Collaboration competition - Microsoft versus Lotus in 2005/2006

Yesterday I attended a Microsoft seimanr here in Melbourne (Australia) and it looks like Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 are going to be pretty competitlve in many regards. Microsoft seems to be very happy about SQL Server 2005's performance (against IBM's DB2) and equally with the tight integration with their other products (Office, CRM, etc).

There were a few glimpeses of Micrososft "Office 12" due late in 2006 or thereabouts. It seems that the Office underpiinngs have been significantly reworked and Office 12 will have some nice new collaborative features. Pity about having to wait another year or so before it's let loose upon us!

Meanwhile Lotus Notes/Domino 7 has shipped and IBM has the next "Hannover" release well into development. There's a lot of life left in Notes and Domino.

I've ben much closer to Lotus Notes/Domino than to the Microsoft products, so have been doing some research to increase my understanding of the features and positiong of the latter. Here are a few articles that I've looked at recently which give a nice independent summary of the Microsoft collaboration product range:

1. Increase Efficiency With Collaboration [using Microsoft technologies] - September 2004
2. Microsoft's Expanding Collaboration Strategy - December 2004
3. Microsoft Sets Its Sights on Collaboration - October 2005

On the surface, it seems to me that doing things the Microsoft way you have to cobble together a wider range of server products that IBM does with the base Lotus Notes/Domino with maybe a couple of others (such as Sametime). And the author of the third article makes a point about the more unified development model of the Lotus products.

Competitoni is good for us all: it's great to see two of the big players working so hard to bring provide productivity features. If the large attendance at yeasterday's seminar is any indication -- and this was just for Melbourne, it's probably the same all around the globe -- Microsoft certainly is managing to generate considerable interest, despite the regular slippages in their product release dates.