off the Hook - 911s Chief Lotu...

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.