One of my favorite features of Notes/Domino is how easy it is to set your servers to accept email messages from variations on your actual email address. For example, if Joe Smith’s email address is jsmith@company.com, Notes/Domino can actually be set (using the “More variations” option in the server document - I believe that’s what does it anyway) to accept and route messages sent to joesmith@company.com, joes@company.com, joe.smith@company.com, etc.

That’s one of the most handy things ever! It makes it very easy to get an email to someone at a company when you’re not exactly sure of their email address. Its also helpful for us, because we have employees that work at the corporate office and/or one of our divisions, so we exploit this option to also accept emails from addresses like jsmith@company-subsidiary.com or jsmith@parentcompany.com.

The result is that its very easy to associate email addresses based on whatever naming convention or URL makes the most sense, and IT doesn’t have to manage it on a case-by-case basis. We can just let employees pick whatever makes sense and run with it (the exception to that is our Spam filtering service does require a match, but we auto-load those with common email address alternatives when creating the account for the first time, thus side-stepping the problem in 90% of the cases).

I was reminded of how powerful this is the other day when I was trying to contact someone I recently met but lost a business card for. I guessed and guessed and guessed at their email address before I finally found a winner. The whole time I kept thinking: well THESE people aren’t using Notes… but should!

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I did my first internal demo of Quickr today at the office. I pulled a group of people that regularly work with customer projects AND are visionaries to show them this tool. I started the demo saying that our I.T. group feels like we’re sitting on a product that can do a lot of good in the company and solve some problems - however, we don’t have a clear idea of how/where/when to integrate this product into the business.

A half-hour into the meeting, they understood exactly what I meant.

Quickr gives us the ability to set up places where we can collaborate around projects. Its easy to understand attaching files (although check-in/check-out is going to be a training point, since lots of people haven’t done that before). Its easy to understand a group/project calendar. The ability to drag-n-drop onto Windows Explorer or the Notes 8.0.1 sidebar (which prompted me to revisit the “we’re not upgrading yet because… blah blah… performance is poor… blah blah blah”) is all very cool and handy stuff! And the task list is much easier to deal with than anything we have today. But here’s what we all felt were issues to consider further:

• It looks really flexible - which is good, and yet creates a training problem if you’re applying it to a process you want to be consistent. Action item: look further into “Custom” places.
• Quickr entry/personal is a PERFECT way to build viral adoption. However, the lack of folders will kill it before it starts. Too many people have FINALLY found a way to structure their file system using a folder organization that makes sense. Not having that means Quickr entry will be seen as a down-grade.
• It would have been really nice to have some strong interoperation with Notes accessible to developers. We want… something… that would give us an easy way to integrate the hundreds of Notes apps we’ve built over time right into Quickr places.
• The navigation appears easy, but gets more complicated the longer you look. - I’m not sure if its terminology or what, but we kept expecting documents to be in one area, but found them in another.
• Custom forms, pages, etc. look really powerful but appear to be hidden within the system (and I had to hunt them down each time I wanted to create or edit one).

Of all the products I’ve dealt with lately, this continues to be the one that has the most promise. But cracking it into the organization continues to be really tough. We have a good set of action items out of this meeting to research further, and a list of projects that might fit into this initially. I’m anxious to see where it goes in the next few weeks!

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This week, I attended the “Lotusphere Comes To You” (LCTY) event in Minneapolis. I really like that Lotus does this type of an event. Even though I attend the “You Come To Lotusphere” (YCTL) event, I find the LCTY version is a great way to bring others from your organization to the event to get a quick sneak peek at the highlights from that year’s Lotusphere.

I’m also always impressed at how well they manage to focus on the true high points of what’s going on in the world of IBM/Lotus. Quickr, Connections and Notes 8 - its all in the agenda!

The only suggestion I have for the event (which I have given to Lotus) is that these events really miss out on the hype that exists at Lotusphere. You leave Lotusphere completely excited about Lotus products, energized and ready to get back to work applying what you learned. You leave LCTY a bit more informed but also feeling like something was missing (the hype).

You also miss out (at the LCTY events) on the polished, cohesive presentations. When you’re at Lotusphere, you feel like every detail has been thought of; everyone rehearsed their part of the “show;” and someone was keeping tabs on the entire event to make sure that overlapping content appeared to be intentional (example: slides at the end that say “Other sessions you might want to see are…”).

At the Minneapolis event, it was clear that a few of the presenters didn’t review what they were going to talk about with each other ahead of time (which, honestly shocked me). The result sends a disconnected message to the audience and feels like a waste of time.

So there you go… the good, the bad and the acronym of this event in MPLS.

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I rounded out the week with a very interesting conference call. I asked out (new) IBM/Lotus account rep to setup a brief conference call to chat about Domino.Doc with the manager of our Design Engineering department (which handles so many HUGE CAD files on a daily basis, its frightening).

Before the call even started, it was weird. He informed me that he’s bring in a local IBM/Lotus business partner to the discussion - a guy I’ve know for a long time but hadn’t talked to recently. I realized that my IBM/Lotus rep’s “system” must have had this other business partner listed somewhere because many years ago we talked with him about the same product. Our IBM/Lotus rep assumed it was appropriate for him to be in the discussion - without asking about the dynamic of how that worked out last time.

That was a flaw in his logic, which I tried to point out ahead of time stating that there were people in our company who felt strongly that the project never got off the ground the first time as a function of some bad information and direction from other local business partners that were brought in to talk about the product. Regardless, the call went on.

The timer on my phone said 22 minutes had gone by before someone mentioned “Domino.Doc” (the purpose of having the meeting) and the only reason it was mentioned was because someone said “I thought we were going to talk about Domino.Doc, not Quickr.”

All that aside, its clear to me how Quickr really could be a better fit for us. Its also clear that IBM wants to use Filenet to provide the backbone to Quickr for people who need some seriously powerful document management utilities. Now that we have the latest verison of Quickr installed, we’re going to get more serious about evaluating it (the first time we tried, all of us ran into odd bugs within the first 5 minutes of using it — that’s been MUCH improved).

At about 45 minutes into the call, the IBM guys said “Quickr is really the perfect tool for shops using Notes 8.0.1.” That’s true! But we’re not adopting 8.0.1 any time soon because of the performance issues we’ve seen in testing. We mentioned this on the conference call, to their surprise. They said (and while this isn’t truly a quote … its a pretty close paraphrase):

‘Really?! You’re the first place that has EVER said anything like that! We’ve seen NO performance issues with Notes 8.0.1. Of course, you could use the “-sa”‘ switch run it without Eclipse, ’cause that’s the thing that slows it down. Eclipse is slow. Notes isn’t. I mean, anyone that has 2GB of RAM is going to see no problems with Notes 8.0.1 whatsoever!’

My problem? 95% of our systems don’t have 2GB of RAM. 65% of them don’t have ONE GB of RAM. And, oh yeah, the coolest part of 8.0.1 is the functionality that Eclipse brings to the table (side shelf, etc.) … so I just can’t justify the amount of time an upgrade would take when some of the biggest payoffs aren’t there.

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While this may seem like a vent, its not intended to be. Its intended to be feedback. I see a lot of IBM/Lotus blogs where people enlist the “what do you, the customer, want?” type of question. I think its important that blogs, like mine, exist to provide everyday insight into a sort of moment-by-moment recap of the challenges and thoughts we have about using the software that supports our business.

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