RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange
Craig/David, I think that you may be confusing the Lotus Communications Server (LCS) with the Lotus Messaging Switch (LMS). The LCS was announced at cc:Mail Interchange '93, and was supposed to be the product that served as the Enterprise Messaging Backbone that would link X.400, SMTP/MIME, Notes and cc:Mail, and support gateways to fax, MHS, PROFS, etc. There were supposed to be versions for DOS, OS/2, UNIX (Sun, AIX, HP), NLM, and NT. It was meant to be the message transfer agent, not the message store. Lotus never shipped the product, and I assumed that it was because of technical reasons rather than internal politics, but possibly Mary is correct that it was political, because the technology eventually ended up in the Domino server. The LMS was developed by the Softswitch division of Lotus, and provided a UNIX based alternative to the mainframe based Softswitch Central. That product did ship in the mid-1990s (I forget the date). It served as a message transfer agent, and was not a message store, but it did support optional mail enabled applications such as library services and directory services. It's deja vu all over again. The same internal tensions that hurt the Lotus/cc:Mail relationship are appearing in the IBM/Lotus relationship. Russ Russell W. Chung 800.419.8726 +1/818.957.4925 fax: +1/818.951.5761 http://www.ameagle.com Dupler, Craig [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/04/02 02:03 PM Please respond to Exchange Discussions To: Exchange Discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject:RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange I guess you bought the spin. What I said was correct. R1 did not do anything to which a gateway could be attached. Mary McCarthy gave lots of pitches wherein LMS was clearly described as a combination message store and MTA common to both Notes and cc:Mail, and it did not get built because the team was not assembled. Perhaps integration with AD is finally happening. That in no way contradicts what I said about their early resistance to the notion due to their multi-platform approach. Finally, just because I don't like many of the decisions that they have made along the way, you should not interpret that as not admiring much of what they accomplished. This isn't religion. criticism is not bashing. If it were I would have some real problems, since my strongest criticisms have been reserved for some of the things that the Exchange team has done, even though I think they still win out overall. -Original Message- From: David Weinstein [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 9:03 AM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange The Technology that Notes is built on has allowed it to be resilient and morph it self to an ever changing market conditions. It was declared dead at the start of the Internet revolution but with the help of IBM was able to quickly deliver a decent HTTP server in R4 and native SMTP transport which was fine tuned in r4.5. Just a couple of corrections -Notes always had a messaging component even from the R1 days - its native workflow was built around its ability to do messaging. -LMS was actually was never intended to be a message store. It was product that Lotus developed to compete against third party tools to provide message exchange between disparate e-mail systems like PROFS, All-In-One, MS-Mail, cc:Mail, Notes and Exchange in addition to provide x.400 and SMTP transport. This was primary to assist corporations to exchange e-mail between the different systems they might have run. -Notes adaptability has allowed to continue its tight integration with NT/2000 and with the release R6 Domino, the word is, will tightly integrate AD and provide administrators a single spot to create users both for the Network and Notes. -Original Message- From: Dupler, Craig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 5:13 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange Some typo corrections - sorry. -Original Message- From: Dupler, Craig Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 2:47 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Comment on Notes and Exchange I agree with much of what has been posted, especially about the cost of switching, Notes not being horrid, and Exchange being more about . . . well that's where I started to disagree, since the phrase that was used was e-mail system. So I thought I would throw in some basics that are very old, very boring for most, but perhaps informative for anyone that is currently involved in a Notes vs. Exchange battle/discussion. What is Notes? You have to answer that in context. In 1989 when version 1 first came out, it was a workgroup collaboration tool. It did not do e-mail. It could not connect to the Internet (most LAN e-mail systems couldn't) and it could not connect to X.400 service providers
RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange
Yes I would agree. One small quibble, which actually tends to confirm your observation. As it became clear that the original LMS was not going to be built, other folks at Lotus started rapidly changing the story. Within about a 12 moth period just before the sale to IBM, LMS went from a promised product (as I described it) to an architecture with a denial that there had been a promised product, and then when that registered a no sale, they did change the name to LCS, albeit with any reference to it having something to do with cc:Mail left out, which was probably OK, because the key players in Mountain View had departed by that time. The Softswitch purchase was also interesting. Unlike Jim Manzi, Mike Zisman was keenly interested in securing a management career within IBM. So he started changing the names of the former Softswitch products to feel good. Good discussion. It is reminiscent of some of the things that have happened in our industry. The DC-10 went through several models (-10, -30, -40 and so on), but when it got into a problem with its reputation, they changed the name to MD-10 and tried to do it retroactively. Then when we did the merger, a lot of people started referring to the F-15 as the Boeing F-15, which riled some folks for awhile, but since it was still in production, it sort of went over. But when references were made to things like a Boeing DC-3, lots of people said that was going too far. Like Lotus and IBM, we even have problems referring to products that never really existed, such as the A-12. Such is life. -Original Message- From: Russ Chung [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 8:07 AM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange Craig/David, I think that you may be confusing the Lotus Communications Server (LCS) with the Lotus Messaging Switch (LMS). The LCS was announced at cc:Mail Interchange '93, and was supposed to be the product that served as the Enterprise Messaging Backbone that would link X.400, SMTP/MIME, Notes and cc:Mail, and support gateways to fax, MHS, PROFS, etc. There were supposed to be versions for DOS, OS/2, UNIX (Sun, AIX, HP), NLM, and NT. It was meant to be the message transfer agent, not the message store. Lotus never shipped the product, and I assumed that it was because of technical reasons rather than internal politics, but possibly Mary is correct that it was political, because the technology eventually ended up in the Domino server. The LMS was developed by the Softswitch division of Lotus, and provided a UNIX based alternative to the mainframe based Softswitch Central. That product did ship in the mid-1990s (I forget the date). It served as a message transfer agent, and was not a message store, but it did support optional mail enabled applications such as library services and directory services. It's deja vu all over again. The same internal tensions that hurt the Lotus/cc:Mail relationship are appearing in the IBM/Lotus relationship. Russ Russell W. Chung 800.419.8726 +1/818.957.4925 fax: +1/818.951.5761 http://www.ameagle.com Dupler, Craig [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/04/02 02:03 PM Please respond to Exchange Discussions To: Exchange Discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject:RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange I guess you bought the spin. What I said was correct. R1 did not do anything to which a gateway could be attached. Mary McCarthy gave lots of pitches wherein LMS was clearly described as a combination message store and MTA common to both Notes and cc:Mail, and it did not get built because the team was not assembled. Perhaps integration with AD is finally happening. That in no way contradicts what I said about their early resistance to the notion due to their multi-platform approach. Finally, just because I don't like many of the decisions that they have made along the way, you should not interpret that as not admiring much of what they accomplished. This isn't religion. criticism is not bashing. If it were I would have some real problems, since my strongest criticisms have been reserved for some of the things that the Exchange team has done, even though I think they still win out overall. -Original Message- From: David Weinstein [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 9:03 AM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange The Technology that Notes is built on has allowed it to be resilient and morph it self to an ever changing market conditions. It was declared dead at the start of the Internet revolution but with the help of IBM was able to quickly deliver a decent HTTP server in R4 and native SMTP transport which was fine tuned in r4.5. Just a couple of corrections -Notes always had a messaging component even from the R1 days - its native workflow was built around its ability
RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange
The Technology that Notes is built on has allowed it to be resilient and morph it self to an ever changing market conditions. It was declared dead at the start of the Internet revolution but with the help of IBM was able to quickly deliver a decent HTTP server in R4 and native SMTP transport which was fine tuned in r4.5. Just a couple of corrections -Notes always had a messaging component even from the R1 days - its native workflow was built around its ability to do messaging. -LMS was actually was never intended to be a message store. It was product that Lotus developed to compete against third party tools to provide message exchange between disparate e-mail systems like PROFS, All-In-One, MS-Mail, cc:Mail, Notes and Exchange in addition to provide x.400 and SMTP transport. This was primary to assist corporations to exchange e-mail between the different systems they might have run. -Notes adaptability has allowed to continue its tight integration with NT/2000 and with the release R6 Domino, the word is, will tightly integrate AD and provide administrators a single spot to create users both for the Network and Notes. -Original Message- From: Dupler, Craig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 5:13 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange Some typo corrections - sorry. -Original Message- From: Dupler, Craig Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 2:47 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Comment on Notes and Exchange I agree with much of what has been posted, especially about the cost of switching, Notes not being horrid, and Exchange being more about . . . well that's where I started to disagree, since the phrase that was used was e-mail system. So I thought I would throw in some basics that are very old, very boring for most, but perhaps informative for anyone that is currently involved in a Notes vs. Exchange battle/discussion. What is Notes? You have to answer that in context. In 1989 when version 1 first came out, it was a workgroup collaboration tool. It did not do e-mail. It could not connect to the Internet (most LAN e-mail systems couldn't) and it could not connect to X.400 service providers. None of those things were central (or even peripheral) to what Notes was about. It was about helping small groups of professional people work together without having to physically meet all of the time. It is also worth noting that in 1989, Windows was still in version 2, Word Perfect had just unseated WordStar as the most common word processor on DOS, and that was where the heart of the market was. So the ideas that there was a universally accepted user interface design for PC's and that there was a universal .DOC format were still alien. That world had not yet arrived. Also, it was still a pre-NDS Netware world. So in order to accomplish what the Notes team wanted to do, they had to build their own client U/I with its own style. They had to build their own directory. And, they had to build their own document sharing file format and integrate it into a database. Notes has continuously evolved from that seed. What is Exchange? That also has to be answered in context. But let's be clear, it is NOT an e-mail system. It is a messaging system. When the first development project that that eventually became Exchange was started, Microsoft had just purchased Network Courier, which was located in British Columbia. Also, cc:Mail had just been purchased by Lotus Development. Microsoft and Lotus had decided to use their purchases to buy a seed market share in the LAN mail or messaging business, while they set about to build a real messaging system from scratch. Part of what both companies got was a talent pool. Here is the first critical difference between the two products. Microsoft moved most of their Network Courier talent to the Redmond campus and used it to help build its next generation product. Lotus left cc:Mail in California and did not use its talent pool. Two very different products started to emerge - though this was not immediately clear. In fact, most of us (myself included) started out assuming that Lotus would win and become the dominant player in this space. cc:Mail had a larger installed base, and its talent pool seemed to better understand the issues going forward. Also, the cc:Mail game plan was excellent. They proposed to build a new common messaging server (combination MTA and store) for both cc:Mail and Notes. It was to be called LMS or the Lotus Messaging Server. They gave lots of presentations on this strategy. However, because they did not integrate the two companies after their purchase, the team that could have built the product was not assembled. In fact, many observers thought that there was more negative competition within Lotus between the Notes team and the cc:Mail team that there was between Lotus and Microsoft. A lot more people left the two Lotus teams to join Microsoft than
RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange
I guess you bought the spin. What I said was correct. R1 did not do anything to which a gateway could be attached. Mary McCarthy gave lots of pitches wherein LMS was clearly described as a combination message store and MTA common to both Notes and cc:Mail, and it did not get built because the team was not assembled. Perhaps integration with AD is finally happening. That in no way contradicts what I said about their early resistance to the notion due to their multi-platform approach. Finally, just because I don't like many of the decisions that they have made along the way, you should not interpret that as not admiring much of what they accomplished. This isn't religion. criticism is not bashing. If it were I would have some real problems, since my strongest criticisms have been reserved for some of the things that the Exchange team has done, even though I think they still win out overall. -Original Message- From: David Weinstein [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 9:03 AM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange The Technology that Notes is built on has allowed it to be resilient and morph it self to an ever changing market conditions. It was declared dead at the start of the Internet revolution but with the help of IBM was able to quickly deliver a decent HTTP server in R4 and native SMTP transport which was fine tuned in r4.5. Just a couple of corrections -Notes always had a messaging component even from the R1 days - its native workflow was built around its ability to do messaging. -LMS was actually was never intended to be a message store. It was product that Lotus developed to compete against third party tools to provide message exchange between disparate e-mail systems like PROFS, All-In-One, MS-Mail, cc:Mail, Notes and Exchange in addition to provide x.400 and SMTP transport. This was primary to assist corporations to exchange e-mail between the different systems they might have run. -Notes adaptability has allowed to continue its tight integration with NT/2000 and with the release R6 Domino, the word is, will tightly integrate AD and provide administrators a single spot to create users both for the Network and Notes. -Original Message- From: Dupler, Craig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 5:13 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange Some typo corrections - sorry. -Original Message- From: Dupler, Craig Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 2:47 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Comment on Notes and Exchange I agree with much of what has been posted, especially about the cost of switching, Notes not being horrid, and Exchange being more about . . . well that's where I started to disagree, since the phrase that was used was e-mail system. So I thought I would throw in some basics that are very old, very boring for most, but perhaps informative for anyone that is currently involved in a Notes vs. Exchange battle/discussion. What is Notes? You have to answer that in context. In 1989 when version 1 first came out, it was a workgroup collaboration tool. It did not do e-mail. It could not connect to the Internet (most LAN e-mail systems couldn't) and it could not connect to X.400 service providers. None of those things were central (or even peripheral) to what Notes was about. It was about helping small groups of professional people work together without having to physically meet all of the time. It is also worth noting that in 1989, Windows was still in version 2, Word Perfect had just unseated WordStar as the most common word processor on DOS, and that was where the heart of the market was. So the ideas that there was a universally accepted user interface design for PC's and that there was a universal .DOC format were still alien. That world had not yet arrived. Also, it was still a pre-NDS Netware world. So in order to accomplish what the Notes team wanted to do, they had to build their own client U/I with its own style. They had to build their own directory. And, they had to build their own document sharing file format and integrate it into a database. Notes has continuously evolved from that seed. What is Exchange? That also has to be answered in context. But let's be clear, it is NOT an e-mail system. It is a messaging system. When the first development project that that eventually became Exchange was started, Microsoft had just purchased Network Courier, which was located in British Columbia. Also, cc:Mail had just been purchased by Lotus Development. Microsoft and Lotus had decided to use their purchases to buy a seed market share in the LAN mail or messaging business, while they set about to build a real messaging system from scratch. Part of what both companies got was a talent pool. Here is the first critical difference between the two products. Microsoft moved most of their Network Courier talent
RE: Comment on Notes and Exchange
Some typo corrections - sorry. -Original Message- From: Dupler, Craig Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 2:47 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: Comment on Notes and Exchange I agree with much of what has been posted, especially about the cost of switching, Notes not being horrid, and Exchange being more about . . . well that's where I started to disagree, since the phrase that was used was e-mail system. So I thought I would throw in some basics that are very old, very boring for most, but perhaps informative for anyone that is currently involved in a Notes vs. Exchange battle/discussion. What is Notes? You have to answer that in context. In 1989 when version 1 first came out, it was a workgroup collaboration tool. It did not do e-mail. It could not connect to the Internet (most LAN e-mail systems couldn't) and it could not connect to X.400 service providers. None of those things were central (or even peripheral) to what Notes was about. It was about helping small groups of professional people work together without having to physically meet all of the time. It is also worth noting that in 1989, Windows was still in version 2, Word Perfect had just unseated WordStar as the most common word processor on DOS, and that was where the heart of the market was. So the ideas that there was a universally accepted user interface design for PC's and that there was a universal .DOC format were still alien. That world had not yet arrived. Also, it was still a pre-NDS Netware world. So in order to accomplish what the Notes team wanted to do, they had to build their own client U/I with its own style. They had to build their own directory. And, they had to build their own document sharing file format and integrate it into a database. Notes has continuously evolved from that seed. What is Exchange? That also has to be answered in context. But let's be clear, it is NOT an e-mail system. It is a messaging system. When the first development project that that eventually became Exchange was started, Microsoft had just purchased Network Courier, which was located in British Columbia. Also, cc:Mail had just been purchased by Lotus Development. Microsoft and Lotus had decided to use their purchases to buy a seed market share in the LAN mail or messaging business, while they set about to build a real messaging system from scratch. Part of what both companies got was a talent pool. Here is the first critical difference between the two products. Microsoft moved most of their Network Courier talent to the Redmond campus and used it to help build its next generation product. Lotus left cc:Mail in California and did not use its talent pool. Two very different products started to emerge - though this was not immediately clear. In fact, most of us (myself included) started out assuming that Lotus would win and become the dominant player in this space. cc:Mail had a larger installed base, and its talent pool seemed to better understand the issues going forward. Also, the cc:Mail game plan was excellent. They proposed to build a new common messaging server (combination MTA and store) for both cc:Mail and Notes. It was to be called LMS or the Lotus Messaging Server. They gave lots of presentations on this strategy. However, because they did not integrate the two companies after their purchase, the team that could have built the product was not assembled. In fact, many observers thought that there was more negative competition within Lotus between the Notes team and the cc:Mail team that there was between Lotus and Microsoft. A lot more people left the two Lotus teams to join Microsoft than moved either from Cambridge to Mountain View, or visa versa. Notes 4 sort of had an MTA concept, and sort of didn't. It did not have group calendars, and its messaging interfaces were weak. But, its collaboration environment was a lot stronger. But, alas, by this time the world had moved to NT, with its security system which was on track to become THE LAN services directory, which with the release of the AD it really has. IBM bought Lotus just before Exchange shipped and just before Notes 4 came out, but really did not start to influence the product until Notes 5, and well after the cc:Mail fiasco was ancient history. To their credit, IBM has fixed many of the problems that the new Lotus Division came with, but they made one choice which is still problematic. They decided that they needed the Notes server to be multi-platform, and thus kept the directory separate. For some, this is a huge issue and created a terrible non-integration mess. For others, it was better. It sort of depends on whether or not you think that messaging is a core network service or just an application that belongs in server rooms. That gets back to the business of Exchange not being an e-mail system. When the Electronic Messaging Association (EMA) was formed back in about 1980 or so, they set about to define a highly
