What exactly will happen to the Domino server is less clear -- I have heard suggestions, with no hard foundation, that it might end up as a collection of services on top of a WebSphere server. So I think we can expect the Domino and Notes functionality to live for many years, but have to get used to it actually being delivered in different ways.

[In a private interview that we had with Marc Favennec, Vice President of Lotus Software, Favennec told us that there were millions of Notes/Domino users and Lotus would be "insane" (his word) to plan on killing the Notes or Domino product lines. --DG]

What can be seen now though is actual product -- indeed Lotusphere Online this year used WebSphere Portal as its basis, with Workplace Messaging used to deliver the mail component and portalized Domino apps for other parts of it.

The most complete products in the family are the all-new Messaging and Workplace Team Collaboration products. Messaging is a low-function mail and calendaring offering, aimed, still, at the unserved employees of large enterprises, those where Notes is seen as a less appropriate -- and expensive -- solution.

Team Collaboration can be seen as roughly analogous to a mixture of Sametime and QuickPlace, delivered in the Portal, but with a less well differentiated audience than that for Messaging. And if you have both, then the messaging portion will use the Presence Awareness from the Collaboration component.

Less complete is the Workplace Collaborative Learning application, which is basically the existing Learning Management System product with the student experience portalized, leaving the management parts still operated from a traditional browser interface.

Finally there is Workplace Web Content, the applications obtained from Aptrix -- I can't really say anything more about this as I just didn't have time to go to any sessions about it.

Currently these are offered as take-it-or-leave-it products to run in Workplace, which is itself a WebSphere Portal application. Portal itself is a application run-time environment. Tools, such as WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD), and Portal Builder are available now, or are coming soon, to enable application development for Portal and Workplace.

Domino access portlets are available now for use in Portal, and components are available for use in WSAD to enable access to Domino data and Domino functionality in Portal applications. Workplace itself has its own API, Java only, which exposes Workplace component functionality at a reasonably high level -- functions such as Search Calendar or Manage Attachments in Messaging.

This means that custom collaborative applications can be developed on the Workplace platform, just as we all know and love on Domino. The Workplace apps are componentised. For example, Messaging has separate calendaring and mail components. You can use these separately, as they stand, or work with their APIs.

Big differences from Domino are firstly that you can't dissect the individual components and alter the way they work, and secondly, you must know Java. Actually you are going to have to learn some new skills; the foremost of these will be Java. I'd suggest that, regardless of you company's current plans, that you investigate Java now, so that when it happens, you'll be ready. Of course, if you are a Java developer, you can start on that in a practical manner right now by starting to develop agents in your current applications in Java rather than in LotusScript.