Important New Lotus White Paper

Via Ed The Tireless Promoter Of IBM Collaboration, a new White Paper from IBM Lotus Software titled "Protect and enrich your Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino investments" has been published. This is an important paper, and everyone in the extended community of Lotus technologists should be sure to get it into the hands of IT strategists and decision-makers in their organizations.

This paper is unapologetically pro-Notes and Domino, and that's a refreshing difference IMHO from the messages akin to "we're moving on -- get used to it" and "we know that Notes and Domino are great, but our customers are telling us that's not good enough because it isn't standards-based" that we've been hearing for a while.

Another thing that I note in this paper is the complate absence of any mention of "contextual collaboration". Although the portal builder component for Domino is mentioned several times in the paper, the phrase "contextual collaboration" doesn't come up at all. I take this as confirmation that those words, which have almost been a mantra for Lotus these past two years, seem to have drifted into the far distance on Lotus' strategic radar. I talked to Ed at Groupware Magazine's London conference recently, about the fact that for quite some time every reference to contextual collaboration that I've seen in Lotus presentations has really just been about integrating IM and awareness into applications, and that this falls far short of what I see as the real value proposition of contextual collaboration. Real contextual collaboration, which IMHO is the only good reason for Lotus to be pursuing the strategy of integrating Domino technologies into Websphere, and which should involve much more than portlets and awareness, is still apparenly years away.