At Lotusphere IBM announced to sponsor a new collaboration with OpenNTF. Today at DNUG Kevin Cavanaugh announced more details about this new collaboration. The new OpenNTF Alliance is a group of equal members with the common goal to provide open source apps based on Lotus Notes/Domino.
See here for the OpenNTF press release.
See here for a developerworks article about the new Alliance or see here for information about the Alliance directly on OpenNTF.
I won’t repeat all the information from these sources in this blog entry but let me tell you how happy I am what we have accomplished. My special thanks goes to Brent Peters and Russ Holden who have given me the task to work on this mission. I also want to thank Steve Castledine who I’ve had the pleasure to work together with for the last months. With his passion, his strong development skills and his knowledge of the community it’s fun to work with. In addition there are many other people who have been involved in making this happen, both from IBM internal as well as the people who most of you know well and who are now part of the Alliance.
I’m glad that eight members in addition to IBM have stepped up to move Notes/Domino application development to the next level. I’m confident that we’ll find even more members now that the Alliance has been established.
The Notes/Domino application platform has always been very strong to build applications rapidly. With XPages this rapid application development even gets more powerful since XPages leverage standard (web) programming patterns, technologies, etc. and enable a big range of developers to build applications and building blocks. OpenNTF allows now this community of developers (customers, partners, freelancers) to share these assets easily and use and extend each other’s assets. I think that not only IBM will benefit from this new Alliance, but that the new Alliance will be as valuable for many other companies who use Notes/Domino for application development.