Changing Plans?

As I’m sure most Notes folks are aware, SharePoint just isn’t as mature of a platform as Domino. While it has quite a bit of potential, and you can bend it to your will, accomplishing almost whatever you want (if you toss in a generous helping of C#), it just doesn’t offer the same day-to-day job satisfaction as doing solid development work in a platform on which you have years of expertise.

As one guy who commented a long time ago guessed, I’m just not sure that working in SP matches my long-term goals. I’ve always thought that I should complete my current migration effort, then switch to a new job, or a new role within my current organization. Some recent events at work (not related to SP or Domino) have made me wonder if I should speed up my efforts and just switch.

Purely from a job satisfaction perspective, SharePoint is drudgery. Learning new techniques amounts to a little bit of time reading up on how they are supposed to work, and a lot of time working around the quirks about how it REALLY works.
I’ve been downright thrilled with my recent Domino work on the other hand — I’ve working with apps that have been around for many years, and have become heaps of mangled spaghetti code. Cleaning them up, re-designing to match the current business needs, and converting them to web interfaces… Truly enjoyable work.

It means I haven’t had much to add to this blog recently, I know. There are plenty of people already covering the Notes/Domino world as-is.

I’m sharing these feelings with all of you not because I think it will help you with your own migrations, nor as a ‘fishing’ post to see if anyone wants a consultant for a while, but just as a statement of how your average Notes guy might feel 6 months into a migration. Morale is definitely an issue to worry about on migrations, as frustration levels run high. I know if I were my own manager right now, I’d be worried a lot more about the people on the team than the status of the project.

IIS and Domino

I’ve been quiet lately, I know. The reason for this is that I’ve been concentrating on refactoring Notes apps recently, preparing them for web enablement as they get integrated with SharePoint.

But one issue we haven’t yet resolved is Single sign-on, authenticating our Notes Apps with Active Directory. I know the theory, and I’ve done it before – run IIS on your server, with the WebSphere plug-in, set some stuff on the Domino side, and everything is working. IT usually takes a little trial and error to get it running the first time, but then all is well.

But here is my question – as part of configuring the WebSphere plugin, you give the hostname and port for your Domino server. Normally, Domino folks are putting the plugin on the same box that runs Domino, but…

Has anyone instead put the plugin on their SharePoint server? Will it send the authentication cross-server to a different Domino box? If so, would that then allow us to use the SharePoint domain name to reference our domino apps, and let the server actually process the correct routing of traffic?

I’m guessing no one has tried this yet – but if it does work like that, it could be a very nice solution – we could have Domino apps thrown into our SharePoint site, and the end users would never know or care what the actual platform running behind the scenes is. This would let us maintain our investment in the Domino platform, while still reaping the benefits of a single SharePoint portal for the user interface.