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 NEWSGroove bakes SOAP server By Cathleen Moore and Ed Scannell April 29, 2002 6:07 am PT ENTERPRISES ARE BRACING for seismic change as the impending collision of Web services, peer-to-peer, and collaboration technologies promise to alter the messaging landscape.
Groove, led by Notes creator Ray Ozzie, is expanding the platform to incorporate what it describes as edge services. "It is Web services that are essentially being exposed at the edge of the network, meaning all the way out on the client PC," Ozzie said. It's essentially a SOAP relay." He added that the edge services architecture will enable Groove to rapidly implement small, lightweight, appropriate interfaces for a variety of devices, including phones, handhelds, and PCs. Groove's plans represent an early example of how Groove's technologies will integrate with the next generation of Microsoft's Office platform. "My goal on behalf of the customer and user is for Groove to bring out the latent collaboration power within both Windows XP and Office XP," he said. In addition, Ozzie is currently evaluating how Groove's collaboration platform will integrate with Microsoft Outlook competitors, including IBM's Lotus Notes. "Virtually every one of those customers or partners is going to have to start reviewing their strategies for how they're going to be moving forward with Notes over the next months and years to come," Ozzie said. "I would presume that there will be some customers that are re-evaluating whether they're even going to go to Notes 6," Ozzie said referring to statements Lotus made at Lotusphere in January. Asked whether IBM and Lotus have any comparable technology to Groove, Ozzie said "No." Lotus plans to adopt J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) in future versions of its collaboration products, a move designed to pave the road to collaborative Web services, according to Lotus officials. Lotus is also making efforts to better integrate with DB2 and develop a common stack of service shared by Domino and WebSphere. IBM executives disagree with Ozzie and worried Lotus partners and users, arguing that Domino will evolve to become more open, flexible, and inclusive of other technologies. "There's no termination point [for Domino]. The environment can't remain the same though. So we will continue to evolve that code base and take advantage of technologies we have elsewhere in IBM to move that code forward," said Steve Mills, IBM's senior vice president in charge of the company's Software Solutions group. As Lotus prepares to release Domino 6 this summer, Ed Brill, senior manger of enterprise messaging at Lotus in Cambridge, Mass., said the company has started scoping efforts for next major release, tentatively dubbed Notes/Domino 7, which will push further into open Web services. Much like Domino 6, the next major release, "is an evolution in the direction of the J2EE and open web services framework but it is still the core Notes/Domino based on the same data structures, directory, and messaging engine as it exists today," Brill said. "Why would you jump from a well-established platform [like Lotus] where you have built a lot of value on top, just because they have changed the underlying architecture?" added Dan Rasmus, vice president and research leader with Giga Information Systems in Aliso Viejo, Calif. That is a concern shared by Alan Hale, regional Notes administrator at Fluor Daniel, in Cincinnati, who is considering whether to adopt Notes R6. "Personally, I am not happy with them trying to completely align Lotus with IBM mainstream. I've got everything pinned on Notes and Domino being around for a long time," he said. Meanwhile, Dana Gardner, research director at Aberdeen Group in Boston, commented that Groove's intersection with .Net stands to further disrupt current modes of enterprise collaboration. "Groove is very much aligned with .Net. It could also be construed as a Web service if you deliver it through SOAP and you can do these ad hoc dynamic collaborative environments as a Web service rather than as a deployed server-based function," he said. "I would say the Groove plus .Net gets a lot closer to the collaborative power of groupware and Domino than does .Net without Groove," Gardner added. Related articles Interview: IBM's software chief speaks out Interview: Ozzie's Groove moves toward edge services Cathleen Moore is an InfoWorld senior writer. Ed Scannell is an InfoWorld editor at large. Steve Gillmor and Mark Jones contributed to this article. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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