Category: ibm

Salesforce.com: Why Companies are replacing Lotus Notes

One of the beautiful, annoying aspects of the internet is that it never forgets. There are many, many examples of this trueism coming back to bite companies and individuals. So, let’s look at Salesforce.com.

Back in 2009, at Lotusphere, Salesforce was there, in force as I recall, to demonstrate how their offering integrated with LotusLive. Oh, it was a joyful time.

. . . At IBM’s Lotusphere event, salesforce.com will showcase how customers can bring together Salesforce CRM with LotusLive and Lotus Notes, to harness the power and innovation of cloud computing within their enterprises and across their customers.

Salesforce.com has also entered into an agreement with IBM to work together to further enable technology interoperability and joint customer success for businesses that use solutions from both companies.
“The cloud computing model offers customers a low-cost, low-risk way to manage their IT infrastructure,” said Polly Sumner, President, Platform, Alliances and Services, salesforce.com. “Bringing together Salesforce CRM and LotusLive can help customers further leverage cloud computing to streamline their communication and collaboration processes.”

Wow, kittens AND unicorns. It was beautiful.

Here we are, at the end of 2012. How’s that relationship between IBM and Salesforce working out?

Well, the reality is that Notes penetrated companies pretty darn well back in the 90’s (like a Nirvana song permeated the radio waves), and the departmental applications sprouted and filled all the holes that IT often couldn’t get to. Love it or hate it, Notes became a mainstay platform of the enterprise. In a recent survey we did of our Dreamforce 2012 attendees, we found that 73% did indeed still use Lotus Notes. And that 70.3% were considering replacing Lotus Notes, the majority within the year.

No hard numbers, as in “number of respondants,” but that doesn’t really matter. Of Salesforce’s customers at Dreamforce, 73% of their customers use Lotus IBM Notes and Domino. Of those respondants, as I read it, 70.3% of the 73% are looking to replace it.

[Blog intermission] I am rather shocked that there were that many IBM Notes and Domino customers attending. Consider that IBM probably has less than 50% of the total messaging market, and that of that number, 73% were at Dreamforce. I would venture to say that only other place on Earth, where more than 73% of the audience is IBM Notes and Domino customers is at Connect. Or one of the many User Group conferences held around the world.

What the heck happened from 2009 until now that soured the once exceptional relationship between IBM and Salesforce? Remember, it was all kittens, sunshine, and unicorns back in 2009.

If you read the comments to the Salesforce post, and I highly recommend that you do, Ed Brill chimes in. But then, so does Steve Wood, VP of Platform for Salesforce:

Let me start by making a bold statement: we like Lotus Notes! We also have a huge respect for Lotus Notes developers. It has been a transformational platform for many businesses. It illustrated how empowering the business to “do more” with software can result in amazing things. However, it’s old. And I think I could probably get you to agree that IBM has under-invested. It’s client/server (more on xpages later), users find the product to be pretty clunky from a UI perspective, workflow has to be coded, and it doesn’t REALLY have reporting (it has views). It’s just kind of… well… old and tired. All of this stuff means that Lotus Notes users and developers are looking for a new player – we hear that from surveying just those people. They like Lotus and what it does, but they feel trapped in an aging and underinvested platform – that’s where we see our opportunity (and we’re investing heavily).

I wonder if Salesforce will be at Connect?

Link: Salesforce.com Demonstrates Cloud Computing Solutions at IBM Lotusphere 2009

Link: Here’s Why Companies are Replacing Lotus Notes (And You Should Too)

Cringely: More stupid IBM tricks put customer data at risk

Keeping an eye on Cringely, as he continues to watch IBM. This time around, IBM failed its internal security audit which means that those of you that rely on IBM Global Services to manage your data centers might want to take notice and demand some things from your sales rep or account manager.

I heard from dozens of readers this morning about a message IBM sent to its current employees concerning their 401K plan — changing it from a contribution in every paycheck to a single contribution at the end of the year. Of course if you are laid off that means no annual contribution, less retirement savings, but a real bonus to the company. This, in itself, isn’t worth a column. It’s just Scrooge IBM being more Scrooge-like in search of that 2015 earnings target. What is worth a column is putting this news in the context of IBM having failed its recent internal security audit, which should concern IBM customers.

What, they didn’t tell you?

More >

Firefox and iNotes

Damn, Firefox causes problems for me and iNotes. You visit a customer to do a simple Domino upgrade and what do you end up spending most of your time resolving? Firefox and iNotes issues.

Now, usually, Firefox doesn’t cause a lot of trouble, especially when you stick with one release and refuse to upgrade. But, of course, there are those among us that cannot abide by being a point release behind. Those are the people that immediately download the latest and greatest. In the case of Firefox, that is a weekly download.

Well, at least it seems like there is a weekly (daily?) update to Firefox.

In this instance, I was able to convince the on-site technical support people to discourage too many people from upgrading to Firefox 15, but for those that did upgrade, they were experiencing some issues:

  • When e-mails came in and there were URLs in the text, they weren’t hotlinks.
  • If they attempted to send mail or calendar invites and there were URLs in them, the message/invites couldn’t be sent.
  • They couldn’t attach files to any mail messages.

Wow, that’s fun.

Thankfully, a well constructed search of the technotes resulted in a solid hit.

iNotes not working as expected with Firefox 15 and later

Added the notes.ini setting to the servers, restarted the HTTP task and all their problems went away. That is, probably until someone upgreades to  Firefox 21, or whatever version is the most current right now.

The lesson is that while it is easy to upgrade your Domino servers, be sure to check the TechNotes/wiki/InfoCenter/forums for issues with Firefox. You can save yourself some time and effort by implementing the requested changes before you restart the servers and tell everyone “I’m done.”

Sametime Gateway Update

A while back, I asked if anyone knew Sametime Gateway. I certainly appreciated the responses, however restarting the Gateway and the Nodes was not my idea of a good time.

Even if we were able to script it.

What did opening a PMR with IBM get us?

After much time and effort, on both IBM’s and our part, it came down to a problem between, not the Gateway and Google Talk, as I expected, but a communication issue between the Sametime Gateway and the Sametime XMPP server. That’s right kids, the IBM pieces weren’t able to communicate with each other, which resulted in the installation of an IBM patch. A patch that was unknown to the IBM techs that were trying valiantly to resolve this issue.

Wonderful.

However, this episode did bring me to a harsh conclusion – there are so many moving parts in these new tools from IBM, so many different areas within IBM involved in the development and support of these tools, that there is no one person or group that is responsible for, in this case, the Instant Messaging stack. You need a WebSphere person. You need a Sametime person. You may even need a person from Israel who was there on “Day One” when someone decided that moving Sametime to WebSphere was a good idea, someone with A LOT of institutional knowledge. Then, at the end, someone, somewhere, discovers a patch. A patch that was unknown to the tech, until he happened to ask the right person,the right question.

Apparently, important information is missing from a wiki somewhere.

While I certainly see the usefulness of having something like Sametime Gateway installed and functioning, it’s true value would be delivered by allowing more than just two external communities to communicate with it; AOL Clearinghouse and Google Talk. Yes, that’s right, this is probably the only Instant Messaging gateway on the planet that talks to only two communities. I see no indication from anyone that Yahoo will soon be added back into the mix. Nor do I see any other instant messaging community lining up to be included to Sametime Gateway.

Where is the value you are delivering with this product, IBM?