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Everyone else seems to be posting things that reflect on the last year – so I decided to do the same. Below are the top 10 moments/posts/thoughts that I feel are more noteworthy from this blog. Enjoy.

10. Lotus announces Sametime 8.5 before the end of 2009 (despite me being SURE they’d wait to Lotusphere)

9. Disk savings from DAOS was easy to implement and quite beneficial on disk space usage!

8. Began using Google Voice a utility that’s not all “there” yet but potentially a game-changer for managing phone calls & voicemails.

7. Notes turns 20

6. Realized the using an iPhone is more like integrating something into your life than getting a new phone.

5. Realized that people don’t “search” any more, they “Google.”

4. My alter-ego starred in a video all about “conferences at Disney World” which featured Lotusphere 2009.

3. After much debate (and frustration caused largely by SnowLeopard) I abandoned a Mac in favor of a PC.

2. Notes (Traveler) support for the iPhone was released (and it rocks!)

1. I got fed up with hearing things like “notes is a tarnished brand” and one simple thing to try to make my voice heard for a moment by being featured on theInfoBoom.com along with a companion piece on my blog.

Tags: 2009, daos, google, iphone, lotusphere, mac, pc, sametime, traveler

A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about a conference call of IBM customers (some Notes customers, some not) where one customer on the call said that they felt “Lotus Notes was a tarnished brand.” Many of you ran to the ‘comments’ button to leave your thoughts on that comment – thank you!

Hearing that comment couldn’t have come at a better time. I was struggling to come up with a topic for an article I was writing for theinfoboom.com and this prompted me to have a clear topic to talk about. In the required “300 words or less” I focused on some of the best real-world examples for how & why our company continues to use Lotus Notes in an attempt to help demonstrate that it is FAR from a tarnished brand; rather a thriving product!

Please take a moment to check out this article and leave a comment. In addition, I’ll be hosting a hour on-line chat session Thursday December 10th at 8am central – please join in on that as well if you can!

Your participation will not only help foster some good discussion, but also help me make a point about the power of getting these types of messages out in the IT community at large, specifically to companies who have dismissed Notes based on some very old misconceptions.

Tags: awesomeness, notes

WELCOME to those of you following the link from infoBOOM!

Lotus technologies are the “secret sauce” to the IT dishes our company serves up. And NO, Lotus Notes isn’t just email, there’s so much more! Here are some real-world examples of how and why it is such a powerful component of how we deliver outstanding IT systems…

Mobility & Flexibility
The entire Lotus Notes client can run off a USB memory stick! Simply plug in the USB stick into any computer and an icon appears on the desktop allowing the user to access the full Lotus Notes client experience without installing any software to that computer! Our users can now access Lotus Notes at home or from another computer if they ever have a hardware failure on their primary machine. For users who simply need email access, each email file includes an “iNotes” version which can be accessed via the web. The web interface is nearly identical to their Notes client, so there’s no learning curve!

Operating system agnostic
We have a mix of Windows XP, Vista, 7, Linux and even Mac users in our organization. ALL of these users are able to have the exact same email and application experience by using the Lotus Notes client. The only differences between these operating systems are found in core components (title bars, scroll bars, etc.).

iPhone
Apple’s wonder-phone is closing in quickly on RIM’s BlackBerry devices. With Lotus’ Traveler utility running on your Lotus Domino server your users can use a variety of mobile devices (Windows Mobile, Symbian and many more) including the iPhone! Traveler integrates directly into the iPhone’s mail, calendar and contacts applications and the result is a fast, easy and secure way to access your information … when you’re not playing games, of course.

Getting business done!
Have an ERP or legacy system you need to connect Notes to? No problem. The Lotus Enterprise Integrator (LEI)  is a low-cost solution that is easy to use. Simply point it to your data, establish the type of data link and BOOM your systems are integrated giving Notes a powerful connection to your other key business systems.

Application Development – Easy and Free
Development in Lotus Notes is easy and free with the recent announcement of no additional cost for the Lotus Designer client. Just about anyone can easily design a Notes application in a short period of time – its that easy. However, don’t think that means its “limited” – its not. With support for JavaScript, Java, Lotuscript, XML and much more, Lotus Notes is as powerful as you need it to be!

Cost Cutting
There are many different types of Lotus licensing available making it a cost-effective product for just about anyone. Small/Medium organizations might want to look into Lotus Foundations an all-in-one server solution that is an integrated email, VPN, firewall and file/print solution that’s self-healing, easy to setup and even backed-up all within the one device. Think of it as an “IT department in a box!”

Powerful Web Tools
Notes has progressively become a better web-friendly system. The addition of Xpages allows developers to build powerful, web 2.0 applications within the Notes Designer. There’s even built-in Ajax functionality alongside tools that support CSS, XML, etc. (etc. is not a web standard – didn’t want you to think you had something new to learn).

What’s more, the developer community for Notes is building their own cool applications – many of which you can download for free. The ext.nd project is based on ExtJS and gives you an easy jump-start to web enabling databases with a very contemporary, intuitive user interface that instantly gives users lots of dynamic functionality on the web. There’s also plenty of applications to download from OpenNTF.org, a community of web developers who produce fantastic Notes apps (many web-enabled) for free download.

Project Management & Collaboration
Lotus Quickr offers a web based project management & collaboration system. The result is an easy-to-use, highly configurable utility for managing project teams. Quickr “places” (project sites in Quickr) allow users to control access/security, store files in a library, create/manage gantt charts, calendars and even write their own custom forms.

Quickr also includes “Connectors” – software integration that works with Windows Explorer, Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes and many more. Connectors allow you to check in/out documents from a Quickr place without having to leave the software you’ll use to view/edit the document.

Like much of the Lotus software there’s a strong community around Quickr – and that community is so passionate about the power of the software that they provide free stuff! Quickrtemplates.com offers a number of free Quickr place types (customized Quickr site types for specific uses, like wiki’s, contact management and corporate communications) that will let you quickly download, install and launch great Quickr functionality in your organization.

Lotus software offers so much more than I’m able to type out – or you’re willing to read. The bottom line is this: people who hear “Lotus” and think “Lotus Notes – that old email system” are missing out. Lotus software offers some amazing software and has a community around it that makes the software even more powerful. With systems like Notes, Quickr, etc. you’ll be able to easily, quickly, and cost-effectively make a dramatic change in your IT application landscape. Before you know it, you’ll suddenly realize why its the secret sauce behind powerful applications.

LOTS of big Lotus news today but the one that has my full attention is the release of 8.5.1 scheduled for October 12! This brings the much anticipated support for the iPhone. No, not “uber-ultra lite” – a real, integrated support of Lotus Notes email, calendar and contacts on the iPhone complete with all sorts of corporate security addressed.

One other really important announcement buried in the full announcement:

THE complaint of our users who have been using Lotus Traveler (on non-iPhone devices) has been the lack of a corporate address book. This statement suggests that the new release of Traveler addresses it for at least the iPhone (probably others as well).

Other BIG news included the announcement that Designer and Lotus Mobile Connect are now free (see your specific license details for exact details). Both are huge announcements as it further shows that Lotus Notes is a complete solution that addresses a wide variety of business needs – not just “that other” email platform.

Big news indeed!

Tags: awesomeness, designer, iphone, lotus notes, mobile

When I heard about this at Lotusphere I instantly got excited. For a good rundown of what this is, read this guy’s blog entry (why retype something someone else did brilliantly, right?).

In short, ID vault synchronizes IDs and ensures that users who have multiple ID files out in the wild have the information (certificates, passwords, etc.) in the ID file synchronized. It also includes a number of tools that are designed to provide better administration of ID related activities (password resets and such).

For some reason, in my excitement I *thought* that it would also solve a problem we have where people use PCs in conference rooms and don’t have access to their ID. Sure, we’ve provided instructions about how to move it to a network share, but not everyone “gets” that. We could also store the ID on the network, but that doesn’t fix the issue for laptop users. I *thought* ID vault had something available that would help address that but apparently not.

If anyone knows of a clever way around that problem, I’d love to hear about it.

Tags: domino, id, notes

This is a topic I find myself debating quite a bit lately. I “get” the benefits of virtualizing it, I really do. But the normal behavior/benefit of Domino skews things a bit.

Our Domino environments replicate databases everywhere. Its also really easy to start up a new Domino server on another box in the event of a disaster (an ID file, names.nsf, notes.ini and a bit of elbow grease and BOOM you’ve got a box that thinks its been a Domino server for some time). Those two features alone have always weighed heavily in my continued committment of the Domino platform because it removes a lot of headaches associated with disaster recovery and business contniuity planning.

Still, virtualization is a good idea. But how? What do I need to be thinking about? How do I get started?

And then this article (“Benefits of virtualizating Lotus Domino“) arrives in my inbox. This is probably one of the most helpful rundowns of the virtualization concept that is specific to Domino that I’ve seen. So I’m sharing.

Tags: domino, virtualization, vm

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!

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!

If there’s one single product I’m most excited about from Lotus, its Quickr. Our company, like many others, can always benefit from better tools that help us collaborate with one another, and Quickr looks to be a strong tool to do just that.

However, our Quickr launch efforts have been slow-going to say the least. Previous versions had plenty of bugs that frustrated end-users (read: “gave them an easy excuse to give up”). The latest version has a MUCH improved UI. Yet, I just can’t seem to get past some of the goofy bits about the product that just shouldn’t seem to be there. For example:

• You can’t add users to a room when you use a Domino Directory only. You have to use LDAP. Yes, a Lotus product won’t use the Lotus address book to add new users to a room unless its via LDAP. — Now, that’s an easy fix and let’s face it, if you’re not using LDAP you probably should start. Still, its just goofy.
• The personal edition is there, but not. You can issue a console command to create personal spaces (or mass load them via an XML file) but there’s no UI piece to do so. Again, not a big deal, but goofy.
• The UI has been improved quite a great deal … but there’s still left-overs. You’ll run into a few areas where old (as in “from quickplace”) buttons still exist. Again, not a big deal, but its goofy considering how much the UI has been improved overall.

For the record, all of this has been confirmed through Lotus support.

None of this is going to prevent me from pushing Quickr as a possible tool in the organization. However, when you don’t dive into a product very far and start to run into odd things like this, its often not a good sign of things to come. — I’m just going to assume that the list above is the complete list of goofy things and move on. 

The Minnesota Lotus Notes user group met recently to discuss a migration from Domino to Exchange by RSM McGladrey. You can see the presentation for yourself here.

A couple of thoughts on this. First, the “problems” they identified for moving away from Domino included:

• Aging Lotus Notes solution did not meet the needs of a mobile workforce
• Need more flexible and web-based interfaces
• Anyplace, anytime access to email
• Integration with Microsoft apps
• 85% of workers are mobile most of them

The solution to these problems seems to be pretty easy to me: “upgrade to Notes 6.5 or higher.”

While we all know that Domino CAN do all of the things in the “problems” list above, that’s not the point I want to make. I think this is a GREAT example of why Lotus/IBM needs to do more marketing about Lotus Notes/Domino. Its clear through comments like this (from big companies, even) that there are basic features in Notes that people don’t know about.

Now, IBM is doing a good job of allowing this story to continue to be told because there are some good things for current and potential Notes customers to read about. However, I challenge that a stronger, focused marketing campaign that communicates the value of Lotus Notes in the enterprise would do even more good.

Think about it: if a company like RSM McGladrey, an existing Notes shop, can come to the conclusion to rip out Domino and replace it with Exchange based on the bullet points above … then doesn’t suggest that Lotus/IBM isn’t adequately communicating the value, features and power of their tools with each version release!?

Marketing. It works. – I’ve said before that the “R5 – I am” commercials were the closest thing I’ve seen to a strong marketing campaign. It was a good start, I wish they would have kept going.

Maybe in Notes 8?