IBM Lotus users have cautiously welcomed the first
Workplace products unveiled at the Lotusphere show in
Florida.
Manpreet Singh, chief operating officer of software and services
company IT Factory, said his office has been trying to develop a
Workplace strategy. IT Factory develops applications around Lotus
software.
Customers have been asking about the technology, but no one has
signed for a deployment yet, he added.
Singh is worried about the portability of custom Domino
applications and add-ons to the Workplace system. Workplace
is based on J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition).
"I've been talking to IBM. They say it's practically drag and
drop. That's sales talk. It's impossible."
Alaa El Ghatit, a knowledge management technical strategist with
human resources outsourcing and consulting firm Hewitt Associates,
is also concerned about the resources required to migrate to a
system crafted around Workplace software.
"We really need a lot more information on the return on
investment," he said.
Although IBM said it will not abandon its Notes/Domino base, El
Ghatit is wary that keeping up with existing technology will
require following IBM down the Workplace path - a path he believed
would involve significant costs for staff retraining and new
hardware purchases.
Larry Bowden, IBM's vice-president of portal solutions and Lotus
products, said IBM is listening to customer concerns about
Workplace and will address them with tools and programs intended to
smooth the transition.
IBM will offer development tools to help programmers ease into
J2EE. Plug-ins for WebSphere Studio are available to add to it some
of the look and feel of Domino Designer, as are tools to output
applications developed in Domino Designer to J2EE-consumable
portlets.
"You can continue for years to use the skills you have," Bowden
said. "Over the course of the next three years I would suggest that
you broaden your skill set to involve J2EE, but there's no
emergency."
Amy Palazzolo, responsible for planning Ford Motor's
collaboration architecture, said she came to Lotusphere to
investigate Workplace as Ford evaluates options for a new
infrastructure.
"Ford's adoption of collaboration has mirrored the industry's,"
she said. "We have a lot of best-of-breed technologies mixed
together, which doesn't integrate well and gets expensive to
maintain."
Ford is still in the early stages of figuring how to streamline
its messaging systems, and Palazzolo said she is gathering
information from several suppliers, such as Lotus and
Microsoft.
Lotus' professed open-standards focus is "certainly very
appealing".
MedStar Health messaging and support services manager Frank
Hasting said he is very happy with his existing Domino-based
messaging system and even happier at the savings he foresees from
Workplace products such as Lotus Workplace Messaging, a simplified,
web-based system intended to bring e-mail access to users not
needing a full suite of messaging features.
Medstar supports e-mail for 23,000 users in the hospitals it
runs. Hasting would like to use Lotus Workplace Messaging to add
accounts for another 14,000 workers such as doctors and nurses, who
are likely to access the system through kiosks and need a basic
messaging system.
"In terms of the cost per client, the savings are dramatic, $15
per user versus $60," he said. "It's huge savings, an order of
magnitude. It's going to be great."
Stacey Cowley writes for IDG News
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