Reflections on the Lotus Collaboration Strategy, 2003ff

I attended the Lotus Workplace Collaboration briefing with Ed Brill of IBM Lotus in Wellington yesterday, November 20. The session had seating for 30-40 people, and most of the seats were taken. Ed went through the Workplace collaboration briefing, and then a review of IBM's positioning in the market, with a particular emphasis on positioning vs. Microsoft.

I made a couple of comments to Ed after the session, such as:
- The joining of "IM/presence" as a joint feature in marketing materials and presentations should stop. Presence has much wider applicability across the Workplace applications, and whilst presence had its most recent push via IM, it should be positioned, discussed, and thought about as a cross-product and cross-application piece of fundamental infrastructure.
- Greater linkage of emails and archived IMs in the Workplace interface is needed. For example, in the "Re-inventing Email" screen shot, presence displays the availability status of the email sender, and the current user can initiate an IM with that person ... but, where does that IM disappear to once the session is finished? I think it should be displayed alongside or underneath the email that drove the original session.

Following my own research on Microsoft's new collaboration strategy over the past month, I see the following as key points of differentiation and advantage for IBM Lotus:
- Easier administration ... Workplace functionality can be turned-on and turned-off for individuals and groups, without having to deploy new servers, new software, and new points of integration as in the Microsoft model.
- Server consolidation ... Microsoft's approach breeds multiple separate physical servers just to cope with what IBM Lotus can do on one (or at least, will be able to do so in 1H2004 when Workplace 2.0 is out).
- Platform agnostic ... as in, Microsoft will support Windows Server 2003 only, whereas IBM Lotus offer a number of alternatives depending on the customer's current environment and future plans.
- Client software agnostic ... whereas users have to upgrade to the latest version of Office 2003 to get the "best" user experience with Office System 2003 (particularly Windows SharePoint Services), IBM Lotus enables users to communicate and collaborate via Workplace using existing client software.
- Cost ... IBM Lotus offer very compelling price points, vs. Microsoft's "almost-the-most-expensive-option-on-the-planet" offering, once you deploy Windows Server 2003, upgrade users to Office Professional 2003, deploy SharePoint Portal (and pay the CALs), deploy Office Live Communications Server (and pay the CALs), deploy SQL Server (and pay the CALs), etc.

Comments

[Nick Shelness]

In general I agree with your analysis. I do, though, have four niggles.

1. Windows SharePoint Services 2002 are a free add on to Windows Server 2003. So, there are no additional license costs (server or CAL) involved in running them. You only need SharePoint Portal (badly named - has nothing to do w. a portal) Server 2003 if you want (need) to manage a large number of SharePoint places (lists) across a large number of users.

2. You don't need Office System 2003 in order to access SharePoint services. You can do so quite happily from a web browser.

3. While SharePoint (and other) Services 2003 employ SQL Server resources, you don't need to licence SQL Server (server or CALs) to run them. There is a restricted version of SQL Server (name escapes me) that can be installed for free with Windows Server 2003, and is perfectly adequate for supporting SharePoint (and other) Services 2003.

4. There is nothing (other than insufficient resources) that prevents you from running a range of Windows Services and Office System 2003 and application Servers (bad name) on a single instance of Windows Server 2003.

[Ed Brill]

Nick: "There is a restricted version of SQL Server (name escapes me) that can be installed for free with Windows Server 2003, and is perfectly adequate for supporting SharePoint (and other) Services 2003."
Yes, it's called MSDE. Microsoft's own product managers advise against using it beyond about 10-15 users (there are also technotes on TechNet to that effect). So I believe it's a bait-and-switch -- sure, you can run MSDE, but if you really want scalability, you must run SQL -- at an additional charge.
By the way, the assumption behind your first point is that the customer already owns the Windows 2003 Server upgrades and CALs -- a fair assumption for the majority, but not the entirety, of the market.

[Nick Shelness]

Ed" "Yes, it's called MSDE. Microsoft's own product managers advise against using it beyond about 10-15 users (there are also technotes on TechNet to that effect). So I believe it's a bait-and-switch -- sure, you can run MSDE, but if you really want scalability, you must run SQL -- at an additional charge."

There is a distinction between running MSDE as the basis of an OLTP system, and running it to support SharePoint services. My sources in Redmond indicate that it is just fine for supporting a moderately sized instance of the latter.

[Ed Brill]

http://www.sqlmag.com/Files/09/7840/Table_01.html
are those still current limits for MSDE? 2 GB?

[Ed Brill]

I found a better link
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnmsde/html/msderoadmap.asp?frame=true