I'm usually not a big fan of Lotusphere Online, mainly because it has such a short life. This year though, it has a few features that may not be *new*, but are at least easier to use. One is the session scheduler. You can look at the sessions in each time slot, view the description (and the speaker's profile if they have bothered to fill it out) and easily add sessions to your personal schedule. Many of the sessions even already have the slides attached so you can get a sneak peek at the content. When you're finished, you can easily export them to an ics file and import them directly to your Notes calendar. Easy and useful. Note that the ics file gets emailed to your lsonline email account, which is accessible from the lsonline.info home page.

Maybe you remember seeing GROUP Business Software at Lotusphere last year, or maybe you noticed the name on this year's Knowledge level sponsors list. Maybe you recall hearing about GROUP acquiring Relavis or the IT Factory assets over the past couple of years, or about a recent strategic alliance with Unify Corporation for email archiving. Maybe you've heard some recent buzz, or maybe you've never heard of them and you're wondering why I would even bring it up.

GROUP was one of the world's largest providers of Notes-based CRM and extended email management solutions, headquartered in Germany. This past October, GROUP Business Software and Lotus 911 merged (relatively quietly) to form the largest provider of collaborative business solutions and professional service dedicated solely to the IBM Lotus software brand in the world (or so I am told). The Lotus 911 heritage will continue as the GROUP Experts division of GBS, just on a larger scale. By combining these two awesome teams, we now have a more global presence, the ability to provide our services customers with turnkey solutions to more business problems, a channel to market for some of the amazing technologies Lotus 911 has developed over the years, and a complete end-to-end service offering for customers worldwide.

I am enthusiastic about attending this year's Lotusphere as a member of GROUP Business Software. I am a little sad to retire the famous (or infamous) red shirts, but be on the lookout for our new black GROUP shirts. There will be at least 24 of them instead of just the 12 red ones. Over the next couple of weeks, we hope to put the finishing touches on our merger and hopefully emerge as the "go to" partner for everything Lotus.

For more information, visit www.gbs.com.

Looking for a great deal on cloud-based email, web meetings, file sharing, or online collaboration? For a limited time, existing Lotus software customers are exclusively eligible to purchase any combination of Lotus Live services up to the total number of active Lotus user licenses at the following prices:

• Lotus Live iNotes email: less than $2/user/month
• Lotus Live Web Meetings: less than $5/user/month
• Lotus Live Connections: less than $7/user/month
• Lotus Live Engage: less than $10/user/month

Contact your favorite business partner (hopefully Lotus 911) for details.

 
Unless someone tells me a good reason NOT to, I'd recommend that everyone set the "Message Content" value in the MIME - Conversion Options - Outbound tab of your Domino server configuration document(s) to "from Notes to Plain Text and HTML." It will create a higher fidelity experience for your recipients on the internet. That is all.

 Notes & Domino 8.5.1 were released about 10 days ago and we are seeing a record deployment pace. 8.5.1 contains hundreds of  bug fixes since 8.5. Having said that, 8.5.1 is not completely free of problems. So how do you know if and how you will be affected? The simple answer is a frequently overlooked step in the upgrade process: Read the Release Notes (non pun intended). The 8.5.1 release notes are wonderfully organized into about two pages of LIVE links, so they are (1) very digestible, and (2) always up to date. To make it easy on you, I have pasted the release notes below. Feel free to contact me directly with any further questions or concerns.

Release notes - IBM Lotus Notes, Domino, Domino Designer 8.5.1

Smart Upgrade is a way of pushing Notes client updates to targeted end users via server side configuration. Nevermind the fact that it is hampered by 458 MB client distro, it can be useful in certain circumstances. HOWEVER, I just learned a lesson the hard way. According to the documentation, you basically create a Smart Upgrade database based on a specific template, attach or link to the client installation package of your choice, specify source and target versions, link to this database in the server config doc, and then "create or modify a desktop policy settings document and a master policy document" and "edit Person documents to assign users to the master policy."

Here's the rub...

Apparently, if there is an EXISTING desktop policy applied to users that has the DEFAULT Smart Upgrade settings (i.e., no values), then ANY Smart Upgrade kits matching the users source version will be pushed to the user.

Nice.

Thanks QA.

My postmortem analysis leads me to believe that you could prevent this by specifying a list of names who should have access to the Smart Upgrade kit on the Administration tab of the kit document, but this isn't clear in the Smart Upgrade documentation that if you don't do this then everyone with a Desktop policy that has the default settings and a matching source version will get the upgrade.

UPDATE: This might also bite you (Smart Upgrade not prompting users). Thankfully, it saved me from having a bigger problem.  Ironic that a bug helped save me from another bug :-)

IBM announced today the official release of Lotus Notes & Domino 8.5.1 on October 12. This long-awaited release brings support for the iPhone via ActiveSync, which allows wireless synchronization of email (including attachments), calendar, and contacts with the iPhone's native applications. If you're wondering how that works, the best way to describe it is, install or upgrade to the 8.5.1 Domino server with Traveler, make a few taps on the iPhone, and  "it just works." Windows Mobile and Symbian support are also improved.

In addition, Lotus Notes 8.5.1 adds a bevy of long-awaited end user features such as auto-correction of common spelling and typing errors, easier link sending, attachment visibility, vCards in signatures, more business card integration, and more intuitive archive features. Power users will notice better table resizing controls and a roaming Workspace. In addition, Sametime chats are now in their own thread so you can chat if Notes is busy working on another task.

Administrators will be pleased with enhancements to policies, like the ability to push and enforce client contact synchronization settings, and improvements to DAOS (the amazing disk storage recovery feature) and compression that reduce network utilization.

Developers will benefit from performance improvements in Designer and support for Xpages in the Notes client. Also, as of Notes 8.5.1, the Domino Designer client is available free of charge. Anyone who wants it will be able to download it and use it. The trick is that if you want to deploy any applications you build to a Domino server, then you will have to license the server and/or clients.

Perhaps the biggest news though is the simplification of the end user licensing model for Notes/Domino, which is moving to a Client Access License (CAL) model with two flavors: Messaging and Enterprise. I can help you weed through what this means to you if you want.

Lotus 911 has had various code drops of 8.5.1 in the labs for months and we are very pleased. A few of our customers have even been running the beta in production, so (although every environment should be evaluated independently), my recommendation is "Don't wait. Plan your upgrade ASAP and enjoy the enhancements." :-)

Notes 8.5.1 is going to be chock full of new features for end users. I have listed my Top 10 favorites below:

1. Lots of new iNotes policy controls
2. Ability to automatically attach a vCard to your email signature.
3. New business card access on name type-ahead.
4. Distinct archive template and a "Recently Archived" folder which can contain stubs of the archived documents.
5. Drag email messages to Calendar or Day-at-a-Glance to copy there.
6. Click and drag to resize or reorder table rows/columns in rich text fields and other rich text improvements.
7. I have moved on from the Workspace, but for those who still love it, the Workspace will now roam.
8. Policy to push the "Synchronize Contacts" setting to clients.
9. The spell checker now has options to auto-correct common typing errors such as transposed letters, DOuble CApital LEtters, and capitalize the first letter of a sentence.
10. Embedded Sametime chat (and browser) now runs in it's own thread (so you can chat while waiting  for Notes to do something).

For more on this story as it develops, be sure to subscribe to Mary Beth's Notes Design Blog here.

Several years ago I convinced myself that one of the reasons for Microsoft's success in the business software world was at least partly due to its success in the consumer space. In other words, "everyone has it at home, so they want it at work." This seemed particularly apparent to me with Windows, Internet Explorer, and Outlook. You could argue that Microsoft Office also benefits by being adopted in so many academic institutions. This concept of consumer and academic adoption driving business adoption also seems to have influenced the rise of business instant messaging and business social networking over the past few years. It seems to me that in the absence of some key risk or differentiator in a business solution, the consumer solution has a substantial advantage in business adoption rates.

I won't pretend that I have done extensive analysis on these ideas, and they may be flawed logic. However, as argued by this guy 4-5 months ago here, here, and here, and more recently embraced by the IBM Lotus Marketing team as discussed in this podcast (*cough* credit  *cough*), software adoption in the business world seems to have at least some significant correlation with exposure to end users and decision makers in the consumer space. That is one of the reasons why this consumer email market share update and this article on the battle for email mindshare at colleges and universities concerned me a bit. With Microsoft owning the two largest consumer "cloud-based" email services and Google owning the third spot, and IBM nowhere to be seen, I can't help but wonder how much disadvantage those of us trying to make the case for an IBM solution face not just in selling it, but in facilitating successful end user adoption. Most of my readers know that Lotus Notes is about far more than just email, but consider this: If I am a key executive who uses Microsoft and Google software as a consumer, who are the first two companies I'm going to take a meeting with? Who has the inherent advantage? It's good to hear that Lotus is targeting some advertising at these audiences, but I also wonder if actually letting consumers get their hands on something branded as "Lotus" would amplify the effects. Thoughts?

You may have noticed that the syntax for the search box has changed a bit in Notes 8.x. For example typing in free assessment returns all documents containing both words rather than just documents containing the phrase free assessment (as it would have done in Notes 7.x and prior), which now requires that you search for "free assessment". There are some other subtle changes too. You can of course also use the search builder in the search bar accessible via the view header to build searches based on date parameters, field values, or even filling out an example form. But if you want to mix a keyword search with one created from the search builder, it isn't very intuitive. Well with 8.x, if you do a "search builder" search, you will see the syntax appear in the Recent Searches bar. You can click on it there to put it over in the search bar and add your keyword search syntax to it. If you do, at least do yourself the favor of saving the search for future use. Sorry for not providing more detail - short on time today.

I was in the midst of preparing a response to comment on Ben Langhinrich's public implication that Lotus 911 does not care about our reputation as much as he does about his company's when he chose to disable comments on his entry. Not cool Ben. I merely wanted to say that I predict six "greater good" results from the dialog there.

1. StackOverflow.com will see a lot of new interest from the Lotus community.

2. Elguji will see more interest in IQJam from the Lotus community, as well as more potential sales, as a result of the visibility provided by this public debate (you're welcome Bruce).

3. The Lotus community will have a great example of how quickly and precisely a UI shell can be developed using Xpages thanks to Tim's Elenchus project on OpenNTF.

4. Perhaps the community will end up taking Elenchus and creating an open source alternative to IQJam in cases where a full-fledged enterprise product is not necessary, and that open source project will only serve to challenge IQJam to be better (did anyone "defending" Elguji understand the positive effect of market competition on product innovation and quality?).

5. The Lotus community may get the impression that Ben Langhinrichs will blindly jump to defend an application from a customer that uses Genii software against any perceived "attack" regardless of whether that attack has any merit. I HOPE that doesn't happen Ben as most of us know you are better than that.

6. A Google search of "Lotus911" will soon return Ben's blog entry as #1 due to Ben referring to us no less than 12 times, despite the fact that we as a company did not advocate or sponsor Elenchus. It was the weekend personal work of one of our employees.

Next time Ben, might I suggest that you take 10 minutes to download and inspect something (particularly if it is open source) before you assume and imply publicly that it can't possibly be any good. The mere fact that you escalated it to a "product" illustrates how quickly you jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Finally, as the VP of Business Development for Lotus 911, I speak for the whole company when I say that we do not view Elguji as a competitor. They are a product company and we are a services company. I would gladly recommend Elguji products to any of our customers with needs that Elguji's software can solve. No offense to Tim, but if we really wanted to launch a competitive "product," we'd use channels a bit more effective than his blog.

I am really looking forward to the upcoming North American Lotus User Group meeting (IamLUG) August 3-4 in St. Louis, and I am honored, nay humbled,  to be included among the distinguished speakers - a real who's who of Lotus gurus.

I hope we see a lot of new faces, whether it is because you are new to working with Lotus software or because you haven't been able to attend any other events the past few years. I sincerely believe that there is valuable content whether you are a developer, administrator, or IT leadership.

My session "A universal use case for the business value of the Lotus collaboration suite" will illustrate how business processes that we can all identify with, regardless of organizational size or industry, can benefit from the latest collaborative software solutions from Lotus. We will cover how looking at the Lotus product portfolio as a "suite" (think Microsoft Office) rather than separate pieces of software can help you build a highly valuable and cost-effective collaborative environment that your business can implement to weather the financial storm or catapult past the competition.

We will also discuss strategies for responding to the most common objections to achieving these goals, such as:

• We don't have the budget right now.
• We're too busy with other projects.
• We're moving off of Notes.

The session might as easily be called "How to defend, better leverage, and expand upon your Lotus environment while reducing costs" but that sounded too much like an infomercial. :-)

At the very least, you will leave the session with some ideas on maximizing the value realized from your existing investments in Lotus software as well as several tips you can put to use regardless of your job description or skill set. My hope is that you will walk away with some concrete ideas of how to directly impact your organization's efficiency using the skills , interests, and tools for which you already have the foundation.

So as you look through the sessions you want to attend at IamLUG this year, consider this: All the great technical knowledge you're sure to gain is only meaningful if you can justify putting it to use.

I realize that for many of you reading this, despite the fact that the event is FREE, it may be difficult for you to even convince your boss that you should have the "time off" and travel expenses to attend. My advice to those of you in that category is to emphasize how this event gives you DIRECT PERSONAL ACCESS in a not-so-crowded setting to some of the foremost Lotus implementation specialists on the planet (or at least this side of the pond). If attending helps you solve even one problem you are facing, it's probably worth the trip.

If that doesn't work, give them my phone number and I will do my best to convince them for you. :-)

Hope to see you there!

Scott

With all the publicity (OK, TV ads ) I've seen about Microsoft's new search (err... "decision" ) engine, bing.com the past couple of weeks, I finally gave it a try today.

The query on my mind happened to be the $99 iPhone 3G. So first, I typed "$99 iPhone" into bing.com. The top result was a link to a "Boy Genius Report" article from December, 2008 (that'd be six months ago ) SPECULATING about a $99 iPhone. The rest of the results weren't any better.

Then, I went over to Google and searched for "$99 iPhone." The result? A link to an apple.com page actually describing the $99 iPhone and how to get it (otherwise known as "What I was looking for" ).

The only "decision" bing.com helped me make is not to use it. Don't get me wrong, bing.com does have pretty backgrounds that change every day for those that don't have a screen saver already doing that for them.

P.S. This humorous video pretty much sums it up too.

P.P.S. Want even better results? try my new favorite search engine at http://twoquick.com.

I have recently been watching the public twitter stream of the word Lotus (some might say obsessing). First, it is amazing how many people twitter about the lotus flower, lotus position, clubs called "Lotus", and the Lotus automobile line. Side note: If you want a decent Twitter search string, try lotus -position -elise -flying -flower -yoga -lounge

I was specifically looking for complaints about Lotus software. There are far fewer than I thought there would be. I am only finding about 3 or 5 per day from the public stream. In fact, the praise outweighs the complaints significantly. Almost all of the complaints have been generic, like "Lotus Notes sucks". But hey, you only get 140 characters so I didn't expect a lot of detail. Each time I spotted one, I would reply to it and offer assistance if they would provide more detail. Most people didn't respond. My hypothesis is that most people don't want to have their minds changed about something they "like to dislike." However, most that did, quickly revealed that their complaints were not actually legitimate "suckage" of Lotus Notes, but rather poor implementation, poor management, or lack of training. Many were running 6.0, which is 6 or 7 years old now. Now wonder they're displeased. The only legitimate complaint with 8.5 was about sluggishness on PC's with less than 2 GB RAM, which I'll acknowledge. In almost all cases, I'd say that I was able to significantly diminish if not completely resolve their complaint, or at least inform them that they should upgrade to a more recent version before giving up on it. 

So I encourage you. The next time you see or hear someone complaining about Lotus Notes, ask them why, then help them realize the truth.

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