Something we almost take for granted within IBM is Sametime’s location awareness (also plugged into Notes 8.x of course). In IBM we have access to the extended functionality which ships with IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced (adhering to brand guidelines there, thankyou) – this not only keeps a record of locations you’ve been to yourself but will also present those locations to other users who arrive there.

Location awareness is tremendously useful for a number of reasons, especially in a highly-mobile organisation such as our own. Being aware of where someone is provides some simple benefits like knowing the best phone number to contact them on, or knowing whether it’s worth getting up from your office chair to walk round to where they normally sit. If someone is travelling, they may be in a different time zone and therefore may not be in ‘work mode’ when you are. They may even be in bed when they wouldn’t normally be. In short it gives you important information about how you can collaborate with them.

In the last thirty or so hours I’ve switched location several times and Sametime has got them all right. Yesterday I arrived at our Portsmouth office and the location switched to ‘North Harbour’. Back home, it switched to ‘Camberley’. When I arrived in Staines this morning it switched to ‘Lotus Park’. I then headed for the airport, and once seated in the bmi business lounge I connected to BT Openzone… the location automatically (no intervention from me) switched to ‘Heathrow T1′.

This evening I arrived at the rather nice Park Plaza Tyrrelstown hotel in Dublin. Clearly someone from IBM has already been here (no big surprise, it’s very near our Ballycoolin and Mulhuddart offices) because the location automatically switched to ‘Tyrrelstown’ when I plugged into the free broadband. Take note, English hotels… “free broadband”.

Remember when people used to let fireworks off on Guy Fawkes Night and on that night alone? I do… vaguely. These days it’s like living in Baghdad for a two-week period while one set of neighbours tries to out-do another with aerial incendiary devices that endanger commercial aircraft. As much as I miss my late pooch Molly, it wasn’t fun enduring a fortnight of barking every time there was a bang.

On a different note, and just because I happen to have the blog editor open, the race for the White House is really hotting up. The world’s media have only been banging on about it for eleven months. History will be made… either the first black president or the first female vice-president, and in either situation the most famous loser. The BBC news site have a scoreboard tracking the number of states won so far, and it’s exciting stuff.

The obvious retort to this post will be “you should have bought a Mac” (go on Wild Bill, say it). But the fact is that the current Mrs Adams and the gymnastic flute-playing genius needed a new computer. My work laptop was the only computer in the house capable of running the Sims 2, and although the wife’s computing needs are fairly simple (e-mail, eBay, iTunes) her old laptop is slow, drops the wireless connection too often for anyone’s liking, and has a battery that lasts about 2.7 seconds. So on the spur of the moment one day in Camberley I purchased a shiny new Compaq – 2 gb of RAM, a 120 gb hard disk, dual-core processor – for just a tad over £400. Unfortunately you can’t get a Mac for that money. And this new beast makes my IBM-provided laptop look distinctly low-spec.

Having been purchased during the Summer the Compaq, as you’d expect, runs Windows Vista. This was to be my first foray into Microsoft’s shiny new operating system. First impressions? It’s okay. I was expecting disasters after the negative press, but it seemed fine. I’ll even give it a few plus points… UPnP connectivity with the Archos has been flakey with Windows XP, but with Vista it’s reliable and fast. Nice.

But as you use Vista more you notice some things that seem a bit unfinished or just plain odd. Example: copying some files from one folder to another… if they already exist, Windows XP’s instructions are fairly simple to understand (overwrite, or don’t overwrite). With Vista I did a double-take on the dialog box, read the instructions, read them again, and was still confused.

Why, when I look at a folder, is there a green progress indicator moving across the address bar, even though all the contents are displayed? And why do I sometimes get a three minute lag when I open a folder before I see the contents.

On Sunday night I was using iTunes – although this is not my computer I’ve had to move my iTunes library onto it as it was taking up too much space on my ThinkPad. Suddenly an indicator popped up on the status bar – I clicked on it and it proudly proclaimed “This problem was caused by iTunes, which was created by Apple Inc. There is no solution for this problem at this time.”

Excuse me? What problem. iTunes was happily chugging along and working perfectly. The problem report also told me “A newer version of iTunes is available for download that might address this problem”. What problem?

I’m now looking at a laptop which is functioning perfectly but the problem report tells me that iTunes “stopped responding and was closed”. Eh? It didn’t stop responding, but it was closed… by me, after I’d finished using it.

On the subject of Windows and Microsoft, I see that the BBC are once again falling over themselves to be Microsoft’s free-of-charge PR machine. Four Microsoft stories on the Technology news page today, covering Windows 7, Azure and working with Google and Yahoo.

Among the new capabilities of Windows 7 are some touch-screen effects nicked from the iPhone. I do believe that users would need new hardware to achieve that, so at least they managed some level of consistency. The computer manufacturers will be most pleased, as will manufacturers of screen wipes.

I was at IBM’s South Bank office today, and bumped into my frolleague Phil Powell. Being a Spurs supporter, Phil cleverly dodged any football-related topics of conversation, and said that he enjoyed my video clips now showing on GuruOnline. Crikey, I’d forgotten about those… the recording session was in early July, and although I’d seen some of the clips since I hadn’t seen the finished web page which presents all twenty-eight videos. Apart from a few too many errrrs and errrrms I think it turned out quite well.

It was a long day of recording… we actually recorded the who thing twice, in two formats. The first (and unused) was an interview style. The format that has been used on GuruOnline is the short-snippet approach, answering a number of questions about collaboration. Note that product names aren’t used, it’s purely the IBM Lotus take on what’s important in collaboration.

Ever since we moved into Adams Towers two years ago, foxes in the garden have become a common sight. Their visits increased since our dear old Cocker Spaniel Molly died last year, and now the appearance of a fox barely warrants a mention. They drink from the bird bath, they trot across the lawn, they appear from underneath Lauren’s playhouse, and they snooze in the bushes to the side of the garage. I’ve just finished watching one tuck into the remains of a roast chicken (no bones) on the patio.

Squirrels are everywhere and I’m almost guaranteed to see at least one everytime I look out the window. My frolleague Aidan once described them as “rats with good PR agents” – personally I think they’re entertaining. They’re also very bold – while eating lunch in the kitchen one day a squirrel climbed the railings next to the back door, and then sat on the kitchen window sill and looked in.

We also see a lot of birds – when the foxes aren’t drinking from the bird bath there’s often a queue of our feathered friends waiting to use it… usually robins and great tits, and the occasional fat pigeon. A couple of times I’ve seen a green woodpecker, quite a sight with his bright green plumage and red head. Also common are the striking jays which lends me to disagree with the RSPB’s decscription – “jays are actually quite difficult to see… they are shy woodland birds, rarely moving far from cover”. Whoever wrote this should come and spend an hour in our kitchen.

Last week I received an IBM Thankyou award (thanks James) and I selected some binoculars. They arrived yesterday morning, and I went upstairs to try them out, thinking that there might be a fox or two in their normal spot in an overgrown area in a garden backing onto our’s. No foxes… but there was deer. Quite a surprise – deer are normally herd animals, and although I might have given you the impression that we’re out in the wilderness we’re actually only half a mile from Camberley town centre. After a while the deer disappeared into some bushes, but about ten minutes later it re-appeared, this time with two more deer. Where they came from I don’t know. This was a first in two years.

Amazingly there was also another first yesterday. About 23:00 I was playing FIFA ’09 on the Wii in the games room at the front of the house, when suddenly the front security light went on. This isn’t unusual, and I looked out of the window expecting to see a fox. But there was something else… a badger… an extremely well-fed badger ambling up the sloped lawn (probably a bit miffed at being rumbled by the security light). I called the wife, but by the time she’d paused Ugly Betty the badger had shuffled off into the night. We know there are badgers around because planning permission on a piece of land nearby had been turned down because it was home to a badger sett.

Given that badgers are almost totally nocturnal and are much more wary of humans than foxes are, I think this will be a rare sighting… but hopefully not the last.

The world has gone iPhone-crazy… maybe deservedly so, they are lovely devices with a gorgeous user interface. Personally I don’t agree with the ‘one device to do everything’ mantra – you could spend hours watching movies and listening to music and then you want to make an important call… oh, your battery is dead. For me it’s a phone (a BlackBerry 8800) for business and the Archos 605 for entertainment.

RIM’s big value proposition for the BlackBerry is that it’s a mature solution for the corporate market. With the best will in the world you can’t say that about the iPhone yet. The BlackBerry offers robust security and the right tools to build business applications. It’s mature, tried and tested. Determined not to be dealt a blow by the iPhone’s “I don’t care I want one” pulling-power, RIM have announced the 9500 (also known as the Storm). Again, a poorly-kept secret, but who cares. I want one. Not in the same way that I have an Archos 605, want a new Archos 5 but not so much that I’ll go and get one… I really want a 9500. I will proudly whip it out in front of any customer and show Lotus solutions, but also how lovely RIM’s new device is.

The iTunes Store has just sent me a very nice e-mail telling me that I can pre-order Dido’s new album ‘Safe Trip Home’. It says “Because you’ve downloaded music by Dido from iTunes in the past”. What? I bloody well haven’t. That’s tantamount to slander. It’s almost the same as saying I drive a Fiat Punto, wear high heels and worry about water retention once a month.

Funny that it’s called ‘Safe Trip Home’. Listening to Dido while driving would be anything but a safe trip home, as falling asleep at the wheel is incredibly dangerous. Here’s a money-saving tip… rather than buying an entire Dido album, just buy one track and play it twelve times. The effect is exactly the same.

Why would you want to pre-order something off iTunes? It’s not like they’re going to run out of files to download on the day it’s released.

Back in the good old HTML days of dadams.co.uk there was a page called ‘Hall of Shame’ which featured such things as junk mail, orange juice, onions, roadworks, cigars, unnecessarily large 4-wheel drive vehicles, cricket, wasps, fox hunting and people who pay for £2′s worth of item in a supermarket using a credit or debit card. Oh, and the one that people used to e-mail me to agree about – shop assistants who put the receipt in your hand and then place the change on top of it.

Today I have been driven to consider resurrecting the Hall of Shame, but instead I’ve decided to just highlight this item on it’s own. I’m a Lotus Notes user (and proud of it), most of the offenders are Lotus Notes users, but the problem has nothing to do with Notes – it’s all down to people. My calendar is pristine and organised. I am known to edit calendar appointments sent by other people if I don’t like the wording of the subject or the location (several times a day). Yes, that’s anal. With that in mind, let’s run through a few dos and don’ts. Actually, the don’ts…

1. Don’t put the date of the meeting in the subject field. There’s no need to. When I look at the appointment I can see what date it falls on due to the unique design of the calendar which displays the month and the day of the month.
2. Don’t put the location in the subject field. There’s a special field for that. It’s called ‘Location’. The clue is in the title of said field.
3. Don’t put the location in the subject field. I know I just said that. Let me explain further… if you insist on putting the location in the subject field, when the location changes I’ll get a reschedule telling me the subject has changed. So don’t blame me if I turn up at the wrong place.
4. When you invite me to a conference call, I don’t need every phone number on the entire planet. If you’re based in England, I’m based in England and the rest of the attendees are based in England, we don’t need the dial-in details for Venezuela.
5. Don’t put every phone number on the entire planet in the location field.
6. When you invite me to a meeting, it’s rather selfish if the subject is ‘Meeting with Darren’. For you it might be a meeting with Darren, but for me it’s a meeting with you (whatever your name is).

My relative Caroline has been incredibly helpful with my quest to discover my ancestors, and the other day she spotted something very obvious that I’d missed. Back in August I solved the mystery of my great x3 grandmother – this had been tricky because there was no record of her marriage to Henry Clinch or of the birth of James Clinch (my great x2 grandfather). Henry, born in 1819, was quite a challenge because he didn’t appear on the 1841 census and his birth was before the official birth / marriage / death records started. So although a couple of other Clinch ancestors provided some information on his lineage, I wanted the proof for myself.

Caroline’s find was just so obvious – Henry Clinch took a second wife, seven years after his first wife Sarah died in 1855. This marriage was on record, I knew about it, but never thought it was that important. But of course it was… it revealed his father’s name. As luck would have it, my mum’s cousin Susan already had the certificate. And there was the name of my great x4 grandfather, Charles Clinch. According to the parish records, he was born in Chiseldon, Wiltshire in 1785. This was rather spooky – I found out this information on Friday, the same day I drove past Chiseldon on the way to Swindon.

Although I have yet to confirm it, the information about Charles allowed me to trace back a couple more generations (but I stress, this needs more research) – Charles was the son of Thomas Clinch and Ann Arman, and Ann was the daughter of Richard Arman and Elizabeth Savoury. Richard was born in (wait for it) 1718 and was my great x6 grandfather. Confirming this is going to require a visit to the Berkshire archives to double-check the Charles Clinch information and also see if I can confirm the name of Henry’s mother (Charles apparently had four wives), and then a visit to the Wiltshire archives in Swindon. Realistically it’ll probably be next year by the time I get a chance.

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…