It was just over two years ago that Michael Vizard of eWeek wrote:

Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations.

Unfortunately the actual article is no longer available, but if you Google ‘michael vizard exchange pain’ you’ll find enough references to the article to prove that it once existed. Obviously this referred to earlier versions of Exchange, but it would seem that things haven’t changed much. To the casual observer it would appear that every new version of Exchange brings significant differences to the architecture, presumably as they attempt to fix deficiencies. Remember that their approach to e-mail storage changed with Exchange 2010, potentially causing a huge increase in the storage requirements.

Today, a handsome and enigmatic Scotsman sent me a link to Ferris Research’s blog, and the article in question starts…

It’s impossible to keep in control of Exchange / Outlook PST files. All in all, their management is a major pain.

I’ll be honest and say that I’m no expert on the Exchange architecture, but it’s interesting to see it’s administrative tools being described as “not a scalable solution” and the word ‘pain’ invokes a sense of deja-vu.

The fact that IBM Lotus Notes Traveler (to give it it’s full name) is available on a wide variety of devices is old news. Traveler is now supported on the Apple iPhone, even though I don’t think that device will ever make a big impact on the market (ho ho). At Lotusphere we announced that Traveler will in the future be available for Android phones.

With the arrival of Domino 8.5 last year we provided Traveler support on Symbian-based devices… to the layman that means a fairly extensive range of Nokia phones. This was good news, particularly for someone like me who has made a number of trips to the Nordic region in the past nine months. For a couple of years I’ve been a BlackBerry user – in the UK that makes me one of the masses, but in Scandinavia and Finland that makes me the odd-man-out. Playing the hands-up game with a Nordic audience, I was one of three ‘Berry users at LCTY in Sweden (there were about two hundred attendees). In Finland I was in an exclusive club of one. There was a few iPhones, a couple of Androids, but the majority were Nokia owners.

So, it’s good that we now support Nokia phones. Firstly, I find that in many organisations a lot of people already have suitable Nokia devices, which lowers the cost of deploying Traveler – the organisation doesn’t have to acquire so many new mobile devices. Secondly, to date, Nokia have been closely allied with Microsoft – look at any photo of a Nokia E72 and you’ll see ‘Mail for Exchange’ on the home screen of the phone. We’re now working with Nokia to strengthen our relationship and get Traveler on more Nokia devices used within businesses.

A contact at Nokia was kind enough to give me a Nokia E72 phone, and yesterday I was connected to our Traveler deployment. The set-up was fairly easy once I’d worked out that the internal instructions I was given had different file names, and now the E72 is running with Lotus Mobile Connect, Traveler and (of course) Sametime. The E72 is a very good phone – a big clear crisp display, a extremely good keyboard, easy-to-use navigation, a five megapixel camera, the touch-sensitive track-pad that the latest BlackBerries have, and a built-in torch (yes, the camera’s flash can be switched on to create a torch effect – our American friends would call it a ‘flashlight’, but we all know they can’t even tell the difference between cookies and biscuits).

Click on the image above to see Lotus Traveler running on the E72… and note that we now have an image of this device which doesn’t show the E word.

Polymorph, a premier IBM Business Partner who just happen to be hosting Lotusphere Comes To You in Warrington this year, have posted a testimonial video for one of their customers (Practice Plan) on their web site. I love stuff like this, because it highlights the big differentiator between Lotus Notes and it’s competitors… line-of-business applications. E-mail is a mission-critical solution, but no matter how cost-effective you make it, it is a cost to a business. Applications however have the potential to reduce costs, improve efficiency and increase revenue.

Webinar… now, there’s a word your grandparents probably never used (and they probably didn’t ever use ‘leverage’ as a verb either). Anyway, our friends at OpenSpan provide a Windows Container for use with IBM Lotus Expeditor and Notes composite applications, and on the 14th of April we (i.e. Lotus and OpenSpan) will be holding a joint webinar to talk about this nifty piece of technology which allows your Expeditor or Notes composite-based applications to pull in and utilise .NET, Visual Basic and Windows applications. You’ll hear from OpenSpan’s Francis Carden and our very own Product Manager for Application Development Mike Masterson.

Click on the OpenSpan logo to register.

An update on the guest speakers… not William Shatner, not Leonard Nimoy, and certainly not Harry Hill (I admit defeat). In Edinburgh we have Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller DCB, who is described as the former ‘real-life M’. Or for those of you less familiar with the 007 franchise, James Bond’s boss (if he existed). Given the events she handled during her career, this should be a fascinating talk.

For London I’m very excited by the prospect of hearing from Professor Brian Cox – unfortunately I missed his closing session at Lotusphere as I was on the way to the airport. I’ve been a fan of Professor Cox’s television work – his Horizon program on nuclear fission was riveting, and I’m loving his new series ‘Wonders of the Solar System’. I do wonder how he managed to convince the BBC to send him around the world to many exotic locations in the cause of talking about our solar system, but I guess that when you’re extremely clever you can do that. Did he really need to go to Alaska just to collect a bag of methane? I know of sources slightly closer to home.

Whether you’re North or South of the border, you can register here.

One more thing – I said that I wasn’t speaking at this year’s UK events (that may change, it’s always a possibility) but I will have another role to play. More on that soon, and if you’re attending LCTY in London maybe you can be involved too…

It’s that time of year again – registration for the UK-based Lotusphere Comes To You events is now open. There are three events this year – London (13th April), Edinburgh (15th April) and Warrington (13th May), the latter being run by our excellent Business Partner Polymorph. One great attraction this year is the fact that I won’t be speaking (for the first time in many years) so you won’t have to listen to me… instead you will have the pleasure of hearing from Kevin Cavanaugh, Vice President of Messaging and Collaboration.

The usual fevered speculation about the guest speakers can now commence – we were going to book William Shatner, but he did the Orlando main event so we had to drop that idea. I can tell you that Harry Hill is too expensive (I didn’t bother suggesting him again this year after discovering the cost last year). I’m not going to drop any clues this year, basically because I have no idea myself.

Anything else? Oh yeah, you’ll want the links – click here for the London and Edinburgh events and here for Polymorph’s event.

My frolleague Richard ‘Dickie’ Voaden (who I bumped into in Sweden last week) forwarded a link today, reminding me that the Grim Reaper of software will soon be coming to collect Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and take it to the underworld (and it’ll have Netscape Navigator to keep it company). My reply  to Dickie was something along the lines of “good, and they can do us all a favour and bury Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and plans for any future versions, at the same time”. But you know what…? I actually don’t really care, because I’m very happy as a Firefox user – I’m most happy on the Mac, it’s as good on Windows as you can expect it to be, and it’s great on Linux. When I do use Internet Explorer, because certain applications deem that I do, I just use it and close it again.

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted about a story on the BBC News site which reported that:

Millions of European Internet Explorer (IE) users will have the option to choose an alternative browser from 1 March, Microsoft has announced.

Now, this came as a bit of a surprise because to my knowledge I already had an option, one which I exercised several years ago… and I chose Firefox. Safari is my second choice, followed by Google’s Chrome, and the only reason that Internet Explorer is my fourth choice is that there’s no other browser installed. I didn’t have to wait for Microsoft to tell me I had a choice.

However, I’m sure that the less computer-literate users stick with what’s installed with Windows (i.e. Internet Explorer), and this is what Europe’s Competition Commission are setting out to fix. In certain circumstances Windows will notify the user that they have a choice of browser and present the options to them.

I was amused by the last paragraph of the most recent article on this subject:

Some fear the browser choice system will confuse people. Already some who have been confronted with the choice screen have been worried that their machine has been taken over or fallen victim to a virus.

The irony is that if you switch away from Internet Explorer it’s less likely that your system will be taken over by a virus*.

* I have no proof that this statement is correct, so you may choose to disregard it.