UKLUG supremo Warren Elsmore has announced that the UK Lotus User Group will be holding a two-day event in Edinburgh on the 8th and 9th of October 2009 at the Radisson SAS hotel. That’s handy, it’s my preferred hotel in Edinburgh. The choice of location for this year’s event has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Warren lives in Edinburgh. Nor does it have anything to do with Wild Bill‘s encyclopedic knowledge of every watering hole in a ten mile radius (he’ll probably vehemently deny that, and tell me it’s fifteen miles).

Joking aside, I’m pleased it’s happening in Edinburgh – all of our customers large and small are important to us, but sometime I don’t think those in Scotland get enough opportunities to interact with the community or get to events. So this is great news.

Stay tuned here, Warren’s site and the UKLUG site for further details. It’s in my diary already.

For the full background on this subject please see here.

A couple of months ago I acquired a CD with the Parish records for St Nicholas (Chiswick) from 1855 to 1901. It revealed the details of my main suspect for my Alice West, living a stone’s throw from my great-grandfather Henry Clinch… this was not the right Alice West. My great-grandmother was Alice Maud West, and this one turned out to be Alice Jane West. Disappointing maybe, but by this point I had two options, and this removed one of them.

The other major development during the past couple of months was the early availability of the 1911 census (following a successful challenge under the Freedom of Information Act to bring it forward from 2012). Of course, I headed straight for the record of Henry Clinch and ‘wife’ Alice – information recorded six months before the birth of my grandmother – and it revealed one important detail… that she was born in Acton. This was rather interesting – it recorded Henry as being born in Chiswick, but the 1901 census shows the two birth places reversed. This could have been an error on the part of the census recorder. Ten years later the head of the household was responsible for entering the details, so you’d have to assume Henry wouldn’t have got it wrong.

So, knowing that Alice West was born in Acton, I turned back to a birth certificate that my mum’s cousin Susan had sent me (she acquired it based on a strong hunch) and two previous census records (1881 and 1891). Although the family had moved from Acton to Hammersmith everything matched up… Alice Maud West born in Acton at the right time, and her parents’ names matched the census information to the birth certificate.

Knowing this was the right Alice West, it confirmed the names of her parents – Frederick West and Harriet Underwood (and we’ll call him Frederick West, not Fred West). Tracing back further, Harriet was born in the tiny Hampshire village of Froxfield Green and was the daughter of Stephen Underwood and Harriet Restall. Stephen, born around 1819, was listed as an agricultural labourer, but also as the Parish Clerk – which says that he was literate. Frederick West was born in the Kingston area, the son of John West (unfortunately not an heir to the tinned fish empire) and Sarah (surname as yet unknown). Frederick lived in The Bittoms, an area of Kingston now dominated by a large car park and County Hall.

And there you have it… a mystery solved but opening up new avenues of investigation. What prompted young Harriet Restall to leave a tiny Hampshire village and pair up with Frederick from Kingston and then live in Acton? Today it’s commonplace to move around – I think about my own life moving between Twickenham, Isleworth, Shiplake, Hounslow, Shepperton, Knaphill and now Camberley. In the 19th century it was fairly unusual to go far from your place of birth – maybe for employment or education reasons, but that’s quite difficult to pin down. The search goes on.

Let’s just ignore the man from Plymouth who two years ago said it was a four hour journey so Lotusphere didn’t exactly come to him (which I actually thought was quite amusing but not useful feedback for planning future events). LCTY ’09 (the UK version) is now open for registration. As in previous years you have a choice – Manchester (the Radisson SAS hotel at Manchester Airport, 28th April) and London (Hilton on Park Lane, 30th April). Well, actually you have three choices (see below) and hopefully soon to be four.

We have the agenda finalised, but it’s not on the web site yet – the session abstracts are currently being collected and reviewed, and will be published soon. There will of course be a keynote speech covering the major Lotusphere announcements, there will be some customers speaking about how Lotus solutions have enhanced their businesses, and then there’ll be the usual two tracks in the afternoon. The days will be capped off with a guest speaker – I’ve put in the same suggestion as the last four years, this year someone is investigating said person but we believe he’ll be too expensive. It won’t be Jeremy Clarkson because as Paul Mooney knows the budget doesn’t stretch anywhere near as far.

As you would expect, we’re using Lotus technology to manage the events (you’d hope so wouldn’t you). Lotus Activities, part of IBM Lotus Connections (available from your Lotus reseller or sales rep right now), is the perfect solution – we’ve already captured ideas of content, links, presentations, to-dos, comments, instant messages, agendas (from a Notes application) and registration data. The wonderful thing is that no-one has to ask where things are posted, and it cuts down on the e-mails. Apart from one (sent before the activity was created) there have been no e-mails containing file attachments. That alone makes people very happy.

The image on the right shows the activity itself, accessed via the Notes 8.5 client and displayed by section. Note the ‘Online’ indicator at the bottom… in Notes 8.5 you can takes activities off-line just as you’ve always been able to do with Notes applications.

Do I hear the Welsh and Scottish among you complaining that both events are situated in England? Fair enough, let’s start with news of Lotusphere Comes To Wales (19th March) which is being run by Codel Software in conjunction with our good friends at Cardiff University. Scotland? We’re working on it.

I have just one thing to say before the ceremony starts. Any scenario in which a band as awful as Scouting For Girls are nominated for an award is a bad sign for the British music industry. Unless the nomination was for worst band of the year. I can’t remember the last time I heard a band that made me so badly want to tear my own ears off.

Don’t worry, I’m not going mad in my old age nor have I gone over to the dark side. I’m referring to this article on the CIO web site. It’s hard not to be sarcastic about it, so I’m not even going to try to not be sarcastic. Quite frankly, if people can make a living out of writing articles like this, then I’m going to put fingers to keyboard and start on my latest masterpiece of journalism ’10 reasons why people who own a toaster should buy a loaf of bread’.

It’s interesting that CIO are running another Outlook-based article entitled “7 reasons not to use Microsoft Outlook for your company’s e-mail”. Just seven. How lazy of them. I have to say that it’s easier to debunk the 10 pro-Outlook reasons than it is to agree with the 7 counter-Outlook arguments. Top of my list for the arguments against would be “you’ll end up running Exchange”. Instead they bang on about HTML-based e-mails. But they do at least recognise Outlook’s propensity to corrupt it’s own mail box.

Before I start to stick the proverbial boot in, let me state that I recognise that the CIO article is not written in the context of reasons why Outlook should be used in preference to Lotus Notes. Anyway, let’s crack on and look at those 10 oh-so compelling reasons…

1. Outlook and Microsoft Exchange play well together – “if your e-mail server runs Microsoft Exchange, Outlook is a no-brainer”. Not a good start really. My first thought was that you could replace a few words and come up with “if your e-mail server runs Lotus Domino, Notes is a no-brainer”. When I have conversations with customers about the bird-brained idea of moving to Exchange (spend hundreds of thousands of pounds and arrive at an e-mail solution that does less than the one you had) it’s never about Exchange – no-one has ever told me that they think Exchange is superior to Domino. And even if they did I wouldn’t give them any credence – it requires more servers, the ‘upgrades’ are more difficult, the clustering is poor, and the up-time is consistently shown to be inferior. Outlook is the reason why companies choose Exchange…so if you have Exchange, why wouldn’t you use Outlook?

2. Outlook plays well with Active Directory – and you’d hope so wouldn’t you? Seeing as Microsoft have mandated Active Directory in an Exchange environment it’s what’s known as Hobson’s Choice.

3. Outlook integrates with many devices and applications – okay, to a certain extent I have to take this one on the chin. Outlook’s third party support is very broad. Good job done. However, I’m amused that the article states BlackBerry support as a key factor. Domino, Sametime, Connections… announcements from Lotusphere about Domino Designer, XPages, Quickr and Symphony. I know another vendor who could trump Microsoft’s BlackBerry integration.

4. Outlook makes it easy to organize your assets – not immediately apparent what this means, but a read-through reveals that it refers to rules, out-of-office, colour-coding and follow-up flags. I don’t believe Outlook is the only e-mail client on the market to offer this – there isn’t one thing listed that Notes doesn’t offer.  But how about recipient marking (i.e. that e-mail was sent to you only, or you and two other people), does Outlook have that? How about Outlook’s ultimate inbox? You remember, the one where you copy all of your old e-mails back into your inbox. Genius.

5. Outlook plays nicely with SharePoint – “Outlook users can opt to receive notifications of new or changed content by e-mail, then click through to the SharePoint site”. Wow. This is where the sarcasm can really kick in. URLs in e-mails, whatever next? SharePoint can integrate with Notes courtesy of Mainsoft’s plug-ins. Outlook 2007 can integrate with Lotus Quickr, thanks to an extension Lotus provide. Notes also supports integration with Quickr, Connections, Activities and Sametime (and a whole lot more). What I’m saying is that Outlook isn’t necessarily the pinnacle of integration between e-mail and collaborative solutions.

6. Outlook expedites workflow – surely no-one believes that Outlook is the most flexible client solution for workflow applications? “Companies can set up workflows for functions such as online voting. For example, if a group wants to decide on a location for a festive lunch, the coordinator can send a message offering several options”. Now that’s what I call mission-critical. Sarcasm meter goes into the red, and rightly so.

7. Outlook’s user interface is familiar – not to me it isn’t. Who’s it familiar to? Answer: existing Outlook users. Isn’t that what we call a self-fulfilling prochecy? Here, read this instruction manual – it’s in Vietnamese but the words should be very familiar to Vietnamese people. Okay, I know what they’re getting at. Outlook is (by a smaller margin than most people think) the market leader for corporate e-mail, and therefore if someone arrives from another company there’s a slightly higher chance they’ll have used Outlook in the past. However, thanks to that new ribbon thingy, is Outlook 2007 instantly familiar to Outlook 2003 users? I’ll take advice and comments on that one.

8. Outlook offers integrated calendar, tasks – who wrote this article? Someone who’s been frozen in ice for 15 years and whose last experience of e-mail and calendars was Microsoft Mail and Schedule Plus?

9. Believe it or not, Outlook has pretty good security – I’ll go for ‘not’. They’re actually missing some words here, and the missing words are “compared to previous versions of Outlook”. Compared to Notes it sucks. The article talks about junk mail filtering (like, wow), blocking external content, and disallowing executable attachments… which I don’t believe is any substitution for a managed Execution Control List based on verified signing authorities and the control that provides. I once likened Outlook security to a Ford Escort Mark II – I had one, and I could open a locked door with a wooden ice-lolly stick.

10. Outlook offers one-stop e-mail – yeah, okay, Outlook’s implementation of this approach to e-mail is pretty good. I think it’s better in Mozilla Thunderbird, but Outlook can have a few brownie points.

Look out for CIO’s next article ’10 reasons why people who can’t spell Vista should carry on running XP or buy a Mac’.

Oh, by the way, Ed Brill and I posted at round-about the same time. He’s so much more diplomatic than I am.

I’m a late-comer to Twitter. It sounded like a distraction and quite frankly sounded a bit silly (seeing people in Facebook who were “twittering”). While at Lotusphere I sat and had lunch with some guys from a very important Lotus customer, and Mark the CIO asked why I wasn’t on Twitter. One of my reasons, jokingly, was that I couldn’t bear the thought of signing up and having the embarrassment of no-one following me… so round the table I received a number of pledges to follow me if I joined. And join-up I did…

Two weeks later I have 54 followers and I’m following 58 people. Some of the people I’m following are celebs (Stephen Fry, Alan Carr, Chris Moyles) so I’m not expecting them to follow me.

So, is Twitter useful? I’ve got to be honest… not really. Well, maybe it has been a couple of times. Paul Mooney made the point that it was incredibly useful at Lotusphere for letting the gang know where you were, where you were going and so on. But here’s the issue… Paul is following 250 people. How does he cope with potentially so many updates and filter out the useful from the noise and the blabbering?

It is wholly possible that I’m not using Twitter to the best of it’s ability. It was only over the weekend I discovered that I was missing personal replies to my ‘tweets’. My biggest wish-list item for Twitter would be filtering into groups… for example during the week it would be useful to just track a group of work colleagues, or at Lotusphere just those people attending. It’s possible that one of the various Twitter companion tools can do this but as yet I haven’t had the time to look… perhaps someone can put me straight. For now, I refuse to have it on my BlackBerry – I had Facebook on there for a while and the constant alerts drove me mad.