MIT held its 2005 Spam Conference last week. Some interesting talks, with new ideas. Some mad-sounding, academic ideas that would never work in the real world. Unfortunately some boring, unoriginal, or marketing-driven ones too.

Some interesting trivia:

Continue reading ‘Trivia from the MIT Spam Conference’

Last year at Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida, IBM executives spent a lot of time discussing Lotus Workplace and the future of Notes/Domino.  The message at this time was not as clear as it could have been.  Many customers were feeling that they had to migrate towards Lotus Workplace sooner or later.

This year this key message was updated and refined. One important change was the re-branding of Lotus Workplace to become IBM Workplace. This underscores IBM’s vision that Workplace is three things:

• A new technology based on the J2EE framework
• Aimed at providing portal environments to vertical industry segments rather than just"unserved" messaging users
• Lastly, (and most importantly…) is not positioned to replace existing or new Lotus Notes and Domino installations

Continue reading ‘The Notes Roadmap - Additional Perspective’

A major announcement at this week’s Lotusphere conference is IBM’s Workplace Services Express - known as WSE for short.  WSE integrates capabilities such as document management, team workspaces and instant messaging/presence awareness into a single collaboration platform.  It is targeted primarily at small and medium-sized businesses and positioned directly against Microsoft’s Windows Sharepoint Services.  There is at least one important difference in the approach IBM is taking however - and that is that WSE is designed to create workspaces that are based on roles although it supports ad-hoc use as well. 

Continue reading ‘Workplace Services Express - Are we ready for role-based workspaces?’

Yesterday at Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida, IBM executives spent a lot of time discussing the future of Notes/Domino and Workplace.  A demonstration was given of both the forthcoming Notes 7 client, and what is now officially known as Workplace Client Technology (WCT).  Unmodified Notes client applications were shown running inside of the Workplace Client.  A new component-based application development tool called Workplace Designer was unveiled, that promises to make it almost effortless for skilled Domino developers to create Workplace applications.

What does all this mean?

Continue reading ‘The Notes Roadmap - IBM’s strategy is crystal clear’