 | Level: Introductory Betsy Kosheff, Freelance Writer
10 Mar 1997 Mike Kudla leads the team working on the Notes R5 Mail client, code-named Maui, which he describes as a messaging client that has all the functionality of today's Notes Mail plus support for Internet standard protocols like NNTP, LDAP, and IMAP4.
In 1991,
Mike Kudla joined Iris and took on his first assignment -- to
double-byte enable Notes to support multi-byte (international)
character sets. This meant going through the Notes code
line-by-line, with his initial work leading to today's support for
22 languages. This in-depth knowledge of Notes led to his work on
virtually every area of the Notes client, from the Editor, to
LotusScript to the many application design features for Notes
Release 4. Now he's leading the team building the Lotus Notes Mail
client for Internet standard protocols, code-named
Maui.
What can we expect with the new
Notes Mail client?
Essentially, this is a messaging client
that works like Notes, but can also talk to any Internet server out
on your network. The goal is to have all the functionality of
today's Notes Mail, along with the new Lookout navigation, plus
support for NNTP, LDAP, and IMAP4. We want to provide the richness
of the Notes client to people whose data is not stored in Notes
databases, and we want to let Notes users directly integrate more
information from the Web. This is the ultimate intranet
client.
What will your supporting Internet
standards buy us as Notes users?
Through IMAP4, this client will talk to
any Mail server, and by supporting LDAP, it can let you perform a
directory search against any LDAP server. NNTP and IIOP will let
you integrate information from standard news, distributed object,
and calendaring servers, respectively.
Isn't this just one of several
clients?
Yes, but we are singularly focused on
making it the best client. We want it to be all you need to
integrate task management, calendaring and scheduling, discussions,
basic workflows and browser functionality in an Internet connected
environment. If you want more, like the ability to run custom Notes
applications, you can get the Lotus Notes Desktop product, which
will use the exact same Internet mail we're building
here.
Mike takes time out from working on
the latest Notes client to shoot a round of pool.
Does the planet need another e-mail
client?
Oh, yes, definitely. Choice is good.
You can ask a marketing person, but if you ask me, if you're using
the Web, the lightweight clients are fine for personal use, but
they're never going to cut it for corporations. People want to work
together. That's been proven. They want all the stuff they have in
a Notes client -- a local data store, full-text search, agents,
group calendaring and scheduling. Now they want it built on top of
Internet standards, and this isn't just standards for standards
sake, or so we can have another way to send a message. It's about
potentially enabling new things -- mix and match client and servers
for a greater purpose, which ultimately is the extended, global
enterprise...the type of applications, which by the way, Notes
customers have been enjoying for years. Now we have the opportunity
to extend that and make it even more widely available.
What are the key challenges for your
team?
There are three big ones: the first is
speaking the Web protocols, which essentially involves writing
drivers instead of Remote Procedure Calls for Internet standards
such as LDAP, IMAP4, NNTP, and so on, and
then creating the layer to talk the new protocol and present that
information to Notes user interface so that it gets treated like a
Notes database, with all the inherent capabilities that
brings...like being able to create a folder, views,
etc.
Second, there's work involved in
rewriting the feature set because we're not only incorporating the
Lookout navigation, which is going to give you a whole new way to
manage all the stuff that comes across your desktop, from e-mail to
Notes databases to faxes and so on. But we're doing some new
feature stuff in Mail, Calendar and Scheduling, and Mobile support
too.
And third, there's dealing with the new
data types likeMIME HTML, which
will allow things like images and other objects referenced in HTML
to be stored in a mail message. We want to store these data types
natively without converting them, and then render, display, save,
and send them back out, and of course, make all of this fit
seamlessly in the Notes object-based environment. One of the knocks
on the Notes data store is that the data format is proprietary. We
have written various conversion routines to go between Notes data
format and Internet Standard formats (HTML, MIME, etc.) but this is
not always a lossless conversion. The goal here is to provide the
highest level of fidelity and performance possible, and the best
way to do that is to store the information natively in the format
in which it entered the system.
Which of the Web protocols are
giving you the most hassles?
LDAP needs more functionality and IMAP4
is constantly shifting. You have to remember IMAP was developed in
the academic world and is being embraced as a universal message
transfer protocol. Now we are now seeing the difference between
theory and practice. It doesn't help that people are trying to
extend these protocols under the umbrella of openness. One of the
implementation goals is to reuse as much existing code as possible.
For example, the Notes view allows you to present information in
various ways, sorted on various keys, all under the designers
control. The challenge is to make use of this same paradigm, when
the underlying data is not stored in a Notes Database, but, for
example, on an IMAP Server.
Where do you fit with
browsers?
Our strategy is that browsers are
becoming part of the operating system services and the client of
choice is going to be an integrated one that does a lot of the
things Notes already does extremely well.
What will differentiate messaging
clients in your space?
Features are obviously important, but
interoperability will be especially important.
People need to know they can send mail
from the Internet to people who use any other client and it doesn't
matter how you get there from here. You can communicate using the
Notes Mail client for the Internet with people who use Eudora,
Netscape, the Notes Desktop client, whatever. We need to give
people choices and let them do whatever they want across all the
boundaries, whether protocols, platforms, or operating systems. And
we need to make sure functionality is provided in a consistent
manner, whether it's replication, agent services, access control,
encryption, or whatever. Some vendors don't seem to get the need
for cross platform support, but among those who do, there needs to
be feature parity across the client platforms as well. We already
have a big jump in all these areas. Customers are going to be
taking a hard look at this issue, and we are going to come out
shining.
So are you focusing only on Internet
mail users?
No. We're incorporating Web protocols,
but we're not going to give up the Notes protocols because there
are 11 million users out there and they want the choice to
run their mission critical applications on Notes. We need to give
people flexibility to just read their mail with a smaller faster,
easy to use client, but we're certainly not going to take away
functionality. There're just a lot things you can do with a Notes
client that you can't do with a browser as elegantly. Part of our
strategy is to bridge this gap by "componetizing" key Notes
functionality in Java applets that can be downloaded and used in a
browser. Again, it is all about providing our users
choices.
What's a good example of something
Notes does better?
It's easy to present dynamic
information in a Notes form using Hide-When formulas and
collapsible sections. And we're very dynamic in reacting to users
filling out a form based on their ID or perhaps on their answers to
certain types of information requests. The browser people seems to
be struggling with things like this. However, as the browsers close
the gap, we want to be able to give users their choice as to which
client they wish to use. Or goal is always provide compelling
reasons why the Notes client is the best.
How will this Notes Mail be
different?
Well, besides the Lookout UI and some
new features, our current client needs to be less complex to set up
because today it requires things like Notes user Ids. But there's
no such thing on the Web. Also, we're working on reducing the
footprint. At the same time, we want to preserve and build on the
unique features of Notes because we don't want to just be another
I-mail client -- we want to be the best I-mail client.
What about developing
applications?
We're working on a new site designer
client which will be available separately from Notes Mail, but
which will also incorporate Notes Mail for the Web. There's a real
exciting opportunity here because this is a market characterized by
partial solutions and everyone knows that cobbling them together is
a pain the neck. That's a real familiar song to us. You've got to
use Front Page to do really cool graphics stuff, but then when you
want to do some Javascript or some programming you end up editing
HTML inside of Notepad. What we're building is the next generation
for the Web. It's even beyond Domino.action, because the ability to
rapidly design a Web site is part of the core product and built on
Internet standards. People really need a toolset to build their Web
sites in one place quickly easily, and then when they're done, get
all the advantages like local replication, and not have it take all
day. That's just a giant need out there saying "fill
me."
What kinds of things are you working
on to deal with issues of international messaging?
Lots of things. For example, on the
Web, you can have alternative representations of the same page, for
example, by selecting Chinese or English from your browser. We're
doing work to make it easier to translate dynamically, on the fly,
and to intelligently interpret what language you're using before
loading the spell and grammar checkers, and help, for example,
depending on the content of the document.
What do you think are Iris'
advantages versus the competition?
Well, ironically, we're smaller -- only
about a dozen people. We're working with an installed base, which
is actually an advantage because we've got lots and lots of
enterprise experience. We've dealt with issues over the past four
versions like multi-platform, multi-protocol and multi-data type
support. And we've got the lead on features for groupware and
messaging, both from a developer and an end user perspective, and
we're going to widen that lead. The product has a great market
opportunity and it's just a great, really talented group of people.
When I come in here in the morning it seems like 15 minutes have
gone by and I look up and it's 4:30 in the afternoon.
What advice do you have for
developers?
Well, if they're talented and they have
LDAP and IMAP experience, I recommend they send me their resumes
because there are lots of great things going on here.
Resources
About the author | | | After she was ejected from private school in New Hampshire, Betsy Kosheff turned to a career in journalism. She moved to Chicago to attend Northwestern University's teaching newspaper program, where her first idea for a story led her to the Windy City Hall. There, she proposed that all government officials should dress like hens, and was again, promptly ejected. In 1983 she decided to go into public relations but was overcome with self-loathing and now lives in the Berkshires enjoying the simple pleasures of life, like farming and sitting on an air hose. |
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