Article: Lotus Notes and cc:Mail: Coexistence and its Discontents

For cc:Mail customers deploying Lotus Notes, Lotus has outlined a series of coexistence models. However, there are limitations and drawbacks to this approach. While Lotus has presented their messaging products, Notes Mail, cc:Mail, and SoftSwitch products, as an integrated family of products the technological consistency and integration of these products is less than perfect. It wasn't too long ago that Lotus Development purchased cc:Mail, Inc. and SoftSwitch, Inc. before Lotus itself was acquired by IBM for its groupware technology and brand name.

The first two issues with the coexistence of Notes and cc:Mail are related the hardware and administrative overhead. A strategy of coexistence is costly because it involves maintaining two different hardware infrastructures and administering two different types of systems: one a shared-file database system with no server software components using general purpose file servers, and the other a client/server database system with dedicated servers. At the same time, having two different types of systems means administering two routing or replication topologies and managing synchronization between two different types of directories with different address formats and APIs. On the hardware side, there are two normally independent sets of servers and telecommunications equipment.

In addition to administrative, as well as corresponding operations and support, overhead coexistence has a negative impact on users since different users use different, if similar, e-mail software. Architecturally, this means that, perhaps within the same division, department, or workgroup, users will communicate through e-mail gateways. This is undesirable since it produces network traffic and may create messaging bottlenecks and resulting message delivery delays unless additional, specialized hardware resources are allocated.

A GATEWAY BY ANY OTHER NAME

It's interesting to note that Lotus has stated specifically that the Notes MTAs are not "gateways" but "native MTAs" because this is technically incorrect. An MTA is exactly that, a message transfer agent, not a gateway. An MTA transfers messages from one point in an e-mail system to another or between like systems. By definition, any software the purpose of which is to convert one type of e-mail to another and to interface with two different types of e-mail systems is an e-mail gateway. Similarly, a system that provides a set of gateways that can exchange messages with one another and with various other systems is a messaging switch. The Notes MTA architecture is, like the Microsoft Exchange server, a low-end messaging switching solution. The reason that this is interesting is that Lotus may not have preferred the technically accurate term "message switch" for the Notes V4 "MTA" architecture because that might have placed Notes in direct competition with their own SoftSwitch division and invited comparisons with industrial-strength message switches potentially unfavorable to Notes.

Two reasons might explain Lotus' avoidance of the technically correct term "gateway." First, the cc:Mail system is dependent upon MTAs and gateways that run on separate workstations connected to file servers, rather than running on a server. This makes the system more complex, difficult to monitor, troubleshoot, and manage. In some cases, cc:Mail gateway products have suffered performance, reliability, and compatibility problems and have rightly earned correspondingly poor reputations among customers and in the marketplace at large (a case in point is cc:Mail Link to SMTP version 2.00). As a result, it was prudent of Lotus' marketing arm to distance Notes Mail from cc:Mail with its problematic gateway model. Second, Microsoft Exchange also has a modular message switch architecture but Microsoft has avoided the term "message switch," presumably to avoid comparisons with full-scale message switches such as the SoftSwitch and WorldTalk products. At the same time, Microsoft has avoided the term "gateway," perhaps for the same reason Lotus wished to avoid it, i.e., it's in their interest to distance their new client/server e-mail system from MS Mail which, like cc:Mail, is a file server based system and to represent Exchange as being fully-integrated with MS Mail. So Lotus' adoption of the term "MTA" over "gateway" and "message switch," although technically incorrect, can be viewed as mandatory given Microsoft's positioning of Exchange.

COMPETITION, POLITICS, COEXISTENCE AND MIGRATION

Returning to the question at hand, the similarities between the Notes and cc:Mail user programs can be seen as somewhat superficial. In fact, they differ substantially in all underlying details, ranging from menu options to their respective mobile configurations and transport mechanisms. Since there are two different e-mail programs for users to use, and for help desk personnel to support, there are two different sets of end-user problems, and two different sets of solutions that typically require help desk personnel to interface with two different sets of system administrators. Also, when problems arise between systems, busy staff, and sometimes vendors, point fingers at one another causing solutions to be delayed. In many customer organizations coexistence of cc:Mail and Notes Mail creates political divisions that hamper productivity across the board. It is perhaps interesting to note that such divisions within customer organizations reflects Lotus' own internal division insofar as Lotus offers two competing messaging solutions, selling Notes Mail directly against cc:Mail in order to counter Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft does not have the same problem because they have taken the painful step of declaring MS Mail dead, rather than creating a situation where they are selling competing solutions.

Lotus attempted for years to develop workable coexistence and integration models for customers by planning, and promising, to deliver various server-oriented components for centralization of Notes and cc:Mail servers and MTAs. These solutions were outlined for customers at the annual cc:Mail Interchange and then at the Lotusphere trade shows with each year bringing a different architecture but for over 3 years, no products. Apparently the company was hampered by internal competition. In late 1994, Lotus cc:Mail returned to a years-earlier database overhaul plan (delivered as cc:Mail R6 in 1996) and Notes R4 was released without cc:Mail integration, or even a common-object message store, at the architectural level. On the Notes side, Lotus has finally introduced the cc:Mail MTA running under Notes 4.11a server. It is interesting that the MTA delivers only part of the functionality promised by past coexistence and integration models and less functionality than the MTA itself was originally slated to deliver, e.g., it has no file sharing MTA.

WHOLESALE MIGRATION: THE RIGHT SOLUTION?

In the past year, Lotus has more and more strongly pushed the most workable solution for customers that have a commitment to groupware and the solution that protects Lotus' Notes-based strategy: Migration. Of course it remains in Lotus' interest to promote coexistence because any customer with a substantial commitment to both Notes and cc:Mail will eventually arrive at a strategy of full migration to Notes.