IBM Lotus Notes: In the Cloud but Can I Find Emails
January 20, 2009
IBM’s Lotus Notes has been splashed across my trusty feedreader today (January 19, 2009). IBM is either kicking its Lotus Notes’s sales activity up a notch or the original Ray Ozzie program is undergoing a rebirth. The search function for Lotus Notes has been interesting. At Ziff Communications, we were early adopters of Lotus Notes. In the 1980s it was tough for me to locate a specific email. Last time I tried to locate emails and attachments in a Notes repository, the job was still tough two decades later. There were some specialized searching tools such as Grapevine. I am not sure if this system from Grapevine Technologies is still in business. Today, I can fire index Notes repositories with third party tools. These work pretty well until I have to dig out a Notes archive, figure out what is what, and then go through the indexing and searching fire drill.
Now Lotus Notes is going to the cloud. You can read the story in the Industry Standard here. According to Lincoln Spector, LotusLive provides a signal for the future of this “platform”. Mr. Spector writes in “IBM Shoots for the Cloud with LotusLive but Notes Pricing Is a Mystery”:
After a year of public beta under the name BlueHouse, LotusLive was officially announced Monday at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando. Users can sign up and start using two LotusLive services, Meetings and Events. Meetings integrates audio and video conferencing and costs $48 to $99 per month depending on the number of participants, or 25 cents per minute. Events is intended to help users manage and host an online conference. In addition to the actual conferencing, it also handles registration and other chores. Meetings costs $99 per month or 30 cents per minute per guest.
Like an infomercial, I am going to say, “Wait. There’s more.” IBM and SAP have teamed to make a “smarter workforce”, according to eWeek. Clint Boulton’s “IBM, SAP Ally on Alloy for Enterprise Collaboration here.” The new Alloy product combines Lotus Notes and SAP’s Business Suite. Now when two elephants with appetites for seven figure license deals team up, the result is going to be fascinating to watch.
The question that I had after reading these announcements was, “Okay, will I be able to search for a particular email and attachment in a way that is a marked improvement over the default string matching?” As the volume of email goes up, finding and managing email is particularly important.
There are third party tools from Wave Software here and Coveo who provide solutions. I can turn to Exalead, ISYS Search Software, and several other vendors for solutions as well.
But IBM is moving to the cloud with Lotus Notes, and I am not convinced that either IBM’s or SAP’s search and retrieval system is there yet. Announcements are fine, but when I need to locate an email, I want a low latency system that works. I don’t want to pay more money.
If anyone knows what I am missing with regard to findability, please, contribute a comment in the appropriate section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, January 20, 2009
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
