Licensing Quiz: Who needs a Notes licence?

A customer has 78 names in his Domino Directory.

A. 40 names are people who use Notes within his company eg Fred Smith
B. 20 names are ex-employees whose mail is automatically forwarded to someone in Group A
C. 10 names are forwarding addresses for employees on a MS Exchange server.
D. 5 names are shared jobs with multiple people using the ID depending on the time of day (but only ever one at a time) eg. Receptionist
E. 2 names are dummy IDs used by the developer to test new systems
F. 1 name is a shared job with four people using copies of the same ID concurrently on different computers eg. multiple shipping clerks entering data into a Notes database

So how many licenses does the customer need?
.

OT: Microsoft 's uncertainty about its financial future

For my last post I dipped into Microsoft.com to check on their earnings report for Q2 and on the way out I noticed that Microsoft had put some caveats on their earnings forecast. Now there's nothing wrong with doing that - it makes perfect sense to tell readers what challenges the company faces - but I was intrigued by the tone of those caveats. Here's the actual text:

Actual results could differ materially because of factors such as:

• challenges to Microsoft’s business model;
• intense competition in all of Microsoft’s markets;
• Microsoft’s continued ability to protect its intellectual property rights;
• claims that Microsoft has infringed the intellectual property rights of others;
• the possibility of unauthorized disclosure of significant portions of Microsoft’s source code;
• actual or perceived security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products that could reduce revenue or lead to liability;
• government litigation and regulation affecting how Microsoft designs and markets its products;
• Microsoft’s ability to attract and retain talented employees;
• delays in product development and related product release schedules;
• significant business investments that may not gain customer acceptance and produce offsetting increases in revenue;
• unfavorable changes in general economic conditions, disruption of our partner networks or sales channels, or the availability of credit that affect the value of our investment portfolio or demand for Microsoft’s products and services;
• adverse results in legal disputes;
• unanticipated tax liabilities;
• quality or supply problems in Microsoft’s consumer hardware or other vertically integrated hardware and software products;
• impairment of goodwill or amortizable intangible assets causing a charge to earnings;
• exposure to increased economic and regulatory uncertainties from operating a global business;
• geopolitical conditions, natural disaster, cyberattack or other catastrophic events disrupting Microsoft’s business;
• acquisitions and joint ventures that adversely affect the business;
• improper disclosure of personal data could result in liability and harm to Microsoft’s reputation; and
• outages and disruptions of online services if Microsoft fails to maintain an adequate operations infrastructure.

Most of these seem reasonable but there were some points that seemed just a little... well... paranoid:

• Microsoft’s continued ability to protect its intellectual property rights;
• claims that Microsoft has infringed the intellectual property rights of others;
• government litigation and regulation affecting how Microsoft designs and markets its products;
• adverse results in legal disputes;
• unanticipated tax liabilities;

Why would there be a problem here if Microsoft was behaving as a good corporate citizen? Each of these points seems to operate on the unspoken principle that Microsoft might be charged and convicted of unlawful behavior. So pick a theory:

1. Microsoft has no faith in the legal system and is concerned they will pay a large financial penalty as part of an Unjust and Unfair decision.
2. Microsoft has a lot of faith in the legal system and is concerned they will pay a large financial penalty as part of a Just and Fair decision.
3. Microsoft is just hedging its bets and avoiding all responsibility for predicting their own revenue.

I don't know the answer for sure, but I'm leaning towards Number 2.
.

OT: Micro revenues in a Softening Market.

I see that Microsoft revenue for Q2 dropped 17% year on year and net income dropped 29%. I think it's great that Microsoft will need to pull in its financial horns for a while but my reasoning may differ from the more extreme pockets of the Yellowverse.

What I'm hoping for is that Microsoft will now refocus on creating products that generate revenue rather than just running spoiler campaigns to screw up the rest of the market such as Notes Compete and MS Foundation (without an 's') Server.

I believe all parts of the IT market are well served by having two leaders fighting it out for market share. Any time that a company (IBM or Microsoft or anyone else) comes near to achieving total domination in one segment then innovation and price competitiveness take a back seat to monopolistic behavior.

IBM/Lotus and Microsoft will both be around in the messaging and collaboration market for many years to come and I hope they both enjoy a healthy market share during that time. The competition should help keep both of them honest - although I admit that strategy hasn't been working too well on the Microsoft side of the fence.

The only problem with this scenario is that it condemns c. 40% of system admins to working with MS Exchange and I'm not sure that's something I should wish for. Bad Karma and all that.

Oh well, better them than me :)
.

Why isn't Lotus Traveller available for Lotus Foundations Server?

IIRC correctly the average Lotus Foundations Server sale included 20 client licenses which makes me think that IBM/Lotus should be focusing on software enhancements that appeal to that size of business.

Lotus Foundations Branch Office gave us the ability to replicate from a Foundations server to a Head Office Domino server and that's a valid enhancement. IMHO the inclusion of VMWare enhancement was also a good move. It neatly meets any customer objection that they still need to run some specialized archaic software on their primary production server.

So I've been impressed with the early moves for LFS but now I'm thinking Lotus is heading down a strange path. The upcoming Foundations Reach will give us instant messaging and presence awareness, point to point VoIP and video chat capabilities. Now all of those are good things but are they really make or break points for purchases in the SMB market?

On the other hand almost every customer (and potential customer) for Lotus Foundations has been bugging me about Lotus Traveller for months and from what I can tell we won't be seeing that product on Foundations this side of Christmas and maybe a few months after. I know Traveller needs to be ported to Linux - my question is, why did SameTime get ported first?

Is Lotus trying to catch a larger share of the 20 user market or are they more interested in repositioning Foundations for a larger company? Whatever the reason, the lack of Traveller will probably scuttle at least one Foundations sale for me (hopefully I'll be able to sell the customer a Domino server on the rebound).

I'm not understanding the Lotus strategy here. If we're trying to capture the SMB market then I'd have thought that including Traveller (and maybe a bundled copy of Eric Mack's e-Productivity template) would be the sort of chrome that would appeal to the SMB CEO. Instead of that we get Sametime and Video Chat.

I'm sure Lotus know more about marketing to SMB than I do, but I sure wish they'd explain what they're thinking.
.

OT: Has Bing lost its Bling?

When Microsoft Bing was released I decided that I would set aside my instinctive avoidance of all things Evil and so I reset my home page from Google to Bing. After all, my major dislike for Microsoft is based on their abuse of their monopoly power (...and their marketing lies and their bad operating system and their Rip-and-Replace contempt for the customer etc. etc. but lets stick with abuse of monopoly power at the moment). Therefore it's a natural progression for me to now turn against the Google near-monopoly on Search and support the underdog.

Before you ask, I've just never felt good with Yahoo so they never got a chance in my choice of Search providers.

I'm now struggling with the temptation to reverse my decision. The problem is that Bing just doesn't have the reach of Google and when you're looking for esoteric technical information sometimes you're lucky to get half a dozen hits. Over the last few weeks I've found myself searching on Bing and then checking the results on Google... and Google invariably delivers more hits. I know that my personal strategy isn't going to count for zip in determining search market share and it's certainly costing me billable time to double check my results.

Maybe Bing has a search filter that is set to randomly ignore sites that talk about Lotus software. Maybe they just need to send out more bots. Either way, I think I'll be heading back to Google for a couple of months and give Bing a chance to build some bigger indexes.

Does anyone else use Bing to search for technical info? How do you find it compares to Google?
.

OT: Lotus Small Business Suite

Anyone heard about a new product called "Lotus Small Business Suite" ?
.

OT: Is .docx the new standard?

I just had an email discussion with a client who had sent me a file with a .docx extension. My response to him was that .docx was a proprietary Microsoft format and I would prefer it as Open Document Format or even as a .doc so I could read it. His response was that Microsoft was the standard format and I needed to get software that could read it.

It's always difficult having these discussions with clients but I managed to gently walk him through saving the file as a .doc and resending it to me.

So I'm curious about the rest of the world. Has .docx succeeded in becoming the new standard or does the rest of the Lotus world insist on receiving .doc as a file format?
.

Foundations: Letting the Tiger out of the Box

Did you ever see the cartoon with a man sitting precariously on an energetically bouncing crate with one hand holding onto the wall for balance while the other is grasping a telephone into which he is shouting... "OK, I've got the Tiger into the crate. What do I do now?"

I often think that's a good metaphor for IBM/Lotus and Lotus Foundations Server. IBM has purchased, re-engineered and repackaged Foundations and released it into the market but they are still struggling to find a way to position it within the regular Lotus product line. The big problem is stopping it from cannabalising the standard Domino product line. After all, if you can get all of the features of a regular Domino server integrated with its own firewall, anti-spam, anti-virus, file and print management... yada yada yada ... for less than the cost of that regular Domino server then why wouldn't you go with it? What's to stop the entire installed base of Domino customers from migrating across to LFS?

The strategists at IBM/Lotus wouldn't really have a problem with that scenario. For a start, there's no upgrade path so everyone needs to purchase new LFS software licences and the kicker is that the Windows Server licence for all of those existing Domino servers wouldn't be renewed. More money for IBM/Lotus and less money for Microsoft. I don't think the Yellowverse has a problem with that. My guess is that IBM/Lotus are struggling to develop a sensible pricing scheme that scales from a $300 SMB server all the way up to the $30,000 Domino Utility server, and until they do, they are enforcing technical and licencing constraints with the basic Foundations product to prevent it from running as a fully fledged corporate Domino server.

I certainly don't endorse bypassing the IBM/Lotus licencing restrictions on LFS but I'm all in favor of tweaking the product to make it run more smoothly for the customers. This week I'll be looking at Bob Baehr's LOTUS.PRO Advanced Web Configuration for Foundations. If it does what it says it does then I'll certainly be recommending it to my customers.


Damn it Bob... you've gone and started me blogging again even after I swore off that activity as a waste of my billable time.
.