The Ongoing Notes “Legacy” problem
Last week I was honored to part of a webcast that announced the worldwide launch of IBM Notes 9 Social edition. I was able to speak about how our company uses custom applications built on XPages and Domino to run our business. I also spoke as to how Traveler has helped our workforce be more connected, and how we are looking forward to integrating Connections into our Notes investment via Activity Streams and embedded experiences.
As the Director of IT for our company, I’m always trying to work with the best technologies to meet our needs. Those are not always IBM technologies. We use vendors like Microsoft, EMC, GoToMeeting, Salesforce.com, Basecamp and Box.com. I tend to choose the best platform to fit our specific needs, whatever they may be. I’m not simply an IBM fanboy.
That said, we’ve built the software that runs our business on XPages and Domino because it’s a great platform. We can’t buy off the shelf software to manage our business, it simply doesn’t exist. We could buy project management and warehousing programs, but it would be very hard to bend them to work the way we need. That’s why Domino is such a strong platform. I have a very small staff of very skilled developers who have built amazing applications that our business relies on to manage every bit of work we do. We have built it to fit our business processes exactly, and we can add in features at a very rapid pace. We integrate everything including our Microsoft ERP system, and I couldn’t be happier.
So why am I writing a blog post mentioning “legacy” on the day the brand new IBM Notes 9 Social Edition is released? Well, it’s because the market still sees it as legacy. There has really been no discernible marketing to the contrary. I’ll give you three quick examples that have all happened in the last couple of weeks. All were manageable, but I can’t believe I even have to deal with them.
First, a client of ours had been auditing our warehousing software. A German IT Auditor questioned (with much disdain) why were were using Lotus Notes instead of a “pro” warehousing system, and stated that the fact that we used Notes was a red flag. This was from a very large, very well known organization, yet this IT Auditor considered Notes legacy and worthy of disdain. It was even insinuated that nobody used Notes anymore.
I explained our reasoning for using Notes and Domino much like I did above, and then touted a brand new release of the product as well and over 100 million users worldwide, yet I feel that it fell on deaf ears.
The second one was an executive asking one of my employees what our “exit strategy for Notes” was? When the exec was talking with people from other companies, and some of our clients, the general consensus was that Notes was dead and people couldn’t believe we were still on it. So the executive assumed we had to be moving off of it soon.
Part of that is on me, and I need to continue to do a better job of internal marketing, but the reason I HAVE to do so much in the way of internal marketing is because there is little to no external marketing. You really don’t know that Notes exists unless you deal with IBM on a regular basis.
The last thing that happened was a simple offhanded comment on the This Week In Tech podcast. I don’t remember the context but the host Leo Laporte stated how he hated Notes and would never use it again. Granted, this man hadn’t touched the software in over seven years, but he was still attacking it. I’m sure he has no idea how nice the new client is, or how good the development environment is in XPages. Yet, he still made that statement that was heard as fact by tens of thousands of listeners.
Those of you that know me, and have read this blog for nearly a decade know that I will take IBM to task when it’s warranted, and I will give credit where credit is due. Obviously I believe wholeheartedly in Domino as a platform. I wouldn’t use it otherwise, and I wouldn’t take time out of my busy schedule to record customer testimonials or get interviewed for quotes for press releases. I am very publicly on record with the fact that Notes and Domino is the platform from which our business is run.
Today is a watershed moment. IBM Notes and Domino 9 Social Edition has been launched and it’s the best the product has ever been. It’s truly a great piece of software with so much potential in the right hands. It would be really nice if the tech universe starting seeing it that way. I would just like the perception of Notes to get better in the marketplace, because right now perception doesn’t match reality, and hopefully IBM can work on changing that.
March 21, 2013 @ 8:47 pm
A great post. It’s a shame people see Notes as legacy. Thankfully there are some excellent websites and web applications easily accessible like Collaboration Today that people can be pointed towards. But with the team that you have, Domino is definitely in the right hands at your company.
March 21, 2013 @ 8:57 pm
I recognise this battle, has been a long one for us to get Notes seen as non-legacy. Managed to get the win today (nice for it to coincide with Notes 9) by pushing xWork as a solution for an authenticated platform for 20,000 casual/contract employees who don’t have email. The rapid development, flexibility offered by xPages, and particularly the mobile experience is what’s got the win, along with the shrinkwrap nature of xWork.
March 21, 2013 @ 9:24 pm
I started marketing it on October 11, 2012. People were not happy.
I am afraid you won’t be able to win this war. IBM has given up doing that a long, long time ago. You are on a small island in the Pacific, it’s 1947 and things are as they are. There is no battleship coming to get you. From that very island, things look quite OK. Nobody is attacking you, everybody is well fed, your business is doing well. Once in a while somebody is wondering what you are still doing there. But there is no rush. The island will continue to feed you. 🙂
March 21, 2013 @ 10:16 pm
Sadly IBM has been very ok with letting many partners and vendors refer to Notes apps as legacy. Personally I would have been all over that shit if I had been at IBM. The whole move your “legacy” notes apps to XPages was the totally wrong approach.
March 21, 2013 @ 10:16 pm
I don’t mean using XPages was the wrong approach, I mean the way people phrased it was wrong.
March 21, 2013 @ 10:33 pm
When I left IBM I was actually surprised at how negatively the rest of the world thought (thinks) of Notes, especially in Silicon Valley. It’s unfortunate as Notes/Domino still does so much that modern “social software” does not.
March 21, 2013 @ 10:38 pm
Spot on, John!
March 21, 2013 @ 10:56 pm
Are HTML 1.0 pages “legacy?” Here’s an example of one: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html
How about HTML 2.0 pages? http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/index.html
HTML 2.0 was finalized in 1995, around the same time Notes 4.0 came out.
March 22, 2013 @ 12:31 am
Great post, John. We get it. We always have. IBM has just not, nor likely ever, have an effective marketing group to sell this product and its features. In my opinion, they have come to rely on the blogging community/yellow bubble to do the footwork, which is why I refuse to play fanboy about things on my blog anymore. It’s not our jobs to tell the stories and sell what it can do. It’s time they wake up. That’s just my opinion.
March 22, 2013 @ 4:38 am
Mr Roling, you are a star.
Volker, your analysis is at the same time both amusing and disturbing.
Side note, isn’t ‘legacy’ synonymous with ‘superseded’. How can something that is fully backward compatible – and as Alan mentioned – provides functionality that simply doesn’t exist in other applications, be ‘superseded’?
+1 Carl Tyler, I would have piled on with you.
March 22, 2013 @ 1:42 pm
Well, let’s see. ‘Superseded’ is defined as “to displace in favor of another.” By that description, every new version of something supersedes the previous one. So if your proposition is true that ‘legacy’ is synonymous with ‘superseded’ then every version of Notes is legacy except 9.0, since by the definition of the upgrade process and maintenance contracts provided by IBM, 9.0 displaces all prior versions (albeit in some elongated timeframes.)
Something that is fully backwards compatible can be superseded by the world no longer caring about compatibility. DOS 5.0 is fully backwards compatible with DOS 3.3. Both have been superseded by Windows 7/8, Linux and OSX. Providing functionality that doesn’t exist in other applications is irrelevant if people don’t care about the functionality. For instance, support for Layout Regions or Field Exchange or @DDEPoke — no other platform provides this functionality, and yet it is all superseded by things that are actually useful.
Lotusscript simply doesn’t exist in other applications. And it is well and thoroughly superseded by the investment decisions of the market.
March 22, 2013 @ 6:29 pm
hehehe… @DDEPoke
March 22, 2013 @ 8:04 am
Thank you John for letting us know that even your _excellent_ team faces these walls. As Andy said, we can decide whether to only use that excellent product in our projects or do IBM’s marketing job in addition ;-). Excellent write.
March 22, 2013 @ 12:44 pm
Great post John! And after > 20 years of Lotus Notes and countless efforts I have been part or heard of, explaining to IBM that something in the marketing department goes terrible wrong. Still the C-Level’s that make the money decisions are unaware of the great product they have or could have…+ something else comes into my mind reading your article.
Even if a company has Lotus Notes advocates available within and even if those are in a decision making position. Those people are having a tough time defending such a description and in todays time no one has the time to be involved in such battles and might eventually give. up.
And again, no activ help to support those with great arguments, great PUBLISHED and VISIBLE stories. A lot of great companies with passionate employees are fighting against the tide but.. you get the picture! IBM we need YOU!
March 22, 2013 @ 1:53 pm
I have long observed that if IBM’s social portfolio was a separate company, people would be raving over the breadth and depth of their solution. However, it’s not and as a result, it gets lost in a larger story that IBM (brilliantly) captures in its Smarter-this-or-that campaign. IBM puts so much effort and resource into the larger corporate branding that individual products easily get lost. Moreover, this is amplified by IBM’s sales focus, which is heavily focused on large enterprises. In this scenario, IBM relies heavily on the sales relationship manager to push key products rather than having the customer “pull” them based on individual product marketing. This can be reasonably effective in the large enterprise, your kinds of challenges notwithstanding. It, however, is more challenging in the SME space (small and medium enterprise) and also in those large organizations where purchasing is driven by workgroup or divisional groups…which is precisely where much collaborative software is purchased today. I think this is the gist of IBM’s challenge here. They have a great top-down strategy…in a category which remains stubbornly bottoms-up. Will the market come to IBM? I think so…but will it do it quick enough so that IBM isn’t facing entrenched competition from other “legacy” platforms?
March 22, 2013 @ 3:24 pm
History is written by the winners!
I work in an organisation where, as an experienced Domino developer, I’m treated like a leper, even though the company prerty much runs on the apps I (and others) have built. ALL the money and meetings and focus is on getting SOA services in and technology roadmaps to embrace the latest fads and open source software. If 20% of this energy and money was spent on just allowing the existing apps to be expanded, the business would probably double in size/profit.
March 22, 2013 @ 7:41 pm
John, Well said. The masses are sheep, we need a new shepherd. No matter how many people ask me why I use Notes my answer always is because it just works and does everything I need it to do. Could it do more? Maybe but it does lots already as a webserver, an e-commerce site a mail server and my IM server and my workflow process or my analytics server and the same box also handles our CRM too. In fact few if any other apps out there can do all of that from one box.
March 22, 2013 @ 10:11 pm
John:
First, a big thank you for your participation in the March 13 broadcast –
“From Liking to Leading”: Transforming Your Business with a
Next Generation Platform for Social Business. Audience feedback
indicated that your story, as well as the Celina Insurance segment,
really helped the audience understand the potential power of IBM
Notes and Domino Social Edition. And we’re honored you’ve chosen
Notes and Domino along with other IBM products. We know you have a
lot of choices out there, so thanks for not only choosing IBM, but
being a vocal advocate!
Of course, it’s never easy to hear we’re not doing the best we can to
get that great message out to the broader market. I appreciate your
concern and we are stepping up our activities. Events like IBM
Connect 2013 in Orlando in January, the March 13 broadcast, and our
press release today –
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/40699.wss
– are just the beginning for what we are planning for this year. We
are also revitalizing our online and local User Groups, re-energizing
our developer community with App Dev Throwdown and OpenNTF.org
activities, and conducting more virtual events and webcasts and local
live Social Business seminars in more cities than ever. We have
completely refreshed our web properties, and expanded our digital
content marketing with more videos and blog posts. And yes we are
planning targeted advertising for Notes and Domino this year.
I would like to offer to personally reach out to the German IT auditor
and your executive. I think we have a really great story to help them
understand how far we’ve advanced the capabilities. We are looking
forward to learning more from you, and we are committed to doing even
more to get the Notes and Domino message out there.
Matt Collins
March 22, 2013 @ 11:52 pm
I find it hard to see how Connect 2013 is stepping up your activities, when Notes had what 2 minutes in the opening session and Connect in it’s former branding had been going for 25 years. Not exactly a new approach is it.
I look forward to seeing new approaches though.
March 26, 2013 @ 7:01 pm
Hi Matt, thanks for becoming part of the discussion. I think for me, all of the above you describe is marketing to the already converted. It’s not really giving us in the Community any air cover that was promised years ago in the Lotus Knows campaign.
I am thrilled to hear that you’ll be doing some targeted advertising as I think that has been sorely lacking in prior years.
My whole point in this post was pointing out that even my team faces these challenges where we are continually defending our choice of platform despite our success with it. We are huge advocates as evidenced by my participation on the webcast. But even we are always on the defensive because of the general tendency of the marketplace to label Notes as old and legacy technology.
I didn’t see a whole lot of press on tech blogs and sites on the date of the launch. It’s a brand new version and the tech press by and large answered with a resounding “meh.” That’s why the general populace doesn’t think much of Notes and Domino as a platform any longer.
And while I appreciate your offer to talk to the auditor and to my executive, I appreciate it, but what I’d really like is to never have to get to these conversations in the first place, and that’s what I would really love your help with.
I’ve been defending the platform so long that it’s become second nature, so my recent battles have been dealt with, but if I ever do need your help I will gladly reach out.
So I’m sorry I touched a nerve on launch day, but I really think this is important moving forward, and by the response from everyone else, I don’t think I’m alone.
I certainly hope you can help, and if you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to get in touch. Thanks!
March 22, 2013 @ 10:33 pm
Matt: Sorry to be a critic, but yesterday I just happened to see on planetlotus that Notes 9 Social Edition was released. It’s a well-kept secret by IBM – your press release doesn’t even mention it. This is a big deal to organizations that use the product, and IBM’s web site doesn’t mention this on the home page, or clicking down through Products > Lotus (Collaboration). Hello?????? The product is alive and nobody knows except our little secret society.
March 23, 2013 @ 6:45 am
The perception of “legacy” is the fault of marketing. Legacy software is simply software that hasn’t been enhanced. Clearly a fallacy with the release of notes 9. Perhaps ibm should spend more dollars on working on this perception than the “fluffy” concept of “social business”
March 23, 2013 @ 7:29 am
Great post John.
I totally agree with you. IBM marketing needs to focused on their products and that includes the one that a lot of us bet our financial futures on – IBM Notes.
I’m sure that the “Smarter Planet” campaign is intellectually very clever, but in my opinion, any advertising campaign that has to be explained to clients is a waste of time.
We no longer promote the fact that we use Notes in our solutions, we just sell the solution so that we don’t have to fight the “dead product” argument. No one cares, they especially don’t care when we sell the cloud version.
Notes9 is brilliant. IBM must market the hell out of it aggressively, and directly to the end user. Please don’t lose it as part of some stupid social business campaign which none of my clients understand.
March 23, 2013 @ 1:17 pm
Great post, John. Interesting comments too.
We’ve been told that Notes/Domino 9.0 represents a $100million investment by IBM. My question is what percentage of that figure will be used to tell the market about this great new release, or even that the product still exists?
March 25, 2013 @ 7:43 am
Two new Domino objects. A Bug fixed Designer. A new color scheme and again more places they put the mail and calendar buttons. Bugfixes. 100 million. wow.
March 24, 2013 @ 6:15 pm
Excellent post, John. As has been stated frequently in your comments, it’s a common battle with others, having to explain the logic of sticking with Notes/Domino. Having to do triple duty as a developer, marketer and general technology cheerleader has been the norm for years (unfortunately). I too heard that same podcast, and felt equally irritated at the uninformed nature of the “never go back to Lotus Notes” proclamation.
June 23, 2013 @ 1:21 am
IBM Notes 9 can be found in the Wikipedia defining the term “too little too late”. Microsoft has caught and stormed past IBM in the collaborative software industry. IBM dragged their feet for years and rested on the laurels that far more intelligent and dedicated programmers built and now it’s too damn late to catch up.
In the words of Robert DeNiro in the movie Copland…
“You blew it!!!”