Every once in a while I am reminded of the fact that we still live in a mostly Microsoft world. Yesterday, I pulled up a webpage from our office in Europe and realized that no one had ever tested it for any other browser for IE. I was also in a hurry to find some information on it, so I had to open Parallels, start up Windows, fire up IE just to get one tiny piece of information from the page.

Rest assured, that problem is now fixed.

But it got me thinking: is there a way to run IE on a Mac, now that the browser is officially mothballed for the Mac O/S? I found that the answer is “yes” and its a slick solution!

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Since I posted the entry on the letter to IBM/Lotus c/o Mike Rhodin, my inbox has delivered a decent amount of email responses from people on the post. I’m honestly surprised at how many people took a moment to reply to it, link to it from their blog, etc.

ALL of them shared the same thoughts. People seemed to have similar stories as I do about having to explain their decision to use Lotus Notes to friends, family and colleagues. Everyone expressed frustration with the lack of common knowledge among people about all the things Lotus Notes offers companies … or the fact that the product is still around.

What’s really interesting to me is how many people were from IBM/Lotus. Most of them decided to email me from a home account and asked that I not share their names but they, too, were frustrated at an overall lack of solid marketing to new audiences that clearly communicated what Notes is all about.

So … you know you’re on to something when people come out of the woodwork to agree and are compelled to take a moment to say so … and especially when those people are from the company you’re talking about.

I hope that buzz continues and is part of a wave of change for the future.

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You have the world’s attention at the moment. For the sake of all of us who live and breath Lotus Notes/Domino, please make full use of this brief and rare opportunity.

Out of a strong belief that Notes 8 is the most important release of Notes in the last decade this blog has frequently been a location where I can beg and plead anyone at IBM/Lotus to do more advertising and marketing to get that message out to new audiences. Yes, there have been a number of activities on that circulated around Notes 8 … but its not enough. And, what is out there doesn’t get to the right people. And when it does, it leaves them confused asking “what does an animal hybrid have to do with my company — or Lotus Notes?”

My point is that it is frustrating to believe so strongly in a product and have to frequently respond to questions like “is Lotus Notes still around?”

It is. And it has a great story to tell.

One of the most important parts of Notes 8 is the productivity editors. I was thrilled to see that they were bundled into another free product (Symphony) based on the OpenOffice and ODF concepts. The product drew the world’s attention. I can’t go to a tech website, or for that matter any “business” site, without reading about how IBM/Lotus is targeting Microsoft Office with a very serious and powerful new product.

What great media attention that is! The very thought of something federating companies from the ties of Microsoft Office suddenly compels CIOs to pledge allegiance to whomever proclaims a promise of a world without being tied to these expensive products.

So with the world watching, I implore you to take the opportunity to also tell them that Lotus Notes is very much alive and also worth their consideration. Perhaps you could mention that Notes 8 comes with the productivity editors / Symphony for free and that there’s a lot of integration available between them? You could mention that Notes 8 allows you to finely customize how these programs open and will even give you the ability to preload them with the O/S or with the Notes client.

Maybe you have some future plans to allow Notes developers to integrate Symphony functionality into their Notes apps with ease? Stuff like an @Function to extend mail merge capabilities? Maybe another one that allows users to easily see and graph information in spreadsheets? Perhaps a mechanism to display real-time Notes data from within a presentation? If that kinda stuff is on the drawing board, please do tell people about that. As a developer that’s exciting news. As IT management, its important “road map” information that prompts us to ask if we should be planning for migrations soon.

There’s tremendous value in the Symphony product alone. However, I think this is a great oppotunity to use the spotlight of attention to educate people on how much MORE powerful it becomes when paired with Lotus Notes (which can be paired with Sametime, Quickr, Connections … you get the idea).

You have everyone’s attention and excitement. Please take this opportunity to tell a very broad audience the full story of how Lotus Notes & Symphony work together in perfect harmony. (And feel free to use that tagline — in exchange, you can just hire me or something as someone who can help evangelize the benefits behind the concert of Lotus products).

- Me

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JUST THIS MORNING I was getting coffee and checking up on my email on my iPhone. While waiting, a guy there finished a call on his Treo 750 and asked me how I liked my iPhone. I began to rave about all the features I liked on the device and lost count of how many times he said “wow,” “cool,” etc.

He asked if there was anything I didn’t like about the phone. I told him that getting it to work with our company’s Lotus Notes email/calendar system has been quite a pain. He said “oh, we have Outlook — is Notes still around?!”

I went on to explain that it very much was still around. I explained how we use it to manage our entire CRM, quoting and quality systems not to mention a variety of smaller applications like HR systems, IT management tools, etc. I told him that we have several websites that are done using Notes/Domino and that it allows us to have people update websites without having to know any HTML code.

I even went on to explain that the latest version of Notes (8) is what I believe to be the most important version of Notes in a long time and that it has a number of features that make it a very contemporary email system and a revolutionary collaboration tool.

He said (and I’m not kidding one bit here): “Wow! I had no idea … and I’m actually an IT Manager. They really ought to do some advertising to get that message out to people!”

answer: c

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I went to give a presentation today that I created in the latest version of Keynote (3.0), part of the iWork (’08) suite from Apple and ran into a problem that looked like this:

I started to think through the troubleshooting on this one: “I have a very new MacBook Pro computer with lots of RAM all over the place - that shouldn’t be a problem. I’m connected to a 2nd display, but I’ve done that a lot, too. My presentation worked fine three weeks ago when I gave it … oh, I’ve installed Leopard since then!”

I have to imagine that’s causing the problem. Leopard must be causing Keynote to display the “your computer may not have enough VRAM” error. I tried changing the display settings, as it suggested and the error continued. I tried mirroring the displays and that didn’t work either.

I found this tech note from Keynote 1.0 and reboote, this time with the second display connected during startup (I normally don’t have a problem adding it while the machine is running). The problem went away.

And now I’ll start looking for a fix. That’s a very un-Apple thing to have happen - especially on a very current piece of hardware!

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Alan Lepofsky’s blog (which is one of my favorites because it never assumes everyone reading it knows ALL of the basics … I LOVE THAT!)  has a link to a set of pictures on Flickr of various 2007 marketing efforts from Lotus.

If any of my recent comments about my frustration in the lack of Lotus marketing resonates with you, then I suggest you take a look through the flickr slideshow. Its really interesting to see all of the things they’re doing to help communicate Lotus “stuff” this year … and its great to see!

I do have one ever-so-tiny complaint though: why didn’t I know that any of that happened!? I have a Notes blog. I attend Lotusphere. I keep up on other blogs and news related to Lotus. And with the exception of the photos from Lotusphere, the announcement about the Iscoord integration and the Lotus.com web page - I had no clue any of that was happening.

Perhaps its because I already use Lotus products and thus, am not a target demographic that can be translated into a new account. Which means that at least some of the people that have been surprised to find out Notes is still around when I tell them that I think Notes 8 is the most important release of the product ever; should now have seen some of these ads. I’ll ask them.

Update: They hadn’t. 

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