A friend of mine (who I didn’t realize was blog-stalking me until she admitted to doing it) recently sent me an email simply saying: “Really?! Just like that, you’re going to ditch Notes for Exchange - all because of the iPhone?!”

Not exactly.

I won’t go on and on again about how I feel that IBM/Lotus is totally missing the boat on the iPhone thing. Instead, let’s focus on the facts. Various statements (from IBM/Lotus employees) have offered the following options/statements regarding Notes-iPhone integration:

• A) DWA-uber-lite
• B) Call APPLE and complain
• C) A 3rd party solution (of which there are many - but all fall short of what was shown in the Apple/Exchange demo, which brings us to…
• D) Quickly pointing out that the Exchange product has only be demoed, not shipped
• E) All of the above

Now, as a senior executive in our organization, my job is to look at trends and plot the course of how our company will deal with emerging technologies and general business developments/directions. While, I can’t (easily) picture our company WITHOUT Lotus Notes, I also CAN (easily) see a wide-spread adoption of the iPhone. I’ve tested many (MANY!) phones and this is the first one to get so many things right and still be so easy to use.

… with one HUGE exception: its ability to integration with Notes.

Normally, that’s a show stopper. We’d exclude the device from consideration and move on to the next one. But in the case of the iPhone, I simply can’t. Its such a powerful device, easy to use and gives people the ability to have so many tools easily at their fingertips. Let’s also not forget: its fun! And that’s a big deal! In a world where we are all available 24/7 by emails, voicemails and text messages; we’re tied to this device anyway - so why not make it at least partially fun for us to carry! When I’m traveling, not only am I still completely in contact with the office, I’m also listening to music, watching videos or catching up on podcasts.

Back to trends and developments… another big one for us is a movement to web-based applications. They’re easier to access, often more powerful and quickly replacing a fleet of locally replicated databases that need to be updated each time we connect before we can start using them.

So… if I already have access to the internet everywhere; if my applications are web-based; if I’m carrying a single device that connects me to those applications and my email/calendar/contacts and, by the way, its fun to use - then why do I need my Notes client? The answer: only for databases we haven’t yet web-enabled.

In this model, Exchange can easily replace Domino for users who don’t require the Notes client for Notes-based applications. In our case, there are many groups or divisions where it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to make this jump; which makes it that much easier to consider when I try to find a way to integrate iPhones into the organization.

Hopefully that helps explain our situation. You can extend this even further by saying that other Lotus products (like Quickr - which we’re also evaluating) aren’t the natural “no brainer” they once might have been simply because we’re already a “Notes shop.” If that’s the case (and it is) then its my duty to more closely evaluate competitive products because the value-add of having tight Notes integration is less today than it was a few years ago.

At the end of the day, I don’t want to move anyone off Notes/Domino; certainly not for Exchange! Ugh! But… the iPhone is the single most important device to hit the market for a long time and its just getting started. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t see the potential there and look for ways to integrate this powerful (and now reasonably priced) tool into our organization.

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A comment from my last blog entry suggested that it was difficult to post on my site from a Blackberry. Being an iPhone user, I’ve never really had any problems. Still, I thought I’d try to see if I could improve the DominoKeys mobile experience.

I’ll be testing a few tools over the next week or two and report back on a winner. The first one is up now and so far I really like it. Of course, it is heavily designed for the iPhone.
Incase you’d like it, its called MobileAdmin.

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Its no coincidence that I blogged about the lack of an iPhone/Domino solution from IBM one week after the WWDC keynote. I made myself wait that long - to calm down.
I thought I’d counter my “Exchange tendencies” with a quick mention of some positive things IBM is doing around the IBM product:

1. New Wikis are available for products like Quickr, Sametime and Domino (among others). This is a GREAT idea and a great way to allow customers to participate in things like “best practices” documentation and learning. Brilliant, Lotus!
2.  There’s a new Notes/Domino page on ibm.com. I think this looks really nice - and is much more like something I thought they should have done with the release of 8.0. My biggest compliment: its not over-cluttered with technospeak wrapped in managerialesque-ness. (You know, stuff like “Notes/Domino is the premier collaboration platform based on Eclipse technology which is designed to reduce your TCO through powerful industry standard tools and compliance based rapid application blah blah blah…”)
3. After following the link (on page in #2 above) to read more about Domino Web Access, I saw my biggest surprise yet: a picture of an iPhone with a dedicated page all about how to get this thing to work in the enterprise!

…to my surprise, they didn’t tell people to go buy Exchange. No, they had a whole set of images and descriptions posted that talk about an offering from IBM to tie your iPhone to Lotus Notes. Sure, there’s no ETA (other than “PLANNED for delivery in 2008″). Sure, there’s no mention of push email, calendar or to-do’s. Sure, there’s no mention of administration tools, encryption or how easy it’ll be to set up - but hey, they mentioned it.

I’ll place my bets now on the following predictions:

• LATE 2008 delivery, as a beta
• Uses DWA super-lite
• Requires you to authenticate (on your iPhone)
• No push
• No administration tools (remote setup, remote disable, encryption, etc.)

Go ahead… tell me I’m wrong. I’d LOVE to be wrong. Please!

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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 was standing at the copy machine today (insert SNL line about “makin’ copies” here) when I noticed a new stamp on the table next to the copy machine. (Note the one on the left in the picture below).

I couldn’t help but be amused at this for some reason. The table is full of other stamps showing dates items were faxed, sent, received, etc. But now, someone felt it was important to have a stamp that reads: “emailed.” I’m not sure why the email “sent” file isn’t quite enough proof that an email was, you know, sent - but whatever.

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One of my favorite features of Notes/Domino is how easy it is to set your servers to accept email messages from variations on your actual email address. For example, if Joe Smith’s email address is jsmith@company.com, Notes/Domino can actually be set (using the “More variations” option in the server document - I believe that’s what does it anyway) to accept and route messages sent to joesmith@company.com, joes@company.com, joe.smith@company.com, etc.

That’s one of the most handy things ever! It makes it very easy to get an email to someone at a company when you’re not exactly sure of their email address. Its also helpful for us, because we have employees that work at the corporate office and/or one of our divisions, so we exploit this option to also accept emails from addresses like jsmith@company-subsidiary.com or jsmith@parentcompany.com.

The result is that its very easy to associate email addresses based on whatever naming convention or URL makes the most sense, and IT doesn’t have to manage it on a case-by-case basis. We can just let employees pick whatever makes sense and run with it (the exception to that is our Spam filtering service does require a match, but we auto-load those with common email address alternatives when creating the account for the first time, thus side-stepping the problem in 90% of the cases).

I was reminded of how powerful this is the other day when I was trying to contact someone I recently met but lost a business card for. I guessed and guessed and guessed at their email address before I finally found a winner. The whole time I kept thinking: well THESE people aren’t using Notes… but should!

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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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This week, I attended the “Lotusphere Comes To You” (LCTY) event in Minneapolis. I really like that Lotus does this type of an event. Even though I attend the “You Come To Lotusphere” (YCTL) event, I find the LCTY version is a great way to bring others from your organization to the event to get a quick sneak peek at the highlights from that year’s Lotusphere.

I’m also always impressed at how well they manage to focus on the true high points of what’s going on in the world of IBM/Lotus. Quickr, Connections and Notes 8 - its all in the agenda!

The only suggestion I have for the event (which I have given to Lotus) is that these events really miss out on the hype that exists at Lotusphere. You leave Lotusphere completely excited about Lotus products, energized and ready to get back to work applying what you learned. You leave LCTY a bit more informed but also feeling like something was missing (the hype).

You also miss out (at the LCTY events) on the polished, cohesive presentations. When you’re at Lotusphere, you feel like every detail has been thought of; everyone rehearsed their part of the “show;” and someone was keeping tabs on the entire event to make sure that overlapping content appeared to be intentional (example: slides at the end that say “Other sessions you might want to see are…”).

At the Minneapolis event, it was clear that a few of the presenters didn’t review what they were going to talk about with each other ahead of time (which, honestly shocked me). The result sends a disconnected message to the audience and feels like a waste of time.

So there you go… the good, the bad and the acronym of this event in MPLS.

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I rounded out the week with a very interesting conference call. I asked out (new) IBM/Lotus account rep to setup a brief conference call to chat about Domino.Doc with the manager of our Design Engineering department (which handles so many HUGE CAD files on a daily basis, its frightening).

Before the call even started, it was weird. He informed me that he’s bring in a local IBM/Lotus business partner to the discussion - a guy I’ve know for a long time but hadn’t talked to recently. I realized that my IBM/Lotus rep’s “system” must have had this other business partner listed somewhere because many years ago we talked with him about the same product. Our IBM/Lotus rep assumed it was appropriate for him to be in the discussion - without asking about the dynamic of how that worked out last time.

That was a flaw in his logic, which I tried to point out ahead of time stating that there were people in our company who felt strongly that the project never got off the ground the first time as a function of some bad information and direction from other local business partners that were brought in to talk about the product. Regardless, the call went on.

The timer on my phone said 22 minutes had gone by before someone mentioned “Domino.Doc” (the purpose of having the meeting) and the only reason it was mentioned was because someone said “I thought we were going to talk about Domino.Doc, not Quickr.”

All that aside, its clear to me how Quickr really could be a better fit for us. Its also clear that IBM wants to use Filenet to provide the backbone to Quickr for people who need some seriously powerful document management utilities. Now that we have the latest verison of Quickr installed, we’re going to get more serious about evaluating it (the first time we tried, all of us ran into odd bugs within the first 5 minutes of using it — that’s been MUCH improved).

At about 45 minutes into the call, the IBM guys said “Quickr is really the perfect tool for shops using Notes 8.0.1.” That’s true! But we’re not adopting 8.0.1 any time soon because of the performance issues we’ve seen in testing. We mentioned this on the conference call, to their surprise. They said (and while this isn’t truly a quote … its a pretty close paraphrase):

‘Really?! You’re the first place that has EVER said anything like that! We’ve seen NO performance issues with Notes 8.0.1. Of course, you could use the “-sa”‘ switch run it without Eclipse, ’cause that’s the thing that slows it down. Eclipse is slow. Notes isn’t. I mean, anyone that has 2GB of RAM is going to see no problems with Notes 8.0.1 whatsoever!’

My problem? 95% of our systems don’t have 2GB of RAM. 65% of them don’t have ONE GB of RAM. And, oh yeah, the coolest part of 8.0.1 is the functionality that Eclipse brings to the table (side shelf, etc.) … so I just can’t justify the amount of time an upgrade would take when some of the biggest payoffs aren’t there.

___________

While this may seem like a vent, its not intended to be. Its intended to be feedback. I see a lot of IBM/Lotus blogs where people enlist the “what do you, the customer, want?” type of question. I think its important that blogs, like mine, exist to provide everyday insight into a sort of moment-by-moment recap of the challenges and thoughts we have about using the software that supports our business.

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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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