It’s 19:45, and I’m in the Aberdeen-based Business Class lounge of a certain airline. I shall refer to them as ‘the airline’, which is a much politer term than they deserve. The story goes something like this…

14:16 – I’m in the middle of a meeting with a customer and a text message from the airline arrives on the ‘Berry. As we were talking about Sametime Unified Telephony I was involving my phone in a demo and got a chance to look at the text message about ten minutes later. It told me that my return flight was cancelled and that I should call this number. And it ended with “Apologies”.

During a break in the meeting I called the phone number provided. I listened to the options and none of them really fitted the situation, so I waited on the line as instructed. After about five minutes of silence (no hold music) I gave up and called again, and this time decided to pick option 4. After another five minutes my call was answered, so I explained my plight and gave my booking reference. I confirmed that I was Mr Adams, and was put on hold.

After ten minutes of hold music someone came back, and the conversation went something like this:

Agent: Hello, how can I help you?

Me: My flight was cancelled, I’ve been waiting on hold for ten minutes for someone to tell me what happens next.

Agent: What’s your booking reference?

Me: I already told someone my booking reference. They went away to find out what the alternative arrangements are.

(Pause)

Agent: So what is your booking reference?

Me: Hang on (found booking reference again and repeated it).

Agent: Mr Adams?

Me: Yes.

Agent: How can I help you?

Me: Well, my flight was cancelled…

Agent: What would you like me to do?

Me: Get me home tonight please.

Agent: Would you like me to book you on another flight?

Me: If that’s possible, yes.

Agent: Okay, I’ll see what I can do, please hold.

(Hold music)

Agent: There’s a flight at 20:30, would you like me to put you on that flight?

At this point I was severely tempted to respond with something like “unless you’ve got any other bright ideas about alternative methods of making a five hundred mile journey tonight” or just plain old “what do you flipping think?”, but Miss Customer Service Award Winner 2010 was my key to getting home so I decided to hold back the vitriol.

Me: Yes please.

Agent: Okay, that’s all confirmed, blah blah, flight details.

Any further apology? No. Clearly she was doing me a favour. Shame on me for inconveniencing her with my petty travel issues while she was trying to enjoy a Terry’s Chocolate Orange and read Heat magazine.

It’s now 20:11 – the replacement flight is delayed eighty minutes. I now recall that one of the options on that phone number was to let the airline know about your experience of their service. They can expect a call.

By now I’m one of the last people to blog this (apart from Ed Brill) – this morning I launched a brand new web site, Lotus Notes is Cool.

The idea has been buzzing around my head for a while, and the inspiration to do it went into overdrive after I Love Lotus Notes was recently launched. So during half-term last week, in between washing the car and packing away the trampoline for the Winter, I worked on the site and created some content.

Why do this? There’s a few reasons…

1. I speak to customers and internal IBM people who aren’t aware of some of Notes’ capabilities. I’m not so surprised when people have never seen live text, but I’ve had some people look at my inbox (in the vertical orientation) and ask “how do you get your inbox to look like that?”. I show them the simple ‘Preview on Side’ option and they have a eureka moment. So I think that if people don’t know some of these simple things, they need to be shared.
2. Almost everyone who whines about the Notes user interface and usability is using a pre-8.x version. So I want them to see what the up-to-date version looks like, simple as that.
3. And following on from that thought, it’s somewhere that Notes supporters can point people to when they come out with the mis-informed behind-the-times statement about Notes being “old and clunky”.
4. Notes is a great e-mail / calendar client, but it’s so much more… so let’s get it out there in the open.

The reaction this morning was overwhelming. There was a huge number of tweets and re-tweets, and already a huge number of visitors. Without wanting to boost his bulging ego further, I expect the visits to grow further when Ed Brill does get around to blogging it (Ed, luv ya buddy).

I’ll pick out a couple of choice quotes from the blogsphere today. First, Volker Weber… much respected and very knowledgeable, we all love him, but he loves to fan the flames. In his blog entry Darren Adams is cool (can’t argue with that) Volker wrote:

Darren Adams, who works for IBM in the UK, has finally done something Lotus Marketing has not been able or willing to do in 10 years: show the product.

He also called on Lotus General Manager, Alistair Rennie, to give me a pay rise. Volker, can you remind Mr Rennie when you see him at Lotusphere?

Secondly, David Vasta… the picture of himself on his blog may lead you to believe he’s a bit bonkers, but his words make perfect sense. In reaction to my goal of telling the world about the great features David writes:

Now I can agree to that and to all the Microsoft people out there, what do you have that can compete directly with Lotus Notes & Domino[?]. I will go ahead and answer that for you, nothing!

Finally, I’ve just received a very interesting e-mail from the IBM UKI marketing team…

Previously, in an update on Notes 8.5.2, I mentioned that a Notes application can now boast a full colour icon (i.e. not restricted to sixteen colours). While this does nothing for your productivity, it is an important addition to Notes. Why? Well, because for years people have been telling us that look and feel is important. The Notes design team have done an amazing job with the Notes user interface in the past few years, but for database icons… we’ve always been at the mercy of application designers making the best of sixteen colours.

Now you can take an attractive 32 x 32 image and add it to the database resources. There’s plenty of icons to download on the web, but design supremo Mary Beth Raven has reported that some specific icons (matching the Notes colour palettes) have been made available on OpenNTF.

There are twelve icons available, the image here shows three of them in use.

Nothing annoys me more than waiting in a queue for the checkout in a supermarket. Actually, that’s not true, loads of things annoy me more than that… for example, Eamonn Holmes, and the fact that orange juice is always served at social functions for people who aren’t drinking alcohol. Anyway, I digress – the notion of those new self-checkout machines appearing in supermarkets is a good thing… when they work properly.

Mrs A does a big weekly shop on Monday, but I’m often dispatched at weekends to get the odd item or three. It has been noted that I can never just buy the things on the list, that I always have to add something (which is true). But as there’s usually just a small number of items, I get to use the self-checkout machine. Cool, eh? Hmmm…

On this occasion I was sent to buy a large pumpkin (something to do with Halloween maybe), a chicken (a dead one, for roasting), coleslaw and ice-cream – and I added mini-Battenburg cakes and some honey-roasted cashew nuts (which we absolutely 100% needed).

Being a good citizen of planet Earth I’d brought my own bags, so the first step of self-checkout is to let the machine verify those bags. I followed the instructions, and the machine said it needed human intervention. Cue the old man with a bar-code on a well-worn card – he swiped the card and pressed something, and I was ready to progress.

First item was the pumpkin – the biggest one I’ve ever purchased, it could be hollowed out to provide shelter for three homeless badgers. I scanned it, I placed it next to the bags, and a voice said:

Unexpected item in bagging area

Eh? I scanned in a pumpkin, so why was the placement of a pumpkin in the bagging area unexpected? What was it expecting… a tube of haemorrhoid ointment? Maybe a packet of digestive biscuits? Cue the man with the bar-code card, who swiped and pressed something, and I was ready to progress.

Next up was the chicken – I scanned it, I picked up one of the bags and put the chicken inside, and placed it back in the bagging area. A voice said:

Unexpected item in bagging area

Bloody hell. It’s a chicken, which weighs about the same as a dead chicken and has the same approximate dimensions as a dead chicken. But the machine clearly thought I’d scanned in a chicken and placed an electric toothbrush in the bag. I picked up the bag and a voice said:

Please return the item to the bagging area

Hearing me utter a mild profanity, the man with the bar-code card intervened and worked his magic. Next up, one of the tubs of ice-cream. I scanned it, and this time placed it in the bag without moving the bag (I’m now making very careful movements, like someone playing a bizarre version of Ker-Plunk). A voice said:

Unexpected item in bagging area

By now I wanted to cancel the whole process and join a queue to be serviced by a human being. Enter bar-code man, who once again waved the magic card and pressed the magic button. Like a supermarket version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, this time he uttered a subtle instruction – “it should be okay now”. And hey presto, it was. The rest of the ice-cream went into the cold bag, and even though I was filled with an icy dread at the thought of utilising the second bag, Mr Bar-Code wasn’t required again.

I got home, and Mrs A pointed out that she’d tried calling me, and had sent me a text message to say that I should also buy a bag of penne pasta. Back to the supermarket…

We’ve covered Notes’ live text feature before in the hallowed pages of dadams.co.uk, but this time we’ll dig a bit deeper and show a real-world example. Let me first thank Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg, as his post helped me clarify some of this. I knew the basic concept but needed a little help, and his post gave me what I needed.

A quick intro for anyone who doesn’t know what live text is… Notes has the ability to recognise a set of characters and associate an action with them. Out of the box Notes will recognise people’s names and e-mail addresses… the obvious thing to do with a name is click on it and look up the person in a solution such as, oooh, IBM Lotus Connections Profiles. You can also teach Notes to recognise things like post codes, and then perform associated actions like find the place on a Google Map, look at the local weather, or find the nearest restaurant or wi-fi hotspot. You can teach Notes to recognise account numbers, part numbers, projects codes… anything that is formed of a recognisable string of characters… such as flight numbers.

So here’s the scenario. I receive an e-mail from a colleague saying they’re travelling on British Airways flight number 1541, and it’s typed in as BA1541. That’s easy to recognise using the following regular expression (or some other variation of it):

[BA]([0-9]{3,4})

That’s ‘BA’ followed by three or four digits which range from 0 to 9, and this recogniser means that BA1541 will be recognised as live text… once there’s an action associated with it. The obvious action is looking up that flight number on the BA web site, but here’s where it gets tricky. The BA web site doesn’t want BA1541 passed to it, just 1541 because it assumes that the BA is a given. So 1541 has to be extracted from the value, and this is where groups are used. Look at the regular expression above and you’ll see that the part which defines the flight number (not the operator, BA) is contained within parentheses – this creates a group.

As luck would have it, for the BA flight information that’s all you have to do. As the one and only defined group, just the number (not the BA) is passed to the BA web site and the live text action works. So let’s look at a slightly more complex example.

FlightView.com also allows you to look up flight details, and not just BA flights. But FlightView requires that the airline code (the two letters) and the flight number (the digits) are entered into separate fields. As we’re no longer just looking for BA flights, the regular expression needs to change, and also needs to define two groups and cater for two digits… so it now looks like this:

([A-Z]{2})([0-9]{2,4})

Now let’s build that widget. Start off by clicking on the widget icon in the Notes toolbar (it looks like a jigsaw piece) and select ‘Web Page’. In the next dialog box select ‘Web page by URL’ and then enter http://flightview.com. In the next dialog box select the ‘From a form on this web page’ option and hit the Next button. You’ll then see the following form:

The wizard will work out the available web-based forms to fill in, and present them at the top of this dialog box. Selecting the right one will turn the fields green showing that this is the form that you want. Select Next. On the Basic tab of the next dialog box you can set the widget’s name – you should also select ‘Wire as an action’, and then go to the Advanced tab. In here you’ll tell the wizard that you’re going to use the airline and flight number fields, but not the airlines from the provided drop-down list… so set out the dialog box as follows:

In the next dialog box you’ll need to configure a recogniser – press the New Recogniser (the Americans spelt ‘recogniser’ with a z) and fill out the dialog box as follows – but first create a new content type:

After clicking OK you’ll get back to the main wizard – ensure that you have clicked the option for ‘Recognised content’ and select the recogniser you just created. I would advise selecting ‘Tab’ for the option of how users see the results, but that’s up to you.

Now switch to the Advanced tab. One of the content type properties will already be set, but you’ll have to click the Add button and add the other content type, as seen below:

Click the Finish button and you’re done. Now you’re ready to check if this works (it should do) – add some flight numbers into a new e-mail and save as draft. Preview the draft e-mail and the flight numbers should show a blue dashed underline. Click on one and you should see the flight number broken into the two parts and passed to the home page of flightview.com – and then the results. Bear in mind that FlightView works best with flights that are currently in the air or scheduled to leave soon.

If you also created a British Airways specific widget you should notice that BA flights will be recognised by both your BA and FlightView recognisers, so it’s best to set a default action. If you base the British Airways widget on the recogniser built here, you run the risk of associating non-BA flights with the BA web site, so it’s best to build a BA-specific widget and set that as the default action for BA flights. On the plus side, you’ll be able to create a dashboard from the two actions, providing a BA and FlightView view of the flight in question… click on the image above to see an example.

Last week I blogged about Christmas coming early in the form of some goodies from ClearOne and Plantronics. Having given the speakerphones a thorough testing (hey, I work for IBM, there’s no shortage of opportunities to get on a conference call) it was time to give the headsets a proper going-over. My contact at Plantronics, Declan, provided three new headsets – one attaches to a computer using cables… imagine that. Old school, but about as simple as it gets for connecting and works with any operating system with no drivers… and the price point will suit those with a modest budget. Needless to say though, Plantronics’ wired headsets are far better quality than the ones you can pick up for £10 on the high street.

Next up is the Voyager Pro… this baby uses Bluetooth to communicate between the USB adapter (some people call it a dongle, the documentation says it’s an adapter) and the headset. My previous Plantronics headset used this same USB adapter approach, and it’s a good way of getting round the possibility that your computer operating system’s support for Bluetooth may be a bit, errr, unreliable and difficult to set up. This, on the other hand, is dead easy… insert the USB adapter, switch on the headset, press the call control button, and they’re paired. Being Bluetooth-based it can also operate with your mobile phone.

The Voyager Pro is incredibly light, sits very comfortably on the ear and comes with a selection of ear buds to suit your own lug-hole. If you’re left-eared like me (seriously, I’m no good with phone calls in my right ear) the ear-piece and microphone can be reversed. In the box there’s all the right bits for charging and, a nice little touch, a carrying pouch. One more important thing… the sound quality. It’s fabulous, and considering it’s Bluetooth the range is excellent.

The other device in the box of goodies was the Savi W430. It looks similar to the Voyager Pro – the over-ear piece is larger but still very light, and the microphone arm is longer. Again the box contains spare ear buds, a USB charging cable and a pouch, but it also includes a charging dock. The key difference is that the W430 doesn’t use Bluetooth – instead it uses DECT wireless technology routed through a USB adapter. This results in even greater range and should provide better sound quality with less interference… although I found that the sound quality of the Voyager Pro was so good that it was difficult to tell the difference. Using the W430 I could move from my home office upstairs and down into the kitchen with no sound break-up – Bluetooth doesn’t reach that far.

In general, both of these Plantronics headsets offer excellent sound quality and easy set-up, and are well-constructed – you can tell these are top-quality devices. The Voyager Pro is reasonably-priced – you can pick one up for around £50 – but the Savi W430 will cost you around £189.

I’ll close by explaining why I’m spending time writing about headsets and speaker phones. We spend a lot of time talking to customers about telephony infrastructure and cost-reduction capabilities, but there’s one part of the solution that’s often not discussed… it’s the last three feet, the gap between the telephony client (Sametime Unified Telephony is the best choice) and your ears. If companies don’t think about this and don’t provide the right equipment, their users will end up shouting into their laptop’s in-built microphone and listening to the speakers. That’s a poor experience with no noise cancellation, no echo reduction, it picks up keyboard noise and is totally unsuitable for open-plan offices. That situation is going to stop people using their telephony solution and they won’t use the capabilities that will ultimately reduce communication costs. And that’s why good quality headsets are a worthwhile investment.

As usual, Ed Brill got his blog post in before me, so I’m not going to repeat Ed’s rather thorough overview of the LotusLive Notes announcements. But if you want a quick overview of the new bullets:

• $5 per month, 25 gigabyte mailbox
• Onboarding, data migration and custom mail template services for LotusLive Notes
• LotusLive Notes access from Apple iPhone and iPad, Windows Mobile and Nokia / Symbian devices
• BlackBerry support coming soon

We also announced the new LotusLive offering, the Collaboration Suite, starting at $10 per month and offering LotusLive Notes e-mail with web conferencing, social networking, instant messaging and file store / share services

LotusLive Engage and Connections received a face-lift, and got a major new element… communities. If you’re familiar with IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 you’ll know that communities offer places for teams or people with similar interests or skills to gather and share information. Well, same approach here, the new LotusLive-based communities offer file-sharing, bookmarks, activities and discussion forums.

If you want to try out Engage or Connections, head over to the LotusLive site.

Regular readers of dadams.co.uk may remember a recent post about a Polycom CX100 speakerphone that I picked up at Polycom’s event. Since acquiring this nifty and extremely portable device, I’ve tended to use it at home (when taking and making calls on Sametime Unified Telephony) more than I’ve used my trusty Plantronics CS60 headset. The speakerphone works well in a home office environment as the voice of the other person (or people) doesn’t disturb anyone. The headset remains the best choice when in the office – having said that it does have one big advantage at home… in the middle of a lengthy conference call I can pop SUT on mute and go to the toilet or make a cup of tea. Sorry to paint that picture in your head, but this is how technology gets used.

The speakerphone is also, I’ve found, great for SUT demos – the audience can hear the voice on the other end. However, in using the CX100 people have said my voice has been distant and echoey, even when right up close to the device. Polycom said that there’s an echo cancellation driver available, but it doesn’t seem to be available for Windows 7 (or Mac or Ubuntu).

While discussing SUT with a customer they told me they’d acquired several ClearOne Chat 50 USB speakerphones and said that they were very impressed by the quality. With this in mind, I contacted Andrew at ClearOne to see if they had any knowledge of the Chat 50 working with SUT – the answer was ‘no’ but I was promised a device to test and we agreed to speak further.

Around the same time my good friend Declan at Plantronics called me and we had a chat about how SUT was doing (very well thanks). I told him about the rapidly-expanding IBM roll-out, and Declan said that he’d send me a couple of up-to-date devices.

On the same day both boxes turned up in Staines (and some extra memory for my ThinkPad, it was like Christmas without the stress of finding a perfect Christmas tree). The Plantronics box contained three headsets and an MCD100 USB speakerphone (thanks Declan – these will be used for SUT demos in front of customers). The package from ClearOne contained the Chat 50, which comes in a carry-case with the extras (see later). Both speakerphones offer echo cancellation and full duplex (basically that’s sound data sent in both directions simultaneously), but which is the better device? Time to test, methinks.

Firstly, what’s in the box? The Plantronics device came with just a USB cable… no drivers required. It plugged in and worked. Ten out of ten for simplicity. The ClearOne device, as I said, came in a carry-case with a USB cable, a power adapter and some international plugs, a CD, two other audio cables and a booklet. The power adapter wasn’t required, nor was the CD or the other cables. It plugged straight into a USB port and worked. Another ten out of ten. So what’s with the power adapter and the other cables? Well, you can also use the Chat 50 as a speaker for other devices such as mobile phones and portable media players.

Features – three buttons on both… volume up and down, and mute. When testing the buttons my research associate (Matt Newton, on an SUT call) said that pressing the buttons on the Chat 50 was quieter and could hear when the buttons on the MCD100 were pressed. Neither device has a hang-up button, so I had to use the button on the SUT call dialog box (no big deal).

But the really important thing is the sound quality. Both were far clearer than the CX100 at Matt’s end – he said I was crystal-clear with no echo. The only difference was that the MCD100 was more ‘bass-ey’ and the Chat 50 had more treble. At my end, Matt’s voice was full and clear on both, and the volume was greater than on the CX100.

In terms of voice quality on a simple one-to-one call, the MCD100 and Chat 50 seem to be equals, but additional tests were required. When Mrs A returned from having her hair cut, I got her to partake in the experiment. It is risky having her near computer equipment, but I instructed her to not touch anything and just talk (after all, that’s one of her main skills). Using SUT she called my mobile, and then moved around the room while talking. The MCD100 and Chat 50 were pretty much the same, and picked up the voice perfectly (quieter, obviously). The CX100 was less clear. In close-up tests I agreed with Matt, the MCD100 had more bass, but it does have a bigger speaker. The CX100 was nearly as good close-up, but when sitting back in the chair it was more echoey. However, I didn’t hear the ‘sitting in the fridge’ effect that some people described.

The MCD100 is slightly chunkier, but I like the design. The CX100 has the advantage of being the slimmest and with it’s pouch is ideal for popping into my computer bag.

Now, I guess you’ll be interested in Mrs A’s verdict. She was receiving the call through all three speakerphones and said there was no discernible difference, but if she had to pick one the MCD100 was ever-so-slightly better sound. She also said it was the best-looking device, although she liked the CX100 because the carrying pouch was nice (I appreciate that this would not be the main decision point for people more interested in the technology and sound performance).

So there you have it, both the MCD100 and Chat 50 are extremely fine devices. The Chat 50 has the advantage of having additional uses and the buttons are less clicky, but as a speakerphone for VoIP or SUT there’s nothing between them. One thing that is worthy of note is that ClearOne provide a number of other devices, and I can see that the ability to daisy-chain some of their other speakerphones along a meeting room table is a winning idea… I’m sure we’ve all been in a meeting where the single speakerphone in the middle of the table is a challenge for the remote and local people.

Come back soon for a brief overview of the headsets.

I love Lotus Notes. And I wish it had been me who had set up ilovelotusnotes.net, but it wasn’t. So far the comments have been pretty much what I’d expect – the perception is that the hate-filled rants on ihatelotusnotes.com are mostly from people using older versions of Notes. Mind you, once you hate something you’ll probably convince yourself that you’ll always hate it, no matter how much it improves. So going to that site and telling people that they’re on an old version won’t help. Let them get on with their whining. If they ever read that book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ they may see that whining about your e-mail client isn’t one of them.

It may surprise you, but I think that Lotus Notes Sucks is a far more constructive web site than ihatelotusnotes. Rather than directionless whining, this guy actually took the time to document reasons why he thought Notes sucked… and he was good enough to cross them off when the issues were fixed (up to a point). It’s a shame that the conclusion “Lotus Notes sucks” was applied to each of the eighty points, thereby making it seem a little witless and predictable. Our host also refers to the time he was contacted by Mary from Westford with an offer to participate in the Notes redesign (the basis of Notes 8), but he declined.

What’s also apparent is that the site hasn’t been touched for quite some time – the last update was in February 2006. Several fixed issues remain listed as current ‘suck factors’. Maybe he got bored, maybe his company migrated to Outlook. I hope he’s happy now.

A couple of years ago I recorded a series of videos for GuruOnline. Our contact John has often mentioned that the series has been viewed a considerable number of times (over 19,500), so when the chance to record some more videos came along I needed little persuasion. However, I had forgotten how tortuous the process of filming is… well, for me anyway. I can stand up and give a presentation without a moment’s thought. I can sit across the table from a customer and talk until the Sun expands and swallows the Earth. But stick me between a green-screen and a camera, and gremlins will enter my head.

After a slow start, a large number of profanities and enough out-takes for the GuruOnline team to release an 18-rated DVD box set in time for Christmas, we managed to get thirteen videos in the can. This time around the subject was ‘collaborating in the cloud’… no product names mentioned, but you can read between the lines.

My frolleague Steve Heeney also recorded a set of videos on the same day, rattling off nineteen in just over an hour (impressive). So Steve probably has a better chance of a career in t.v. than I do.

And a bit of trivia to end with… I took four ties with me, changed my mind twice minutes before the camera rolled, and I’m happy with my eventual choice.

You can view the videos, and my tie, here.