Now this is a great website design! I had to do a double-take on the URL to make sure I was really looking at a Lotus webpage, and I was.

The site design here is very contemporary, attractive and easy to get around. All of the key points of information are quickly brought to your attention (including the all-important “contact us” - which, let’s face it, is the one link every single company hopes you click on … assuming there’s not a “buy now” link that is).

The solution looks really nice, too. I really think they’re on to something here with a one-stop-shop server room in a box for smaller companies.

All that being said, I’m still a bit confused about what software is all included in this tool. It looks like a nice sampling of Lotus software, but its not clear if you get everything; turn on what you want to purchase; or only get selected pieces of software.

… and that’s probably intentional so that you click on the “contact us” links to get more information from a sales rep or business partner.

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I attended an IBM event last week where I had a breakthrough epiphany: IBM struggles to communicate the breadth of their product and service offerings in the same way that IT departments struggle to communicate the tools and applications they’ve deployed to their user community.

This problem is compounded by the following facts:

• New employees are always coming on board - thus you need to find a way to continuously communicate your products/services/applications/etc.
• People are busy - so however/whenever you communicate to them, you need to make it relevant at that moment, or they’ll forget it or ignore it.
• Names change - IBM changes product names frequently. IT shops do the same with applications, or merge applications which essentially has the same effect.

So here’s the question: how do you communicate everything you have to offer in a way that’s memorable, continuous and relevant so no one gets missed.

At this event, a lot of discussion was had around this topic. Lots of suggestions were offered: website listings, application catalogs, company newsletters, printed materials, meetings, training sessions, etc. There’s no shortage of possible solutions - but which one is the right one?

The answer: communicate in as many ways as possible - and as often as possible. That may seem like a no-brainer, but let’s face it: we’re all busy.

As I thought about this topic I realized that one group that really does an exceptional job at addressing this problem is the Lotus group within IBM. Here’s a (short) list of the ways I get info about Lotus products/services/etc.:

• Lotusphere - an excellent event that’s entertaining, fun and broken into lots of sessions & tracks making it easy for me to get into the right type of session for whatever my needs are or whatever my function in an organization is.
• Lotus.com - while I think there’s room for improvement on the site’s navigation, its still a great resources.
• Lotus bloggers - an excellent community of people who share code, ideas, successes, failures and all sorts of candid comments about how they use Lotus software in their daily lives
• Wikis - a great source for best practices, documentation, etc.
• Redbooks
• Greenhouse
• OpenNTF.org - a great place to stop by for some application jump-start action
• Events near you - proof of technology events, Lotusphere comes to you, etc. — all great resources to attend to get more information

… the list goes on and on. However, its a great example of how people within the Lotus community share information in a variety of ways. Perhaps the fact that there are so many ways to get information on what’s going on with Lotus products only makes us all that more passionate and vocal about what we want (need) and fuels debates like “how the iPhone should work with Lotus Notes” but, at the end of the day, I think you can agree that the coverage Lotus provides on their offerings is really impressive.

And… perhaps its a model for distributing information about my own company’s IT systems. Now if I can just get them to spring for a company-wide trip to Disney World, we’ll be all set.

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Before leaving for vacation, I had the chance to attend an IBM event all about Sametime. Two years ago, during Lotusphere a colleague of mine said (after seeing a similar demo): “you know, I can see a world where internal email almost entirely goes away - everything is based in Sametime, Activities, Quickr or some combination - we simply… collaborate, anywhere on any device.”

I have to admit: I see it too!

First, let’s review what Sametime has to offer. — Wait, better idea: let’s review what it DOESN’T have to offer. The answer: not much. Its really a very complete tool. The only thing I’d like to see (of course) is iPhone support - but that IS (at least at the moment) Apple’s hold up. By their own admission, they’re working on a way to improve an IM-type application so it doesn’t have to stay in memory the same way others do today.

For a more complete list of what Sametime has to offer, check out the graphic. It’ll do a much better job than I did in the paragraph above.

Here’s what else I love about Sametime - its one product that really does have the same experience on Macs. We’ve been hearing about Eclipse for a while now and Sametime is where it really is clear why IBM is committed to that. My Sametime client on my Mac (pictured) is nearly identical to its Windows counterpart.

Normally, when I say that, its followed by an “except that it doesn’t have…” but with Sametime, I’ve got none of that! I can even integrate side-shelf applications into the Mac Sametime client. Shown in the graphic is my Cisco Voicemail application.

I shouldn’t need to explain to anyone how powerful it is to have one utility that shows all of my contacts, their contact information, their picture, their on-line or meeting status, my voicemail and lots of other tools all in one easy, intuitive application.

Nice work, Lotus! I’m anxious to see what’s next because this application is so complete - its almost hard to envision room for improvement!

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With the thought “actions speak louder than words” in mind, I’m not going to talk (again) about how disappointing it is that IBM/Lotus doesn’t have an announcement about a product that would make the iPhone and Domino work as well together as the demos of the iPhone and Exchange appear to work. I’m not going to comment on how frustrating it is to watch IBM/Lotus bloggers tell people to contact Apple and request the functionality. Instead, I’m going to tell you what we are actually doing:

This month, an Exchange server will go live in our organization. It will be connected to Domino to allow us to deliver iPhone services to our corporate users. We have a number of iPhones requested from our user community and more are sure to come.

Since we plan to have an Exchange server, we’ve also discussed a group of existing Domino users that could be migrated to Exchange as their mail platform. These users only use email and Exchange is a great alternative for them. This also calls into question our commitment to Domino elsewhere. Some departments, like our HR group, are moving processes into applications that are not Domino-based, allowing us to delete Domino databases and prompting the question: why continue to use Notes as their email client? This becomes an even more interesting question when you factor in the UI similarities between Outlook and Notes 8.x - especially since Notes 8.x requires so much more system resource that we’ve decided to not move to it for the time being.

Having an Exchange server in the mix also opens up other possibilities, like further integration with our Cisco VoIP system, integration with some of our manufacturing equipment & systems and even prompted some discussion on evaluating SharePoint instead of Quickr (which we’re now doing).

All of this has been a very natural series of events for us, and I doubt its far from over. At the end of the day, Apple has done a great job of convincing the business world that the iPhone is a product everyone should carry with them - and the lack of integrating with our existing Domino environment (with the same ease and functionality as demoed with Exchange) means our IT team needs to look elsewhere for a solution.

Dark side, here we come.

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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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One of my favorite websites lately is BNET. The site is a great tool for anyone in business but is especially helpful for managers. Their articles are well done and extremely well laid out. You can easily work through lots of information in a short period of time thanks to their executive overview style layout.

This week, they’re featuring a short video that couldn’t be more up my alley! Its all about how to present like Steve Jobs. They also have an additional article recapping some of the details on the video, incase you prefer to read. Incase you’re really under a time crunch and want an even shorter run-down, let me help by providing the bullet points I wrote down while watching it:

• Headline - Start with a memorable headline to provide a theme that will carry through the presentation.
• Outline - Tell people what you’re going to talk about briefly. Then, open and close each theme to help transition from topic to topic.
• Enthusiasm - Be passionate and excited about what you’re talking about. Use words like “best,” “biggest,” “exciting” and “cool.”
• Sell an Experience - Numbers and stats are meaningless unless their in context and relative. Jobs talks about how many iPods are sold in a quarter and then quickly breaks it down into how many are sold per day, or hour. — Its easier to envision yourself in an Apple store, watching that number of iPods be sold before your eyes vs. the entire quarterly total.
• Visual & Simple - Use as little text as possible in your presentation. Use images. Don’t use more than 2 or 3 images on a slide.
• Dramatic Flair - Make it a show.
• Identify and build up to the most memorable moment
• Reherse
• One more thing… - Probably Jobs’ most well-known line, it gives people a bonus or an encore to the event.

I thought these were all great suggestions. I’ve implemented some of these into my presentations lately and its been met with lots of success. I have stopped short of wearing a black turtleneck and jeans … but that didn’t change the fact that I felt very Jobsian during the presentation. That’s a good thing for me because he’s one of my favorite presenters of all time!

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I spent most of last week in a 6S (some will say there are only 5S’s) “Lean-Sigma” event. Our organization is in the process of adopting these philosophies and I’m on the steering committee to make that happen. In the last few months, I’ve attended several events, training classes, meetings, etc. on the topic - and it’s all pretty good stuff.

Which got me thinking: can these concepts, which are most easily applied to manufacturing, be applied to IT?

The answer: yes!

We held a 6S (sort, straighten, shine, standardize, sustain, safety) event on our network shared drives. The goal was to clean it up and reduce all files and folders by a factor of 25% (keeping in mind that they had NEVER been cleaned in mass like this for about 12 years). In the end, we had a first-pass clean up of 34% and marked much more for “red tag” (kind of a soft-delete concept) which will automatically be deleted in 30 days.

This really is a great event for an IT department to sponsor. We gathered people from each department and spent a day talking about what type of information should be stored (and where) on our network drives. We talked about how to organize, assign an owner and define retention periods for different types of data. In the end, we reduced the top-level number of folders from over 230 down to just under 20, making it MUCH easier to find information. And reduced the company-wide network share by 68%! We’ve now scheduled events to attack other department-based network shares as well.

For more information about how we went about doing this, including how to setup a similar event in your organization, please click here to download a PDF of the initial presentation used in our event. Or you can access it on-line via SlideShare.

If you do one in your organization, please stop back and post the results, feedback, etc. I’d love to hear how it went!

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You read that title and you’re still here?! Seriously?!

Here’s the deal, today’s workplace has so many different options available (mediums) to us for how to communicate with one another. However, the typical workforce is comprised of employees from different backgrounds and generations, so it might not be obvious to everyone when it is appropriate to use each communication tool.

For that reason, I did a bit of research and put together a sort of common knowledge approach to the subject. (If there’s something formally written on this that I’m not aware of, please let me know. Otherwise, if you’re looking for a great thesis idea, this might be it!) I formatted this into a few slides that were then used in a presentation about some new VoIP, IM and Cisco tools we were launching at the company.

We start by listing out major categories of communication mediums. These are then subjectively rated on their ability to be effective for the types of messages listed below (each is described in more detail beside it):

• Urgent Issues - Issues that require you to quickly get ahold of someone, communicate and arrive at an action plan.
• Complicated Issues - Topics that can not easily be summarized by a few sentences. Perhaps things like designing a new product or dealing with an intricate process.
• Presence Awareness - Messages that require others to be absorbing the message instantly. For example, a faxed message assumes a person will get to it within several hours, perhaps days. An instant message (IM) assumes the person is on-line and available to read that message within a few moments.
• Retention - The persistence of the message. For example, a phone conversation only stays around in the memory of the attendees whereas an email is documented until deleted.
• Conveying Content - All the visual and contextual information about a message. Gestures, intonations, etc.

My stab at a matrix to define this looks like:

So that does a good job of giving people something to think about when choosing what medium to use. You can simply think about the message you need to send and pick the best option. Designing that new product might be best done face-to-face and over the phone (which, arguably could be broken into their own segments - but the focus of this presentation was more on thinking about this topic in terms of technology enabled communication mediums) and asking Joe where you’re doing lunch today would be fine to do over IM.

But that’s only part of the picture. You also have attributes of the communication medium itself that play into the picture. Things like:

And those can be shown graphically on a chart that measures them using a subjective 1-100 score (or in this case, 1-120, but only so you can clearly see the items that hit “100″ on the chart). That might looks something like this:

So, since I’ve fallen asleep 12 times since I started typing this, I’ll stop. Regardless of if these graphics area dead-on or not, I think they’re at least something that is helpful to look at and think about for a moment. When I presented this, I had many people email me days later saying that the concept stuck with them and prompted them to change the medium they were using to communicate on a few topics.

I, being the clever guy I am, wrote back saying: and your decision to email me that comment was incredible appropriate as well.

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From Lotusphere 2008…

This was the single session I was most excited to attend at Lotusphere this year. The session was well attended by an always passionate group of Mac users. However, this year it seemed to also include people that need to start supporting the increase in Mac interest they are seeing in their company.

The big focus here was on the Mac 8.5 beta that is now available. Other major items from the session included:

• Symphony is in a pre-beta build but will be available ~2H of 2008
• The delay in 8.0.1 for the Mac was due largely to the delay of Leopard. The team chose to focus on 8.5 instead (which explains why you can get your hands on that beta version but not the upcoming release of 8.0.1 that will go to Windows in Feb.)
• Domino Web Access (DWA) works well with Firefox and the team is committed to better support in Safari 3.0.
• Sametime 8.0 supports video. In the second half of 2008, it will also support web conferencing.
• Quickr (web) works today. Support for plug-ins is to be determined (but the group applauded loudly on the suggestion that Quickr plug-ins should be a high priority).

The session wrapped with a nice demo of the Notes 8.5 client in the Mac. In short, it looks and acts just like it’s Windows counterpart. The team is also focused on making it more Mac-esque through things like Command function support and default mail app selection ability (making Notes your default mail program).

Finally, there was one question (and some applause to it) about if Lotus will port the Domino server to run natively on the Mac Leopard XServe server. The answer was “no” with the added comment that Lotus isn’t sure how much demand there is for that. — An arguement I’ve heard over and over again.

As someone who manages an IT department with data centers world-wide, I can honestly say that the ability to run Domino on the Leopard server would be HUGE. It would reduce licensing costs (Windows CALs), improve management ability (you can manage the Apple OS via their tools, which are easy and powerful, especially for remote site management), and I would assume that there would be a performance and stability improvement considering how solid the Mac server O/S remains.

Clearly there’s a need to define the value proposition and strategy behind why Lotus should focus on this concept. Call me, I’ll help.

All in all, I felt this was a great session that hit dead-on with the needs of Mac users in the business. There is still much desire in the community for even more (we want it now, we also want the Designer and Admin clients, we want better support for the iPhone, etc.). But it was the first time I can ever remember that IBM/Lotus really made a statement even close to: “we are committed to supporting the Mac - and not as a secondary O/S that we wish we didn’t have to pay attention to.”

That attitude has clearly started to change and the proof is available now as a download!

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I’m a big fan of Disney, obviously. And since he took over for Michael Eisner in 2005, I’ve been a big fan of Bob Iger. He’s patched together relations with Pixar, set a strategic friend in Steve Jobs and Apple, branded some great new products and positioned one of the world’s biggest studios as a company that’s ready to take a leadership position in defining how media content is consumed in an internet-focused world where people want to download and share content, not buy it in a store.

In my estimation, he’s done a great job of handling all of this. So when I saw an article about how he works, I eagerly perked up and listened (er, read, I guess). Of the 5 key components of his style, I learned that we share a lot of similarities. In order (of how he mentions it in the article):

1. Get up before dawn. - OK, so this is where we differ the most. I do the opposite: work later into the evening to close out the day doing everything you set to accomplish. Same concept, opposite end of the clock.
2. Be punctual. - Yes, yes, yes! I HATE showing up for a meeting and waiting for others to arrive. I would add to this that when the meeting is over, leave. My company’s default meeting duration is one hour. I’ve changed mine (in Lotus Notes) to be 30 minutes and I often find that if we’ve thought about the agenda ahead of time and been punctual we get done very quickly.
3. Loose your driver. - Having someone (other than my wife) drive me into the office isn’t really an option for me; so perhaps this isn’t a big problem. Still, the concept is solid. I try to leave some time throughout the day to clear my head and have some white space in my life. It helps you reflect, reduces stress and leads to more creativity.
4. Write notes. - People don’t get complimented for good work enough. We simply don’t take the time to tell people they did something really well. Just this week, I sent two quick emails to people outside my area to tell them that something they worked on was very well done. Iger is right … it seems to go a long way.
5. Put history to work. - A former manager of mine loved the phrase “let’s not re-invent the wheel.” I, being a techie kinda guy, hated that phrase because I wanted to believe that even the wheel could be improved upon. However, at the end of the day, both that manager and I can stand to learn a lot from looking back on history and learning from its success and failures. A bit of historical research before you start any project is almost always a good idea.

   Bonus points to Iger for integrating an iPod into the research example he gave.

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