The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal..
J. Nicholas Hoover, the author of the article could be describing Domino but no, it's Sharepoint.
While IT manages master page layouts, business units can build one-off sites without IT's help. "This is why SharePoint has taken off like wildfire
General Mills Manager of .NET
So how do we counter this? What can we do? What should Lotus do?
Sharepoint is already under the covers, maybe even paid for in licensing, so why not use it? Sound familiar? It should, Lotus asks the same question, and has for years.
When you put Domino into your organization, you had, from early on, the capability to do so much more, but few understood it all or do today. The discussion databases that predate wiki's, the Team Room's that predate most collaboration software in the market, plus a built in messaging system and strong server options all provides a great package.
Now it looks like companies want to go modular. Server for this, a server for that.
Doesn't this go against the thinking of modern times?
Less power consumption, fewer servers, reduced carbon footprint, fewer Administrators, reduced expenses?
And now The Cloud hovers ever closer and may provide the myth of all the above.
You as a customer will experience all the benefits just listed, yet your provider/host of Cloud Computing just took it all on.
How are they doing with it? What are they doing to minimize it?
Does this interest you? Will it make any difference for you to go with IBM, Amazon or anyone else?
I've started looking into cloud computing here as a solution for a lot of new projects that we are bringing online. Unfortunately I'm working under a management staff that apparently has little faith in "New" technologies, I put new in quotes, because the idea of cloud computing isn't really that new, and there are some sites that offer a version of it already, aka Google apps. We have an ongoing Green initiative that we are made to take into account when we are investigating solutions for business needs, but for some reason if I suggest that we use a web service as a solution, I get a nervous laugh from the department head, and then he shoots the idea down. Usually he cites concerns of data security, worry's that the internet access to our office would go down, and then no one can work on stuff etc... I know that these aren't valid excuses to ignore emerging technologies, but I don't sign the checks around here, so I have to take the solutions down another path. I have found that I can still follow our Green IT policies, and make the Boss and his Boss happy by using tools like VMWare. Surprisingly management is more than happy to spend tons of cash on 3 monstrous servers and a new software package. We are going to use V-Motion with 2 production servers and 1 cold disaster recovery server at an off-site location to hold 12 server VM's (load balanced of course). By reducing the amount of servers in the rack, we can save on electricity, and that can turn into a measurable dollar amount for the IT department. Now if IBM would just tweak their licensing and stop counting processor cores and switch back to sockets it would make my job easier,I'm not excited about having to run a "tattle tale" utility on my Domino servers and submit them to IBM so they can be sure that I'm not using more cores that I told them I was....
ReplyDeleteScott, I hear you on this one. I'm one of those that feels the chance of a timeout by The Cloud could cripple me.
ReplyDeleteIn fact it almost did last week. And I am not a $10-20 or 100 Million company. Imagine their losses in theory.
HUge servers which contain other VMs do save money, not much, but the space and the air and well you get the picture.
Good for you to commit to finding the Green way.
As to IBM and the licensing, I agree and have brought it up as have others.