Re: RDBMS-based Intranet groupware products vs Notes : RDBMS vs proprietary doc. storage

Notes versus other groupware solutions? To me, it appears to be the battle of the proprietary choices: GroupWise, Collabra, Exchange (if you can truly call that "groupware"). Over the next couple of years I suspect we'll see dozens of Internet-based solutions pop up, all claiming to be "open" because they use Internet communications protocols, but in reality they'll all just be more proprietary solutions, many of which will die off over time.

Notes certainly isn't perfect. The lack of version control sucks, and the human interface can be pretty annoying at times. It's upside is that it does what it does well. It tracks threads and provides reasonable workflow with a programmer interface that is similar enough to Visual Basic. As an added bonus, it runs on lots of different OSs -- think Microsoft Exchange will ever run on Solaris?

What about data publishing? Contrast the cool features of Notes with the brain-dead troff-wannabe that is HTML. Java is so complex that it'll be years before there are robust releases of standard tools that make it accessible to non-programmers.

Lotus/IBM are being acceptably aggressive with pricing, and with Domino technology for Web publishing, they might actually have something worth marketing. If they learn how to mass market software, we could see some interesting changes in the internetworking industry, not just in groupware.

I hate to sound like a commercial for Lotus, since I'm convinced that IBM is capable of marketing sushi as cold dead fish, but as long as IBM doesn't fuck it up too badly, Lotus Notes can probably maintain a decent lead over its competitors for a long time coming. It even has the potential to take the Web server market on head first.

Time will tell if Lotus has the balls to market Notes properly, or if they fumble it as badly as Xerox fumbled the Mac GUI. Received on Mon Jul 08 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST