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Ten months ago I ordered a Dell laptop to replace my MacBook Pro at the office. I’ll be honest, at the time I thought I would be so convinced that OSX was a better O/S that 6 months into the decision, I’d want my Mac back.

That’s not the case at all.

Sure, I still run Mac’s at home and I’m not interested in changing that, but as a word device, my 64-bit Windows 7 environment makes everything much easier. Network drives? No problem. Cisco/Sametime integration – check. Quickr connectors? Eh, don’t go there.

So while I once called this move going to “the dark side” I have to admit I’ve only benefited from the change. In fact besides the overwhelming sense of being cool, the only thing I miss from the Mac environment is quick look and expose/spaces.

It was interesting to think about all this on the drive in this morning and then see an article about the Top 10 Reasons Apple is the future of IT. I get the point and I’m open to the idea in our environment but my own personal experiences as a HUGE Mac fan suggest that in our environment (which has lots of IBM, Cisco and Lotus Notes based utilities), its not something that makes as much sense as Win7, XP or even Vista.

Tags: ibm, lotus, mac, windows7

I’ve been using my iPad since not long after it came out and I LOVE it, especially with the connectivity I have to Notes. Setup was a snap! Just like Traveler for the iPhone, I simply point to a URL and follow some simple directions. Moments later I have enterprise email, contacts and calendar on one of the most amazing devices Apple has produced to date.

The moment Traveler was setup on the iPad I had one primary thought: “Notes looks AMAZING when Apple does the user interface!” — That thought was immediately followed by another “People are going to challenge Lotus about their UI… I just know it.” Clearly, they did.

At the risk of sounding like I’m coming to Lotus’ (and Ed’s) defense, I want to point out one very important fact (since I personally COMPLAINED about the lack of this for quite some time — I’m now showing my appreciation and respect…): Lotus/IBM didn’t choose to build their own iPhone/iPad app which required you to enter an entirely separate interface for email/calendar/contacts… they (with much difficulty/hassle, I might add) integrated with Apple’s core email/calendar/contacts functionality.

That’s huge! – And its the reason Notes on the iPad looks so good! Apple is known for great UI’s and the blend of their interface and Lotus’ enterprise software core makes for a great product.

Does the Notes calendar interface need some work? Eh, maybe. I personally would like to see them brush off some of the old Lotus Organizer stuff, give it a Web 2.0 feel and an Apple polish and add it to the set of views in my Notes client. — Or… I could just use my iPad, which Lotus has made VERY easy for me to do.

Thanks, Lotus!

Tags: calendar, ipad, notes

For as long as I can remember I’ve had some great, short business tips in the back of my mind at all times. Little snippets of information that I assumed I’ve learned over time. This weekend I was cleaning out some old books when I picked up one I’ve had for years called “Never Confuse a Memo with Reality” and suddenly realized: most of those tidbits are in that one single book!

The book is great and relevant even today (despite being printed circa 1993). I really like the format which is straight to the point and easy to plow through quickly or have on hand during down-time (aka “conference calls” – j/k). Here are some examples of what’s inside:

• Be nice to receptionists – if they like you, they can help you. If they don’t, they can hurt you.
• Brag about someone to another person – that person is bound to find out.
• Never take a problem to your boss without some solutions.
• Don’t write memos of more than one page – use graphics wherever possible.

All good stuff. I’d recommend picking up a copy.

Tags: books

Dan Grosz, the VP of IS at VIP Parts, Tires, and Service is someone I’ve had the opportunity to speak with on a few occasions about a variety of challenges that IT leaders at mid-market sized companies face on a daily basis. This week, he’s contributed a great article to theInfoBOOM.com all about Business Intelligence.

Articles on InfoBOOM are nice and short, so I won’t retrace Dan’s steps other than to say that I agree with his perspective 100%! Many people throughout organizations (most of which are often found in your Accounting/Finance departments) are drawn into fancy presentations about BI tools that will easily allow you to slice and dice your business information effortlessly and without the help of heavy lifting from IT. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Dan touches on some key topics around a successful BI implementation and how IT is still the cornerstone of deploying and managing a BI tool within an organization. I encourage you to check out this article and join in on the discussion!

I. Am. Thrilled! to see that Lotus is doing so much lately to show a commitment to the Mac, iPhone and now iPad. Its actually been a bit hard to AVOID seeing something in the press about that – which is great. I’m especially glad because a quick click on the “iPhone” link in this site’s tag cloud will show lots and lots of entries where I’ve talked about the need for this over the last few years.

And its clear that Lotus has listened (perhaps not to me, but a bunch of us). That’s great! It sends a great message about the brand’s commitment to some outstanding devices; it positions them in a great way (hey, anyone who can ride Apple’s ad/press-tailwave should do so!); and I still believe that it will translate to $.

There is simply no other point to this article than to acknowledge that lots of people are talking about this and I think its all great news. Its easy to have a blog and stay focused on what improvements are needed or what messages are not being heard – I just wanted to say “thanks!” for listening and acting on this one. Its great stuff!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tell my boss that I NEED an iPad! 

Tags: buzz, ipad, iphone, mac, News

Which of these three does not like the other?

I heart Quickr. I “heart” it even more now that I’ve seen a preview of Quickr 8.5 at Lotusphere. It appears that Lotus has done some great work to streamline the user experience quite a bit. For me, this was one of the biggest take-aways from Lotusphere as our own deployment of Quickr has stalled out largely due to some clunkyness in using the product.

I (as the guy in charge of all things IT world-wide at the company) haven’t done much to help people get passed that. The main reason is that I have a big commitment to Windows 7 being our O/S of choice and Win7 doesn’t play nice with Quickr connectors.

Sidebar: I’m not quite clear on when that support will come. Anyone? Anyone? Buhler? Buhler?

The dudes at Snapps have come up with a GREAT iPhone app for Quickr. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used this thing since it came out. Its very simple, easy to set up (even an end-user can do it) and quite helpful. Plus it looks great, works great and I’m not sure there’s many other features I’d like to see in this thing.

If you haven’t seen it for yourself, its worth taking a look at because it is GREAT!

Tags: iphone, quickr, snapps

Irony: I officially remove “Mac” from the title bar of my blog the same week Lotus does a fantastic job of proving they are committed to the platform!

A bit of a history lesson before we get to this post…

When I started this blog I focused mostly on Lotus stuff. Shortly after I became a Mac guy. I then realized I was standing in two communities that (at the time) had little overlap but a lot in common (namely a strong, vocal, passionate and talented community around the product).

In the last 4 months I made the decision to go back to being a “Windows” guy largely due to looking at the roadmap our company had for deploying technology and coming to the realization that if I was the guy who was going to stand in front of the company and lead them into these new tools, I better use them myself.

As I have gone further and further away from Macs at the office, Lotus has gone closer to them – which is exciting to say the least. We still have a few here and for many users it simply isn’t much of a change to use “Windows” Notes (8.5) vs. “Mac” Notes. And that’s no small accomplishment on the part of Lotus! I’m delighted to see them continue to have a stronger commitment to that platform!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still a Mac guy at heart (and at home). But I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I didn’t admit that it is noticeably easier to get my job done being on a Windows platform due in large part to consistency in using the same other software (VPN, VoIP, etc.) as everyone else.

So … for now, I got the Mac out of the focus of this blog. But given that my decision to finally do that came on the same day I saw many news stories from Lotus about their commitment to the Mac, I have to wonder if its temporary.

Time will tell.

Tags: consistency, mac, windows

Initial reactions from the Lotusphere OGS…

I don’t think there has been a Lotusphere that I was more interested in seeing what would happen with than LS10. We’ve all been handed a fresh release of  Notes/Domino, a stable Traveler product (answering much of the iPhone demand) and a Sametime release that’s so new it still has that “new car” smell to it. I left for Orlando wondering what they could possibly debut at Lotusphere.

The answer: not a whole lot. And I’m OK with that!

Let’s first cover some of the bullet points I found interesting from the opening general session:

• William Shatner was the guest speaker – he did a great job and reminded me of the power of storytelling in getting your message across. The guy is simply a pro. (He even made fun of his Priceline ads RIGHT as I was tweeting about the same thing)
• WiFi sucked. The APs must have been seriously overwhelmed which is unfortunate. A big part of this event is the community and I found reading the community’s thoughts (via Twitter) in real-time last year to be quite interesting. (Sadly the improved AT&T coverage didn’t help and the fact that I forgot my brand new Verizon MiFi was the final blow to the whole “wireless internet” thing).
• Lots of customer & business partner perpsective stuff. This is a tough thing to do. Unless you can “connect” with the person talking, you tune them out. I personally liked the Xerox story, Panasonic and GM (and the entrance in a yellow Corvette didn’t hurt either). I can really appreciate GM’s willingness to attend this event considering how much PR they’ve had on the company in the last 18 months – not all of which has obviously been positive.
• Notes client – despite being called the foundation of most of the product line, I honestly can’t tell you one single improvement/announcement/feature unique to the client itself (throwing out a few things about integration with other things, LotusLive, etc. and some screen shots from Project: Vulcan). Oddly enough, I’m totally OK with that!
• Quickr – is getting some great attention. I am putting a lot of faith in this product at the office and I’m glad to see improvements being made. I’d like to see them being made faster, but I’ll take what I can get. (Most noteworthy from today was better UI for adding content and iCal support for team calendars.)
• Sametime – This is essentially a whole new product (in my opinion) and it looks fantastic! One “new” thing demo’d was multi-person video conf. support. The term “HD” was thrown out there. I’ve looked at A LOT of systems that do this and Sametime (demo’d with a 3rd party tool from RADvision) isn’t “there” by comparison to other stuff out there. (However, its also much cheaper.)
• Traveler – now supports encrypted messages through a new app in the Apple AppStore.

Other big news included some new updates to LotusLive – all of which were talked  about but only referenced. I’m expecting the “depth” to be in other sessions on that  topic. It looks interesting. I’ve considered LotusLive but felt it was a bit “early” for my tastes. I think its one to watch though!

The biggest news was the announcement of Project Vulcan. Its not a product, its a direction. Simply put – its brilliant! Today’s world is far more transparent than ever before and companies that are making some huge strides in the markeplace are (often) the ones who embrace this and use “being transparent” to their advantage. I expect (hope) this is where Lotus is going as well.

Project Vulcan is a sort of mission for Lotus’ focusing on building on their existing portfolio, converging their products (and how you deploy them either on-premise or in a cloud) and innovations which drive businesses forward (such as social software) – all of which is designed to foster new opportunities.

Its a good move for Lotus because it helps the community understand WHAT they are focusing on. I expect that in the coming months/years we can then translate that into the products and features that evolve as a result of this.

That being said – “Lotus Knows” their audience and knew that they needed to show some screen shots working versions of products to help us wrap our minds around it. And those products look outstanding! (Very “Apple” in a few cases – which I think is good.)

Final thoughts: much like last year, I didn’t walk away excited about new products. It didn’t feel anywhere near an Apple type of event. However I did walk away excited about Alistair Rennie taking over the GM position (he’s hilarious off-script!) and excited about the future Lotus is embarking on!

It will be interesting to see what the rest of the week brings, especially at mini-keynotes and in various technical sessions (which, as they did last year, will no doubt contain many more announcements that simply didn’t “fit” into the OGS).

Tags: lotusphere, ls10, vulcan

When I was asked to wrote my article about Lotus Notes for theInfoBOOM.com (which was a great success, btw – so THANK YOU for viewing/participating in that with me!) I suggested to a few people at IBM that Ed Brill would be a great person to get to write a column as well.

As Ed pointed out in his blog, it was a bit odd that I ended up writing about Notes while he wrote about social media (those topics ended up being chosen completely independent from one another). Now that his article is posted on theInfoBOOM.com I think Ed was quite right in saying that our selection of topics gave us each a more authentic voice. If Ed would have talked about Notes, it could have been perceived as an ad. Likewise, if I would have talked about blogging/social media – it would have had far less of an impact since my posts come from the perspective of someone outside of Lotus/IBM.

Its a good article and I encourage you to go read it and post a comment.

Oh… and see you at Lotusphere! (If you’re like me, you’re frantically finishing up as many projects as possible to have a clear mind down there … and in anticipation of coming back with hundreds of new ideas!)

Tags: blogging, notes, social media

I’ll admit that in every single one of the 8 (I think that number is right) Lotusphere’s I’ve attended, I haven’t given much thought to the LS online tool that’s prepared with the event. Until now.

Perhaps the lsonline.info site has been this good in the past – but this was the first year I’ve noticed it … and WOW is it a great tool! The interface is very easy to use. I was able to scan through the list of sessions and create a calendar of what I wanted to see in very short order (a process that normally involves multiple reads through the materials, scanning for sessions that repeat and generally a good afternoon planning session right after I pick up my Lotusphere registration information).

But the best part was that I could export my schedule as an .ics file which then can be uploaded into Notes so that my calendar is available with me – how handy is that!

It doesn’t end there, they’ve also provided a mobile interface (www.lsonline.info/m) which works fantastic with my iPhone!

Very cool!

Tags: iphone, lotusphere, ls10