InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
May 31, 1999
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While QuickPlace eases team application development, it continues to take advantage of Domino's powerful application development tools. Lotus will release a QuickPlace software developers' kit that documents hooks into the QuickPlace object hierarchy, but Notes developers are already using Domino Designer to customize QuickPlace templates and integrate QuickPlace data with traditional Notes and file system data. The developers' kit will also provide tools that let Dream Weaver, FrontPage, and other Web authoring packages generate QuickPlaces.
Lotus plans to incorporate Sametime services into the next release of QuickPlace; both products leverage the Domino Directory, making it easy to map Sametime awareness and authentication to each QuickPlace and its interior rooms. Lotus has already provided sample applications that add Sametime features to Domino mail, discussion, and document repository databases. The Sametime Meeting Services Programming Toolkit includes ActiveX controls for Notes and Java applets for meeting control, electronic white boarding, and application sharing.
Some of the QuickPlace data structures that are passed around internally are already built with XML, but QuickPlace 1.0 does not expose XML directly to developers because of differences in the way XML is handled across the browser audience. Lotus will likely leverage Office 2000's use of XML to store and search document metadata in QuickPlace 2.0, building on its use of Microsoft technologies such as Internet Explorer's Dynamic HTML editor in the current release.
Sametime, QuickPlace, and Domino/Notes release 5 share a dependency on the Java Virtual Machine 1.1.4 when displaying in Netscape Navigator. Internet Explorer users can take advantage of QuickPlace's rich text component to insert images from the Web, something not available in Notes release 5 Web-capable apps. Since QuickPlace is bundled free with Domino Application and Enterprise servers, Domino developers can use the new technology without waiting for Lotus to fold the capability back into the next release of Domino.
Keep It Simple
This rich level of functionality exposed by Domino and its associated products to enterprise developers certainly makes it an attractive platform for Web applications. But the key to Lotus' long-term success as a platform vendor is to make using those features as easy as possible. That has been the main attraction of Domino technology vs. solutions built on comparable Microsoft products. Domino is delivered in a state closer to a complete offering than the collection of components that make up a BackOffice solution.
That selling point hasn't been lost on Lotus and its partners, nor has it been lost on IBM. The built-in database connectivity to IBM's DB2 in Domino release 5 could be a foreshadowing of more bundles like the IBM Suite for NT unveiled last year, and similar suites for other operating systems. A combined Domino-DB2 suite could begin to threaten Microsoft's BackOffice suite--and win IBM lots of new DB2 customers.
However, Domino may have to devolve a little to succeed as a platform. Lotus has already shown some indications of heading in this direction with the messaging-only version of Domino and the NT version without an integrated Web server; it's possible that Domino could be further componentized for development purposes once it's integrated with both COM and Corba. For example, Domino's integrated directory and certificate services could be used in a COM+ and Corba environment as an alternative to Microsoft's Active Directory Service and Novell Directory Services in some environments, or it could be used for some applications as a placeholder while waiting for ADS to mature.
In the long run, Lotus needs to build up something similar to Microsoft's developer community to compete. That's begun to happen--Lotus' DevCon event and Web resources have started to draw developer interest, but there's nothing that really parallels Microsoft's tools and supporting materials such as the Microsoft Developer Network in Lotus' arsenal. IBM has a developer program that somewhat mirrors that of MSDN, but it's really aimed more at the consulting community than at the business developer level.
Lotus certainly has the will to succeed and the means to continue to develop Domino as an enterprise platform. It's time to stand and deliver.
Steve Gillmor is director of Southern Digital Inc., a Charleston, S.C., IT consulting firm; he can be reached at sgillmor@southerndigital.com. Sean Gallagher is managing editor of InformationWeek Labs.
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