The report does not examine the vast number of intranet and e-business applications that are used by Exchange customers and are built on a Microsoft development platform using IIS, SQL Server, and integrated Exchange messaging collaboration and workflow services. Lotus acknowledges this, and in fact their future plans for Domino are centered around integrating the development platform between the WebSphere design tools and DB2. Many new Web-based applications from Lotus do not use the Notes database as its primary store, or use the Notes client at all. One such example is Lotus LearningSpace. Microsoft believes that customers want the key applications in the nine categories listed in the report to be Web applications.
Domino is a poor Web server and a non-standard Web development environment.
Porting existing R4 applications to the Web is a difficult, highly-skilled task. This is in stark contrast to Domino Web applications, which must be hosted on the Domino database and built using the proprietary Notes Designer. The proliferation of unsupportable custom applications built using the Notes Designer is a major maintenance burden for corporate IT departments. This often forces Lotus customers to develop large numbers of custom applications, as reflected in the inflated usage of Notes as measured by the survey. As recently as the January 2000 LotusSphere, IBM admitted that the majority of Notes customers had still not migrated to R5.