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So now I know why it’s known as a ‘CrackBerry’.

Last year, Lizzie from RIM sneered at the mobile phone I had at the time. Perhaps “sneered” is too harsh a word as she meant no malice, but we recognised the fact that there were better devices available. Now I appreciate that. Better looking, better screen, better battery life… but more importantly, access to e-mail, calendar and Sametime. Despite this being one of the busiest times of my working life, I’ve managed to maintain my no-scroll-bar inbox. Precious minutes in taxis, the bus to the airport terminal, standing in customers’ receptions are opportunities to deal with e-mail. So when I finally get to sit down and do some work, the e-mail workload is diminished.

If I were to go to another employer tomorrow, I’d have an extra question to add… will I earn more, what car will I get, do you use Lotus Notes (or are you lacking enlightenment), and finally… will I get a BlackBerry? Or to be more precise, will I get a BlackBerry 8800? I’ve swapped the 8100 for an 8800 and I’m loving the bigger keyboard and bigger display. Number of times I’ve missed the camera? Roughly zero.

I am officially addicted.

By the way, in the interests of being fair and balanced, other mobile solutions for Domino are available from CommonTime and Nokia.

A few days behind with this news, but Notes 8 beta 3 is now available. As I reported a month ago, beta 3 is more stable and performs better than beta 2 - this is to be expected as that’s pretty much what the Notes 8.0 team are working on between now and the ‘mid-year’ ship date. Having said that, there are still some nice tweaks included - my favourite is the improved ‘Day-At-A-Glance’ calendar in the sidebar. Although the previous iteration was great, it had one problem… if you had only two appointments in one day (one early, one late) you’d end up with a big chunk of empty space between the two. Screen real-estate is very important, so the new summarised view is much better (you can go back to the original time-slots view if that’s your preference).

After much debate in Mary Beth Raven’s blog , the recipient indicators in the Inbox (those which tell you whether the e-mail was sent to you alone, or whether you were one of x number of recipients, or whether you were only cc:ed) have reverted back to circles rather than the originally-planned chevrons. I was happy either way, but the circles are more visible. A good example of the attention to detail being shown in the development process, and of the interactive way that the Notes user community is contributing.

I’m here in Dublin for the Irish Lotus User Group event. With a capacity crowd of 250 (and a long waiting list) the interest in this event has been phenomenal, drawing in people not just from Ireland but from the UK and a few places across Europe. ILUG supremo Paul Mooney (with a loyal band of followers) has done an amazing job and put together an agenda which includes Alan Lepofsky and Notes 8 user interface guru Mary Beth Raven.

Alan delivered the keynote speech and provided an excellent overview of how social software and technology embraced at home is now making it’s way into the work environment. He barely talked product, but described how an enterprise can use technology to empower it’s staff to contribute and innovate.

Mary-Beth then spoke about the process of designing Notes 8, and how important the ‘persona users’ were to working out which features were important to different types of user. I’ve been using Notes 8 for over six months, and this gave me a fresh perspective on all those great things that have been added.

This was a free event - so it was a proverbial free lunch with RIM sponsoring some excellent goodie bags containing a green ILUG hat, a t-shirt, a USB key and a USB coffee-cup warmer. IBM sponsored the evening do at Dublin’s swanky En Seine night-spot.

At the end of the two days the sponsors raffled some great prizes (including a Nabaztag, oh boy do I want one) and a Blackberry 8800. After the organising committee took their well-deserved applause Paul Mooney received a two-minute standing ovation and then was presented with a Mac laptop as a gift from the community.

In September we’ll be holding the UK Lotus User Group event (incorporating DBUG, the Domino / BlackBerry User Group) - as a first event for UKLUG we can’t hope to hit the same heights as ILUG hit in this it’s third year. But we can learn from the ILUG and SNUG (Scottish Notes User Group) experiences.

Paul, Eileen, Warren, Kitty, Bill, Duffbert and Volker - congratulations, you did the Lotus brand proud.

This June sees the release of IBM Lotus’ new suite of social software solutions entitled Connections. It comprises of five components:

• Profiles - who I am
• Communities - what I’m interested / skilled in
• Blogs - what I know
• Bookmarks - what I’ve discovered, what I’d like to share
• Activities - what I’m working on

In IBM we’ve been using much of this technology for a long time. Profiles is based on IBM’s own BluePages solution - this is the most widely-used application in IBM, providing not only basic information (phone number, e-mail address, location, reporting structure, etc) but also information about skills, interests and business relationships.

We’re also a well-established blogging community with more than 27,000 active blogs. I’ve heard people argue the merits of corporate blogging - personally I think it’s a great thing within an organisation to give people the platform to air their thoughts, solicit feedback and generate a debate. My colleague Brendan Tutt and I discovered this during Lotusphere in January when we performed (almost) live blogging during sessions to keep our colleagues back in the UK up-to-date with announcements and product information. One particular blog entry, ironically covering the business value of social software, sparked a heated debate. For a while it was the most-read and commented-upon blog entry in IBM. More important were two other factors - firstly we gained some valuable opinions about how we could approach the market with this new solution. Secondly we widened our ’social’ circle inside IBM through starting dialogues with new colleagues who had added comments.

One other thing strikes me about blogging (and here’s where the Connections solution adds value) - imagine being a senior member of an organisation… a CEO or Vice President… and being able to gain an insight as to what your staff are discussing, what the hot topics are, and which subjects they found most interesting. That’s an alternative way of spotting trends… not trends from structured data, but trends in human knowledge and innovation. It’s a compelling thought.

Social bookmarking… it’s there on the web with tools like del.icio.us and Digg. I think there’s a number of ways this can be used. My approach is to share the links to content that people ask me for on a regular basis - so I encourage people to look at my bookmarks, drill down on a tag, and they should be able to find what they’re asking me for. Other people bookmark anything useful that they come across, and provided that they use tags sparingly and accurately this is also a good approach. In my opinion, bookmarks in IBM have become a better way to search for something than using our Intranet search. For example, if I search on the word ‘linux’ the Intranet will return over 200,000 results. If I search the bookmarks for linux, I get just over 4,000 results. But the chances are that I’ll be able to find what I’m looking for using those 4,000 results by drilling down into the relevant tags (rather than sifting through 200,000 search results). The added bonus is that I’ll also discover people who have an affinity to Linux.

Finally, but by no means least, activities. What is an activity? It’s something you do with a team of people - a project, a deliverable, perhaps an event. Activities can be short or medium-term (something long-term might warrant a TeamRoom or Quickr place) and are probably ad-hoc in nature (although templates can be used for repeated activities). However, for me the compelling factor about activities is that they tend to contain or require lots of different chunks of information that traditionally originate and sit in different solutions or places. Let’s take an example of putting together a customer event - what information are you going to collect along the way? E-mails, calendar appointments, tasks, instant messages, files (documents, presentations, spreadsheets), links to web pages, agendas, contacts, ad-hoc notes… lots of different stuff that tends to sit in different places and often isn’t easily shared. An activity drags these items together and makes them available to the team.

Now, if you like the sound of that, consider this… wouldn’t it be great if your colleagues stopped e-mailing file attachments to you and put them in a central shared place, a place that existed in the context of what you’re working on? You bet. One thing I have found is that if I raise that subject with any size of audience, most people will nod in agreement that this is a good thing.

There’s more good news for anyone who’s a Notes user (a good position to be in with Notes 8 arriving soon). Notes 8 provides integration with activities. You can see your activities in the sidebar, you can drill down into an activity and see it’s content. You can grab an attachment from within an e-mail and drop it straight into an activity (thus sharing it with the team). You can end a Sametime chat by clicking on the activity icon and capturing the transcript in an activity. And (this is really clever) you can click on someone’s name (the sender of an e-mail for example) and see a list of the activities that you and that person have in common. Business value? Yes. Cool? Absolutely.