Yes Virgina there is a Wave 12...

Whew, what a busy few weeks. Especially with the releases we announced yesterday about new tools and updates to the existing tools. These tools will help customers who are transitioning to the current Microsoft solutions. The question is, what about next wave of coexistence and migrations? (To SharePoint 2007, Exchange 2007, Office 2007 and more...)

                                                 

Will we have transition tools to the next wave of collaboration products? Absolutely!   The 2007 product wave of collaboration tools will offer a great upgrade for any Domino topology. As with the current products we will also have a a set of transition tools to the 2007 product line. We have actually been working on these for quite some time and will contiune to spend a great deal of effort making sure that there is a solid set of transition tools around the 2007 product line.

What will they be like?   They will follow the same fundamental PPCM transition model with tools aimed at planning, coexistence and migration phases. Specifically we will have

· Reporting tools to help understand the Domino topology.

· Coexistence tools and still emphasize coexistence as a valid long-term state, key to lowering the cost of a transition.

· Content migration tools to migrate any desired content.

What is changing?   Actually quite a lot. Most of the Microsoft targets. (Especially Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007) have had major changes in the interfaces we use. As a result, most of the tools as they are known today are being completely retooled.

Quick example: The MAPI interface that we used to route mail in/out of Exchange through the connector has been replaced with more standard based transport interfaces in Exchange 2007. So for Exchange 2007 we are working on a completely new mail connector that uses these new interfaces and also we are now able to add some new features that was previously locked out through the old design.

Also expect some new capabilities/tools that we currently do not offer. We will be discussing these changes in more detail over the next few months, and at Tech-Ed next week.

What can we do better? Sure ! If you have any feature/functionality that you think we should be considering in these transition tools, reply and post here. Now is a great time to look at these since we are in the middle of working on these tools.