Collaboration Matters!

I've not seen it used in production, I always thought of it as a migration sales tool, "keep you clients, change your servers", knowing that by the time they migrated you had sold the benefits of running the Notes client :-)

Quite a challenge. But now with the EU forcing the wire protocols open and a lot of reverse engineering around them (e.g. Evolution) it might be a sign of larger things to come.

If there is something bigger coming then it would be better to first make this announcement and then put DAMO in maintenance mode. True I don't see relevance in the market for this tool but at the end Microsoft might spin another IBM is giving up story.

I have one customer using DAMO for all users, about 40 people. Have yet to convince them to use Notes clients, but all they are interested in is email. A few other customers with one or two DAMO users.

There were some large companies which used it, and why it probably was created to start.

While I have used it to sell mixed offices or offer an alternative way to work, I have yet to see any client use it entirely.

I have a customer (1.000 - 2.000 user) who use it for migration from exchange/outlook to Lotus Notes. So they could keep the Outlook client and build a stable Domino infrastructure and after that they could switch user by user to an outlook client.

But I would call this a "migration scenario".

That's unfortunate. They should've worked harder to make it better as opposed to discontinuing. Companies aren't using it in production because of the problems with the product and because IBM says that it is NOT for production use.

Considering that most Notes-to-Exchange migrations happen because "users hate Notes", why not provide full fidelity support for Outlook clients? Maintain your awesome infrastructure of Domino servers, let the users have the client they want and collect CAL revenue.

Alas, not to be.

Plenty of small businesse that Migrate from Echange/MS-SBS to Foundations use the DAMO client to avoid any major changes on the client-side.

As it is now it's a no-brainer to get thos customers on the Foundations platform. If we have to start telling them that the will be forced to change their e-mail clint then...

Foundations works perfectly as a RIP from SBS because we can use DAMO.

The DAMO code continues to ship in Foundations...this announcement only pertains to future versions of Domino as a stand-alone product. At some point, things may change for Foundations as well, but that is not part of this announcement.

I guess the point is, the code works as-is and continues to be supported as such for at least the next several years. Engineering work on DAMO has always had its edge-case challenges, and this announcement basically says we're not going to keep pursuing those. The work done to make Notes a much richer client, and the bifurcation you see in Microsoft's Office 2010 strategy (where Outlook is just one of many clients, including Groove's new version etc) means that it's always going to be a chasing game. None of the other vendors who claim Outlook support do it 100% either, there are always features or conditions that make it impossible. Calendaring & scheduling (especially areas like delegation, resources, cross-domain) is particularly difficult.

When we show Outlook fans Notes 8.x, they almost always are happy with it..it's just getting past the emotion. I'd rather put the energy into that than chasing interop.

As being a 'strategic statement'. I think it was a good idea, but never meant to be a permanent solution.

It is true, the interoperability of C&S, primarily, was the biggest roadblock - there was just no good way to align Outlook's funtionality to that of Notes.

Believe me, though, we tried :)

May it be fondly remembered by all of those who had success using it.

I have had very good results for email MS Outlook 2007 via the IMAP client driven by a back-end Domino 8.5 (fully patched) server. I get all my email wherever I set up the client (and I can use Thunderbird too), I can share the mailboxes of others in a separate IMAP folder, it's fast and efficient and I can do more things in terms of sorting, flagging and organising mail more quickly than I can when using the Domino native eclipse client which is sometimes sluggish and quirky.

If IMAP integration with whatever client takes a user's fancy was somehow allied to a decent web-service based calendar and scheduling tool, that would immediately commend itself to me. You need LDAP working for the address resolution - but that's OK and works too in Outlook.

We run MS Exchange as our main mail system here - so I am in a good position to judge the benefits and disadvantages of working with both, and for me and my colleagues, who can't escape the MS embrace for mail (and I have an Exchange account delivering separately and wellon the same mail tree in Outlook natively and Thunderbird using IMAP) it's a good and efficient choice.

As the Domino calendar works by processing and offering iCalendar objects, there must be a path here for getting it all working for the Outlook/Exchange migration shops almost seamlessly perhaps witha calendaring addin that exploits the iCaelndar protocols, offering the Notes Eclipse client to people who can cope with it happily and Outlook to the CEO! If Lotus can make Traveler work as well as it does now, there must be scope for a 'lite' mail client that does it all as neatly as Outlook 2007 without DAMO (which I've tried and abandoned somewhat in sorrow I'm afraid)

You need to use DAMO 8.0.2.14

The problem I got is connecting to the server, sometimes it just does not connect. When it connect during the wizzard, all goes OK.

You can then open the names.nsf of the DAMO Folder and ad connection documents.

If the 1st wizzard does not work, you need to run the setup again and or delete the outlook MAPI profile, launch outlook once, then try installing DAMO Again

I have had like 4 users on DAMO, now I only have 1 DAMO user and it works fine. Not always that easy to setup, but it works.

HTH

Oliver

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