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Domino.Doc, thank you and good night.

Posted on February 02nd, 2009 in Document Management, Social Networking

One of the business partner community was asking me about the future of Domino.Doc and I had to refer to an update I had towards the middle of last year which is basically “an update is coming”. If you go hunting through IBM’s forums and search on the future of Domino.Doc there isn’t really much information available.

However, an annoucement was made at Lotusphere 2009 regarding the future of Domino.Doc. In short, it is time to say thank you and good night. Domino.Doc End of Life has been announced and support will end on 2012 (although service extensions will be available). Users of Domino.Doc may breath a sign of relief that the future is now know but there was more to this annoucement than announcing an end of life.

From a capability perspective Domino.Doc sits in between project team rooms/places, simple document management and enterprise content management (ECM). I am inclined to agree with this assessment. As recognition of this IBM has annouced a software package where users of Domino.Doc can migrate to Lotus Quickr, Filenet or IBM Content Manager (assuming they are still on maintenance).

Essentially we are looking at a migration from Domino.Doc to ECM.

The presentation from Lotusphere seems to say that IBM and Business Partners will help with any migrations and a redbook and a tool will be built to also assist customers.

I know a number of organisations that are using Domino.Doc based solutions that are seeking to deliver a greater degree of document control. In some cases this type of document control is better delivered through ECM solutions. This is especially true for government organisations where legislation around the world is requiring that they have a greater degree of tracebility and trackability of their content and documents. This announcement may create some opportunities for those organisations as it allows Domino.Doc users to migrate to a richer document management solution along with a Funky front end provided by Quickr.

I have included the Lotusphere presentation in PDF format for you to download and mull over.

August 27, 2009 -- Question #13 How do I assess the migration from Domino.Doc to Quickr (2)

Tags: domino.doc

garywalsh

I am sorry...but migrating from DomDoc to Quickr is in most cases simply absurd! If all you needed was the type of functionality Quickr delivers, then you probably are not running DomDoc in the first place. You do not have to be a large enterprise to require EDMS capability. May SMB customers need version control, workflow, auditing, archiving, document review/retention...etc. For all its shortcomings, DomDoc had a lot of functionality. Most companies extended that with customization, expensive customization. Many smaller/mid size companies have DomDoc. Quickr is not an option because it does not do document mgt. Replacing the Domino infrastructure with Websphere and moving all the users to Filenet or ICM is too expensive. It does not matter if they get free credit for the licenses...that is not where the majority of the costs are. There is a gaping hole in the IBM software inventory now that DomDoc is gone. What customers are going to do is look outside of what IBM can offer. Why not. If they have to spend a ton of money...why would'nt they.

Chris Sparshott

@garywalsch, I can't disagree with you and I am always keen to hear about other options? what are your suggestions in light of this decision?

garywalsh

This is where it gets a bit awkward Chris. I represent a Lotus business partner that offers a Domino based solution that we feel fills the hole that currently exists in the IBM/Lotus portfolio. We think we can keep the customer a Lotus customer. I see where other vendors place posts on forums that are clearly efforts to market their product. The bias is obvious. Rather than go down that road how about this...you and I hook up on a web meeting. I will show you what we have, then you can post your thoughts on this forum. I bet I can make you say wow! You game?

garywalsh

And the conversation ends...

Chris Sparshott

@Dean Good comments to highlight the impact on the Business Partner community. I wish there was a "third" option available but bigger and better minds than mine will have to come up with that answer.

Dean

I agree with Neil butwill take it 1 step further.

Whilst IBM are happy to "offer" a replacement product at no cost they're completely missing the point that the cost of software is about 20% of any application.

How do they think our clients who have just invested 250K + in a DDM solution delivery (about 50 of that was software) will feel when we say "hey - we need to replace this but don't worry the software won;t cost you anything"

Who is going to cover the devlopment/delivery/migration costs (in the above example - about 200K ?????? - I'm sure our client will be delighted. We (as a BP) certainly can't cover it.

So no I don't see it as just a missed opportunity - I see it as %%^% Disaster that may well impact on our company's future.

Chris Sparshott

@Neil You make a good point. While I think this creates an opportunity it is also an opportunity lost. There is now a hole in the porfolio without a clear way of plugging the gap. If we don't use Domino.Doc and Filenet / Content Manager isn't appropriate what do we use?

Neil

I think that IBM have missed an opportunity, DDM sits very well between Quickr and ECM systems.

It provides a number of very important functions that Quickr does not, and will not for a while, and is currently easily extensible (DocEvents) etc, something which Quickr lacks.

I also think that Filenet etc are overkill for a lot of organisations....

DDM provided a really nice middle ground, was cheap, and ran on peoples existing infrastructure.

What DDM really needed was a make-over, and some new features...

Its also a shame that another product/function is withdrawn from the Domino portfolio...

Chris Sparshott

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Domino.Doc, thank you and good night.

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