Comparing Instant TeamMessenger to Outlook 2003 and Notes 6.5 IM
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With all the great noise around the Notes 6.5 and Office 2003 releases, I decided to do an "honest" table comparing Outlook 2003 IM integration, Notes 6.5 IM integration and Instant TeamMessenger 2.0.
Outlook 2003 has a check box for email integration, but it is as basic as they could have come up with, in fact this equivalent integration has been in Outlook 2002 and Outlook Express 2000 but the support was for the MSN Messenger client, it's not great as it only shows awareness for the person that sent you the e-mail, when in the real world the people you most want to chat with are often the ones in the TO and CC fields. As usual Microsoft gets the check box in the column, so although they may not be the best they do have it.
Compared to the default Sametime client and the one that is within Notes, the MS Messenger client blows it away, for 3rd parties who want to integrate into the MS Messenger client it blows Sametime out of the water. From the point of view of client integration Lotus offers zip, nada nothing. You either have to build a complete new client (what Instant had to do) or you go work for IBM Consulting who have access to the source code, this is a big chink in the armour for IBM, and it will actually be much easier for 3rd parties to offer basic IM integration with Microsoft than it will be with Lotus. If your world revolves around Java based apps and portals than that statement changes a little bit, but I personally believe that Portals and client based Java apps will be good for something's, but the majority of the market will not be there (Sorry Ed, Alan). Microsoft still have a strong play in the browser market with various toolkits, but it is not Java based, it is obviously Windows. You can access services on the server, so that is not necessarily a huge issue to work around to build support for other platforms.
So Microsoft has some serious advantages over Lotus on client integration possibilities and with a question hanging over the future support from Lotus for the COM and C++ toolkits, Microsoft may well end up with the Win32 platform to itself.
Notes 6.5 has some issues with name resolution, if you're not using the same directory for your Notes infrastructure as your Sametime one, you can often end up with Notes 6.5 showing no names of people on-line, as it doesn't resolve anybody. With the movement to LDAP for QuickPlace and Sametime, I am sure this is a situation many customers are going to experience and will be disappointed that no solution was provided by Lotus to address this.
In a couple of weeks I will give a description of when it makes sense for a company to choose Microsoft Live over IBM Lotus Instant Messaging (Sametime) and vice verse. There are a number of reasons why one is a better choice than the other and I'll try and explain them.
The table behind this link was correct when I created it, but it's possible (but unlikely) that Microsoft will change something before Outlook 2003 ships.
Click here to see the table
I wish I had paid more attention in English class, as this still doesn't read the way I want it to read. That's the trouble with going to an all boys school and having a 25 year old female teacher when you're between the ages 12 and 16 I guess, very little attention was ever given to the usage of commas and semicolons...ahh Miss Case where are you now I wonder.
With all the great noise around the Notes 6.5 and Office 2003 releases, I decided to do an "honest" table comparing Outlook 2003 IM integration, Notes 6.5 IM integration and Instant TeamMessenger 2.0.
Outlook 2003 has a check box for email integration, but it is as basic as they could have come up with, in fact this equivalent integration has been in Outlook 2002 and Outlook Express 2000 but the support was for the MSN Messenger client, it's not great as it only shows awareness for the person that sent you the e-mail, when in the real world the people you most want to chat with are often the ones in the TO and CC fields. As usual Microsoft gets the check box in the column, so although they may not be the best they do have it.
Compared to the default Sametime client and the one that is within Notes, the MS Messenger client blows it away, for 3rd parties who want to integrate into the MS Messenger client it blows Sametime out of the water. From the point of view of client integration Lotus offers zip, nada nothing. You either have to build a complete new client (what Instant had to do) or you go work for IBM Consulting who have access to the source code, this is a big chink in the armour for IBM, and it will actually be much easier for 3rd parties to offer basic IM integration with Microsoft than it will be with Lotus. If your world revolves around Java based apps and portals than that statement changes a little bit, but I personally believe that Portals and client based Java apps will be good for something's, but the majority of the market will not be there (Sorry Ed, Alan). Microsoft still have a strong play in the browser market with various toolkits, but it is not Java based, it is obviously Windows. You can access services on the server, so that is not necessarily a huge issue to work around to build support for other platforms.
So Microsoft has some serious advantages over Lotus on client integration possibilities and with a question hanging over the future support from Lotus for the COM and C++ toolkits, Microsoft may well end up with the Win32 platform to itself.
Notes 6.5 has some issues with name resolution, if you're not using the same directory for your Notes infrastructure as your Sametime one, you can often end up with Notes 6.5 showing no names of people on-line, as it doesn't resolve anybody. With the movement to LDAP for QuickPlace and Sametime, I am sure this is a situation many customers are going to experience and will be disappointed that no solution was provided by Lotus to address this.
In a couple of weeks I will give a description of when it makes sense for a company to choose Microsoft Live over IBM Lotus Instant Messaging (Sametime) and vice verse. There are a number of reasons why one is a better choice than the other and I'll try and explain them.
The table behind this link was correct when I created it, but it's possible (but unlikely) that Microsoft will change something before Outlook 2003 ships.
Click here to see the table
I wish I had paid more attention in English class, as this still doesn't read the way I want it to read. That's the trouble with going to an all boys school and having a 25 year old female teacher when you're between the ages 12 and 16 I guess, very little attention was ever given to the usage of commas and semicolons...ahh Miss Case where are you now I wonder.
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