off the Hook - 911s Chief Lotu...

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