How is this going to work?
by Volker Weber
Ed Brill tells us on the IBM Lotus site that in about three weeks IBM is going to launch Workplace 2.0. I find it quite interesting that so far this product has not even seen a public beta test. The only thing we have seen displays on the front page today:
We have temporarily disabled Team Space and Web Conference creation while we resolve issues with these features. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Last week, IBM launched a beta test for the next release of the other product line:
We are excited about this release and your participation in the Beta program. Your involvement will help us achieve a new benchmark in product quality for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated products
Who else is wondering whether Lotus Workplace 2.0 is rushed to the market on a tight schedule?
BTW: I found out that there will be a launch event in Munich as well. I hear it is going to be on May 12th but I don't have more details. Apparently the agenda is still work in progress.
Comments
There is a lot of activity by Lotus/IBM to bring new versions of software to the market right now which in fact is not bad, but:
I have updated Domino, Notes, Sametime and Quickplace to version 6.51 and nothing is as good as it used to be. Online awareness in Notes is a mess, no real improvements in Quickplace - even no newsletter to external groups after a year of development, 3 same configured Domino server, 3 different results on LDAP requests. But they offer a new Explorer style template for Quickplace - improved by Tony Estrada - missing even basic components for navigation in folders !!!
Right now we try to set up a Websphere Portal server 5.02 - i mean setup in real life, no installation party. I myself tried a couple days!!! and now with an IBM specialist (i think she is really good - technologically ) two more days and no running server. There is just not a single good documentation available, either old or still draft with wrong syntax. And not a single word what to do if one step does not work. Tomorrow we will give it a new try.
I think this time IBM/Lotus should do their work and fix all that before bringing new products to the market. Our customers do not like to pay for bugfixing and workarounds we have to develop...
And the lady from IBM told me there is no update from Workplace to Portal - i thought that is a feture.
But there is also good news - the support from IBM to us as Business Partners has improved about 1000000% from not existing to quite helpful.
Huptus
I am curious what you mean by "Online awareness in Notes is a mess". (Which is not to say that your other concerns are unimportant -- just that they are more explicit)
I'm not surprised by what Huptus says. My experiences with Websphere 3.5 and Websphere 4 were enough to show me that IBM don't really care about the installation or setup procedures of these flagship products (it is nothing like setting up the old Lotus products such as Domino, which has always been a breeze). Working with Websphere was almost enough to put me off Java for life (until I found better ways to use Java than the J2EE/IBM model).
I also have licenses for DB2 that I don't use because the installation procedure was obviously such a mess compared with alternative products. I used to struggle in previous jobs trying to get OS/2 to work (it was a fantastic OS, but the installation was lousy, and so was the IBM support.)
I really hope they don't screw up Notes, but it sounds like they might.
The best Java app server for setting up and just getting stuff done is Puakma, no question. If it wasn’t for corporate standards and the like, I wouldn’t even bother learning Tomcat, WebSphere et al.
Online awareness in Notes 6.51 looks like this: Sametime has a DA to two different domains. Within the Connect client everything is fine showing all online users. Inside Notes the awareness list shows some - not all - of the users of one domain online. Inside my mail it shows only users of the second domain online. In a different DB it shows the users of the first domain online. When we used 6.5 it did not show all users online but this could be fixed by checking the LDAP results. There was a reason for this behavior - missing entries in cn. But for 6.51 this does not work anymore. I remember an entry in the notes.net forum about different awareness results by logging on and of from Sametime a couple times. I have to search for this entry later today as i just have breakfast but i think there was a comment like "This has been reported to Lotus Product Quality...". By the way, all servers in this setup use 6.51 CF1. Awareness in Quickplace and on our website work fine. By the way, if i check some of my 6.51 servers on LDAP results they look totally different even if they are set up the same.
Update: see some parts of screenshots all taken at the same time - http://www.siriusonline.de/awareness.gif - i will keep the picture at this location for a couple of days. If you want to keep it, save it.
thank you for posting the picture. I can't handle tech support (not my gig), but at least it is good for me to know the kinds of issues that others are experiencing. (FWIW I've not seen this within IBM's multi-domain deployment)
I did not expect support from you - i know about your job. It is just to show you issues we have to deal with. And to show you i´m not "trolling"...
