If you are IBM and you have to sell a 20 year old email and collaboration platform, what do you do? You stop calling it Lotus notes and start calling it Open Client. Why Open? because you just ported it to run on Linux and Mac.
Recently IBM released a "new solution" that would let customers avoid the vendor lock-in associated with Microsoft's windows environment. You could continue using Windows or you could buy Linux desktops and slap the open client on top and have a easier to manage group-ware environment. What do you get as part of Open Client? A mix of Lotus Notes for email and collaboration, Sametime for instant messaging and couple other pieces.
The "Open" part of the name conveys an idea of open source which is not the case here. Everything is closed source here except the underlying eclipse platform it runs on.
As far as Lotus Notes is concerned, I know some people who changed their jobs because of the company they worked for didn't move away from Lotus Notes. Yes! people hate Notes to that extent. Yeah! I know people hate Microsoft too, but this one is a different game. The worst part is that once you have rolled out a Notes based system for your company, it's really tough to switch out of it. No wonder the only way IBM could sell this piece of garbage was to bundle it free with some other products you bought from them.
IBM's pitch on the new Open Client is that you could save money on Linux installations and lower cost of maintenance because you are dealing with only one kind of application across all your different operating systems. Yeah, right! does anybody think that life will easier to go from dealing with Microsoft to dealing with Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell and IBM???
Honestly, I don't get it. If you are one of those who believe IBM is out there to save your money, go ahead and hire couple of IBM's consultants to evaluate your needs 'cause the Open Client is priced according to your requirements.
