I’ve been heads-down on some deadline-critical work, so I hadn’t followed the Notes/Dominio 7 release as closely as I evidently should have. I woke this morning to find out that— oops— IBM isn’t shipping DB2 support in Notes 7. See Ed Brill’s page for his take on it, including the news that you can apply for access to the DB2 functionality. I have to wonder whether there are secret criteria for the application process; I guess I’ll find out when I apply. It’s too bad that this feature didn’t make the cut, although IBM had a tough decision: slip to keep the feature or ship without it. Given the customer uncertainty over the impact of moving to DB2 as part of Workplace, I’m sure they would have liked to ship this feature on schedule.
Interestingly, the reason Ed cites for not shipping the feature is that not enough customers were testing it. Microsoft has worked long and hard to build a real-world customer testing program, the Technology Adoption Program (or TAP). TAP customers run pre-release builds of Exchange in production, with full support from PSS. Of course, MS also dogfoods new releases in their own environment; between the TAP and internal MS users, my recollection is that there were about 150,000 mailboxes running live on Exchange 2003 during the latter part of its dev cycle. I expect to see the same thing– probably with bigger numbers– for Exchange 12. Perhaps IBM should consider a similar approach.
Paul's Down-Home Page 
The feature is absolutely shipped, the availability program is about controlled enablement of it.
There is no separate DB2-ized version of Domino 7, all the code is there. It is a license key requirement for the server to recognize it can use DB2.
And there are DB2-enabled servers running inside of IBM and have been for a while. But it takes a diverse set of customers and environments to nail all of the potential test cases.
Many Domino customers probably have no DB2 experience either and no interest in switching.
Why would they test DB2 integration in beta if they had no plans to use it ?
Test comment; Ed said that comments are broken.
Another test comment, this time from IE 6 SP1 on XP SP2.
David, interesting take– thanks for your comments. If the feature shipped, IBM should only have shipped it with adequate testing, which (according to Ed) it hasn’t yet gotten. You can certainly argue the meaning of “adequate” in this scenario; “adequate” for a small company’s test lab wouldn’t be “adequate” for New York Life, for instance.
Otherwise, the scenario is “ship it in 7.0, fix it in 7.0.1”, which is logically equivalent to “ship it in 7.0.1”.
@ Paul: “Ship it in 7.0.1” is dramatically better than “ship it in 7.0, fix it in 7.0.1” – we get to skip that whole install/crash/restore cycle that normally is in between those two steps (this assumes, of course, that the 7.0.1 version itself doesn’t need to be fixed :D).
Worth noting: IBM shipped 7 early. It was announced for Q3, which normally would mean delivery on 9/30 or 10/1 (in our industry, 12/1 wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows…). I guess they *could* have spent that extra month trying desparately to QA the DB2 piece sufficiently, but I like this approach better.
Honesty. Refreshing, really.
Consider this: the only serious competitor to Domino in the enterprise messaging and collaboration market has, on multiple occasions, announced a major change in their data store and not even gotten to the stage that IBM has achieved with this “limited availability” release. In reality, IBM has often made distinctions in the level of support that they give certain features, frequently depending on the platform the customer is running on. Particular features can be “certified”, which means that IBM is fully satisfied with the testing, or “supported”, which means that IBM is not satisfied with the testing but is unaware of any problems and is confident enough to say that they will devote whatever resources are necessary to resolve anything that comes up. The last category is “unsupported”, which obviously means that you’re on your own. The limited availability program that Ed described is simply an extension of that, allowing some customers to get “supported” status for the feature while others will have “unsupported” status. I.e., as Ed described, if you’re a DB2 customer, then you can apply to get “supported” status for the feature, otherwise it’s available but “unsupported”. The New York Lifes out there are going to demand a high level of support for the feature no matter when IBM makes it available. It’s a major architectural feature, and they’re going to demand significant hand-holding. The truth of the matter is that if IBM puts the feature out to everyone at once, even if it works perfectly they’re just not going to have the resources to provide that kind of hand-holding to everyone. Maybe not to anyone, because they’ll be stretched too thin. By limiting the number of customers who get the supported status, IBM is making sure that the New York Lifes really will get the level of support they need. Back when I worked for a big technology company, we called this sort of thing a “controlled release”.
I figured out where your comments are busticated — on the home page. When I click the permalink, I can leave comments.
Right you are, Ed– thanks. I figured that out while aboard a small, noisy Delta CRJ and fixed it as soon as I got to a quiet spot in the terminal 🙂
Paul, it’s quite amusing to see you write this in your newsletter column today:
Help me see the difference between your criticism of IBM for not supposedly testing this feature sufficiently and the way you’ve just let MS off the hook for same?
PS that last comment is from me. Not sure why the “remember me” didn’t stick, probably me as I switch between browsers.
Fair question, Ed. The difference, as I see it, is twofold. First, MS shipped a feature (in-place upgrades) and documented the circumstances in which it’s supported. IBM shipped the feature and requires you to get permission (which may or may not be easy to obtain) to turn it on.
Second, even if in-place upgrades didn’t work, there are still several ways to accomplish the same thing. Not true of moving your Notes data to DB2.
Finally (OK, so three reasons): MS didn’t promote in-place upgrades as a key capability of their product release, as IBM did with DB2 support.