And its clear that Lotus has listened (perhaps not to me, but a bunch of us). That’s great! It sends a great message about the brand’s commitment to some outstanding devices; it positions them in a great way (hey, anyone who can ride Apple’s ad/press-tailwave should do so!); and I still believe that it will translate to $.

There is simply no other point to this article than to acknowledge that lots of people are talking about this and I think its all great news. Its easy to have a blog and stay focused on what improvements are needed or what messages are not being heard – I just wanted to say “thanks!” for listening and acting on this one. Its great stuff!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tell my boss that I NEED an iPad! 

I heart Quickr. I “heart” it even more now that I’ve seen a preview of Quickr 8.5 at Lotusphere. It appears that Lotus has done some great work to streamline the user experience quite a bit. For me, this was one of the biggest take-aways from Lotusphere as our own deployment of Quickr has stalled out largely due to some clunkyness in using the product.

I (as the guy in charge of all things IT world-wide at the company) haven’t done much to help people get passed that. The main reason is that I have a big commitment to Windows 7 being our O/S of choice and Win7 doesn’t play nice with Quickr connectors.

Sidebar: I’m not quite clear on when that support will come. Anyone? Anyone? Buhler? Buhler?

The dudes at Snapps have come up with a GREAT iPhone app for Quickr. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used this thing since it came out. Its very simple, easy to set up (even an end-user can do it) and quite helpful. Plus it looks great, works great and I’m not sure there’s many other features I’d like to see in this thing.

If you haven’t seen it for yourself, its worth taking a look at because it is GREAT!

A bit of a history lesson before we get to this post…

When I started this blog I focused mostly on Lotus stuff. Shortly after I became a Mac guy. I then realized I was standing in two communities that (at the time) had little overlap but a lot in common (namely a strong, vocal, passionate and talented community around the product).

In the last 4 months I made the decision to go back to being a “Windows” guy largely due to looking at the roadmap our company had for deploying technology and coming to the realization that if I was the guy who was going to stand in front of the company and lead them into these new tools, I better use them myself.

As I have gone further and further away from Macs at the office, Lotus has gone closer to them – which is exciting to say the least. We still have a few here and for many users it simply isn’t much of a change to use “Windows” Notes (8.5) vs. “Mac” Notes. And that’s no small accomplishment on the part of Lotus! I’m delighted to see them continue to have a stronger commitment to that platform!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m still a Mac guy at heart (and at home). But I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I didn’t admit that it is noticeably easier to get my job done being on a Windows platform due in large part to consistency in using the same other software (VPN, VoIP, etc.) as everyone else.

So … for now, I got the Mac out of the focus of this blog. But given that my decision to finally do that came on the same day I saw many news stories from Lotus about their commitment to the Mac, I have to wonder if its temporary.

Time will tell.

I don’t think there has been a Lotusphere that I was more interested in seeing what would happen with than LS10. We’ve all been handed a fresh release of  Notes/Domino, a stable Traveler product (answering much of the iPhone demand) and a Sametime release that’s so new it still has that “new car” smell to it. I left for Orlando wondering what they could possibly debut at Lotusphere.

The answer: not a whole lot. And I’m OK with that!

Let’s first cover some of the bullet points I found interesting from the opening general session:

• William Shatner was the guest speaker – he did a great job and reminded me of the power of storytelling in getting your message across. The guy is simply a pro. (He even made fun of his Priceline ads RIGHT as I was tweeting about the same thing)
• WiFi sucked. The APs must have been seriously overwhelmed which is unfortunate. A big part of this event is the community and I found reading the community’s thoughts (via Twitter) in real-time last year to be quite interesting. (Sadly the improved AT&T coverage didn’t help and the fact that I forgot my brand new Verizon MiFi was the final blow to the whole “wireless internet” thing).
• Lots of customer & business partner perpsective stuff. This is a tough thing to do. Unless you can “connect” with the person talking, you tune them out. I personally liked the Xerox story, Panasonic and GM (and the entrance in a yellow Corvette didn’t hurt either). I can really appreciate GM’s willingness to attend this event considering how much PR they’ve had on the company in the last 18 months – not all of which has obviously been positive.
• Notes client – despite being called the foundation of most of the product line, I honestly can’t tell you one single improvement/announcement/feature unique to the client itself (throwing out a few things about integration with other things, LotusLive, etc. and some screen shots from Project: Vulcan). Oddly enough, I’m totally OK with that!
• Quickr – is getting some great attention. I am putting a lot of faith in this product at the office and I’m glad to see improvements being made. I’d like to see them being made faster, but I’ll take what I can get. (Most noteworthy from today was better UI for adding content and iCal support for team calendars.)
• Sametime – This is essentially a whole new product (in my opinion) and it looks fantastic! One “new” thing demo’d was multi-person video conf. support. The term “HD” was thrown out there. I’ve looked at A LOT of systems that do this and Sametime (demo’d with a 3rd party tool from RADvision) isn’t “there” by comparison to other stuff out there. (However, its also much cheaper.)
• Traveler – now supports encrypted messages through a new app in the Apple AppStore.

Other big news included some new updates to LotusLive – all of which were talked  about but only referenced. I’m expecting the “depth” to be in other sessions on that  topic. It looks interesting. I’ve considered LotusLive but felt it was a bit “early” for my tastes. I think its one to watch though!

The biggest news was the announcement of Project Vulcan. Its not a product, its a direction. Simply put – its brilliant! Today’s world is far more transparent than ever before and companies that are making some huge strides in the markeplace are (often) the ones who embrace this and use “being transparent” to their advantage. I expect (hope) this is where Lotus is going as well.

Project Vulcan is a sort of mission for Lotus’ focusing on building on their existing portfolio, converging their products (and how you deploy them either on-premise or in a cloud) and innovations which drive businesses forward (such as social software) – all of which is designed to foster new opportunities.

Its a good move for Lotus because it helps the community understand WHAT they are focusing on. I expect that in the coming months/years we can then translate that into the products and features that evolve as a result of this.

That being said – “Lotus Knows” their audience and knew that they needed to show some screen shots working versions of products to help us wrap our minds around it. And those products look outstanding! (Very “Apple” in a few cases – which I think is good.)

Final thoughts: much like last year, I didn’t walk away excited about new products. It didn’t feel anywhere near an Apple type of event. However I did walk away excited about Alistair Rennie taking over the GM position (he’s hilarious off-script!) and excited about the future Lotus is embarking on!

It will be interesting to see what the rest of the week brings, especially at mini-keynotes and in various technical sessions (which, as they did last year, will no doubt contain many more announcements that simply didn’t “fit” into the OGS).

As Ed pointed out in his blog, it was a bit odd that I ended up writing about Notes while he wrote about social media (those topics ended up being chosen completely independent from one another). Now that his article is posted on theInfoBOOM.com I think Ed was quite right in saying that our selection of topics gave us each a more authentic voice. If Ed would have talked about Notes, it could have been perceived as an ad. Likewise, if I would have talked about blogging/social media – it would have had far less of an impact since my posts come from the perspective of someone outside of Lotus/IBM.

Its a good article and I encourage you to go read it and post a comment.

Oh… and see you at Lotusphere! (If you’re like me, you’re frantically finishing up as many projects as possible to have a clear mind down there … and in anticipation of coming back with hundreds of new ideas!)

Perhaps the lsonline.info site has been this good in the past – but this was the first year I’ve noticed it … and WOW is it a great tool! The interface is very easy to use. I was able to scan through the list of sessions and create a calendar of what I wanted to see in very short order (a process that normally involves multiple reads through the materials, scanning for sessions that repeat and generally a good afternoon planning session right after I pick up my Lotusphere registration information).

But the best part was that I could export my schedule as an .ics file which then can be uploaded into Notes so that my calendar is available with me – how handy is that!

It doesn’t end there, they’ve also provided a mobile interface (www.lsonline.info/m) which works fantastic with my iPhone!

Very cool!

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.

Moving on … this week I noticed a post about an iPhone app Mercedes is working on as a additional remote for their cars. That’s perfect considering my other car is a C-class. Here’s the down-side of this app: no remote start. It simple mimics the functionality you have on your existing key fob. Let’s take a look at the steps needed to start your car for a moment (as I illustrate my point to this entry):

With current key/fob:

1. Remove remote from pocket
2. Press button – car opens

With proposed iPhone app:

1. Remove iPhone from pocket
2. Press button to activate iPhone
3. Slide finger to unlock iPhone
4. Swipe to screen containing your MB remote application
5. Press icon to start app
6. Wait a moment
7. Press button to open car – car opens (I’m just going to assume that it does it as quickly as well – which I somehow don’t think will be true.)

So there you go, GM. Simply hurry up and build the app I talked about and you’ll have a GREAT new feature Mercedes doesn’t even have! Again, I’m available for beta testing. 

And yet this year, they did.

Lotus Sametime 8.5 is schedule to be released next week and it promises to be a BIG upgrade. At the top of my list of favorite new features is the zero-footprint install. That’s been the biggest pain in getting people to use Sametime in our organization (they just don’t “get” why they ask for Sametime and get Java errors).

Of course #2 on the list is the pictured iPhone client. I’m anxious to see how that works! I did a usability lab on it last year at Lotusphere and can already tell they addressed some of the issues I had with it. Well done, Lotus!

A bunch of great links are out about the new version, here’s my roundup:

• What’s new in Sametime 8.5
• Sametime 8.5 Features/Benefits (PDF)
• Lotusphere 2010 Sametime Sessions
• Sametime 8.5. How-To Video

One additional note: the YouTube video above is GREAT. Not only is it a great way to show how the product works but its something I can pass out to other users when we launch it. This is precisely the kind of thing that’s extremely helpful to have (from IBM/Lotus) for our team!

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.