Hear hear. You're on the button there Chris.

I'm in the same boat, very very keen on selling Foundations to my SMB customers, but am so disappointed by the needless limitations built into the product at this stage. As you say, it seems to be perfect for distributed site deployments, yet cannot possibly be used in that environment at this stage.

I am struggling to see what IBM has brought to the Nitix party since the acquisition before Lotusphere - there has been some rebranding and changes to the GUI, yet none of the limitations of the Nitix solution have been lifted.

It currently smacks of a missed opportunity to me...

I'm not overly impressed with the professionalism of the IBM makeover - there are some horrendous typos in the Foundations User manual and their posting of the .iso on Partnerworld included seven images (four of which were labelled 'Disk 4 of 4'). Not a good start.

But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. It seems that your concerns are basically that IBM hasn't delivered what you wanted in * your* timeframe. Given the impending release of Microsoft's Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server products I can understand that IBM felt presured to get something out of the door in Q2 2008.

I think there will be significant creative tension over the next twelve months as the IBM code jockeys plead for more time to implement the features you want and the marketing types look for immediate releases to throw into the SMB battle against Microsoft. In short, I think that all of us (you, me and IBM) see the product moving in the same direction but we have different ideas on which features should be fast-tracked.

For the moment we have an excellent product to sell into whitespace clients.

I second Chris and Stuart. Our organization would love to be able to extend the domain with low maintenance servers.

HEY, LOTUS!

Please use these ideas to your and our advantage!

@ Chris, I disagree with your comment about 'it is the market they are currently pitching to.'

Domino is a wonderful application. LFS is a completely different kind of animal which provides networking, firewall, website, backup, databaseoptional anti-spam/anti-virus etc and is ideally positioned as a small business server. Oh... and it also provides Domino email and some Domino application services.

I completely understand the desire of IBM Business Partners to want to sell this product into their existing Domino clients. Lars summed it up that philosophy quite well by wanting to see LFS as a potential low-maintenance extender for existing Domino domains, but I don't remember the Nitix/IBM/Lotus advertising which pitched LFS as that kind of solution.

If you want to stick with a Domino-centric sales strategy that's fine but don't dump on the square peg just because it doesn't fit into your round hole.... (uh... I could probably have phrased that better) .

I'm not an IBM fanboy but I think they're copping an unwarranted beating here.

BTW: over 99% of my 2007/2008 revenue came from standard Lotus/Domino consulting so I'm in the same boat as every other Lotus Business Partner in considering the value of LFS.