclear.

We had a draw for a debit card loaded with $ 4K that Scott put together with Ardexus, Metalogics, Integra and FIRM.  Good job Scott.

Monday is the longest day for the Showcase.  As John would said so well last year, "you cannot talk and are walking on stumps by the end of it."

Posted by: Gary Walsh | Add / Read Comments (0)
Categories:  Lotusphere2009 

Sunday is business development days with sessions for partners.  Some interesting announcements.

Opening session was in some ways good, in others not so good. They had an artist hurl paint at a scrreen and in short order create a very large and impressive rendering of the Mona Lisa.  This was to support IBM's theme for this years BP day.."the Next Renaissance".  The not so good was that the live demo showing the integration of Notes to other products bombed. Network issues were to blame.

IBM's SaaS offering, Bluehouse, is going to be called LotusLive and will be live early this week.  This is a shared teamspace hosted directly by IBM.  Has a Quickr look to it, with IM, File sharing, Symphony...etc.

As we expected, Lotus Document Mgr  (aka DomDoc) was officially killed off.  May 9 it will come out of the price list. By Sept 2012 customers will no longer have support from IBM.  That gives a pretty long lead time.  The recommended migration path is Quickr with Connections to IBM Content Manager or Filenet.  They are giving customers full credit for existing DomDoc cals, and if they want to buy new licenses they are $ 130 each vs the $ 735 each the full Filenet cals.  That is a limited license. You can only use the API for migrating data. The connector for Quickr is only available for the J2EE version at this time.  They are promising one for the Domino version too but there was no mention of a release date.  

From the Geek file Notes 8.5's xpages feature looks interesting.  At first brush it looks to me like a web form design tool. You can take fields defined on a form, and visually lay them out for publishing to the web.  This saves all the httm that we typically wrap around fields and add to the forms and pages so they look good on the web.  More on this later.

The session on Lotus Foundations was packed, and I had to admit Caleb, the lead for LF, did a great job.   He had Geek blood in him, doing a Steve Jobs like demo and fielding all techy questions himself for the most part.  Bareware was there as a partner who is on the Foundations platform with their Notes solution and talked about the process to package an application. There is a tool available. They showed it and it allows you to set ACL's and do some other setup tasks quickly.  Smartmarket is the site where they will be posting partner apps. There are some partners already there, even though the legal docs we have been trying to get for weeks are not readily available.  Have some meetings coming up to investigate how we can get onboard. Docova currently runs on Foundations. We were working with Nitix before the aquistion.

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I decided to fly out of the Kitchener airport to negate the long drive to Toronto and the busy terminal. Weather came in and the 3:15 PM departure turned into a 5:15 departure. The plane was a twin turboprop that sat 50 people, and there were on two of us on the flight. Not what you would call a money maker.

My two hour wait for the connection in Detroit had evaporated and turned into a full out sprint from Gate 39 to Gate 8.  They were closing the doors to the plane as came thundering down the walkway.  Lucky lady who sat beside me must have thought I was a victim of hyperhydrosis.

Anything is better than a night in Detroit, and a night in Florida is way better.  Got in around midnight to the hotel at the Dolphin.

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Another Lotusphere Giveaway from DLI.tools and Docova.

We're giving away our DLI.Inspector software, valued at $5000+, for free.

Have a Software Asset Management tool for your organization -
see what lurks on your users' machines in an easy, automated manner.

And have the tool as a gift from us.
This full license of the DLI.Inspector will not expire,
(but does require free activation beyond the initial trial).

Hurry, this special offer is open until March 31, 2009.
Download Today!

Download the Free License here

Posted by: Scott Tomlinson | Add / Read Comments (0)
Categories:  Announcements  Lotusphere2009 

Lotusphere always starts the year off right -- getting a chance to connect again with all of our customers and business partners.
There's always so much energy at the conference, this year looks like no different.

Just make sure you stop by our booth, it's our biggest event yet - a draw for a $4000 USD pre-paid card!


For more Lotusphere announcements,
see our Lotusphere 2009 previews & announcements page

See you in Orlando!

Posted by: Scott Tomlinson | Add / Read Comments (0)
Categories:  Announcements  Lotusphere2009 

Something that is common to companies both large and small is the use of templates to create accurate and consistent documentation.  The ability to incorporate this into a team collaboration environment takes this to the next level, reducing costly errors and providing a repository to store and quickly locate the documents down the road.

I recently created a sample Docova document type for this purpose. The context was the creation of legal Non Disclosure Agreements, but it could be almost any document type from form letters to press releases.  

Here is how it works.

1.   A custom NDA Docova document type is created that includes a subform with a series of custom fields for the variable text on the form letter.
2.   The NDA boilerplate form letter, a Word document, was edited to include Word bookmarks where the variable text is inserted.
3.   The template was added to the Docova home database, and referenced on the custom NDA document type.
4.    A button was placed on the subform that used thingFactory to get a handle on the Work template, and push the field values to the bookmarks.
5.   Some folder views were created to organize the NDAs by customer, date...etc.

Here is a video overview of the finished product.

http://www.docova.tv/videos/formletters/formletters.htm

Start to finish...about four hours of work.

Posted by: Gary Walsh | Add / Read Comments (0)
Categories:  Collaboration & Workflow  Document Management  Video Posts