The Future Is WorkPlace…

Well the WorkPlace seminar seemed to go fairly well. There was a good turnout from most of the big notes houses here in Ireland and the presentations were full of interesting little facts…

The main point that the speakers were really pushing was to do with the fact that the Lotus Notes client that we know and love today will still be around in the coming years but will have added capibilities such as the optional DB2 backend and that the IBM are trying to merge all their Lotus products into a single strand that will all have the WorkPlace title. So even if you are a 100% notes house, this time two years you will be running Lotus WorkPlace.

Another interesting fact is how IBM are trying to break up all the different products ( not just lotus products ) into their different components and then re-engineer them into the WorkPlace product so that you can just ‘turn them on’ as you require the functions once you purchase the license, and that it’s possible that if you only need a feature for a few months then you only have to pay the license for a few months.

We also had a short talk from one of the Lotus Ireland staff members. Lotus Ireland is where that main development for the Lotus WorkPlace is taking place and the speaker mentioned a product under development called ‘WorkPlace Designer’ which will become a RAD tool for Lotus WorkPlace. This will be based around the Eclipse project as will be the WorkPlace rich cient.

All Lotus products starting with 6.5.1 (Q1 2004) will be fully integration tested with each other and released all at the same time. This means an end to the mixed environments that we nearly all run today to keep SameTime, QuickPlace and other domino based applications up and running in a single domain. The next releases of software will all have their version numbers aligned to 6.5.1