Forrester has issued new research on the collaboration market. Together with IBM Microsoft is positioned leader in this field …
[Via Recent Research from Forrester]
Microsoft is a Leader in the collaboration platforms market with a suite of products that are part of the Windows Server System and the Microsoft Office System. Microsoft’s deep strengths lie in strong security, Information Workplace (IW) readiness, and product road map, but it also has a strong positioning in architecture, administration, executive vision, and strategy. Microsoft is weaker than leading competitors in team collaboration and cross-platform support. Microsoft’s strengths make it a good fit for Microsoft shops (especially organizations that use Office 2003, Windows, and Active Directory and have standardized on the .Net framework for at least some application development) that need a full collaboration platform (yet don’t mind lack of unification among the components). Microsoft is well-suited for enterprises that are developing IW strategies and may need a budding IW platform, as well as those that place a premium on vendor market share.
Oh, this is funny.
“Microsoft is a Leader in the collaboration platforms market…”
Sorry. Only one platform. Wintel. Wintel 2003 in fact. Sharepoint arguably requires Internet Explorer, which theoretically runs on the Mac. But Mac/IE doesnt work with Sharepoint. So its Intel, Windows XP or Vista (whenever *that* comes out. Gartners now betting on mid 2007), and Internet Explorer 6.3.14152 (recurring) or whatever. “Whatever” being the function of how many security holes you’ll tolerate in your environment till the next patch Tuesday.
and then
“Microsoft is weaker than leading competitors in team collaboration ”
Forgive my simplistic outlook, but surely to collaborate, you have to collaborate with others – teammates ?
And doesnt this sentence contradict the first ? Either your the leader, or your weaker. Either your a platform, or multiple platforms. Then it says its weaker in cross platform support. Yeah. Especially if you want Exchange 12 – it’ll be on Windows 64-bit, whilst the rest will be on Windows-32 bit. “Support Hell” anyone ?
“Microsoft’s strengths make it a good fit for Microsoft shops”.
No ? Really ? If your up to your ass in patch kits, security holes, unmanagement servers, ’90s’ architecture (Exchange. My favourite), you wont mind Sharepoint 2003, which doesnt actually do document-level security either.
Oh. I love this bit:
“standardized on the .Net framework”.
Ah. But no-one has standardised on the .Net framework, aside from Microsoft. And even then, there’s a whole hotchpotch of versions of .Net that each of the separate pieces of the MS Collaboration strategy “framework” need in order to function. Different versions of .Net. Unsupportable, contradictory versions of .net. And the best bit ? Some poor sucker will have to support more and more of these in the future (all at the same time), as upgrading all those different parts is going to be impossible.
Hell. I cant even do something ridiculously simple such as “upgrade” an MS Windows 2003 Web server to an MS Windows 2003 “Standard” server.
What chance has anyone got once you have Windows 2003 64 bit, Sharepoint, SQL, Groove, Office 12, Exchange 12, etc, etc ?
This is where Chairman Bill’s “Tight Binding” to MS products really starts to cause problems. Especially for the Sharepoint folks who have to wait for “Vista Server” (or Longhorn) to come out – but thats stuck behind Vista. Which is what – three years late now ?
Fun.
Or as customers call it – “Upgrade Hell”.
Mmm.
—* Bill
@Bill,
Hey Bill welcome back.
I missed your ever so comprehensive way of commenting.
To understand the context of the experpt you’d have the read the whole report I guess.
“Only one platform. Wintel. Wintel 2003 in fact.”
Exacty how many Lotus Notes Domino shops run on Wintel ? According to IDC research in 2004 it was 85% (Eightyfive!) something says me this has not decreased rapidly …
“Sharepoint arguably requires Internet Explorer”
No it does not; the following browsers are supported : Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2; Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 2; Microsoft Internet Explorer 6; Netscape Navigator 6.2 or later; Mozilla 1.4 or later; Firefox 1.0.4 or later
I do wonder why you always put forward these claims without the least bit of background check. You should visit the Microsoft website every once in a while you know 🙂
“Sharepoint 2003, which doesnt actually do document-level security either.”
It’s true Shraepoint hasn’t got itemlevel security *yet* (please do read into SharePoint Server 2007, or better have a go with the Beta 2 version)
Microsoft does provide Digital Rights Management for organsiations who do take document level security seriously. DRM takes security beyond your application environment, because when a secured document “leaves” the domino environment on a memeorystick it no longer secured ?
Anyway good to hear from you 😉
@Henning
I do not know of any limitations wrt Firefox support for SharePoint. I could be as you state that some features do not work fully …
Was it this week or last week but the Sharepoint installations that I am aware of do not fully support Firefox, at least not for the (content) management functionality.
Reading and basic interaction have improved. That is a good thing.
I’m sorry It seems I misquoted IDC.
It’s not 85% but 83,9% (eighty-three-point-nine) and the study was not done in 2004 but in 2005 : http://www.peterdehaas.com/2005/10/more_users_migr.html
@Peter – “It’s not 85% but 83,9% (eighty-three-point-nine)”
What exactly does that mean? Does it mean that 83.9% of the physical servers hosting the ICE are Wintel or does it mean that 83.9% of all users are on Wintel servers? Because there is a huge difference between a company like myself running active-active Domino clustering on 2 physical iSeries systems (6 total Domino servers) versus my running that same configuration on possibly 6 physical Wintel systems because of the scalability.
@Charles,
My guess is there *is* a tight relation between OS revenue’s and deployments 😉
I agree with you that a Wintel deployment may require more servers than an ISeries deployment for example. Revenue wise however my experience is that the iSeries cost for hardand software often far exceeds the wintel cost.
The IDC numbers say that 83.9% of the *REVENUE*, not *DEPLOYMENTS*, use Win32 or Win64. This report makes no statements concerning the number of deployments. Furthermore, IBM doesn’t sell platform-specific licenses for Domino. They have no way of knowing what OS it is deployed on so the dollar figure for Win32 deployments cannot possibly be very accurate for Domino customers. There is scant documentation regarding how they compiled those numbers, and I’m not buying them.
Since the IDC report is focused solely on revenue, and setting up a Win32 collaboration environment requires far more servers (and consequently licenses) than other platforms, it is no surprise that Microsoft leads in revenue. To me what this report shows is that Win32 is simply the most expensive option. It is an interesting report, but it does not say what you’re trying to make it say.
I also question how an “integrated collaboration environment” is being defined for the purposes of the IDC report. The Forrester report here specifically states “Microsoft’s strengths make it a good fit for Microsoft shops … that need a full collaboration platform (yet don’t mind lack of unification among the components).” Doesn’t lacking unification inherently mean it is NOT integrated? Doesn’t having to run numerous products, both on the client and on the server, also contradict the meaning of “integrated”?
I just noticed, in the post on Ed Brill’s blog, that the report makes a similar complaint about “lack of unification” regarding Domino. I don’t have access to the full report, but based on these two excerpts it looks like they just took some boilerplate and replaced the names to make everyone look like a winner.
This is another reason why I mostly ignore analyst reports. They rarely have any substance.
Peter, nothing in the IDC report correlates revenue to deployments. You’re welcome to assume whatever you like, but there are no facts in this report to back that up. I’m not arguing that statistically more groupware servers may be deployed on Windows. I’m just saying this report does not make that correlation, and you are misrepresenting the report by saying it does.
In my experience Windows was significantly more expensive in up front hardware and software costs than an iSeries or commercial linux solution. Your experience is obviously different.
@ Charles,
On the IDC report, I agree with you.
On iSeries vs maybe a very distributed Wintel environment I would also agree. Consolidated Wintel vs iSeries I would argue.
Maybe its fair to assume that the wintel OS revenue size in the report tightly related to a large Lotus Notes installed base which is stil very distributed …
Revenue, eh? And OS revenue at that? Even better since before 2004/2005 there was no actual “fee” for purchasing OS/400. It was basically just bundled with the hardware. How would IDC even get or guess the numbers for this? Currently you can purchase and activate OS/400 licenses on a per-processor basis.
Oh, earlier this year when I bought a RedHat Enterprise server license it was $316.05 with 1 year support included. A Windows 2003 Enterprise server license is $3,999! Over 10x the cost. So, for every 12 licenses that RedHat sells it equals the revenue from a single Windows license.
But according to your take on this IDC report, the revenue proves that the world has gone after Microsoft and loves it so much that even Domino admins choose it in droves to run for their environments…
@Peter – I’ll leave the consolidated wintel argument alone because it’s not a real world scenario. In practice it’s simply not done because of scalability and stability issues with Windows. Even among Microsoft fanatics you won’t find many shops running more than a couple of Domino partitions on Windows, but you will find people with up to 16 partitions on Linux, UNIX or iSeries.
You are right that the Windows revenue numbers could be skewed because of the cost of client licenses. I’m in the process of doing a writeup on the comparative costs of licensing a Lotus and Microsoft ICE. I’ll send you a link so you can eviscerate me when I’m done. 😉
@Chris – If you read the Methodology section of the IDC report you will see the cost of the OS is not what is being reported, just the cost of the groupware software. My contention is that since Domino (and possibly Websphere and Workplace — I don’t use them so I don’t know) are not licensed per platform, how do they know which platform to attribute the sales to?
@Charles, gotcha. Good point about the licensing per platform.
Peter, I disagree with the statement [when a secured document “leaves” the domino environment on a memeorystick it is no longer secured ?].
As a Lotus Notes document cannot live outside of the database environment, if the Domino Administrator has activated “Enforce Consistent ACL” on the database on the Domino server then the authentication and ACL requirements for a local replica copy of Notes database physically located on a memory stick are the same as on the Domino server.
If you wish to implement more robust security then you can also encrypt the data with a private key and store the Notes user certificate on a Smartcard.
With proper security measures undertaken, I fail to see how the physical location of the secured document on a memory stick impacts data security. After all I assume you are talking about commercial grade security not military grade security such as tempest.
@Ian,
Is see where you are coming from, but the ‘document on a memeory stick example’ illustrates how users work. They take a document (word, excel, ppt, …) with them on the stick, not their IT environment.
@Peter: the ‘document on a memeory stick example’ illustrates how users work
As Ian stated, it’s not how Notes users work. A Notes “Document” cannot reside outside of a Notes Database. Further, the users will soon be able to take their Notes environment on a stick. =)
@CHris, you made your point. You need Notes everywhere for the security to exist. That’s maybe good from a Notes administrator perspective and not logical from an end-user perspective
@Peter, I apologise for forgetting sometimes that Microsoft people have a filecentric paradigm and Notes people have a recordcentric paradigm, so while you naturally assume when you hear the word “document” that it refers to a file (word, excel. ppt, …) while a Notes person naturally assumes when they hear the word “document” that we are referring to a Notes document which is actually a record in the database. When we think of files such as word, excel and ppt we think of them in terms of attachments.
For a Notes person, we would commonly replicate the whole Notes database (unless it was too large) to the memory stick, rather than detach an individual file. This is because Notes is a disconnected model which encourages local replicas of the database, rather than making new copies of individual files, which create version control and security issues.
Many Notes people continue to “live” in the Notes Client while disconnected from the network and use replication and the disconnected model to apply the same security, access control and edit rights to a local replica as the replica on the corporate server. Next time we reconnect with the network either locally of remotely we simply replicate the differences.
Once again, my apologies for forgetting that we might be looking at the world from slightly different paradigms.
@Ian,
No apologies needed :-. My point is not made as a “Microsoftie”with “a file centric view”, but based on the fact (and proof in the market) that user put files / data on not secured “data carriers” such as memory sticks or external harddrives.
I seriously argue that IBM Lotus Notes end-users do this any different than other users.
And how about the situation that you email the document to lets say a user that does not have Lotus Notes / Domino …
@peter:
>> “Sharepoint arguably requires Internet Explorer”
> No it does not; the following browsers are supported : Microsoft
> Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2; Microsoft Internet
> Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 2; Microsoft Internet Explorer 6;
> Netscape Navigator 6.2 or later; Mozilla 1.4 or later; Firefox
> 1.0.4 or later ”
Well how about supporting webstandards instead of implementations? And being a Gecko user for my complete online life (well after gopher died out 🙂 and a sharepoiunt luser, I can say that with any other browser than the crippleware some call “IE” you only et half the functionality with a sharepoint site and a better browser.
But skipp the browser war and start to support webstandards!