My review of the Workplace Services Express Roadshow today
Tags :Conferences
I am sitting live in the roadshow listening
and watching them install, demo and show a Day in the Life for a
WSE user. Here is my overview of what I learned while sitting at
the show:
- Workplace Collaboration Services is for the enterprise and is a much larger install and licensing cost. (I knew this one coming in but a small percentage of the attendees were not clear on what was what yet.)
- WSE is for smaller shops and includes a current 20 free licenses to install for Passport and Business Partners. Additional licenses are sold in 20 user packs (they think) or per processor. But WSE can only be a single machine. A maximum of 2000 names users is also a limit
- It can install a local Cloudscape database for users or utilize a LDAP directory. No schema changes were stated to be made to the LDAP sources
- The document management integration with Windows was cool but quite scarily looked like Domino Document Manager on the Win32 integration, but on steroids for the web side.
- The basic templates and built in features are cool for shops first deploying. For advanced shops, looking into importing templates and portlets will be a market in itself around this product
- The java editors were very nice letting users without Microsoft Office actually edit and do some basic word processing functions.
- You could access with IE 5.5, IE 6 plus Mozilla 1.4 (1.3 could work but lacked some fucntionality) and recent Firefox 1.1 with success
- If you know Portal or Websphere Application Server you already have some basic skills
Of course, there was a few things I did not like during the show, but some were made up for
- When they talked about integrating your existing mail infrastructure, they kept saying Exchange at a rate of 3 to 1 over Domino. I only started paying attention when they kept saying Exchange Portlets. Unfortunately, most of the audience was Domino already.
- Chat and awareness worked well, but uses some bizarre ports, not Sametime ones. Tunneling didn't seem to be an option which could be hard for remote workers at sites or customers.
- The final half of the show didn't work, as they did not test the load and change the IP addresses from where the were last. They spent 20 minutes showing where to download it. They did have some test machines locaded up front to play live on the other system that was running though
blog comments powered by Disqus
On Tuesday, March 15th, 2005 by Chris Miller
