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I won’t go into all the details, but I’ve had a Blackberry Pearl sitting in my desk drawer since my friends at RIM gave me the beautiful device in December. Last week the process of getting it connected to e-mail and the world-at-large suddenly gathered pace, and then today my SIM was updated and I got the news that I was registered on the Blackberry Enterprise Server. An e-mail followed containing my enterprise activation password.

Having been a Palm user for a number of years (and briefly, I’m sorry to say, a Pocket PC user), I had an expectation that getting the Blackberry to receive e-mail and connect to Sametime was going to take a few configuration steps. How wrong I was… it couldn’t have been easier. I clicked on the enterprise activation icon, I entered my e-mail address and the supplied password, I selected ‘Activate’ from the menu… and that was it. The Blackberry told me it was going through the necessary steps, and when it reached 100% there was my e-mail (identical to what I could see sitting in my Notes 8 inbox) and there was my fully up-to-date calendar. It was too easy - having a technical background I could almost say I’d rather go through some pain to set things up because that’s how you learn how things work. But imagine supplying Blackberries to hundreds of users and it being that simple (because it has to be).

Now for Sametime 7.5.1 Mobile Edition… I used the Blackberry’s browser to visit the ‘OverTheAir’ install page, selected the right install option, and off it went. When the install finished I entered my Sametime user name and password, and my Sametime contact list appeared (same as the one that’s now integrated into Notes 8). Again, too easy… which is fine, businesses like easy because it saves them money and improves productivity (that sounds a bit marketing-like, but it’s true).

Late last week Ed Brill announced on his blog that there would be another public beta of Notes 8 before the product ships ‘mid-year’. I’m somewhat spoilt as I have access to internal builds of Notes 8 and have seen the quality improve in the time since the first public beta - I think that everyone else will be very pleased when they see the progress made.

Having been using Notes 8 for so long (since beta 1 late last year) Notes 7 looks almost alien when I see someone else using it. Notes 8 is packed with features that I use on a day-to-day basis and now can’t do without… stuff like:

• Message threads - seeing related e-mails grouped together on the surface of the Inbox, thus removing clutter
• Type-ahead addressing which picks up the names of people who you’ve collaborated with recently (even if you didn’t add them to your address book) or frequently (imagine how many Smiths there are in IBM, but it always presents my colleague Martin Smith first)
• Activities integration - a great capability for managing the myriad of information fragments that constitute a project, and the Notes 8 integration is slick and seamless
• The productivity editors - goodbye PowerPoint
• Integrated Sametime - which effectively puts Voice-over-IP, telephony and video capabilities into the Notes client
• The new design for the ‘day-at-a-glance’ calendar in the sidebar

With Sametime 7.5.1 just released (and way ahead of the competition), and with Quickr and Connections due to ship this Summer, the Lotus portfolio has never looked stronger. Spread the word.