3c-InterOp [new blog focused on communication/collaboration/coordination]

3c-InterOp [new blog focused on communication/collaboration/coordination] "There are a bunch of us who have been deeply involved in the Notes/Domino (and related product) industry for many years. Some of us have worked at Lotus in various capacities, all of us are now "indies", working at small consulting/development/training/article-and-book-writing companies, and we are all Lotus/IBM business partners. Our common center of gravity is (and will probably continue to be) Notes and Domino. Why? Because we know it real well, we like it (despite a few warts here and there), and we think it provides real value to our customers, and will (if allowed) continue to do so for years to come. Notes/Domino as a product has been transformational in the way it allows small, medium and large organizations to build, deploy, maintain and use business applications that can be roughly placed in the "collaborative" category. The services and features of the product are unequalled in the collaborative application space.
So, what's the big deal? Well, the deal (it remains to be seen how big it will be) is that some of us have been speculating about /hypothesizing on/discussing what some of us see as a wave of change which we think may be about to transform the Notes/Domino software industry. Domino has always been strong in its ability to exchange data with other products (relational database systems, message queues, desktop apps, etc.).
But what we think we're starting to see more recently is an emerging focus among developers on integrating Domino apps (and I'm including apps that use the Notes client and "Web" apps, which use browser clients) with other "app server" platforms. The most common app server product mentioned tends to be WebSphere App Server, IBM's J2ee implementation. That's not surprising, Notes and Domino customers are used to dealing with IBM, and it's natural that most of the ones who are starting to look outside the Domino space for other kinds of platforms would turn first to another IBM product.
Does this mean that Domino is on the way out, or are we only changing how we use it? And if we're going to be using other platforms, is WebSphere the only other logical choice? What about Microsoft's .NET framework?
These are the topics we're going to be exploring in some depth here in this multi-author blog. (And, by the way, none of us thinks that Domino is dead, although some of us think that it will play a different role in the world of application development in coming years).
Here are some examples of topics we expect to be exploring in coming weeks and months:
Getting Started with .NET Technology - The Big Picture
Getting Started with J2EE Technology - The Big Picture
Technological comparison of Domino, J2EE and .NET
How to Decide What to Use - Domino, J2EE, .NET
.NET Application Architecture Meta Model
J2EE Application Meta Model and Object Model
Security Model Comparison and Coding Techniques Domino, .NET, J2EE
Inter-Operating Web Applications in Domino, J2EE and .NET Bringing it all together
Application Deployment and Administration J2EE and .NET"

I hope to contribute posts occasionally.