This morning I came across a tweet from Ed Brill about Symphony / Open Office with a link to this article about Apache OpenOffice IBM Edition. The article is positive reinforcing that although Symphony 3.0.1 is likely to be the last release, IBM’s commitment to OpenOffice continues (as those of us in the yellow bubble have known for a while) both by feeding Symphony code back into the OpenOffice project and in the release of IBM Docs, announced last week at Lotusphere.
But one point stood out for me in the article. Apache OpenOffice and the IBM Edition will not be based on Eclipse. And anyone at Lotusphere or who used LotusLive Symphony (the tech preview name for IBM Docs) will be aware that IBM Docs is browser-based. At the same time last week, a browser plugin was announced to use Notes Client applications through Firefox and a.n.other browser, to minimise the footprint on PCs. Also Connections mail will enable users to access their inbox via Connections (again in a browser), whether that be Lotus Notes mail or Exchange. And for three years XPages has enabled developers to extend Notes Client applications more easily and more quickly to the web. Similarly there are mobile applications to access all IBM Collaboration Solutions products.
With recent developments, the focus for a single access point has shifted to browser or mobile. So the elephant in the room is this.
What is the future of the Notes Client?
Symphony 3.0.1 will still be supported. There has been extensive work to improve XPages in Notes Client performance in 8.5.3. Embedded experiences will work in both Notes mail and iNotes mail. But composite applications seem to have died a death (except for the Mail application). Symphony integration from Notes Client does not seem pervasive and with XAgents, integration with Excel or PDF seems the way forward. Plugin development for Notes Client has had great potential. With Karsten Lehmann’s work on integrating from XPages to Notes Client, there is potential for offering enhanced functionality to XPages applications that cannot be provided in a browser. But Notes Client plugin development has not been embraced by more than a few in the development community.
But let us not forget that the Notes Client still has one major advantage over ANY competition. Local replicas. While all around you are bemoaning the vagaries of wifi, anyone with a Notes Client and local replicas can still be productive. But the utopia of the Notes Client as a single access point, as the application you use to complete your daily work, the utopia that seemed a possibility with R8 seems to be gone. I cannot conceive the Notes Client disappearing completely and 8.5.4 will ship with Symphony 3.0.1. But if you want a single access point for your daily work, it looks like that’s more likely to be a browser, with all the headaches that brings for everyone in IT departments.
” more likely to be a browser, with all the headaches that brings for everyone in IT departments.”
It’s interesting, in customer conversations over the last 24-36 months, we’ve heard more and more preference for a browser- and mobile-centric view of end-user access. The Project Vulcan blueprint outlined this direction from the IBM point of view and now with things like the XPages work, the Notes Application Player Plug-in, IBM Connections Mail… you can see we are executing on that. Not to the exclusion of the Notes client of course – Notes Social Edition will have embedded experiences through Open Social 2.0 and can work with IBM Connections for activity streams. Notes Social Edition also has improvements in core mail and calendar functions.
A long, long time ago, my boss told me that Lotus Notes was always going to be the best at four things – offline, mobility, performance, and integration. I continue to see these as the value propositions for the Notes client going forward, in Social Edition and beyond. However, I see the iNotes/XPages/browser experience as having caught up in many ways, so more and more end users will be delighted with the browser-based approach.
More than 90% of all Exchange users are using the Outlook fat client. Even when running Exchange in the Cloud the preferred client is Microsoft Outlook. When we speak of Mobile I very well remember how it was when IBM introduced iNotes Ultra Light. Finally it was native access on the iPhone that made people happy, not a web interface (and Traveler so far got very positive reviews). Native in many cases still beats the browser. Googles dirty little secret is that hardly anyone using the 50$ Google Apps uses their Office applications as the premier client.
The Notes client, as it currently is, may not have a stellar future especially when only the XPages programming model is moving forward. The overhead is just too big. I still would prefer Notes to have a good story in client/server AND mobile/web. I admit this would probably again mean a major overhaul of the client.
And even for the Eclipse model I am not sure if it would not have been more successful if capabilities to easily design composite applications would have been implemented right from the start. It is not that nobody wants to use the Java elements that are used in the mailfile. It is that hardly anyone knows how to do it in a simple way. The design elements have never made it into the premier tool for designing Notes applications. The Dominio Designer client.
It is how it is and certainly XPages are a solid way for developing new applications. The application player keeps Notes at the functional level of Notes 7 which was introduced in 2005. I am aware that many are very excited about it but would still prefer an approach that better connects the new with the old Notes world.
@Ed I agree on the strengths of the Notes Client. Improvements in e.g. OSGi on the server and XPages have certainly allowed the browser to catch up on integration though. On the rest it’s not only better than a browser, it’s vastly superior to most rich client alternatives, which is wonderful.
Re: browser headaches, as a developer, supporting different browsers has become easier with XPages, but with companies using variants of Internet Explorer from 6 to 9, with or without compatibility mode, that can be a nightmare. Dojo charting for example will only print in compatilbility mode on IE8, but compatibility mode has its own issues. Business-critical web-based systems, the browsers supported and requirements for testing are often a restriction to alternatives and upgrades, hence a number of companies still using IE6 (though admittedly upgrade issues are not specific to just browsers).
Long ago when they first started openly talking about the Project Vulcan initiative it was very clear the direction..
http://www.idonotes.com/IdoNotes/idonotes.nsf/dx/project-vulcan-say-goodbye-to-the-notes-client.htm
Re supporting the Notes Client Versus the browser app – I contend that the supposed pain/effort for IT departments to support the client is largely self caused by poor implementation and minimal maintenance. In a corporate world the work effort is then switched to the deV team to conVert the Notes app to browser(s), whether with domino/xpages/flex/whateVer. All it does is shift the effort around so keep the client with all the useabilty/business benefits that brings, shame the UI is shamefully out of date – thats another debate.