This January I will be attend my tenth Lotusphere in 15 years. Having started with Lotus Notes v2, and now experiencing v8.5.1, the road has been long and rough. Now, I am looking at Notes with an experience from the strategic side, and I do see issues with Notes from a longevity point of view.

To start, where I am working now, Notes became the “glue” for applications between the legacy ERP and the need to have processes that the ERP could not service. This usually has spawned applications that did/do not integrate well over time. As well as developed in verticals that did not allow for re-use or even a common development library. I am now dealing with a Tier 1 ERP deployment and I will be attending Lotusphere to see what integration points exist.

This is where I feel IBM is letting it’s customers down. To be specific, my company does not wish to engage in the partner community to solution needs or integration. due to perceived value. Our management is under the impression that typically the partner community is expensive and the knowledge transfer has varied success. I personally feel that IBM could do a better job of exposing solutions. This might allow IBM to deal with the SMB space in a way that leverages a market that Notes typically does not penetrate.  My point is really to ask the Domino team to expand on the default application set that comes with Domino/Notes.  Now I know all about Foundation Server and how that is positioned, but does require some distinct skills (linux/domino) to exist in staff that typically do not co-exist. I do remember being the only Domino Admin that ran on Solaris 2.6,  and while it is a bit easier to run on Linux/Unix today, not many of those folks are interested in Domino. (Yes, I do know that Domino folks are interested in Linux).

So, if anyone can offer tips on integration of Oracle OBIEE or other eclipse based solutions, I would love to hear them either through email or at Lotusphere.