Just before Christmas I recorded a video interview with Graham Lewis from IBM Software Marketing. The subject is Notes 8, how we’ve improved the user interface and usability, the strategy for integrating collaboration solutions and the business value of the capabilities. Have a look, enjoy the demo snippets and gaze in wonder at my shorter-than-usual haircut.

Shooting a video at IBM South Bank is not without it’s challenges. We chose a day that coincided with a customer event in the room next door, and the video shoot was halted several times by banging doors and coffee breaks which took the noise above the sound man’s comfort level.

The other challenge was creating some demo movies that fitted into a tiny 320 x 240 window… a certain amount of creativity was involved. Check the page again soon as we plan to add some other movies of Notes 8 functionality, this time a bit more in-depth and with a larger window size.

Firstly, let me say thanks to my brother Steve, his wife Zoe and the kids Tom and Melissa for putting me up (or putting up with me) for a couple of days. The Chunky Monkey was already in the freezer when I got there and we had bacon rolls for breakfast. Oh, and I enjoyed the time spent with you too.

I got to Orlando on Sunday afternoon, checked in, registered at the Lotusphere desk and then headed to some top secret internal Lotus sales training on LotusLive. Okay, it was top secret then, but wasn’t after the opening session (more on that in a second). Sunday night for the time for the opening party, and it was considerably warmer than last year.

I’ve already covered the opening session, so no need to go over that again. And I was going to focus on the announcements rather than Tuesday-night karaoke. I thought my renditions of ‘Sweet Caroline’ (accompanied by Lewis) and ‘Daydream Believer’ (accompanied by Chris) were rather good.

Anyway, the important stuff. I mentioned in another post that there were very few announcements about Notes / Domino, but there were lots of sessions and aspects of the product as such XPages, DAOS and ‘Alloy’ (the Notes / SAP integration) caused a lot of buzz. The reason for few Notes / Domimo announcements is simple… we’ve just shipped 8.5 and it’s too early to focus on version 9. Come to Lotusphere 2010 and it’ll be a different story.

So what were the big announcements? There was a lot of focus on Sametime, both the forthcoming version 8.5 and Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT). Version 8.5’s big focus is meetings – a new rich client, a new browser experience which loads in seconds and a new approach to meetings using always-available and favourite rooms. Add to that a new browser-based client, iPhone support and new contact list views and it’s quite an update.

SUT also received a lot of airtime, with demonstrations of a huge array of features (call management, routing rules, call transfer, conference calls, and a lot more). Expect it “mid-year”.

Connections 2.5 was the other big news. Despite the 0.5 version increment there’s a lot of new stuff… more display options for home pages, a ‘wall’ for profiles, and (I think the most significant) collaborative file sharing. This file sharing is also planned for inclusion in Quickr later in the year, so either product (Quickr or Connections) will give you that capability.

As I mentioned in the opening session overview, RIM’s Jim Balsillie joined Bob Picciano on stage to announce more Lotus / BlackBerry integration… mobile access to Open Document Format documents (spreadsheets and presentations to come at a later date), support for Quickr, and a new Connections client supporting Activities, Blogs, and Communities in order to augment the access already available to Profiles and Dogear. He also announced integration with Domino Designer and XPages in order to make Domino-based applications more accessible on a BlackBerry device.

And finally (although there was a lot more) the announcement that all things hosted or software-as-a-service would be branded as LotusLive. This includes Bluehouse which becomes LotusLive Engage, Sametime Unyte which becomes LotusLive Meetings and hosted Notes which becomes LotusLive Notes. The acquisition of OutBlaze’s messaging solution was also discussed with more details to come after the acquisition is finalised.

That’s all for now… although I’ll be speaking at various Lotusphere Comes To You events for the next three months.

A number of people have forwarded various links to me today on the subject of announced job cuts at Microsoft… many accompanied by comments to the effect of “enjoy”, “good news” and “this will make you smile”.

Actually it doesn’t make me smile and to be honest I don’t think it’s good news. Winning against Microsoft, taking out Exchange and replacing with Domino, hearing that a company is looking at throwing out Office in favour of Symphony… that makes me smile, and that’s only natural in the market we compete in. Most of the time we compete fairly, and I know many people at Microsoft who I have worked with in the past, and I like and respect them. I bumped into one here at Lotusphere – I shook his hand and spent a few minutes talking about things we were doing (great to see you Tony). We may trade snipes on a blog next week, but we’ll know it’s healthy competitive debate.

When a powerful technology company like Microsoft announces job cuts it’s not a good sign and it’s not good for the industry. It’s also not good for the people effected who have to pay mortgages and support families. So anyone sending me an e-mail expecting me to be smug and punch the air, you’ll be disappointed. IBM posted good results, but we should all be aware how fragile the economy is.

Back in November last year I was disappointed when I had a BlackBerry Bold for a week but then had to return it to my friends at RIM (it was a loan device for a joint customer event). Since then I moved to a Curve, but have looked on enviously at the Bold devices in other peoples’ hands.

I’m please to say that yesterday I managed to obtain a new Bold, and I’ll say thanks again to my provider. The device switch-over was quick and easy, so now I’m receiving e-mail and calendar data, conversing via Sametime Mobile and looking up important information using the Connections client for the ‘Berry. Let’s have a look at the pros and cons of the Bold…

Cons – it’s larger and heavier than the Curve, slightly shorter battery life (although opinions vary). And I think that’s it.

Pros – a higher resolution and slightly larger display, supports WiFi and 3G, an improved media player, better speaker for hands-free, more memory, comes with Word Mole (top game)… and it looks better overall.

One of the strange things about this Lotusphere is that there’s no big Notes / Domino announcements. I suppose it’s all about timing – Notes / Domino 8.5 have just shipped, and it’s too early to feature Notes 9. That’s not to say there aren’t any sessions on Notes / Domino… there are… loads, and they focus on topics as diverse as XPages for building Web 2.0 applications to deploying and administering Notes / Domino in efficient and cost-effective manners.

The big announcements and the most visible glimpses of the future have been around Connections 2.5, Sametime 8.5, Sametime Unified Telephony, LotusLive solutions and various bits and pieces surfacing on the iPhone.

However, if you know where to look you’ll find some info on the future of Notes. Yesterday I attended a session on new features in Notes 8.5 – although I knew most of it I picked up some new info, such as how to install and wire in a new plugin to integrate with LinkedIn. But the whole session was made really worthwhile with the brief tour of some future ideas. Jeff Eisen demoed a preview of tasks (to-dos) on the Notes sidebar, showing how easy it was to create and manipulate tasks. The really cool part was when he went into a new e-mail and inserted a new task (could be plural… tasks) into the body of an e-mail, explaining that the recipient would see those tasks moved into their own to-do list and become part of a task workflow process.

Right now I’m sitting in a session about e-mail archiving – important stuff as it relates to cost of ownership and also personal productivity – and as well as covering the current options they’ve spent a lot of time talking about things being done to make archiving easier, making the archives more seamlessly integrated with the user’s mail box and making it easier to find and access archived data. It’s great stuff and shows that the development teams are constantly pushing ahead with improvements in so many aspects of the product.

It’s like being at a rock concert, although I haven’t been stripped of £8 for a tour program. You can feel the heat from seven thousand people fuelled by caffeine and the lights are blinding. I’m hoping this is going to be blogged live but at  the moment the wireless network isn’t co-operating… presumably a few thousand other people are trying to connect.

Bob P announced that since the release of Notes 8 we’ve added 12,236 new businesses to our user base.

Guest speaker is actor Dan Akroyd.

Bob P came back to the stage and talked about the theme of resonance, descrbing it as the elements of our collaborative solutions working in harmony.

Next up were customer reference stories – Coca Cola talked about the important factors – ease of use, extended enterprise, openness, mobility and partnerships. NetJets talked about their portal-based customer interaction solution for managing worldwide scheduling of private jet resources. Ian Haynes from HSBC spoke about the bank changing their culture with a comprehensive collaboration suite, with Lotus being their key partner.

Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research in Motion – announced BES support for Domino 8.5 and forthcoming BlackBerry offerings for hosted Notes. RIM provide three of the five top smartphones in the US. Announcements of a new BlackBerry client for Connections (supporting all of the Connections applications), a new BlackBerry client for Sametime, and Symphony and Quickr on BlackBerry. And finally, a plug-in for Domino Designer to provide Domino applications directly onto a BlackBerry device. Wow.

Bob P announced that Bluehouse has become LotusLive – which in itself includes a wider brand for hosted and Software as a Service solutions.

Alastair Rennie spoke about Notes celebrating it’s 20th birthday. Kevin Cavanaugh then came to the stage and described Notes as a 20 year old rebel hanging out with disruptive friends (Mac, Linux and open standards solutions). Notes 8 is being deployed quickr than previous releases. ‘Project Atlantic’ – Notes 8 and SAP integration – was announced as ‘Alloy’… demo from Ron and Suzanne which included a LinkedIn plugin for Notes and widgets in iNotes.

Kevin then spoke about application development and XPages – another demo covering the new functionality and a rich internet application running on a BlackBerry storm (and how to display it correctly on the smaller screen). Kevin then covered the value of moving to Domino 8.5 in terms of performance updates and cost of ownership reduction.

Bruce Morse – Sametime and UC² (of course) and discussed it’s role in speeding up business processes. Announcements for Sametime 8.5 and Sametime Unified Telephony. A great demo followed showing aspects of SUT in action. Sametime 8.5 includes many enhancements including iPhone support and new browser and rich client meeting experiences.

Jeff Schick – wins the award for most enthusiastic speaker and announced Connections 2.5, including wall and micro-blog features in Profiles and LinkedIn integration. A new wiki for Connections and Quickr, new content sharing capabilities, and support for the iPhone. Quickr 8.2 for Domino announced and mentions of Quickr Next.

Larry Bowden – portals are critical to better business outcomes. Mashup Center allows line-of-business people to construct their own applications – IBM leads in this field, and remains #1 in the portal market.

Back to Alastair to talk about LotusLive, followed by Sean Poulley. Bluehouse becomes LotusLive Engage, available in Q1. Demo shows Engage integrated into Notes 8 and how to collaborate with extended enterprise contacts. It also showed joining a live meeting from a BlackBerry device. Three new partnership announced – Salesforce.com, LinkedIn and Skype – that covers over 400 million people.

Kristen Lauria previewed some of the new marketing plans aimed at showing Lotus as the leader in redefining the collaboration category.

That’s it for the opening session – maybe I’ll blog more during the week. The wireless network is overloaded and so is my diary.

To put this into context, every year about this time, Microsoft announce their spoiler – something to take the shine off Lotusphere. Previous spoilers have included new versions of the Notes-application-to-Sharepoint migration tool – yes, the one that migrates only the simplest of out-of-the-box Notes applications. Microsoft have become so predictable in doing this, and the spoilers have always been so weak, that it’s actually reached the point where customers and the Lotus community were waiting with mild amusement to see what this year’s bleat will be.

And here it is… Exchange now has a roadmap… well, okay, they’ve announced the number of the next version (14) and also said that it’s already been in use at some educational establishments who have signed up for the hosted version. So, it’s a version number, with no release date (not even for a beta) and scant details about what it will actually include. Call that a roadmap? 14 is a strange number given that it’s gone from 5.5 to 2000 to 2003 and then 2007. But look at it this way… Exchange 2007 was originally dubbed Exchange ‘12′. So what would come next? I think Exchange customers already feel nervous enough about the next ‘upgrade’ without the version number being 13.

Remember this big Exchange news comes two weeks after we shipped a major new version with many improvements and new capabilities, and a focus on delivering a reduction in cost of ownership. I’m inclined to think this is more of a coincidence than a spoiler. Quite honestly, who’s going to say “oh wow, they’ve announced the version number”? Unless it’s in a sarcastic tone, and then it’ll work.

My favourite comment from the blogs today was “What’s the difference between Microsoft alpha and gold software? – the invoice”.

However, rather than just sit back and laugh at Microsoft’s feeble attempt to upstage Lotusphere (assuming it was), we’ve gone on the attack. Speaking as someone who is admittedly a follower of the divine Lotus religion, even I would have to admit I’ve seldom seen such a strong and gung-ho press release. Just look at all those companies who have moved from Exchange to Domino… and bear in mind that list doesn’t include some 2008 wins which have yet to become reference-able.

Anyway, here’s the article on CNN Money and here’s the IBM press release. Oh, and here’s another article on USA Today. It would seem we are no longer dancing round the opponent, we’re moving in and landing some punches. Next stop… Lotusphere.

I e-mailed the link to this BBC News story to my frolleague Pete ‘Hampster’ Hampton today, but changed the title to ‘BBC begins Windows 7 push’. And then I changed the title again to ‘BBC continues with Windows 7 push’. Because let’s face it, they’ve already been banging on about it for ages.

Thanks also to Ian Scott for reminding me of the story.

Not everyone is as keen as the BBC to herald Windows 7’s arrival with gilded trumpets on a path of sparkling pixie dust strewn with fragrant rose petals. Jason Perlow, blogging on ZDNet’s Tech Broiler, believes that Windows 7 should be a free upgrade for users entitled to Vista and states that “Windows 7, for all of its performance improvements and bling, is essentially one big service deluxe pack for Windows Vista” and that it’s “essentially a performance and usability fix for a defective product”.

Harsh words, but maybe fair. I’ve said in the past that I occasionally feel pangs of sympathy for Microsoft when it comes to Windows. No other company has ever been in the position of dominating the operating system of the planet’s personal computers and then having the burden of keeping it fresh, exciting and desirable for the hundreds of millions of users. Most companies on the planet are out to make money, and why shouldn’t Microsoft make an honest buck out of the research and man-centuries of development effort? They have had to invest heavily to deliver their operating systems, even if there is a school of thought that says that the cash has rolled in unchallenged off the back of the Office and Windows monopolies. Unchallenged for how much longer, you have to wonder?

My thoughts about Vista can be summed up in a single word… “why”? We have a laptop running Vista at home, and so far the only thing I’ve found that’s better than XP is the UPnP support that allows the Archos 605 to stream videos from the laptop (something that had to be set up for the sake of setting it up but in reality is never used). Granted there are other advantages that apply to a corporate environment – a chap from the UK’s Health Service told me that the security across simultaneously logged-on sesssions on shared workstations was critical to them. Fair enough. I guess the best thing you can say about Windows at this point is that it has a roadmap… unlike a certain other Microsoft product.

Ed Brill has provided some links to items of press coverage on the now-released Notes / Domino 8.5, namely from Forbes and the Financial Times. Not to be outdone, I’ve been talking to the press too… not about affairs with super models this time, it’s all about the new Notes / Domino release.

From the interviews I’ve done in the past week you can now read the results at vnunet.com, Computer Business Review and CIO.

Due to the Mac-centric nature of the announcement (at Macworld), the conversations started around the Mac client, but by far the two most interesting topics of conversation for the journalists were the storage-saving capabilities of the Domino Attachment & Object Service and the integrated Symphony productivity suite.

What I love about the 8.5 release is that we at IBM Lotus have delivered another substantial version which delivers new capabilities which will benefit customers and help them to reduce costs… provided as part of a consistent upgrade strategy and as part of an ongoing publicly-stated roadmap.

Addendum… my frolleague Chris Reckling (we’ve known each other since 1-2-3 days) has published an overview of ten great 8.5 features. Of course, anyone who’s seen Spinal Tap should know that top ten lists should contain eleven items.

As part of the quest to track down long-dead relatives… sorry, connect with my past… I have subscribed to a couple of web sites. Genes Reunited was one of them. Now, before I have a pop at Genes Reunited, as I’m undoubtedly going to (and let’s face it, you’re now looking forward to it), let me first say that it’s actually a very good site to join if you’re into the family history research fad. I’ve discovered some good info, and I’ve made contact with a relative who has been tremendously helpful. In short, if you’re researching your family history, you should join.

However…

The one feature I have an issue with is ‘Hot Matches’. Let me explain. Genes Reunited allows you to upload your tree (it supports the GEDCOM standard, blah blah, technical stuff). To give you an idea of the quantity, in the last month over four million names were added to the combined trees of Genes Reunited members. Every two weeks the Hot Matches feature will look at your tree and then look at a cross section of the other tress and match up details – the idea being is that if I have a Mary Brown in my tree, born in 1855, Hot Matches will tell you about Mary Browns in other trees which may belong to distant relatives. And in doing so you make contact, swap details on ancestors, have tearful reunions with people who have the same great x7 grandfather, and so on.

Sometimes this works rather well. The first Hot Match in my list for this fortnight contains details for ‘Emma’ whose tree contains one of the Ottaway family, born in Norfolk in 1816. This chap I know is the wife’s great x3 grandfather, and therefore Emma may be a distant relative of the wife. So, this is rather good, eh? Hmmm…

Back to Mary Brown. You’ve probably guessed by now that I’ve used that name as an example because a) she was an ancestor of  mine and b) it’s a more frequently-occurring name than anyone in the Ottaway family… or just about any other family. If you stood in any street of any town in the mid-1800s and threw a handful of gruel over your shoulder, you’d probably hit a Mary Brown. So you can probably believe me when I tell you that the Hot Matches search for Mary Brown, born in 1855, brings up quite a few results. But how hot are they?

This evening I started to plough through eleven pages of Hot Matches, and got through two pages worth before I got fed up and started writing this. Among the ‘Hot Matches’ were Mary Browns born in Hull, Bury, Glasgow, Plymouth, Staffordshitre, the Shetland Islands, Georgia (yes, the US state) and Tasmania. If you were playing hide-and-seek none of those could be considered hot… or even luke-warm. Not when you’re looking for a Mary Brown born in Chiswick.

Ironically, Hot Matches would ignore Mary Browns born in Chiswick in 1854 or 1856 – which is a bit daft considering that you have to give a bit of leaway with dates, especially if your research is based on censuses where the ages are often rounded up or down.

Let me finish by saying that I understand why Hot Matches can’t work with exact matches for locations. The GEDCOM record doesn’t break a place of birth down into towns, counties and countries… it’s one single location. If exact matches only were paired up, Mr Ottaway’s record wouldn’t have been matched due to a spelling discrepancy and the fact that Emma used the town and county, whereas I just used the town. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have nine more pages of Hot Matches to get through.