For those falling into the second camp, IBM's announcement last month that it'll no longer be upgrading DAMO is somewhat disturbing. DAMO stands for Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook and was one of Lotus' particularly interesting efforts to create interop between the Microsoft camps and the Lotus camps. Unfortunately, per a June 19th statement:

The development teams at IBM responsible for the Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) functionality currently plan to continue to support and maintain the functionality. There are no plans to add new features or functions to the technology beyond those that have been developed and tested. Issues brought to IBM Support where it is determined that the functionality is not working as designed will be addressed.

The latest version of DAMO is built on the 8.0.x code stream and there are no plans to bring it forward to a more recent version of Notes. DAMO has been tested and its use is supported with a Domino 8.5.x server. DAMO is a feature of Notes and Domino 8.0 and will continue to be supported for the life of those products.

As with any IBM program, however, the foregoing reflects IBM's current plans and directions, and are subject to change by IBM at any time based on IBM's then-current business requirements.

We've asked around and as-yet, we haven't seen that Lotus plans a substitute offering. But we could be wrong. David's often said we have the world's largest peer review body, so if I'm missing something, don't hesitate to tell me. But a few Lotus customers have brought this to my attention and, frankly, I'm a bit bummed.

While there may never be an easy way to pry Outlook out of the hands of some users, DAMO was a great way of replacing the back-end, without Microsoft end-user loyalists being any the wiser. It was a great way to get better security, better data management, and better scalability into an organization, without tearing away the Outlook clients that some users hold so dear.

But now, it looks like IBM's giving up on DAMO. Of course, never say never again. DAMO works and is supported under Domino 8.5.x and ND9 is some time off, so there's no immediate damage to this announcement. That said, we strongly, strongly encourage IBM to include at least the equivalent of DAMO functionality in future versions of Domino.

After all, can't we all just get along?

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.