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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

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. 

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!

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* 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.

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.

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?!

I traveled via plane with my in-laws for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago. In the security checkpoint line, my father-in-law made the observation “you must fly a lot.” He was referring to how much of a “system” I had about everything dealing with airline travel. I never thought much about it until he said something. Then, this morning, I saw a clever little blog post someone did that sums up a system very similar to mine. Enjoy.

Geeks & Airline Security

I have a tendancy to post blog entries that people read as negative. Its not that I’m trying to be negative, I’m trying to offer constructive critism. I also subscribe to an old CEO philosphy: “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” With that in mind, any time I critique something, I try to offer solutions for how to fix it.

But … sometimes it all just sounds negative, I suppose. So, let’s balance it out.

Lotus had some big announcements at Lotusphere this year. The two I’m most excited about are Notes 8 and Quickr.

Why I’m excited about Notes 8:

Its not the Eclipse stuff, although I can appreciate why that’s important (and just hope they can speed it up a bit – or that the beta version is just really really slow), its mostly the new UI. Notes 8 finally looks as good as Outlook/Exchange, if not better. I really can’t say enough good things about the UI and I think it’ll make people WANT to use Notes. And that’s important because of the second reason I think Notes 8 has a lot of potential: built in editors. — The ability to edit your documents, spreadsheets and presentations (or Word, Excel and PowerPoint files) within the Notes client is HUGE! Its easier, its more convenient and it costs less! As an IT manager I am willing to explore any chance of getting rid of Microsoft Office license fees out there!

And I haven’t even commented on composite applications! That is going to be HUGE. I think any company that’s had Notes in house for 5+ years probably has a few applications that really ought to be tied together. The idea of redeveloping these applications to consolidate them is a nightmare. With composite applications, you don’t have to. You can simply add some development effort to tie together the pieces you need. Brilliant!

Why I’m excited about Quickr:

My company has needed a product like Quickr for a long time. It solves the problem of not having a check in/out document storage area. It solves the problem of how to search for documents. And it organizes documents in a way that doesn’t require us to spend tons of time thining about a taxonomy that can be applied to the whole organization (which has historically been the thing that kills this type of project in the past).

In addition, the fact that its a Lotus product sweetens the deal big time! Notes 8’s UI is nice and clean and it has productivity editors … but now I can add to that all the “stuff” that Quickr does and I suddenly have a powerful suite of Lotus apps. And they’re clever apps that, too. For example, this dialog box will solve one of the biggest issues we have on a daily basis: where to store documents using the least amount of space/bandwidth possible.

I think the Standard editon of Quickr will be a great tool for us. But I’m also looking forward to the “pay-for” version which adds the promise of team spaces that look nice and are easy to use. Project collaboration is a big deal in our company and we’ve built a lot of Notes databases to manage parts of our overall process. Adding composite applications in Notes 8 will give us the ability to begin to thread these together. But there will still be missing pieces. These pieces are “team” elements (calendars, blogs, file repositories, etc.) that we don’t have a home for today (or that exist in one or more email files … visibile only to the owner).

So … I can’t wait for Notes 8 and Quickr. And that’s at the heart of why I’ve been so vocal about wanting to ensure that someone is paying attention to the marketing end of these products. I honeslty believe that these products could be the solution to some of the most common problems other IT managers have and its important to get the message out infront of these people because they’ll need to be armed with lots of details (and a fair share of hype) if they’re going to stand infront of their teams, employees and CEOs and say “I think we should switch to Lotus.”

I said I’d make this application available in March and by my clock I’m meeting that deadline with 31 hours to spare!

The latest version of Help Center (v2.0) is now available for FREE as a download. It contains many new features over the previous version.

My decision to make this software (which had previously been sold for approx. $500/server) free is based largely on my lack of time to make sure I can be available for real-time support, like I could when I launched the first few versions in the last couple of years. While version 2 has been in use at some locations for many months, there might be a few bugs in it that I will work to fix over time. — I just wouldn’t feel right charging people for this version knowing that I haven’t been able to do the exhaustive testing that the previous version had.

That’s why its “free.” — I also feel like its my turn to give back to the software development community. I’ve downloaded hundreds of applications, templates, blogs, etc. that people have built and posted for free over the years. I think that whenever you take advantage of that type of thing, you need to contribute something in return, or donate to some of the causes.

So here’s my contribution. Please do visit the Help Center link for more information, screenshots and the download.

All I ask is that you take a moment to register with the site prior to downloading. It’ll help me get an idea of how many people have downloaded it and give me an idea of who’s using it. — Don’t worry, I sell your information or pass it on to a business partner and cause you tons of sales calls. That would defeat the whole “giving something back” concept.

I am very close to posting the files for the free version of Help Center. Before I do, I wanted to make a few changes to this site to support a forum and a gallery of screen shots.

I’ve been playing around with a few options that integrate into WordPress to try to make it easier for everyone (for ease of use, login, etc.). The first attempt was from Yellow Swordfish that looked promising. It adds a forum feature into WordPress. The problem (shown below) is that I don’t have time to update the theme of my site to make it more easily accessible through my site’s design.

So instead, I’m working on a true forum install and connecting it to WordPress. More on that later.

… In the mean time, I’ve been testing the new design quite a bit and working out some bugs that would have been really anoying if I launched it on the first of March. I’ll get this thing out by the end of the month one way or another!

Here’s a gallery of pictures from Lotusphere sessions. For some odd reason, they compiled in reverse chronological order. However, since I didn’t realize it until it was all uploaded to my site (and since EVERY internet connection I can find in the area is S.L.O.W.) I’m going to leave it as-is.

You’ll get the idea.

Lotusphere 2007 Pictures