Unless you've been on a cruise for the
last couple of days, you've probably heard about the announcement of LotusLive
Notes (LLN). Whether you take the angle that this pushes IBM into immediate
market leadership, or that they left out the crucial piece of custom applications,
or that Lotus simply isn't as good a hosting provider as their business
partners are -- you probably aren't aware of the key market differentiator
that LLN provides: the hybrid model.
Well, let me amend that: you're probably
aware of it, insofar as you've heard it mentioned. But you probably don't
know how it works. And because this is an IBM offering, you're probably
figuring that integrating an on-premises Domino implementation with the
LLN hosted implementation means putting the IBM Tivoli Cross-Domain Federation
Identity Broker Gateway Server into your DMZ with the custom IBM Lotus
Domino Blarficator Addon pack that can only be installed by a team of 5
architect-level consultants from the Global Services team who charge $300
every 10 minutes and will only install the software on genuine IBM Z series
hardware. So your minimum investment in that integration is $5.3 gagillion
and it takes 17 months.
You're wrong.
Here's what you need to integrate your
on-premises Domino implementation with LLN: an OU certifier and a single
Domino server in the DMZ
Yup. That's it.
Why? Because LLN is built on Domino,
not some mishmash of technologies pretending to be Domino. And because
it's Domino, it uses the Notes PKCS and NRPC from the ground up. So when
IBM asked themselves "how can we allow customers to manage the delegation
of identity to our hosted environment?" they looked at how they'd
solved that problem for customers since Notes 3 and said "we just
need a certificate branch that we can control." So you give them an
OU branch from your top-level O certificate, and they spawn all the servers
they need from that.
Because they do it in Domino terms,
that also means that every one of those servers can talk to your Domino
server in the DMZ. You just need to enable it as a pass-thru server. All
the gateway services were built into Domino 4 versions ago. There's
nothing new there -- just 128-bit symmetric key encrypted NRPC travelling
point-to-point between your DMZ and the LLN data center, and reaching from
there into whatever directory and mail servers you've defined in your own
Domino domain.
So what that really means is that when
you use the hybrid features of LotusLive Notes, you're effectively using
a hosted extension to your own existing domain. They even replicate your
NAB.
That's all there is to it. It's
crazy elegant, really, because it doesn't worry about introducing a bunch
of NEW stuff. All these problems were addressed ages ago by the platform
itself, and now there's just a really cool way to implement it with IBM
as a service vendor instead of a product vendor.
And because it doesn't introduce a bunch
of new stuff, it JUST WORKS. Your users get to their new LLN-based servers
in exactly the same way they would if you migrated them from one server
to another in your on-premises environment. They work with calendar
federation, schedule management, directories, authentication, local replicas
and transparent mail routing exactly as they would with a high-quality
Domino implementation: seamlessly. A cloud-based user can run a busy-time
query against on-premises users the same way a pure premises implementation
can -- because the server just proxies the request between all the individual
home servers as defined by the directory.
Now I won't claim that the implementation
is perfect. There are unsupported features. There are quirks. There
are limitations. But on the whole, what IBM has done here is incredibly
innovative and could only be accomplished with a technology like Notes,
where identity and security are built into the DNA of the platform.
Here's the real kicker: IBM doesn't
care if your "on-premises" servers are really on-premises. They
don't even know whether they are. So if you want to, say, put your email
services into the LotusLive cloud, but you're disappointed that you can't
move your custom applications, you should realize: YOU CAN. You just can't
move them to LotusLive. But you can move them to another hosting vendor
that supports custom applications. And as far as IBM is concerned, that's
just part of your "on-premises" Domino environment.
Have I mentioned the GROUP Live Platform-as-a-Service
offering? As many of you saw at Lotusphere, that is our data center middleware
platform that lets you dynamically implement and scale Lotus servers with
a few clicks of a button. Naturally, we're now extending that platform
to allow seamless integration with LLN, using the same fundamental strategy
as the IBM team: exploiting Domino's existing capabilities to seamlessly
extend a cloud-enablement to be cross-vendor. Whether you use it
in your on-premises facilities, outsource your hosting to a third party,
or want specific networks deployments for specific applications, the approach
chosen by IBM will allow maximum flexibility.
Of course, while this addresses the
IT support need of servers & infrastructure, it doesn't address the
business need of end user experience. Whether they're in the cloud or on-premises,
your mission critical custom applications are still whatever you designed
them to be. So the next big question is: how can we make a 10 year old
workflow app not only sit in a hosted data center, but also work better
when it does.
The answer, dear reader, is a tale for
another blog post....
These videos are made of win
Wed, Feb 1st 2012 9:30p Nathan T Freeman It has long been my opinion that good software
designers should understand the basic economics of trade. Ours is a highly
specialized practice, and it produces an absolutely staggering surplus
when we trade. But this can be very difficult to understand unless you
grasp the concept of Comparative Advantage. (Understanding Asymmetrical
Information is also a good idea, but let's save that for another day.)
Because of the absolutely marvelous
title, I stumbled upon these videos from Prof [read] Keywords: ntf
RAAWWWWRRRR!!!
Tue, Jan 10th 2012 11:00p Nathan T Freeman There's some tuning left to do, but I wanted
to get this out to the world before Lotusphere.
I've created an XPages
SDK for Eclipse RCP, so you can
install the latest version of Eclipse and easily set up Notes or Domino
as your target platform for your Java code. I assigned myself the task
of documenting this internally for GBS in January, and I realized that
I could spend a day documenting it, or spend two days writing a program
that would do it automatically.
It was really n [read] Keywords: domino
lotusphere
notes
ntf
xpages apple
eclipse
java
mac
openntf
65
A thought experiment
Sun, Dec 11th 2011 10:50p Nathan T Freeman In this time of vibrant political debate
in the US, I am frequently confronted by the notion of the social
contract. I find this idea
very challenging; both to accept or to refute. So I created a thought experiment
that sums up the issue for me...
Let us hypothesize for a moment that
you are a slave. In your captivity, you are permitted to procreate. Your
owner proposes the following:
"I will buy your unborn child in
exchange for an extra meal for you and your spouse each day. [read] Keywords: ntf
exchange
exchange
wiki
36
Do not settle
Thu, Oct 6th 2011 12:10a Nathan T Freeman Forget what you know about Apple products.
Learn from Apple's founder. "You
are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
You will be missed, Steve. [read] Keywords: ntf
apple
50
Welcoming our newest colleagues
Thu, Sep 29th 2011 10:48a Nathan T Freeman If you read this blog, you've probably
heard by now that Synaptris
is part of GBS. I'm very pleased
to welcome our new colleagues.
As it happens, my team has been working
closely with Synaptris engineers for several months now. We tapped them
to work on our Dojo Grid control for surfacing Domino views presented in
Transformer apps. They have done a spectacular job. We're looking forward
to deepening the integration even further to leverage their expertise in
content searching and [read] Keywords: domino
ntf
xpages applications
dojo
email
integration
67
The ultimate Domino Designer performance improvement for XPages developers
Mon, Sep 19th 2011 10:10a Nathan T Freeman If you're an experienced XPages developer,
chances are you live in the Source tab of the XPages editor. But even if
you live in that editor, you'll notice that various
things seem to slow down Designer
with mysterious causes.
If you're willing to give up some of
the bells & whistles, like drag/drop from the Controls Palette, custom
editors for Properties, or icon cues on the Outline, you can switch from
the XSP editor to the native XML editor using the following preference
se [read] Keywords: domino
ntf
xpages properties
xml
54
True then, true now
Wed, Aug 24th 2011 6:43a Nathan T Freeman Economic
reality hasn't changed.
We'll miss you, Mary Beth. But the world
needs a serious UX effort put into 3D modelling software. When you leave
it to code slingers, you
get this. Please end the suffering. [read] Keywords: ntf
interface
43
April 24, 2002
Sat, Aug 6th 2011 9:43p Nathan T Freeman Name that speaker....
The congress and
the president will shift radically towards expanding the size and scope
of the federal government. This will satisfy both the liberals and the
conservatives.
Military and police powers will grow satisfying the conservatives.
The weflare state, both domestic and international, will expand, satisfying
the liberals.
Both sides will endorse military adventurism overseas. This is the most
important of my predictions.
Policy changes [read] Keywords: ntf
policies
security
