This week, I think, marks the 10th birthday of Lotus Notes R5. I say “think” because I can’t remember the exact date, but I know that it shipped very late in Q1 of 1999.

I remember Lotus Notes R5 very well for a number of reasons. The first is that I spent two weeks working in Cambridge, Massachusetts (across the Charles River from what is officially Boston) in October 1998 (crumbs, last century). Myself and a team of a few other Lotus colleagues, including Jean Nelson and Craig Iffert, worked on some pre-release collateral for the product. And it was during those two weeks that I made my one and only trip to Westford, where I sat in on a Product Management meeting with the then-Notes client Product Manager – a young man by the name of Ed Brill. I wonder what happened to him…

In April 1999 we held a big launch event for Notes R5 at the London Arena. At the time it was the biggest ever Lotus event in the UK, although it’s now been surpassed by Lotusphere Comes To You. I remember a number of things very clearly…

• It was held the day after Jill Dando was murdered… sounds morbid but it’s one of the things you do remember. I came home at lunch time to put some things together before heading up to London for the overnight stay and the incident was naturally being covered on the news.
• We used to have loads of people in Marketing – they all stayed overnight at the hotel near the London Arena and a huge party of us had dinner. I remember wondering why we needed so many people – indeed, no offence to anyone, many of them were barely involved. The Technical Sales team were, of course, doing all the presentations.
• Cliff Reeves, at that time the head of Product Management, went over-time on his keynote presentation… by at least 30 minutes. The producer Nikki was tearing her hair out.
• The podium which was used for presentations didn’t have a ridge on the bottom edge, so to stop the laptops from slipping off an enterprising roadie gaffer-taped a Mars bar into position. That Mars bar was still stuck in place when the podium arrived in Manchester.
• Attendees asked about Linux and XML. Yes, 10 years ago people were asking when Notes and Domino would be available on Linux. When people asked me about Domino supporting XML, I’d ask “well, what do you want to achieve?” – the resulting confused look told me they didn’t really know why they were asking, it was just one of those things they thought they should be asking. No-one gave me a sensible answer (although in the years since people have done, and Domino supports XML in a number of ways).

It probably won’t amaze you to hear that we do occasionally talk to customers who are still using Notes R5. I met one a couple of weeks ago, and I’m going to see another in April. It amused me and annoyed me when last year I met with people from an organisation who told me “Notes is so unattractive and clunky”. I asked if they knew how old their Notes client version was, and I saw a look of realisation on their faces when I said it was over 9 years old, and I think put it into context for the person who said that Outlook 2007 was much nicer. 8 years on you’d hope a product would look better.

Occasionally I see people in IBM still using Notes 7 (why, I do not know). Having used Notes 8.x for over 2 years I couldn’t imagine using version 7 now and I can’t believe how far the client has come since. Currently I’m using a beta of 8.5.1 and despite being a minor point release upgrade it has a few nice little improvements over 8.5.

Anyway, I’ll close by saying “happy 10th birthday, Notes R5″ and let the nostalgia begin.

The guest speakers for the Manchester and London events have been confirmed, but I’m not saying who they are. For the third year running I suggested Harry Hill and have always been told he’d be too expensive. This year (presumably to humour me and to shut me up) our lovely events manager Chrissie actually did go and find out how much Harry Hill would cost. And she was right, he is too expensive. I have offered to bridge the gap in the funds should I win the lottery tonight.

But instead we have two great speakers. What can I say about them? Well, one thing you do know is that they’re cheaper than Harry Hill (who in turn, as Paul Mooney knows, is cheaper than boorish petrol-head Jeremy Clarkson). For London we have a figure from the world of sport, and I’ll offer “wheels” as a vague clue.

For Manchester we have a comedy legend – and if you think legend isn’t a term that shouldn’t be handed out casually, I can assure you that there’ll be no arguments about applying that honour when it comes to this speaker.

You can leave guesses in your comments if you like, but I’m not going to reveal the identities.

On a day where the Spuds almost eliminated their relegation concerns with a win over Chelski, a day when Arsenal took another step towards cementing 4th place (best we can hope for) with a win over the increasingly doomed-looking Newcastle, there was a shock win for Fulham. And no-one was more shocked than the ManUre fans, some of whom had travelled nearly 20 miles to watch the spectacle.

So okay, ManYoo are still top and are 10 points ahead of Arsenal, so I have no right to gloat. But this isn’t about gloating, this is about taking up an issue with the BBC. Their news site reported “nine-man Man Utd crash to Fulham” thus giving the impression that Fulham won because ManYoo were only playing with nine men. However, for most of the match Utd had ten men, and didn’t have a second player (the charming Mr Rooney) sent off until after Fulham had scored their second goal. Alright, ManYoo played most of the match with ten men, but that headline does take away some credit from Fulham, whose eleven men probably cost a quarter of the price of Utd’s nine men.

I consider the issue clarified.

Before I watched the preview video, there was one big feature which was being Twittered and talked about… copy / cut and paste. No way. Imagine that, being able to copy some text and paste it elsewhere. Those whacky Apple guys, what will they think of next?

Okay, I’m being a little sarcastic, although as a non-iPhone / iPod touch user I wasn’t aware that copy / cut and paste wasn’t available on the device. Watching the video the support via the user interface looks very good, and includes a shake to undo (so maybe no good for people who are jogging or are very nervous).

Coincidentally I was at an IDC Unified Communications conference yesterday, and speaking to one of their analysts at lunch we discussed the iPhone and BlackBerry. The IDC analyst was of the opinion that the iPhone was firmly aimed at the consumer market. When you start to watch Apple’s video you could be forgiven for agreeing with him. They focus a great deal on gaming, music and social networking applications. There’s some very cool stuff – I know a certain 11 year old who was excited to hear about the Sims 3 and the characters’ ability to dig into the iTunes content on the device via the game. Multi-user gaming was pitched at bored kids on a car journey, although you could see the peer-to-peer connectivity being useful in a business context.

However, there was some business focus within the address – Oracle took to the stage, there were testimonials for medical applications, push-messaging is supported, as is support for calendar standards. There are huge array of features exposed via APIs for application developers – ability to make better use of Google maps being just one of them.

Cynics may say that Apple are confused and haven’t decided what they want the iPhone to be. For now I’d say that it seems to be emerging as a very powerful platform. So far my experience is that it hasn’t gathered major interest from corporate customers – lots of people have them in their hands but I haven’t seen anyone planning a mobile strategy around them in the way they do with BlackBerry. Clearly it’s important that we, IBM Lotus, support the iPhone with solutions such as iNotes Ultralite, Sametime Mobile and Connections Mobile. More APIs and more enterprise-ready features could see great acceptance from the corporate market, and also allow us to build better solutions.

The nice people at RIM have loaned me a 8900 (also known as the Javelin, but also as the new Curve) to take a look, and here’s a quick overview. Is it the replacement of the 8300 series (the original Curve) or is it the baby brother of the 9000 (the Bold)? The answer… yes. Even though you can still buy the original Curve which remains a damn fine device.

Given the the 8900 is effectively the new Curve, it seems right to compare it to the 8300. The screen is the same size but at a resolution of 480 x 360 it’s display is crisper, and boasting the version 4.6 operating system (like the Bold) the home page and background image look dazzling. The dimensions are almost identical – the 8900 is 2 millimeters less deep, 2 grams lighter and 2 millimeters taller. The 8900′s camera weighs in at 3.2 megapixels, compared to 2 megapixels for the 8300.

Unlike the Bold the 8900 doesn’t boast 3G, but does have both Wi-Fi and GPS (which is an either / or situation on the 8300 series)… so the Bold remains the one Big Daddy with everything. The keyboard is pretty much the same, although if you put the two together this might be the only point on which the 8300 wins – the 8300′s keys are just a bit better defined (maybe because the 8900 as the all-black look). However the typing experience is absolutely fine.

One aspect on which the 8900 does win is the speaker – both hands-free calls and playing music are greatly improved. The overall styling of the 8900 in black and chrome is very another selling point – it looks slick and sits very well in your hand. One other interesting thing I noticed… the inside is laid out differently. A decidely chunky feeling battery sits across the top and doesn’t cover the SIM and micro SD cards. According to RIM’s specs, the 8900′s talk time is better (5.5 hours versus 4) but the standby time is less (15 days versus 17). Mind you, when have I ever gone three days without needing to charge?

Conclusion: if you like the styling of the Bold, but think it may be a tad too big, the 8900 is the baby for you. If you have anything pre-8300, I’m sorry to say it’s going to look a bit sad by comparison.

A couple of interesting articles on the Beeb’s news site caught my eye this week, both of which had the same basic premise… that social networking sites are overtaking e-mail as a communication tool. A couple of years there was an interesting statistic (can’t remember the source, can’t be bothered to find it) that said that the volume of instant messages has already overtaken e-mails, so it’s interesting to see that yet another medium is pushing e-mail out of the way.

The first of the Beeb’s articles reported that 67% of web users were spending time at social sites and blogs, and that in the UK one minute of every six was spent on a social site. And get this – “the fastest growing segment of users turning up and using social sites over the last year was among 35-49 year olds” – oooh, I just squeaked into that age range. Indeed, I do Twitter, I am a Facebooker, and I login into LinkedIn every now and again. I get invitations to Plaxo, but it sounds like a mouth-wash and I think three social sites is enough.

The other article suggested that “Social networks ‘are new e-mail’” and says that people are using social sites rather than actually sending e-mails (which is sort of different to the mantra of the other article). This may apply to many people, personally I’d disagree. My personal (i.e. home use) e-mail habits haven’t changed over the past couple of years. My usage of Facebook hasn’t replaced the e-mails that I send, and I wouldn’t bank on Twitter or Facebook supplying information that I wanted to ensure someone would receive. However I can see that for some groups of people it could ring true.

Also worthy of note is the fact that over the weekend Facebook has changed it’s interface to become more ‘Twitter-like’.

In the workplace we’re seeing that social solutions are of great interest, but naturally businesses are concerned about the public sites being used by the workforce. However businesses want to capitalise on the enthusiasm and possibilities of this new way of working, not to mention that fact that people coming into the workplace are very familiar and comfortable with the concept – hence IBM Lotus Connections is a great way to provide the solution with some control and focus and without the distractions of the public sites.

I don’t think that e-mail will disappear, at least not in the next ten years. I firmly believe that activity-based working (see here and here) is the way forward, and unless you’ve experienced this way of working it’s hard to believe how productive Lotus Activities can be. Too many people are reactive to their inbox – this is the way to break out and focus on your crucial tasks and share information in a controlled manner. However, not every e-mail adheres to a particular business activity – many are ad-hoc – and an e-mail which is associated to an activity you’re working on may not apply to the sender (but that’s okay, even though you receive an e-mail you can drag it into the activity). Instant messaging too will trim down on the volume of e-mail (Gartner say 40% reduction, IBM say 38%). Today people run e-mail clients – the inbox is centre-stage. But I can see a day when e-mail is pushed to the periphery – if you’re a Notes user, think of it being in the side bar while your activities and social updates come to the fore-front. Of course, that’s what’s great about Notes – it’s evolving and can consume these new capabilities and ways of collaborating. If you have something which is just an e-mail client… where’s that going to go? Time will tell….

Over here in IBM-land we’re big users of instant messaging. The Sametime solution has a daily average concurrent connection statistic that is bigger than most companies and even some small nations… 170,000 people logged on.

Yesterday my frolleague Mark Holmes and I had a telephone conversation… imagine that. Yes, we do use the phone sometimes and actually many Sametime conversations consist of “hi, can I call you?”. This one started off with “can you talk?” which I responded to predictably with “yes, I’ve been able to since I was two”. Most amusing of course, and as we enjoyed the joke we took a temporary diversion onto the subject of instant messaging etiquette. I don’t recall IBM ever publishing guidelines on usage of instant messaging – maybe there is somewhere, but I pledged to have a quick dip into the world of the Interweb to see what advice was out there.

The first best practise I came across was entitled ‘knock before you enter’ and suggested that instant messaging conversations should start with “can you chat?” or “are you available?” – yes, let’s all be nice. So, first one I found and I 90% disagree with it… and actually I told some colleagues about this one earlier in the week. I suggested that people shouldn’t Sametime me with “hi Darren” and then wait for me to reply before they carry on – if you have a question, just get on with it. The main reason was that I was on a conference call for an hour – and was ignoring Sametime – twelve Sametime messages arrived and over half just said “hi” or “hi Darren”. The others I was able to deal with quickly, but for those who’d said “hi” I had to respond to say I was now available and then wait for them to type in the question… which causes delays.

Some other suggestions on that page are “be brief” and “watch what you write”. Not unlike e-mails then. And finally this one… “don’t use the instant messaging program to spy on your friends by going online under a secret screen name”. I think I’d put this one down as a reason to use an enterprise-grade real-time collaboration solution rather than the public networks.

Further down the search results I came across the hallowed pages of renowned blogger Stowe Boyd, who advises “never check whether a person has time to chat.. if he’s online and reachable, he’s all yours”. Yes, I agree. But by the time I reached “send large files without asking whether it’s okay… you know better than anyone what people need… don’t have any qualms about using up other people’s download bandwidth and hard drive space” I got the impression this wasn’t altogether serious, and looking back at the top of the page noticed that it was a tongue-in-cheek list lifted from How to Annoy People Using Instant Messaging.

The search ran out of steam quickly – loads of results but they all basically said the same obvious things. I think my favourite has to be “if you’re going to ask questions at least make some attempt to find the answers for yourself first”. Oh yes, oohhhh yes. But this also applies to e-mails or phone calls.

I’ll end with my pet peeves…

1. Don’t start your instant message with “I know you’re busy but…”. Whether you acknowledge I’m busy or not, you’re still going to interupt me and ask a question, so let’s dispense with the false empathy. Get on with the issue.
2. Someone asks a question and I say “hang on a minute, let me look for something” – so I leave switch to a browser or Notes and start looking, and then see the instant message window flashing because the other person has said something else. So now I break off from searching to go back to look at what they’ve said. And 99% of the time it’s “thanks”.

Despite venting a little anger, I love Sametime – you have to balance up the occasional interuptions with the incredible productivity benefits of being able to quickly reach people around the globe – they may be working from home, logged on via a mobile device or even out of hours. And of course, you can always go into Do Not Disturb mode.

I’m actually now using a beta of IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1, but that’s not important. I thought I’d update you on a couple of cool things I’ve done with some of the new (and existing) capabilities.

Firstly, Notes 8.5 has the ability to ‘show-through’ calendars from other sources onto your own personal calendar. This could be another user’s calendar, a calendar from a Teamroom, a calendar from a custom Notes application, a Google calendar, an iCalendar feed, or to-dos from IBM Lotus Activities. This is not only very useful for seeing when my colleagues are busy, but it also creates a great demo. You can create a .ics file in Mozilla Sunbird and then show that on your own calendar… and of course you have control over the appointments so you can get the demo you want.

However, we have got a couple of real-life use cases for this feature. My frolleague Baiju has set up a Notes calendar for tracking visiting Lotus executives – one mouse-click shows when they’re in town and available (or unavailable) for customer visits. The second is my legendary Briefing Agendas application. The raison d’être for this application is being able to deal with changes to agendas and to share them. If you type your agenda out in a word processor, as soon as the start time changes – or someone wants more time, or an agenda item gets canned, or two things need to swap round – you have to manually track through the agenda and make the changes. Probably a few times. The Briefing Agendas application takes care of all this, adjusts times, allows you to swap, delete and add agenda items.

So, we have this application full of agendas, and it has it’s own calendar… but wouldn’t it be great if you could show the agendas from that application into your own calendar? And then double-click on the agenda to open it and see the details (directly from your own personal calendar)? Of course it would be… and it is.

The second cool thing also relates to the Briefing Agendas application. Although I recently gave it a face-lift to make it look more Notes 8-like, it still wasn’t quite there. And then I discovered a DeveloperWorks article by another frolleague, Steve Castledine, and User Interface Designer Margo Ezekiel. The article de-mystifies the process of converting an existing Notes application to take advantage of the Notes 8.x composite application model and to get that Notes 8 look-and-feel. So, following Steve and Margo’s instructions, I gave the Briefing Agendas application a Notes 8-style blue rinse… and after just 15 minutes it came out looking very nice…

Steve and Margo have posted another associated article which covers some of the advanced properties and handy tips for controlling Notes 8.x Java views – some good things here to further embellish the application.