Disconnected
by Volker Weber
Interesting comment:
This is for the IBM shareholders and accounts Department:
I am a customer.
My business depends on Lotus products.
I actively sought out this product: no one from IBM got around to trying to sell it.
However they did provide demonstrations insights and previews,
I decided to buy it.
Now I discover that Connections (note the name) doesn't connect to my other Lotus products,
Reading the exchange above it seems this was "planned" ...
One small piece of business less for IBM. Cash loss small to medium. credibility loss? This is not a marketing problem. Its not a technical problem. Its a bottom line problem.
I am trying to imagine a competitor coming out with a product that does not support its own database or directory.
Comments
One must ask which Lotus Design Partners were involved with testing Lotus Connections and how the heck it did in fact get released without connectivity to the other core Lotus products. My assumption is that the Design Partners gave it their rubber stamp of approval without performing extensive testing as they should. I hope we don't see any surprises with the upcoming Notes/Domino 8 products.
Bruce, not sure design partners can be blamed, IBM does and will ship things regardless of what design partners may say.
I have been involved in many betas where IBM is getting feedback from beta customers that the product is not ready, but tey ship anyway, only to release a critical fixpack a few weeks later.
Yes, that happens sametimes. ;-)
Carl - this was not a bug. It was a decision.
Paul, this may be a wonderful example for a buggy decision.
I'm with you 100%. This is just stupid. While I don't know on which end the work needs to be done, I am assuming that the Domino LDAP would have to be pimped to support something that Connections requires.
In that case, they really should have done that work in Domino 8. They could have shipped Connections before ND8 (as they did) and said that Domino LDAP would be supported when ND8 ships.
That I believe everybody could have accepted. This is just another one of those IBM stories we can only hope won't become too well known outside of our little community of Notes geeks. Or Domino geeks, since you hate Developers so much ;-)
I'm not so sure what my answer would be if support for Domino LDAP needs to be added to Connections. I think that planning for that extra time from the start and shipping Connections a little later would also be acceptable.
This discussion has me wondering, if LDAP is a standard, and IBM supports standards, why do Domino, Tivoli etc. interpret the standards differently? Why if Domino supports LDAP is it not working?
Carl, that is something I've seen a couple of times. In fact, I'm currently involved with the roll-out of a non-Domino application that also uses LDAP. The manufacturer says: We've successfully installed it using these 3 LDAP servers. Which basically means: If you want to use something else, we'll try to help you but can't guarantee it works.
I think the problem here is different interpretations of the standard by all the LDAP server developers.
I second what Joerg said.
About a year ago I was periphally involved in a customer situation involving Brand X LDAP and Brand Y Application server.
From the first few debugging sessions it seemed to be an issue of the Application Server only after doing extensive traces, it was discovered that the LDAP server did handle on particular exchange sligthly differently, causing the failure.
Whose fault you ask? Dunno, only know that the LDAP server got fixed, which resolved the problem.
Ah specs and the ways to read them, can cause endless fun.
Regards, Martin
The most interesting part of Connections for Domino shops is the Activity Server with its nice R8 plug-in. And that part does work with Domino very well. The part that is missing (not for very long I would guess, given all the new attention) is the profiles import/sync.
Maybe it is a decoy to distract from other shortcomings?
:-) stw
