During the past week a colleague sent me a link to Campaign Monitor’s statistics on e-mail client popularity. A first glance shows Outlook to be the most popular, Lotus Notes to be absolutely nowhere, and iOS devices to be the strong-performing new kids on the block.

However, it’s very important to look at the way that the statistics have been collected. Campaign Monitor use a request to a remote image in their e-mail, and then can check the type of client that makes the request. Now, this would be accurate if not for three things:

1. Many e-mail clients don’t show remote images by default (it’s a good mechanism for not indicating live e-mail accounts to spammers). Notes 8.x, most versions of Outlook, and Mozilla Thunderbird will block remote images. Typically I won’t load the images if I’m not interested in the content, and I suspect many other people exhibit that behaviour. So many of Campaign Monitor’s e-mails will go unregistered, thus skewing their statistics.
2. The statistics mash together personal and business e-mail accounts. Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, GMail (although Google may argue), Apple Mail, Outlook Express and Thunderbird are predominantly private / personal e-mail solutions. Full Outlook and Notes are predominantly used in business environments. The mobile platforms (iOS, Android) are likely to figure in both sets. All I’m saying is that it would be more illustrative to take a view of the personal and enterprise markets separately. In business Outlook and Notes would outstrip the others, therefore it’s unfair to show Notes with such a small share. For personal accounts the picture would be completely different.
3. Spam filters – are Campaign Monitor’s e-mails getting stopped by spam filters before they get to business users? Maybe, and again that will skew the Outlook and Notes statistics, and probably for the business-used mobile platforms too.

The survey then lists the ‘movers and shakers’ compared to two years ago. The fact that iOS devices have grown most (84.23%) is no surprise, although actually I would have expected more. The fact that Notes has fallen (by roughly the same amount) is also no surprise, knowing what’s been happening in the enterprise market over the past few years. However, I refer to point #1 above – older versions of Notes (and I mean 7 and older) didn’t have the ability to block remote images. Notes 8.x does have that ability. So the same population of Notes users, but with more using Notes 8.x, would show less usage using Campaign Monitor’s method of gathering statistics.

Scrapple is a neat side-bar plug-in for Lotus Notes, a place where you can keep little fragments (scraps) of information that you use time and time again. It’s very simple to use… to save a scrap of info, you simply highlight it and drag and drop it into the Scrapple panel. By the way, that drag and drop works from anywhere you can grab some text, not just within Notes. To use a scrap, you just drag and drop it from the panel. You can also drag a Notes document into Scrapple, and then drag it out again to form a doclink back to the original document.

Typically I use Scrapple for stuff like IBM location addresses, and also the explanation I provide many times a week as to why I’m not the person who will assist some excited new iPhone or iPad owner obtain a Traveler account and get it set up. If you were one of those people, and you felt like you received a canned response… you’re right, you did. Get over it.

Today I realised another great use for Scrapple. For reasons we won’t go into, I had to schedule about twenty-five conference calls over the next two weeks. You can imagine what an enormous amount of fun this was. Thankfully for my invitees, I’m not one of those people who considers it necessary to include a phone number for every country on the entire effin’ planet for a UK-only audience (but you never know, just for the fun of it, one day I may dial into a call using the Cayman Islands number). But I did have to include the UK paid-for and toll-free numbers, and the participant pass-code, and the Irish numbers for a couple of calls.

Scrapple made this easier, because the first thing I did was entered the call details into scraps in the side-bar, and then just dragged in the one I needed for each invite. Finding suitable free-time for twenty-five calls was the bigger challenge.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Scrapple was written by the awfully talented Julian Robichaux of SNAPPS and is available from SNAPPS’ on-line widget catalog.

For an overview of live text please go here. And for an old dadams.co.uk look at live text and widgets, travel back in time to early 2008.

The most common use of live text recognising a post code is plotting the place on a Google Map… but you can also see the local weather forecast (for what it’s worth), find the nearest NCP car park or BT Openzone hot-spot, find a hotel, get local government information, and sometimes find the nearest Starbucks (I say “sometimes” because their store locator is a bit unreliable).

Following the introduction of the new crime and policing information web site (for England and Wales), you can now click on a post code in Lotus Notes and find out how likely it is that you’ll get mugged or assaulted during your visit. All you need is this widget and, if you haven’t done it already, to turn on live text and the My Widgets panel, like so…

• Go to File, Preferences… Widgets, and click the option for ‘Show Widget Toolbar and the My Widgets Sidebar panel’.
• Then go to the preference for Live Text and click on the option for ‘Enable Live Text by default for all supported content’.

Then drag the widget into the My Widgets panel, find an e-mail or calendar appointment containing a post code, and you’re ready to go. If you’re travelling to IBM Hursley, you should be pretty safe. IBM South Bank…? Let’s be careful out there.

So, of course, the first thing you do is look at your area. Our road is not exactly crime-central (one burglary) but the centre of Camberley is apparently a hot-bed of anti-social behaviour and ‘other crime’ (shoplifting in Poundland maybe). Oddly, the peak spot corresponds with the location of a number of bars and pubs and the one night-club on Camberley High Street. And the other peak spot is one of Camberley’s less salubrious residential locations.

I just received an e-mail from a colleague who’s currently in Basingstoke, and he’s now too scared to leave the building. Personally, I’d be more worried if I was in Bristol.

Here’s something that’s been in the works for a while internally and has now seen the light of day. I’m a big advocate of IBM Lotus Connections Files for sharing content. I like to see the look on peoples’ faces when I say “no, I won’t send that file to you… but I will share it with you”.

Using Connections Files I can control the sharing, I can see how many times the content has been downloaded (my most popular presentation has been downloaded 228 times, proving that I’m no Chris Crummey), who has downloaded it (very useful) and I can see comments and recommendations. The value-add for colleagues is that I’m not hitting their e-mail quotas with big file attachments.

Now some of that functionality has arrived in the Lotus Notes sidebar. Lotus Greenhouse members can download the plug-in which provides easy access to your Connections Files and drag-and-drop integration.

I can drag a file attachment from an e-mail (or Windows Explorer) and post it quickly to my Connections Files. If I want to share a file, there’s a couple of ways of doing that. I can drag it from the panel into a new e-mail… but rather than adding an attachment it adds a nicely-formatted link (see click-able image below). Alternatively I can share a file with people by right-clicking and selecting the ‘Share’ option, and then adding the names of colleagues. It even suggests people you’ve recently shared with.

I can see my own files, files that I’ve shared with other people, and files that have been shared with me. And probably the coolest feature (and very useful), for shared files I can actually see who has downloaded the file (and which version they downloaded).

I doubt it. But an interesting article from the London Evening Standard kicks off this idea.

Before we know it, email will seem as quaint as the fax machine and dial-up accounts.

The article starts with the thoughts of Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. He rarely uses e-mail. And then Mark Zuckerberg (don’t know who he is, something to do with Facebook) who describes e-mail as ‘formal’.

Let me start by saying that I welcome the idea of receiving less e-mail. To me, there is nothing more frustrating than collaboratively sharing a piece of content, or setting up a collaborative activity, and then having someone e-mail their comments or revisions back to you. Actually, maybe trying to open a plastic carrier bag in a supermarket (you know, the ones where the inner surfaces cling to each other) is marginally more frustrating, but you get my point. Neither Mr Dorsey or Mr Zuckerberg work for large multi-national corporations with diverse business units, so their views won’t necessarily ring true with everyone.

Later in the article they discuss the power of social collaboration as a value-add for marketing – that’s something that McKinsey agree with, stating that “companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins”. Consider the old mailshot – that’s something likely to end up in my e-mail trash can. But information presented in the right manner on the web, and shared by trusted advisors in your network, is perhaps more likely to find the target.

Ignoring work, I rarely use e-mail. My personal e-mail account receives about ten e-mails a day – not spam, but mainly notifications. It’s rarely e-mail from real people. So here I’ll agree with Dorsey and Zuckerberg, most of my communications with real people outside of work (and some work-related) are via Facebook and Twitter. Now that Florida Steve has an iMac (smart fellow that he is) we use Skype with video to communicate.

My daughter Lolli has found her own way of communicating with her peers, having the luxury of never being put into an environment where e-mail is mandated. She has an e-mail account but rarely uses it – she’s part of the new generation. But will e-mail have disappeared from the workplace in time for her NOT to be given an e-mail client on her first day?

It’s an old habit that has to die hard, and such things don’t happen overnight. I’ve been a Lotus Notes e-mail user for over 19 years… even if that was only 5 years within an organisation that uses e-mail daily it’s a very embedded habit. You need something that replaces e-mail, and something that people will trust, understand and find easy to use. Replacing e-mail is not easy, because your e-mail is actually doing a number of jobs for you – it carries discussions, it delivers content, it notifies you, it draws you into business processes, and it allows you to collaborate with the outside world. However… look at those uses of e-mail… isn’t there a better way of doing all of those?

Of course, there are other ways of doing those things, but the problem is that you end up with something that’s fragmented. Discussions can take place in blogs, forums and activities. Content, I believe, shouldn’t be delivered – it should live in a shared place and you come to it. Notifications…? Let’s come back to that one. And collaborating with the outside world – the good thing about e-mail is that it’s a ubiquitous common denominator, but it’s also a break in the collaborative chain.

Oh, by the way, I should also mention that people receive e-mail on a variety of mobile devices, so you have to throw them into the equation.

Naturally, I’m going to bring this back round to the IBM collaborative portfolio. We’re going down the right path with Lotus Notes – it has the ability to bring most of these things together in the one client. Instant messaging, activities, content sharing, notifications (today in the form of RSS) and e-mail. But this is not the end-point. Look at Connections, in particular the stream of updates from the various facets of the platform. What you see there is starting to get towards the vision – the stream of updates shouldn’t just include stuff from the IBM / Lotus stable. Open standards are key to ensuring that the stream of information includes everything you need. And that is where Project Vulcan is heading. Expect to see much more at Lotusphere ’11 (if you’re going) or wait for the info to start arriving afterwards if you’re not going (like me).

In summary, I don’t believe that e-mail is going to die off this year, or even within the next 5 years. But I can see a time where it will get relegated to the side (the side bar, maybe) and a stream of open interactive notifications from various sources will take the centre-stage.

Lotus Notes 8.5 introduced the ability to overlay other calendars onto your own. The ‘other calendars’ can come from a variety of sources:

• Other users’ Notes calendars
• Notes TeamRoom calendars
• Notes application calendars (e.g. an application for managing events or a workflow application with milestones and deadlines)
• Google calendars
• Open standard iCalendar feeds
• Lotus Connections Activities

Lotus collaboration advocate Chris Crummey talks about the idea that work / life balance is a myth, and what you’re left with is work / life integration. So, while it’s important to be able to overlay the calendars of colleagues and applications onto your own calendar, it’s also important to be able to add some personal things, such as:

• The calendar of a relative (I have the current Mrs Adams’ Google calendar available)
• The Arsenal fixtures, so I can see when they’re going to scrape a 2-1 win or a disappointing draw
• The birthdays of my Facebook friends

So what about the weather? We love talking about the weather in Great Britain, so wouldn’t it be good to have a forecast readily-available?

A couple of days ago I was watching a presentation by my frolleague Jon Mell, and one of the screenshots contained a calendar (not a Notes calendar, but that’s not important) with information from a number of sources… one of them being a weather forecast. A light-bulb lit up just above my head (not sure if anyone else in the room noticed) and I thought “that’s a good idea”. Notes supports calendar overlays provided by the iCalendar format, and after a brief search I found a site providing for weather feeds for UK towns (wunderground.com). Camberley wasn’t an option, but Bracknell was and that’s near enough to give an idea of the weather conditions in my home town.

If only they could predict the weather more accurately…

Click on the image below for a larger view.

Update…

There were a number of requests for more information about this so I wanted to add a basic how-to.

Go to http://www.wunderground.com and search for your home town (or the nearest place). When your place has been found, you’ll see a green iCal indicator on the right. Do a right-click on this and copy the link location.

Now go to the Notes calendar and click the ‘Add a Calendar’ link. In the resulting dialog box you’ll need to select an iCalendar feed, set it to a public calendar, add a label (such as ‘Local weather’) and then paste the iCal feed URL into the URL field (click on the image to see how it should look). Select some tasteful colours and press OK.

That should be it. Please note that the feed only shows weather for week ahead, but bear in mind that most weather forecasters can’t accurately predict what the weather will do tomorrow, let alone in six days time.

It’s not even December yet, but our friends at Teamstudio are already thinking about Lotusphere. Michaela from Teamstudio notified me that they’re running a contest to put the spotlight on the best Notes applications, and Notes applications that are begging to be mobilised (and I know that Teamstudio have a great solution for doing just that).

Details are here and you have until 31st December to get your application entered.

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.

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.