Let’s be fair, OK?
October 2, 2007
A week or so ago, I found the following blog entry:
http://rndnotes.wordpress.com/2007/09/18/why-i-like-domino/ (via Ed Brill)
The gist of it is that developers need to know more basic technologies to be a good Sharepoint developer than they do to be a good Notes Developer, therefore Notes is better. But in all fairness… that isn’t fair. Both technologies have many aspects to their development. Both technologies have underlying server administration. I know almost no developers that truly know it all:
I know Notes developers who don’t know anything about Notes admin. Those who do don’t always know the OS level admin to suport a Domino install. Thos who know all of that might not know all the options in the notes.ini to customize server performance. And an admin who knows all that often doesn’t know LotusScript. Or if he/she does, they don’t know Java. Or maybe they know Java, but not JavaScript, so they are limited on the web application front.
The point is that any technology platform these days requires multiple areas of expertise. And almost nobody learns everything. The list of skills needed to run a platform need to exist at an organizational level, not within an individual. What it boils down to is that neither Notes/Domino nor Sharepoint are highly effective in one-man shops. Unless you personally are one of the few people who truly know it all (they do exist, but most people who think they know everything overrate themselves) you need a team with varied skills to run them well.
If we start to reject any technology platform that requires knowledge of multiple skill sets, the entire industry will start to stagnate. Technology is complex these days. That is why everyone in this industry specializes in something. It is a nice thought that powerful enterprise systems can be simple enough that one person can know it all, but I find that idea somewhat unrealistic.
Instead, we need to seek the platforms that best meet our business goals, including our goals of the size and cost of our IT organizations I believe that a Notes/Domino shop can do that for most businesses. I believe Sharepoint has less flexibility, but can still meet the business goals for many businesses.
But in our measurements and judgments on these platforms, I recommend that we focus on their effectiveness within our organization, not the skill sets of any individual involved in their development.
October 13, 2007 at 2:45 pm
[...] Wann be fair? Read that link.I am all for it. [...]
October 21, 2007 at 1:02 pm
I agree that as technologists we need to be open-minded about selecting the right tool for a job. I disagree, however, that everything should take multiple people with specialized skillsets to properly implement and maintain. I am most passionate about the SMB space, and in that arena you are only going to find a single or at most two moderately skilled people who are in charge of everything with a plug.
It was in that type of environment that I did everything from a bare metal up Domino installation to phone system administration to software development in Access, VB, LotusScript and DB2 stored procedures.
I won’t claim to be an expert or say that I know everything, but I learned enough to keep up with the business needs. I think it is one of the strengths of Domino that it provides such a huge variety of services, and they’re all easily accessible as a check box during install. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated.
Ben Langhinrichs posted recently about how overly complex many of the software installs are becoming. http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/archive/20071018-0513 . I agree with him completely. Not everything can be installed in two minutes, but it shouldn’t take a week of reading just to figure out the order to install products in, either. And it shouldn’t take multiple specialized people.
You’ve got an interesting blog here, thanks for sharing your perspective.
October 23, 2007 at 12:07 pm
The big difference between the Lotus and MS solutions has always been in the connections. MS always expects you and your team to provide the tape, glue, and string it takes to put the solution together and keep it up and running. Lotus’ integrated Domino solution is just easier to get up and running and keep it there. Think about it this way: given a server with the OS already set up, how long would it take you to get a development environment/server up and running in Domino? Sharepoint? I am willing to bet anything that the Domino answer is exponentially smaller than the Sharepoint answer. Here’s another one for you: what does it take to move an application from one server to another in Domino? Sharepoint? I mean totally off one set of hardware and onto another.
Still think the complexity of the 2 environments is comparable?
October 23, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Sean,
It took me about 10 minutes to get my SharePoint Dev environment created from the base OS. About the same as it would for Domino. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Moving a SP environment? Just move the files. SharePoint is just an ASP.NET site. You can move it like you would an HTML site, so long as you update your IIS config.
Keep in mind, when people put together the huge lists of MS technologies that are needed, they are normally talking MOSS, not SharePoint. They are two totally different beasts, even though MOSS is built on top of the SharePoint services.
The big lists of technologies and complex setups tend to come from MS partners, who make their living by making MS complex. At the basic level of ASP.NET, IIS, and WSS, it just isn’t as bad as people make it out to be.
In a large production environment, yes, you would have more complexity. On both sides of the fence. Once you get multiple servers going, and clusters, with DR environments, LEI and other such tools, Notes also can turn into a beast to install and keep running.
But I also want to throw you a bone – SharePoint has nothing as nice as the template process for migrating design changes from a dev copy of a site to a production copy. From what I have seen, it utterly fails when you get to process issues within the SDLC. If you want to find an area in which to abuse SharePoint, that is where you should focus your efforts.