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A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about a conference call of IBM customers (some Notes customers, some not) where one customer on the call said that they felt “Lotus Notes was a tarnished brand.” Many of you ran to the ‘comments’ button to leave your thoughts on that comment – thank you!

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.

Tags: awesomeness, notes

LOTS of big Lotus news today but the one that has my full attention is the release of 8.5.1 scheduled for October 12! This brings the much anticipated support for the iPhone. No, not “uber-ultra lite” – a real, integrated support of Lotus Notes email, calendar and contacts on the iPhone complete with all sorts of corporate security addressed.

One other really important announcement buried in the full announcement:

THE complaint of our users who have been using Lotus Traveler (on non-iPhone devices) has been the lack of a corporate address book. This statement suggests that the new release of Traveler addresses it for at least the iPhone (probably others as well).

Other BIG news included the announcement that Designer and Lotus Mobile Connect are now free (see your specific license details for exact details). Both are huge announcements as it further shows that Lotus Notes is a complete solution that addresses a wide variety of business needs – not just “that other” email platform.

Big news indeed!

Tags: awesomeness, designer, iphone, lotus notes, mobile

The invite to Google Voice that laid waiting in my inbox this morning really felt like getting the golden ticket from Willy Wonka. The slow-releasing invites appear to be causing quite a bit of buzz (eBay has a number of them for sale ranging from about $50-$150).

I knew this product would be cool – but I didn’t realize how it would completely change how I manage phone calls at the office… within the first 30 minutes of using it.

Here’s the run-down of how it did that…

• Setup Google Voice phone number (even got a vanity number!)
• Forwarded it to my cell phone number
• Recorded three voicemail messages (friends, work and default)
• Setup a few contacts who are likely to call on the new Google number and assigned them a voicemail message
• Forwarded my office phone to my new Google #

That’s it (so far). Here’s what its done to improve things for me:

• ALL office calls (ones I want; many I don’t) appear on my cell (w/o having to give out my cell #)
• If I ignore the call – it goes to Google voicemail w/ the “work” message (since its forwarded from my office phone, the source phone # is always my extension)
• Google voice saves the message, transcribes it into my inbox as text (and is surprisingly accurate) AND sends me a text message with the first several words of the message that was left.
• I now know exactly who called, when, and can SEE what they were talking about without having to listen through the entire message.
• All “um’s” and “uh’s” are removed from the text transcription
• I can listen, forward, save or delete the messages via my Google website (including some of that functionality on my iPhone)

And I haven’t even getting to a whole list of other cool stuff it does. For example, I can click on a contact’s name/number and press “Call.” Google will call my cell phone and as I pick up a voice tells me to wait a moment while it places the call; it then dials the number of the person I’m calling and the call is routed — for free (in the U.S.).

An amazing tool. I’m already feeling like I don’t know what I’d do without it and anxious to see what else I can do with it. Stay tuned…

Tags: awesomeness, cell phones, google voice, phones