On our production systems, we've been forced to run Solaris since about 2001, when we ditched some old ALR-9000 Gateway servers running NT 4.0 and Domino 4.61d. Sure, I'd have loved to buy a herd of cheap Intel-based boxes and run clusters atop Linux -- in fact, the Sun guy over in our systems division asked me why we hadn't just done that instead of spending over half a million dollars on a pair of full-dress 6503s -- but we were told that Sun is our production platform, that's why.

Over the years, Domino has run adequately on Solaris, though of course the new, hot releases and bug fixes almost always were released for everything but Sun a lot sooner. Our first QuickPlace 1.0 server was on Windows, but when we went to QP 2.08 atop Domino 5.08, it was on top of Solaris.

In recent years, we've had a hell of a time getting QuickPlace to stay running. Mystery problems that only occurred on Solaris that didn't exist on Windows or AIX or Linux or BeOS or AmigaOS or AppleDOS or TRS-DOS or any other damn platform... and it'd be months before IBM could figure things out and patch stuff for us.

Imagine our delight when we were on this conference call and some people from IBM basically said that the 8.0x releases are the end of the line for new releases of Quickr on Solaris. Imagine the glee of our pro-Microsnot systems people when they realized that Sharepoint would finally be able to "replace" QuickPlace/Quickr. Imagine how pissed off I was to hear that IBM claimed they'd announced the end of the road at Lotusphere or thereabouts... and I remember asking several people who ought to have known whether Solaris was going to be supported properly in the future.

Imagine Sun's delight when we tell them that our V2000 blades are going to be the last Quickr servers we ever own.

I went hunting, of course. Looked all over the IBM/Lotus sites, even the unofficial ones, for something, anything, that said specifically that under newly-released-just-last-weekend Quickr 8.1 on Domino, Solaris was not a supported platform. I failed utterly. Even on the 8.1 press releases and documentation/administrator cheat sheets, they refer you to another site for the hardware/software requirements, and the page they refer you to has information for 8.00/8.01, but not actually 8.1. Do we assume that it is supported just because I can't find anything that says it ain't?

Anybody out there know what the deal is?

Yes, yes, I've known for years that Sun is likely going to go the way of NetWare, OS/2, NT on Alpha, and HP/UX as far as support for Domino and its related toys. Yes, I've wondered for years how long Sun can go on selling overpriced, overcomplicated server hardware running a Unix variant that doesn't even do half the cool stuff Ubuntu does. Yes, I've watched as the people we can call at IBM who actually know anything about Solaris get old and gray and die off from boredom.

But no, I cannot find an announcement, let alone anything that gives me any good reason why I shouldn't just hand over my 70,000-seat license for Quickr to the Sharepoint hooligans and say, "here, you figure out what we do with the more than 800 Places we have and the hundreds of gigs of critical data all those execs stored in them."

Once again, IBM is getting out the big hose and shoving it up our Solaris-powered orifices.

1. term paper 08/20/2009 07:51:08 AM
Homepage: http://www.usatermpapers.com

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2. Turtle05/31/2008 08:16:16 PM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

Damjan: no, not presently. If you are a major Quickr on Solaris shop, contact Jelan and other people, up to Bob Picciano if necessary, to let them know NOW that you want and expect IBM to continue to provide Quickr support for Solaris. If you're really feeling lucky, tell them you'd also like to see support for Solaris x86 and maybe OpenSolaris.

3. Damjan P05/18/2008 11:48:56 AM

What is the status of this? Will IBM provide Quickr 8.1 on Solaris platform or not? If yes, when? What about future releases?

4. Jelan Heidelberg, Lotus Quickr Offering Manager04/07/2008 03:04:22 PM

Unfortunately we were unable to contain Solaris support within the IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1 release cycle. We are currently working with Sun to investigate how we may be able to add support for Solaris to Quickr for services for Domino in the future. We are working on this issue with the small number of customers that have been impacted. Domino 8.0x currently supports Solaris, The next version of Domino, now under development, will support Solaris. Speculation that Domino is dropping support for Solaris is completely inaccurate.

5. Henning Heinz04/01/2008 09:35:14 AM

My problem is that with your writing style this was quite funny to read. The story itself is a sad one but my opinion is that IBM assumed that none is running Quickr on Solaris anyway. Now that the message is out that some brave men (and woman) have not been threatened enough l see a chance that it will get a grace period.

6. Bill Malchisky04/01/2008 06:05:35 AM
Homepage: http://www.effectivesoftware.com

The irony here is that many of the gov't shops where I worked have all ditched AIX for Solaris and now, IBM is suspended from gov't contracts due to an EPA investigation from a MAR 06 contract.

So what, to retaliate, they ditch Solaris support? Conjecture, I know...but it is an interesting coincidence--if only that much.

Regardless, it is pathetic. Some idiot in Management really put their blinders-on here.

7. Chris Whisonant03/31/2008 08:34:11 PM
Homepage: http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/lotusnut

No Solaris for 8.1: { Link }

Sucks, I know, and I have no recollection of this announcement either.

8. Andy M03/31/2008 06:10:42 PM

Well, I can tell you that I am disgusted at this news. Like yourself I was expecting Quickr 8.1 to work on Solaris, as nothing was announced to the contrary. We even bought new Solaris servers to run it on - I will have to reassign them to something else. IBM have really screwed their customers once again. Can we get an assurance that Domino itself will continue to be supported on Solaris?