One of my favorite sites TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) just put up a story about Lotus Notes coming to the iPhone. The article left the reader with excitement over the announcement (rightly so) and avoided any discussion about how the product being announced was a web application, not an iPhone application (again, probably a smart move).

I was curious to see if anyone else who read the article made a comment about this fact. And, they did, with the same degree (I’d argue a STRONGER degree) of concern that I’ve expressed over the lack of a true iPhone native application.

But that wasn’t the thing that struck me. It was all the Notes-hatin’ that was going on in the comments. I suggest reading through them yourself (perhaps it would be good to grab one of those stress toy things first, ’cause its a frustrating read). The thing I found interesting was how many people either “didn’t get” why people use Notes or condemned IT departments for still using it today.

It was frustrating to read it all. Thankfully, there were some people who stepped up to the plate and offered positive comments to help balance it out. I hope someone in the Marketing department at Lotus reads it and uses it as an opportunity to more clearly communicate the power of Notes in the future. Hint, hint. 

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I probably don’t need to tell you that yesterday was the launch of the new 3G iPhone. If that’s a surprise, may I suggest moving on to your next random blog.

Ah, you’re still here. Great.

Yes, I did go to the AT&T store near me Friday morning. No, I didn’t wait in line (like I did last year). Infact, I got there about 30 minutes after the store opened and saw a line that was nearly twice the line I stood in when the original iPhone launched a year ago.

As I called various friends to catch up on their iPhone experiences, everyone had the same report: more people in line this time, the line moved slower and their store of choice ran out of phones sooner.

Sounds like a good launch for an Apple product. Plenty of interest. More people that expected. Taking orders for the next round of deliveries. All par for the course.

But blogs suggested another key point to this story: a tough day for Apple/AT&T. I lost track of the official answer to “does everyone need to have the phone registered in the store?” Some said yes, some said no, others said they did, but were told to just go home and do it themselves.

It wasn’t just the 3G iPhone, either. The 2.0 software was “found” ahead of its launch (by the way - its awesome - I already have found applications that are suddenly “must have’s” for my phone) and MobileMe has been plagued with startup problems. The brief bit I was able to get into MobileMe looked really impressive. I can certainly see the value of having all my contacts, calendars (home, work, subscription calendars, etc.), bookmarks, pictures, files, etc. all on-line.

And yet, access to MobileMe wasn’t given until I did an update in iTunes which allowed Safari to see the service. What?!?!

Regardless, it looks great but is clearly still having some difficulty. This morning, my RSS reader showed that there’s already an update required on my Mac for the service. Its been very un-Apple thus far.

Now, I’m chalking all this up to the fact that they’ve got a lot launching right now. But, as I reflect on the level of which I’m usually critical of Lotus/IBM for similar “growing pains” I felt compelled to take a moment and recognize the 3G iPhone and MobileMe situation for what it really has been in the last 24 hours: promising, but troubled through the early launch.

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For years, Def Leppard has been my all-time favorite band. They’ve risen above tremendous and unusual struggles. They’ve sold over 65 million albums and performed for over 50 million fans. I’d be willing to bet that your music collection has at least one of their CDs in it (most likely “Hysteria” - and if it doesn’t, run out and buy that, stat).

As an avid fan, I’ve watched many interviews where they have repeatedly told the media to stop considering them to be a hard rock band (they’re not - never have been infact) and that they are no where near “done” with their careers. Today, they launched the latest proof of that: “Songs from the Sparkle Lounge.”

Why am I talking about them on this blog? Because I often talk about the importance of marketing and communicating a clear, concise message. Def Leppard knows how to do that.

Albums like “Slang,” “X” and “Yeah!” all have unique sounds that still preserve the melodic rock and catchy hooks they are known for. Each of these albums demonstrates that they aren’t afraid to take creative chances and pay tribute to their own musical influences - but most importantly, each album’s style proves that their music is relevant to a modern audience. (Although I’m the first to say that there are many hits on each of those albums that deserved to make it big and never got enough air time.)

With messages like that (and knowing that radio stations will give them only a brief moment on air), marketing becomes key. Not only does the band embrace all the things we expect from modern bands (social networking, websites, blogs, microsites, etc.) but they clearly understand how to tell the world about their product. In the last week, the band released their new CD (which comes with comemorative guitar picks), scheduled a performance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” performed twice on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” (see section about NOT being a heavy metal band) and announced new songs available on Guitar Hero 3.

Now that’s marketing!

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I’ve just left the 2008 Lotusphere Opening General Session (2nd session). I have to say that this was the most exciting start to a Lotusphere I’ve ever seen. The Orlando Symphony Orchestra played some great songs while the screens all around featured a theme of “from individual actions, larger patterns emerge.”

As everyone sat down, there was a playbill on our seats that described the “symphony” we were all about to see. It talked about a symphony in three movements:

1. From individual actions, larger patterns emerge
2. A myriad of possibility
3. It all works together

A this point, I was pretty dang impressed. This appeared to be the cohesive direction I’ve wanted Lotus to have for years. It looked like the start of a synchronized marketing campaign that would end the day showing me how all these applications worked seamlessly together.

And for the most part, that’s exactly what they did. The OGS whipped through the entire line of Lotus products and did a good job of showing how they all integrate together. I think the concept could have been a bit tighter - the playbill suggested they would be a bit more explicit about walking through those concepts as they talked about each application. It was left to each attendee to figure out the tie to those concepts themselves … which is fine.

Other interesting topics (random):

• Notes and SAP have an application that allows you to access SAP via Notes (which would be cool, if we used SAP)
• Notes 8.5 is coming out … sometime … this year.
• Notes 8.0.1 is coming out … sometime … this year … before 8.5.
• A Mac version of 8.5 will come out after its released for every other O/S under the planet … but the beta is available now (guess what I’m doing tonight!)
• Sametime is focusing on becoming the core of your telephony infrastructure. It promises to work with a mix of PBX and VoIP vendors without extensive rip-n-replace. The demos looks promising. Of course, no costs or ETAs were discussed.
• Domino Web Access is getting redone to look like Notes 8 (which is brilliant - I never understood why it looked different). DWA also gets a light and super-light mode, the latter will work on the iPhone (but that means you have to connect to the web and log in to get stuff on your iPhone, not quite the integrated solution I had hoped for).
• Lots of performance improvements on the road for 8.X
• Symphony will integrate with lots of Notes stuff - I’m anxious to go to some sessions and find out exactly what that means; but its nice to hear they are talking about doing that!
• Quickr 8.1 will come out in March. A demo was then done of a future version of Quickr (so, apparently 8.1, which isn’t out yet, isn’t the “future”)
• Lots of people started to leave the room when they began talking about Websphere Portal. Even more left when they started to talk about Lotus Connections. — I always find that to be an interesting indicator of what people are curious/interested in.

Lots of other updates, but those are my main thoughts thus far…

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Over the weekend, I got an email from IBM stating that Sametime 8 was now available … and that INCLUDES the Mac client. WOOHOO!!!

I’ve installed it on my Mac and its very nicely done. It really feels like a big improvement from the previous version. I then fired up Parallels to load it into my Windows environment. It was at that moment I realized I needed to do some more research on the new versions/flavors of Sametime. So I called my IBM/Lotus rep, who’s still working on getting me an answer to “what each version of Sametime exactly does” compared to the others.

She did send me a link to a blog with some good Sametime information. That’s helpful, but what I was really looking for was a table that showed each version of Sametime and what features are available across those versions. Apparently, this doesn’t exist (or else I assume she would have sent it by now).

What I did find was this graphical representation of what I was asking for:

This is a GREAT graphic, but I’m not sure what it means. I’m trying to figure it out based on the graphics, but stuff like the plug icon still confuses me. Does Sametime Standard 8 require A/C power?

Meanwhile, the other big mystery I’m trying to solve is how this integrates with our Cisco network. I know it does, I just don’t know HOW. When I find out, I’ll let you know. In the mean time, the visions of seeing my Sametime contact list with icons showing if a person is on-line and on the phone; and then being able to click-to-call them without having to look up a phone number — are very, very cool visions that I can’t wait to make happen. It’ll allow us to get ahold of people so much more effectively and easily, especially the mobile workers that are rarely in their “home” office location.

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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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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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Ever since I heard that IBM/Lotus was going to spend some serious time (and money) promoting Notes 8, I’ve been anxiously awaiting opportunities to see the results of those efforts in action. Anyone who’s talked to my lately might be surprised that I’m not posting something about my true feelings behind this ridiculous concept.*

But no, I’m living by the “if you don’t have something good to say…” rule.

While I was on Digg.com today I noticed a clever little ad on the side promoting Notes 8 (kind of). As you can see, its a nicely designed ad and I thought a pretty clever way of distributing those pieces of content.

Not bad. Not bad at all!

---

* OK, so since the end of the “If you can’t say something nice…” comment in today’s world means “… then post a blog entry about it.” I felt it was appropriate to give an ever-so-brief reason for why I thought the link above is a bad idea:In short: Its a clever idea, but poorly done. It is apparently targeted at end-users but does very little to explain what the product does and why I need it … certainly not until I read the text on the cards shown after picking my “messed up animal of choice.” However, even once you read those short descriptions, you find comments like “… that’s almost as smart as Notes 8.”Now, I may be jaded on this one. So I did a study. I put that site in front of 8 people I knew that don’t work in IT and have never used Lotus Notes. I simply said “I want to show you this site about an exciting new product that you could use every day at the office to improve the way you do your job - and I want you to spend 3 minutes with it and tell me what the product is, what it will do for you and if you are interested in learning more.”

So far the answers are (summarizing common themes here):
- Um… Lotus Notes?
- Don’t know. But it has something to do with animals.
- No, not really. Why did you show me this?!
Still, I’m hopeful that other upcoming ads will be more informative and inspiring.

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Two of my favorite things have joined forces! I’ve been a big fan of Postini after seeing it being used by my father-in-law’s home email account. I was impressed at how powerful it was and how easy to use it was … two things that don’t always go together in the I.T. world. After seeing him use it, I marched straight back into the office and signed our company up with Postini and have been happy ever since.

The power of Postini goes beyond their spam/virus detection tools. The true power is in how they have configured the administration. IT Admins can sign into an account and control global settings on the filter (such as sensitivity, junk mail behavior, etc.) and then upload a list of users (or connect to their LDAP) to give end-users as much control as IT thinks they can handle over their accounts.

Bottom line for IT Managers: your team sets it up once and sets the baseline level of detection and then you pass on the rest of the management to each user. They can control their own white/black lists, sensitivity settings, etc. but can only do so within the confines of how you’ve set up the “global” settings. That means your team won’t have to manage adding individual email accounts to white/black lists all day long!

I’m anxious to see what this acquisition means but since I’m a fan of both I have to believe it’ll be positive.

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I’ve noticed a number of articles in IT trade rags within the last 45 days or so about IBM products. For example, InfoWorld is suggesting that IBM is leading the Web 2.0 trend straight into the business world. MySolutionInfo.com picked up a press release about Quickr’s availability. ComputerWorld is expecting that 112 million people will be using Lotus Notes by 2011. And the Wall Street Journal is talking about how IBM employees have been using social networking and web 2.0 tools.

Meanwhile, I’ve been complaining that IBM/Lotus isn’t doing enough “talking” about all of the exciting new products. — I’m glad to see that I’m somewhat wrong about that!

As someone who’s passionate about the power Lotus Notes/Domino can bring to an organization, I’m THRILLED to see so much press about the products. I still think there’s room (and need) for more. I think the time is right to strike now with even more marketing effort. Blogs have covered lots of details about the new set of Lotus products; trade magazines are picking up stories and helping the buzz; and Lotus has done a good job announcing them at events like Lotusphere. Its now time to take it to the masses! I’ve been an advocate of a widespread TV campaign that speaks to the power of Lotus products in the workplace. Something with the buzz of the R5 ads but with more storytelling on the product itself and its value.

After all, when the iPhone comes out next Friday, what will all us techies have to talk about then? What do you say we all switch to talking about the cool new Lotus ads?!

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