PlanetNTF

That’s in my opinion a short wrap up of the IBM messaging strategy.

• Work with your browser, mobile and Notes browser plugin (if necessary)
• Get rid of the Notes clients
• Move to the cloud

As a business partner, I’m a little bit concerned about the massive cloud push started already and continues growing with IBM Mail Next. Most of the customers will not very likely follow the cloud strategy for the still very important and highly confidential mail service (at least at the moment and maybe Germany is in this point a little bit more “special” than other countries…). Nevertheless, the hybrid solutions are offering a good possibility to move slowly and carefully to the cloud. And as long as IBM’s strategy is “Cloud first” and not “Cloud only”, I’m still happy.

I’m very curious to get first impressions of IBM Mail Next and I’m very happy to see that this new mail experience is fully hosted on the lovely, good old Domino server. The combination of iNotes and Notes Browser Plug-in is great and if some more functionality will be built into the plug-in (like local mail and archiving, auto update, etc.) it will become a great replacement of the Notes client.

I’m already encouraging my customers to use this browser focused workplace starting with Notes/Domino 9 and to get used to this experience and leverage all the benefits. And during most of the client rollout projects we are working on, we additionally roll-out the browser plug-in to start the transformation and to get ready for the future. Until now, no customer replaced the Notes clients completely with iNotes and the browser plug-in, but we will see how long it will take to bring this strategy to the “real world”.

I think it is the right direction to get rid of the Notes clients and I’m looking forward to start working with IBM Mail Next.