I listened to the latest Taking Notes podcast this evening, where Bruce and Julian discuss BleedYellow with Nathan and Chris from Lotus911. It's a great story and makes compelling listening, but as Chris described the setup - a huge 8-way server, 16Gb RAM, and installed with six virtual machines - that hosts the thing, I started to wonder. I mean, we all have spare servers like that on the shelf, so it's fantastic that Lotus911 took the time, effort (3 days to get it all installed and working) and not a little kit, to put BleedYellow together. I think that there are many companies that would like to get their feet wet with Connections, which is one of the reasons Nathan and Chris give for putting BleedYellow together in the first place - it enables people to have a play - which to my regret, having signed up, I just have not had the time to do.
But there will be many companies who would like to run serious pilots inside their firewalls, and I just think that the sheer amount of kit and expertise that's required to get it working is a significant inhibitor to having a play, and generating that a-ha! moment. Would it have been better if the whole thing could be done on one server, or even came with a single install that just did the whole thing. At least, unlike some other vendors we could name, you don't need individual licenses for all the things that are required to make Connections work (an LDAP directory - use Domino, WAS, DB2 and so on. How many other people have put a Connections trial together, and how many - like me - are put off by the sheer amount of kit required to make a go of it?
Mick Moignard February 26th, 2008 01:33:35 PM