On Friday I’m delivering a presentation on IBM Lotus Notes / Domino 8.5 at the open day of Swindon-based Lotus Business Partner InfoSys. As we’re now past beta 2 of 8.5, I thought I’d better spruce up the material we covered at Lotusphere Comes To You. Some details have changed and been refined since then (six months ago), and of course the Notes client has continued to be polished (and I can truly say it’s now shining).

Publicly we’ve continually said that 8.5 is a server-focused release – at Lotusphere Domino’s chief architect Russ Holden called it the most significant Domino release since (I’m sure he said) version 5. And without doubt there are some very sigificant developments on the server such as the Notes ID vault and the Domino Object & Attachment Services. These are things that will contribute to lowering the cost of ownership of a Domino infrastructure.

However, considering 8.5 is supposedly a server-focused release, there’s a load of new things in the client… obviously nothing as major as the leap from version 7 to 8, but there’s several slides-worth of stuff that I’m going to cover for an audience who have already seen Notes 8.0.1. As we get towards the 8.5 ship date at the end of the year I’ll cover these capabilities in more detail.

What caught my eye today was something I’d not yet explored much, the new integration between Notes 8.5 and IBM Lotus Connections. Activities have been integrated since day one, but up until now the other bits (Dogear, Profiles, Blogs and Communities) weren’t so well integrated.

The new integration works like this… firstly, right-click on any document (e-mail, appointment, task, journal entry, TeamRoom document, workflow document, etc) and you’ll get a Lotus Connections menu that leads to the one seen above. So you can bookmark any Notes document in Dogear, but you can also insert a reference to the document in an Activity and share it with your colleagues.

Then there’s the new search menu. The screenshot seen here comes from an e-mail right-click menu (cropped), and this will allow you to search Connections in the context of the e-mail sender – find their Profile, associated Activities, Dogear bookmarks, Blogs or Communities. You can also search the five Connections elements from the Notes 8.5 search bar.

The results of any search will be seen in Notes, whether the results are Notes-based or Connections-based content. The screenshot below shows the results of searching for my name in Dogear.

Note that you can return to previous searches, and change the scope of the search. For example, in the case of Dogear and Communities, you can limit a search to your own bookmarks or communities that you’re a member of. When searching Profiles you can search by name or by keyword.

What we’re seeing here is that the Notes client is not just about e-mail, and has now gone further than the traditional Notes applications that so many companies derive value from. The open nature of Notes 8.x and beyond provides many possibilities for plugging in other capabilities. Already we’ve seen Sametime and Quickr tightly integrated, and now Connections. Early in 2009 we’ll see a deep level of SAP integration with the solution codenamed ‘Atlantic’. I’ve said it before… when you decide that there’s a better way of collaborating than sitting in an inbox all day, Notes is ready for you whatever you need to achieve. Crikey, I should be in marketing…

With businesses going to the wall, people stuffing what remains of their meagre savings under their mattresses, and a Winter full of fuel price rises approaching, trust GMTV to cheer us up. I’m always amused by the way they shove their reporters out in the elements to a location connected with the story but not actually interacting with the story. For example, veteran news-hound John Staplegun (sorry, Stapleton) was talking about woes in the City, so they plonked him on the opposite side of the Thames among the carrier bags and dog poo – the visual effect being that the City was visible in the background. But for all the difference it made, he might as well have done the report standing outside Tesco in Rotherham.

This morning, after the daily doom-and-gloom report, GMTV saw fit to wheel in Coleen Rooney, wife of gargoyle-like footballer Wayne. I’m sure she’s a very nice young lady, and she’s now positioning herself as a style guru. Wise move, given that her one and only skill seems to be shopping… but according to the merchants of doom, we in the UK aren’t going to do much of this because we’ll all be skint for years to come. So how nice to hear from a young lady to whom the credit crunch means nothing and can probably afford to wade waist-deep in gold around her mansion.

Tune in tomorrow for more news of people being made redundant as Christmas approaches, followed by a tour round the Beckhams’ new yacht.

Ah, good. Every year the Turner Prize nominees are announced and it gives me, a complete philistine with fewer artistic tendencies than Cro-Magnon man, the chance to basically call them a bunch of charlatans.

First, in case you missed it, here’s a link to last year’s blog post on the Turner Prize. The nominees and their works are different, but thick layer of bullsh*t has not changed in depth.

This year we could debate the fact that the artists are actually talented artists but they’ve reached that stage in their career where they don’t actually have to create something that takes a lot of artistic talent in order for it to be regarded as art. In rather the same way that Pablo Picasso was a talented artist, but later in his career he could just flick paint on a canvas and someone would declare “it’s a Picasso” and hand over five million quid. Or fifty billion pesetas.

Acceptance of this stuff I believe comes not from us, the public, but the art establishment who knows art better than we do. To us a collection of dots is merely a collection of dots, but when someone who knows about art tells us that it’s artistic genius (because the dots were painted by Damian Hirst) we believe it. I say “we” in a very general way, because I don’t care who painted the dots (or put the shark in the preserving fluid) – a child of seven could have painted those dots. So am I being unfair on those artists who may actually have demonstrated great artistic skills previously, but are put in front of the public for creating the garbage we see exhibited for the Turner Prize? Possibly…

Anyway, that said, let’s have a look at a couple of nominated works. One is a set of photos – okay, there’s a lot of skill and know-how involved with being a great photographer, but I’d say there are more telling prizes for photographers who, for example, capture important moments in history as they happen (rather than a cup being knocked off a table).

Before I discuss the works of Cathy Wilkes, remember that back in 2001 I said “if I nailed six corn beef tins and a dead squirrel to a piece of chipboard, the jumped-up curators of the Tate Modern wouldn’t be falling over themselves to hang it on the wall”. However, if Ms Wilkes exhibited a “female mannequin perched on a toilet with a bowl with left-over bits of dried porridge at her feet” it would be a completely different story. And it is.

I’ll leave the final thought to art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston, who (for someone in her profession) is showing worrying signs of living in the real world… “This Turner prize is going to be very, very confusing.”

And finally (finally), and I know this is a repeat, if you want to see a real artist demonstrate an incredible talent, I never cease to be amazed by the pavement art of Julian Beever who has added a few more works of art to his collection since last year. True genius.

The Domino and Sametime blogs provide a steady flow of information about the products, but I noticed a couple of blog entries in my favourite RSS reader (NewsFox) that I thought were worth highlighting.

Firstly, Andrea Waugh-Metzger of the Domino blog team discusses Domino 8.5′s ID vault. As Paul Mooney is fond of saying, users never forget their Notes ID password (tongue in cheek, maybe) but just in case they do the ID vault allows them to recover their ID. It also provides a mechanism to support people who have multiple workstations – like me for example, not because I want to, but because my main laptop has a fault with the RGB port meaning that I have to use an old laptop for presentations. This is a pain when my Notes ID password changes and I have to remember to copy it from one laptop to another. That will change for the better in the future.

Meanwhile, over at the Sametime blog, my long-time frolleague Rob Ingram discusses Sametime 8.0.2′s integration with Microsoft Sharepoint Services. This allows you to make Sharepoint author names live with Sametime awareness. Another example of IBM Lotus striving to deliver business value regardless of the collaborative solution – Sametime already supports Outlook and Office. So if you have gone down that route, at least you can console yourself with a superior real-time collaboration solution.

And finally, nothing to do with Sametime or Domino but vaguely connected to Internet technlogy, NewsBiscuit has reported that a fourteen year old English boy has been praised for his persistance after two-year search of Google Earth for a topless lady sunbather. Hey, I don’t control what turns up in my news reader, I just report the facts.

There’ll be more stuff on Notes 8.5 soon, but for now here’s a question. Look at the image – what’s the difference between those two e-mails? Is this isn’t much of a competition because I’m going to tell you. They both have the same subject and content, and if you opened the e-mails and read them you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. The only visible difference would be that one was sent later than the other… oh, and one is over 1 megabyte bigger than the other.

Okay, here’s the answer. Both contain an image (it’s a pasted in Powerpoint slide). One was pasted in using Notes 7, resulting in an e-mail of 1.3 mb. The other was pasted in using Notes 8.5, and you can see the dramatic drop in size. And yet there’s no visible difference in the quality of the image.

Notes 8.0.1 introduced new compression capabilities to decrease mail box sizes by around 30% – and now we have this image compression. Add to that the Domino Attachment and Object Service, and Notes / Domino customers have a recipe for massive reductions in storage requirements. That can lead to a decrease in cost of ownership. And remember, this is all being done on a consistent and upgradeable architecture. Are other e-mail vendors offering that? Go on, ask them…

Just a quick one to say “congratulations and thanks” to everyone who worked so hard to deliver UKLUG 2008. It was unfortunate that I had to flit in and out on the Thursday due to customer meetings, and was completely absent on Friday due to other commitments.

Let’s start with Warren Elsmore, without whom there would be no UKLUG. No-one pays Warren to work so hard on UKLUG, he does it because he believes in the community and the solutions. For that he has the gratitude and respect of a great many people.

Paul Mooney and Bill Buchan – always there to provide back-up, and always helping out with expertise to make the agenda so engaging and valuable.

Mike Smith and Matt White – lots of work prior to and during the conference.

A huge thank you to the sponsors.

And finally thank you to various other contributors – if I miss anyone here it’s unintentional and I apologise… Rob Novak, Kim Novak, Steve Castledine, Carl Tyler, Neil Burston, Gabriella Davis, Bob Balaban and Tim Clark. Oh, and Ed Brill for the keynote and various customer meetings.

When the earlier series of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ were on television I hadn’t yet been bitten by the genealogy bug and so didn’t see any of them (and crikey, according to the web site there’s been five series… and I missed them all). This time round I’ve ensured that I haven’t missed a single second.

In one respect it’s been slightly disappointing – I was hoping that it would serve as a good guide to researching a family tree, but with the exception of Patsy Kensit it seems that most of the celebs have managed to hop on a plane and travel to exotic places to carry on their research (well, okay, admittedly Poland isn’t really what I’d call exotic).

The high point of the series so far, although not relevant for helping in the research of British ancestors, was Jerry Springer’s voyage of discovery. His realisation that his two grandmothers died during the holocaust was one of the most moving and compelling pieces of television I’ve ever seen, and his anger was balanced nicely with the final moments of joy when he discovered unknown cousins in Israel. Any viewer without a lump in their throat must have been truly devoid of emotions.

Ainsley Harriott’s journey was also bitter-sweet, but in a different way – he was angry at discovering a grandmother several generations back had been a slave in Jamaica… but then also discovered another ancestor had owned slaves. Still, Ainsley got to travel to Jamaica and Barbados on BBC expenses (paid for by me and some other British television viewers).

There has also been something slightly irritating – mere mortals like me have to do their own research… time-consuming and sometimes fruitless. I’ve been waiting for a chance to get to the archives in Kew for six months and I’m still no nearer to marking a day for a visit. By contrast, our celebs have had an army of researchers, historians and genealogists on hand – so when David Suchet walked into an office in Lithuania there were already a pile of documents waiting for him. Patsy Kensit seemed to go from not knowing the name of her grandfather to identifying a mid-1800s relative (and visiting his grave) in the space of one day. Maybe it was more than one day, but she was wearing the same clothes.

Final point – I wonder how many celebs the BBC researched before they came up with eight interesting histories. All of the six so far have had interesting ancestors and stories. Was that a lucky guess by the producers or did they research many more celebs and discard the boring ones? My father’s roots in Scotland and Sweden may have been interesting but unfortunately are untraceable. On my mother’s side we have fish mongers, cheese mongers, general labrourers and drapers from nowhere further afield than Essex to the East and County Mayo in Ireland to the West. If I were a celeb, I wonder if anyone would have found this interesting. What prompted the young Henry Clinch to take up cheese mongering, move from Berkshire to Chiswick, and then switch from cheese to eggs? It doesn’t exactly promise a great moment in television history.

Today my iTunes library surpassed 1,800 tracks, and as I travelled from Wakefield to Camberley (at a steady 69.4 mph of course) listening to a variety of music I wondered to myself “what would my musical taste look like as a wordle?”.

This took five minutes of configuration – export the iTunes library, manipulate the text file to take out the word ‘the’ and take out any spaces in the band names (this was necessary, otherwise ‘Smashing’ and ‘Pumpkins’ would be treated as separate entries). Copy, and paste into wordle. Play around with the fonts and layout a bit… and there you have it. I actually have fifty-two bands or artists represented in my iTunes library, but I set the maximum words to fifteen so that it wasn’t too crowded and full of words that were too small to read.

Before you mention it… yes, I like a-Ha. No shame in that. They’ve moved on to a more mature sound since their 80′s pop days. No surprise about the biggest names there, and there is no truth in the rumour that Westlife were #sixteen in popularity.

Our friends at Apple are featuring IBM Lotus iNotes Ultralite on their web applications page. After spending over four years reminding everyone that what was iNotes is now Domino Web Access, someone has now decided that we’re going to call it iNotes again… which is actually quite cool because it fits in with the Apple trend of putting ‘i’ in front of everything.

iNotes Ultralite is basically Domino-based e-mail, calendar and contacts accessed through the iPhone’s Safari browser, and the user interface and functionality has been specifically designed for the iPhone. The other very important aspect of iNotes Ultralite is that it’s based on IBM Lotus Domino, and therefore has all the advantages of scalability, security, manageability and robustness… not to mention a consistent architecture which will be upgrade-able in the future. That means you won’t have to rip it out, migrate the data and replace it with a completely new architecture to get to the next version (unlike another solution I could mention).

There’ll be some updates to iNotes Ultralite when we ship Domino 8.5 later this year… and we’ll have more Apple / Lotus symbiosis as IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 for the Mac will be released at the same time.

I’ve just read the very sad news that Richard Wright, co-founder and keyboard player of Pink Floyd, has died of cancer aged 65. Richard Wright was the unsung hero of the band. For many years Roger Waters was the creative powerhouse, but it was David Gilmour and Wright who largely provided the music to Waters’ ideas (even though they weren’t often credited). Wright’s song-writing and musical contributions shaped classic albums such as ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’. He suffered writer’s block and was driven out of the band by Waters during the recording of ‘The Wall’ but made a triumphant return with ‘The Division Bell’ in 1994.

Celebrities die all the time, but seldom has a death touched me so personally. Of course I never knew the man, but I have spent many, many hours enjoying his music. David Gilmour, who describes Wright as his musical partner and friend, has provided a fitting tribute on davidgilmour.com.