Responding to Chad Dickerson

Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld CTO and columnist, posted this in his blog. Ed Brill responded here. Ken Yee (he of Notes FAQ fame, but not a blogger) posted a response here in Chad's forum. I did too. Here's what I wrote:

RE: iDiscuss: CTO Connection

[8.1.5] :: Posted 24 July 2003 02:11 PST by rschwartz  

re "the collaboration problem"

Is there really just one type of collaboration? And does either Notes or Groove solve every aspect of the problem? No! Of course not, There are many different types of collaboration. Groove addresses some of them. Notes addresses some. There is some overlap. There is a lot that is unique to each.

With all respect to Ray Ozzie, it has been five years since he was the "key person" behind Notes, so _of course_ he's going to promote his new way of thinking, but he's also not going to talk much about all the things that Notes does that Groove doesn't do (yet). For all of the things that Groove does well that Notes doesn't, there are equally many things that Notes does well that Groove doesn't. Perhaps that should be modified to "Groove doesn't do yet", but if your interest is what you can do today, you can't ignore the fact that Notes was solving a larger set of problems ten years ago than any one product on the market does today. We'll have to see whether Groove, or anything else for that matter, ever gets there.

The truth is that nobody is going to use Groove alone. They'll use Groove and an email package, and maybe a portal, and maybe a web-based team room product, and maybe a document management system, a content management system, a CRM system, a variety of other collaborative applications, and perhaps even a blogging tool... and to make collaboration work smoothly they'll have to build the integration between all these things. Notes can do all of that on its own, or with the help of some IBM or 3rd party add-on products that work within one already-integrated architecture. You may, of course, choose not to use Notes for all of those things, as it will never quite be best-of-breed in areas as specialized as CRM or content management, but the point is that you do have the capabilities to do all those things -- and you can build all sorts of custom solutions around those capabilities.

That's where Notes really shines: when the customer invests in custom collaborative applications that fit the way they really do business. As good an idea as Groove is, it doesn't come close to the ease of developing custom applications that Notes provides.

I say that it's great that you have both Notes and Groove. It's a powerful combination. Of course, Notes and IBM's own instant collaboration product (until recdently known as SameTime) are a more powerful combination due to their better integration with each other. I don't know whether you have any Mac users, but if you do they're certainly not feeling empowered by Groove.

You've chosen to keep Notes because change for the sake of change is wrong. Bravo! But you say that migration away will have to be all or nothing, because it's "too tightly coupled". You say that there are migration tools, but the truth is that there is no one product out there that you can migrate to, and no set of tools that you can use to migrate with, not without great cost. The problem isn't that Notes is too tightly coupled. It is that there is no product or set of well-integrated products that makes all of Notes' capabilities nearly as easy to put together and customize. Nothing even comes close.

Richard Schwartz
RHS Consulting Inc.