Workplace is looking good to me…

I know that some of the community think there is no compelling reason to install Workplace in their organization, but I definitely think differently.

Yesterday’s final session that I hit was on Workplace Designer. Let me tell you, I really think they are hitting all the right Notes (pardon the pun) on this one. They are designing a RAD tool that Domino developers will be VERY familiar with. It has many of the same paradigms we’ve all been used to, but instead of creating .NSF’s it’s creating J2EE apps for Workplace Portal. It’s still in its infancy and I’m already excited.

This morning I hit the overview of Workplace Services Express, and I’m not as geeked out over that. I think it’s a great platform, but I don’t know if it will benefit my employer. We already have Domino and Sametime installed and used heavily, so those need to integrate. Well, you can use Domino’s LDAP as your authentication, and you can use Domino mail (served up through a portlet) and they also have portlets to serve up custom Domino apps. So far, so good. But, the Instant Messaging is separate of Sametime, and even though it’s based on SIP, the speaker didn’t think that Express will support talking to the Sametime community. Also, even though it wasn’t said, it didn’t look like rich client would be a part of Express either. Lastly, there didn’t seem to be good ways to geographically load balance while he said that the full-blown Workplace portal does.

So, I’ll be in several more Workplace sessions today because I need to figure out exactly which path I’m heading down, but in all, Workplace is impressing me from the portal side of things. There is a lot of great integration points, and when the rich client hits, it’s going to be phenominal.