For a LONG time, I’ve been a huge fan of the RSS reader program (for the Mac) NewsFire. Its such a simple, elegant application. In a world of complicated software layouts, this one was only as complicated as it absolutely needed to be. It was also fast and well designed. Considering the number of RSS feeds I follow, I never felt overwhelmed when using this application - which is pretty impressive!

A couple of years ago, a friend tried to get me to switch to NetNewsWire. I tried it for a few days but felt that everything was the opposite of what I loved about NewsFire. This tool had a busier layout, too many panes and suddenly left me feeling like I was following way too many RSS feeds, despite the fact that I exported the list from NewsFire and deleted the default set that comes with NetNewsWire when you install it.

However, there’s been a tipping point: iPhone compatibility. This application not only gives you a great iPhone optimized version of the software, but also uses their synchronization services to keep your iPhone and Mac versions of the software in sync with each other. That one piece of functionality has been the tipping point that has caused me to now exclusively use this software over the other (NewsFire).

What’s more, if you read the reviews of it in the App Store in iTunes, you’ll see that people have complained about its performance and limited functionality (compared to the full-blown application). I understand those comments, but the sync utility it provides makes me simply not care.

Its a great tool. I suggest trying it for yourself!

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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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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’m starting this week off-topic, so why not keep going. If I had a fourth blog (one, two, three), it would be about cars. I love cars. I’ve even blogged here about cars in the past. And right now, I’m looking for a new car.

Which has me in dealerships. Which made me realize that I should finally write down my list of the top 10 reasons you should instantly leave a car dealership:

1. “What can I do to get you in this car today?”
2. “I want you to meet my sales manager…” (bonus points if they do this but DON’T let you go back to see him when you’re negotiating)
3. A dealer who insists that they go on the test drive with you.
4. Showing you an offer that only has a monthly payment (and conveniently omits your down payment, tax, title, license, trade value, etc.)
5. Dealers greet you before you can close the door on the car you arrived in.
6. “What are you currently paying per month?” – They may need to find out what you want to pay per month later, if you’re negotiations are centered around a monthly number as the primary element, but the only reason they care what you are paying now is so they can make an offer that’s not far off from that … to make it seem like less of a jump for you. It says nothing about the “deal” you’re getting on your car.
7. Offers made on any of the following:
   - Post it notes
   - Sheets of paper divided into 4 quadrants (the 4 square box is actually a sales technique - and not an effective one)
   - Paper that was ripped in half
   - Paper that originally had something else on it … like the menu of a local restaurant
8. Dealers who use any of the following statements:
   - “That’s priced right.”
   - “You won’t find a better deal than that!”
   - “If you want to go all the way up to [some town more than 15 minutes away], go ahead. But this car’s right here now and it won’t be when you come back.”
   - When asked why another dealer has a comparable car for less, they answer: “There’s something wrong with that car.”
   - Any comment that bashes another brand
   - “I suggest you get our protection package.”
   - Calls a sales manager to “ask if the car is still available”
9. A dealer who says: “What’s your phone number? I won’t call you.” — If you’re not going to call me, you don’t need my number.
10. Anyone wearing a green suit OR more jewelry than you and your spouse combined.

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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.”

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I’ve been an avid Mac user for almost two years now and I still find myself finding cool things about the O/S that impress me. Sometimes, its just cool applications that have been there the whole time waiting for you to discover them; however there are also a TON of great looking applications out there for. A great place to get started finding them is at iUseThis.com. (You can see what I’m using in my iUseThis profile.)

Since I haven’t blogged for a while, I thought I’d share two particularly helpful tips for other Mac users:

1. Put Album Art in your Dock. - This cool application replaces your iTunes dock icon with the album art (if available) for the song that’s currently playing. (See below)

2. Screen Captures, without extra software. -

Capture your full screen
Press shift open-apple 3 to create a full screen print image on your desktop. (If you have dual screens, two images will be created, one for each screen.)

Capture a portion of your screen
Press shift open-apple 4 to get a cross-hair selection icon to capture a portion of your screen.

Capture a single window
Press control shift 4 space and you’ll get a camera icon that selects a window for you to capture.

And if that’s not enough … you can also access an application called “Grab” in your “Applications\Utilities” folder that will give you some nice menus to do all this and more!

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Just before Lotusphere, IBM contacted me about talking to “a reporter or two” about using Notes on a Mac. I said “sure!” I’m always happy to promote Macs and Notes, this seemed like a perfect way to do both.

SEVERAL calls later from more trade magazines than I can remember, I started to wonder if my comments “made the cut.” Then the phone rang. And rang. And rang. Turns out that some of my comments were published … and now a flood of sales reps felt compeled to call me and solver problems I didn’t know I had.

I’d suggest taking a moment to check out the article. Its an interesting look at how people are finding ways to bring Macs into the office, with or without support from Apple.

I also have a PDF verision of it here.

Update: Apparently, I’m mentioned in MacWorld too. Which is cool, but a bit confusing since I’m quoted saying the same thing even though a different person interviewed me (and I recall having more interesting things to say to them). Whatever. Still, its cool to see your name in print.

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I’m going to give out two free pieces of press on this post. One for the website/podcast where I found the other.

While watching the GeekBrief.tv podcast, I discovered a new must-see site for Mac-aholics. The site is called Mactactic and its a sort of buyers guide rating system for all things Apple. Its brilliant because as a Mac-fan, my biggest fear is buying a new Mac product the day before an even newer one comes out.

Seriously … we stay up worring about that kinda thing on the eve of a purchase.

As you can clearly see in the first section of the site, they “estimate” when to buy stuff. I haven’t found anything about their estimation method, but it looks about where I’d rate things if I were to do it.

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Today is turning out to be a most extreme day for a lot of reasons. Near the top of the list of reasons why is the fact that my Apple AirPort Extreme finally arrived.

This little device supports the new (pre-) 802.11n standard that allows for much faster WiFi speed (approximately 5x faster than 802.11g, with an update from Apple on my current Mac hardware systems) and has a really cool Mac-Mini-esque form factor that will make my WiFi hub something that goes from being burried in a storage space out of sight to proudly taking a decorative place in my office as an uber-cool piece of tech.

The thing I’m most exctied about, however, is the ability to have network storage (built-in 40GB hard drive, with USB connections to add more). I’ll blog more about it once its installed.

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This isn’t new technology but it continues to be amazing to me. My wife is flying home today from a business trip and I need to pick her up at the airport. I wanted to see what the flight status was and I couldn’t remember the flight number.

I opened up my Mac dashboard and added the Flight Tracker widget (which comes standard) and entered the airline and departure/arrival cities and found her flight information … and the arrival time estimate … and that they were running early … and what gate they’d be at … and their current altitude … and their current speed … you get the idea.

How amazing!

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