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Following the success of the Scottish Notes User Group (SNUG), we have resurrected the UK Lotus User Group with the announcement of an event on Wednesday 26th September 2007 at ComputaCenter’s Hatfield location. Registration is now open at the UKLUG web site… in fact we’re near to a capacity crowd already.

A couple of things you may notice. Firstly, SNUG appears to be a Notes user group rather than a Lotus user group. This is purely accidental, although if we named it the Scottish Lotus User Group, it would be known as SLUG. Secondly, what’s with having a Scottish user group and a UK user group (oh, and an Irish user group - more on that later)? What does this mean for SNUG?

Contrary to suggestions there was never any intention to name this new user group the “English Lotus User Group”. For starters that would annoy the Welsh customers (and we have some loyal and important customers in Wales). Does having an UK user group impact SNUG? No… SNUG members are more than welcome to attend UKLUG meetings - we have a vibrant established community in Scotland, but it’s a long way from London, so it’s important that we maintain SNUG as a sibling organisation that is part of the UK community. We have a wonderful corporate sponsor in the form of Standard Life who do a great job of driving the events and ensuring the momentum is maintained.

The Irish Lotus User Group (ILUG) - Paul Mooney of BlueWave and his band of devotees have continued to build this year-on-year, and it’s attracting people from all over Europe. Next year he’s hoping for 400 attendees. UKLUG and SNUG can learn from this and grow.

Anyway, back to UKLUG - Warren Elsmore has put in a lot of work, we have speakers from HSBC, Prudential and Scottish & Newcastle, and Mark Calleran (CIO of The Salvation Army) will be Master of Ceremonies (and discussing their own use of Lotus software). In addition to the customer speakers we have knowledge management guru David Gurteen and the chairman of OpenNTF, Vince Schuurman.

A final point… this is a free event. Due to a limit on the number of attendees we will be wait-listing people shortly. If you register and then cannot attend, please don’t let that place go to waste - let the organisers know and free up the place for someone on the wait-list.

Lotus Quickr, the collaboration solution for serious grown-up business people, is now shipping. But we need to get a couple of things straight.

Firstly, it’s Quickr with a small ‘r’. Quickr, and not QuickR. Check out the Quickr web site for proof.

Secondly, it’s pronounced “Quicker”. The name just happens to have an ‘e’ missing. It’s not pronounced “Quick-Arr”. Think about that popular photo-sharing web site. No-one calls it “Flick-Arr”. Not unless they’re from Devon or Cornwall. Or a they’re a pirate.

I’ve been spending a lot of time presenting Lotus’ upcoming collaborative solutions over the past few months, and the reaction has been very positive. Perhaps “very positive” doesn’t do the reaction justice - people love the new stuff… Quickr, Connections and Notes 8.

Today was no exception, I provided two stand-up routines at an open day hosted by InfoSys, a Lotus Business Partner. You know me, I love an audience, and they seemed to like my positioning of Mentos Mints and Diet Coke movies on YouTube as an example of community innovation. You had to be there, but it got a big laugh (and I think they got the point too).

I spoke to many of the attendees after my sessions and during the day, and there were three main themes. They love Quickr. They love Connections (and get the idea of social software in the enterprise). And increasingly people are becoming very receptive to the idea that there is a cheaper and viable alternative to Microsoft Office… namely the Productivity Editors embedded into Notes 8.
The premise is simple… Notes customers are already paying for Notes, and we will provide them with spreadsheet, word processor and presentation editor functionality for no extra license charge. In other words, they get the Microsoft Office functionality that they pay for today free with the Notes 8 client. That means that for large numbers of users they can save on the cost of an Office license.

For customers with mixed estates including Linux and Mac client users, the news is even better. No longer the poor cousins, they will experience the same functionality as their Window-using colleagues (Mac to be supported post-Notes 8.0). The thought of supporting the Open Document Format and freeing themselves from proprietary document formats is also very compelling.

There is one interesting perception that I always comment upon and challenge… the idea that organisations could keep Office for their power-users and provide the Notes 8 editors to the rest. That implies that they think the Notes 8 editors are a cut-down offering… they’re not, these are extremely functional editors.

I didn’t expect the battle against Office to be easy, and I’m realistic about the fact that Notes 8 is not going to make a huge impact on their market share in the next year. But I am pleasantly surprised by the number of people who are taking this proposition very seriously and thinking that they could save themselves a lot of money.

A few days behind with this news, but Notes 8 beta 3 is now available. As I reported a month ago, beta 3 is more stable and performs better than beta 2 - this is to be expected as that’s pretty much what the Notes 8.0 team are working on between now and the ‘mid-year’ ship date. Having said that, there are still some nice tweaks included - my favourite is the improved ‘Day-At-A-Glance’ calendar in the sidebar. Although the previous iteration was great, it had one problem… if you had only two appointments in one day (one early, one late) you’d end up with a big chunk of empty space between the two. Screen real-estate is very important, so the new summarised view is much better (you can go back to the original time-slots view if that’s your preference).

After much debate in Mary Beth Raven’s blog , the recipient indicators in the Inbox (those which tell you whether the e-mail was sent to you alone, or whether you were one of x number of recipients, or whether you were only cc:ed) have reverted back to circles rather than the originally-planned chevrons. I was happy either way, but the circles are more visible. A good example of the attention to detail being shown in the development process, and of the interactive way that the Notes user community is contributing.

I’m here in Dublin for the Irish Lotus User Group event. With a capacity crowd of 250 (and a long waiting list) the interest in this event has been phenomenal, drawing in people not just from Ireland but from the UK and a few places across Europe. ILUG supremo Paul Mooney (with a loyal band of followers) has done an amazing job and put together an agenda which includes Alan Lepofsky and Notes 8 user interface guru Mary Beth Raven.

Alan delivered the keynote speech and provided an excellent overview of how social software and technology embraced at home is now making it’s way into the work environment. He barely talked product, but described how an enterprise can use technology to empower it’s staff to contribute and innovate.

Mary-Beth then spoke about the process of designing Notes 8, and how important the ‘persona users’ were to working out which features were important to different types of user. I’ve been using Notes 8 for over six months, and this gave me a fresh perspective on all those great things that have been added.

This was a free event - so it was a proverbial free lunch with RIM sponsoring some excellent goodie bags containing a green ILUG hat, a t-shirt, a USB key and a USB coffee-cup warmer. IBM sponsored the evening do at Dublin’s swanky En Seine night-spot.

At the end of the two days the sponsors raffled some great prizes (including a Nabaztag, oh boy do I want one) and a Blackberry 8800. After the organising committee took their well-deserved applause Paul Mooney received a two-minute standing ovation and then was presented with a Mac laptop as a gift from the community.

In September we’ll be holding the UK Lotus User Group event (incorporating DBUG, the Domino / BlackBerry User Group) - as a first event for UKLUG we can’t hope to hit the same heights as ILUG hit in this it’s third year. But we can learn from the ILUG and SNUG (Scottish Notes User Group) experiences.

Paul, Eileen, Warren, Kitty, Bill, Duffbert and Volker - congratulations, you did the Lotus brand proud.

This June sees the release of IBM Lotus’ new suite of social software solutions entitled Connections. It comprises of five components:

• Profiles - who I am
• Communities - what I’m interested / skilled in
• Blogs - what I know
• Bookmarks - what I’ve discovered, what I’d like to share
• Activities - what I’m working on

In IBM we’ve been using much of this technology for a long time. Profiles is based on IBM’s own BluePages solution - this is the most widely-used application in IBM, providing not only basic information (phone number, e-mail address, location, reporting structure, etc) but also information about skills, interests and business relationships.

We’re also a well-established blogging community with more than 27,000 active blogs. I’ve heard people argue the merits of corporate blogging - personally I think it’s a great thing within an organisation to give people the platform to air their thoughts, solicit feedback and generate a debate. My colleague Brendan Tutt and I discovered this during Lotusphere in January when we performed (almost) live blogging during sessions to keep our colleagues back in the UK up-to-date with announcements and product information. One particular blog entry, ironically covering the business value of social software, sparked a heated debate. For a while it was the most-read and commented-upon blog entry in IBM. More important were two other factors - firstly we gained some valuable opinions about how we could approach the market with this new solution. Secondly we widened our ’social’ circle inside IBM through starting dialogues with new colleagues who had added comments.

One other thing strikes me about blogging (and here’s where the Connections solution adds value) - imagine being a senior member of an organisation… a CEO or Vice President… and being able to gain an insight as to what your staff are discussing, what the hot topics are, and which subjects they found most interesting. That’s an alternative way of spotting trends… not trends from structured data, but trends in human knowledge and innovation. It’s a compelling thought.

Social bookmarking… it’s there on the web with tools like del.icio.us and Digg. I think there’s a number of ways this can be used. My approach is to share the links to content that people ask me for on a regular basis - so I encourage people to look at my bookmarks, drill down on a tag, and they should be able to find what they’re asking me for. Other people bookmark anything useful that they come across, and provided that they use tags sparingly and accurately this is also a good approach. In my opinion, bookmarks in IBM have become a better way to search for something than using our Intranet search. For example, if I search on the word ‘linux’ the Intranet will return over 200,000 results. If I search the bookmarks for linux, I get just over 4,000 results. But the chances are that I’ll be able to find what I’m looking for using those 4,000 results by drilling down into the relevant tags (rather than sifting through 200,000 search results). The added bonus is that I’ll also discover people who have an affinity to Linux.

Finally, but by no means least, activities. What is an activity? It’s something you do with a team of people - a project, a deliverable, perhaps an event. Activities can be short or medium-term (something long-term might warrant a TeamRoom or Quickr place) and are probably ad-hoc in nature (although templates can be used for repeated activities). However, for me the compelling factor about activities is that they tend to contain or require lots of different chunks of information that traditionally originate and sit in different solutions or places. Let’s take an example of putting together a customer event - what information are you going to collect along the way? E-mails, calendar appointments, tasks, instant messages, files (documents, presentations, spreadsheets), links to web pages, agendas, contacts, ad-hoc notes… lots of different stuff that tends to sit in different places and often isn’t easily shared. An activity drags these items together and makes them available to the team.

Now, if you like the sound of that, consider this… wouldn’t it be great if your colleagues stopped e-mailing file attachments to you and put them in a central shared place, a place that existed in the context of what you’re working on? You bet. One thing I have found is that if I raise that subject with any size of audience, most people will nod in agreement that this is a good thing.

There’s more good news for anyone who’s a Notes user (a good position to be in with Notes 8 arriving soon). Notes 8 provides integration with activities. You can see your activities in the sidebar, you can drill down into an activity and see it’s content. You can grab an attachment from within an e-mail and drop it straight into an activity (thus sharing it with the team). You can end a Sametime chat by clicking on the activity icon and capturing the transcript in an activity. And (this is really clever) you can click on someone’s name (the sender of an e-mail for example) and see a list of the activities that you and that person have in common. Business value? Yes. Cool? Absolutely.

I won’t go into all the details, but I’ve had a Blackberry Pearl sitting in my desk drawer since my friends at RIM gave me the beautiful device in December. Last week the process of getting it connected to e-mail and the world-at-large suddenly gathered pace, and then today my SIM was updated and I got the news that I was registered on the Blackberry Enterprise Server. An e-mail followed containing my enterprise activation password.

Having been a Palm user for a number of years (and briefly, I’m sorry to say, a Pocket PC user), I had an expectation that getting the Blackberry to receive e-mail and connect to Sametime was going to take a few configuration steps. How wrong I was… it couldn’t have been easier. I clicked on the enterprise activation icon, I entered my e-mail address and the supplied password, I selected ‘Activate’ from the menu… and that was it. The Blackberry told me it was going through the necessary steps, and when it reached 100% there was my e-mail (identical to what I could see sitting in my Notes 8 inbox) and there was my fully up-to-date calendar. It was too easy - having a technical background I could almost say I’d rather go through some pain to set things up because that’s how you learn how things work. But imagine supplying Blackberries to hundreds of users and it being that simple (because it has to be).

Now for Sametime 7.5.1 Mobile Edition… I used the Blackberry’s browser to visit the ‘OverTheAir’ install page, selected the right install option, and off it went. When the install finished I entered my Sametime user name and password, and my Sametime contact list appeared (same as the one that’s now integrated into Notes 8). Again, too easy… which is fine, businesses like easy because it saves them money and improves productivity (that sounds a bit marketing-like, but it’s true).

Late last week Ed Brill announced on his blog that there would be another public beta of Notes 8 before the product ships ‘mid-year’. I’m somewhat spoilt as I have access to internal builds of Notes 8 and have seen the quality improve in the time since the first public beta - I think that everyone else will be very pleased when they see the progress made.

Having been using Notes 8 for so long (since beta 1 late last year) Notes 7 looks almost alien when I see someone else using it. Notes 8 is packed with features that I use on a day-to-day basis and now can’t do without… stuff like:

• Message threads - seeing related e-mails grouped together on the surface of the Inbox, thus removing clutter
• Type-ahead addressing which picks up the names of people who you’ve collaborated with recently (even if you didn’t add them to your address book) or frequently (imagine how many Smiths there are in IBM, but it always presents my colleague Martin Smith first)
• Activities integration - a great capability for managing the myriad of information fragments that constitute a project, and the Notes 8 integration is slick and seamless
• The productivity editors - goodbye PowerPoint
• Integrated Sametime - which effectively puts Voice-over-IP, telephony and video capabilities into the Notes client
• The new design for the ‘day-at-a-glance’ calendar in the sidebar

With Sametime 7.5.1 just released (and way ahead of the competition), and with Quickr and Connections due to ship this Summer, the Lotus portfolio has never looked stronger. Spread the word.