My frolleague Matt Newton is running a series of Notes upgrade workshops during September and October. With Notes / Domino 8.5.2 available this week there’s never been a better time to look at upgrading a back-version infrastructure, to take advantage of the attractive and highly-functional Notes client and the many improvements on the Domino server (many of which will contribute to lowering the cost of ownership). To quote the invite…

The Notes & Domino 8.5.x upgrade workshop is intended to provide the customer with an in-depth examination of the new capabilities of version 8.5.x. For existing customers, this exploration will help them assess the additional value and potential impact to their existing environment. For new customers, this exploration will give them an invaluable insight into Notes & Domino 8.5.x.  At the conclusion of the workshop, the customer will leave with an excitement about the business problems this new version can help solve.

Sounds good? Okay, here’s the dates and locations for these free-of-charge events…

• Wednesday 29th September – IBM Warwick
• Tuesday 5th October – IBM Staines
• Wednesday 6th October – IBM Manchester
• Tuesday 12th October – IBM Edinburgh

Interested? E-mail Matt using matt dot newton at uk.ibm.com – or leave a comment here and I’ll pass your details on.

Warning – this blog post contains details about a yet-to-be-released product version. There is a remote possibility that some features may not make the shipping version, blah blah, etc.

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2 (to keep the brand police happy) is scheduled for release in Q3 of 2010. Those of you working to the Gregorian calendar may say “hey, it’s Q3 now” – indeed it is, so expect it soon. ‘Soon’ is of course a vague adverb – in the grand scale of the history of our planet the 2014 World Cup is happening soon. England will soon get another chance to lift the elusive trophy. Anyway, I digress. So what’s in this forthcoming version? Loads of stuff, but I’ve picked out a few highlights.

Multi-threaded replication – we have some whopping big Notes applications containing thousands of documents… sales opportunity tracking, customer contact, and the IBM directory catalog which allows me address any one of the 350,000-ish people in IBM even when disconnected (actually at only 80 mb it’s not really that big). Sometimes there’s a lot of updates in these applications, and the last thing you want to happen is that all-important e-mail getting stuck behind a behemoth replication operation. Never fear – now you can replicate multiple applications (and e-mail) at the same time, and chances are your e-mail will finish first while the big fella keeps going.

21st century application icons – when I started at Lotus in 1991 (straight from school, obviously) and used Notes version 2.0a, Notes application icons could only have sixteen colours. When I woke up this morning, that was also true of the current version (8.5.1). But that’s set to change with 8.5.2 – you can now load a full colour 32 x 32 image into your application to use as the icon. The old-style icon will remain stored in the application and will be used with older versions or if that full colour icon hasn’t been set. A feature that has zero productivity value yet will please millions (me included).

New mail preferences - quite a few here, including the format of displayed names (e.g. last name followed by first name, rather than first then last) and ‘automatically close original e-mail when replying / forwarding’.

Forward an e-mail from the Trash folder – I hate having a scroll-bar in my inbox, so I’m often quick to delete e-mails. Later, I’ll need to forward that e-mail to someone else, which means restoring it first. 8.5.2 allows me to forward directly from the Trash folder. I’m already using that one a lot.

Send someone a personal group – a great new feature in the personal address book, you can click the Send option and a special e-mail type will send the group contents. The recipient will then see an option to import the group straight into their own personal address book. You can also do this for location profiles.

There’s loads of other features, these are just a few that I’ve picked out. Notes / Domino 8.5.2 will be coming ‘soon’.

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.

Imagine wanting to arrange a meeting with someone and being able to see whether they’re free or not… how great would that be? Well, most modern e-mail solutions (such as Notes / Domino and that one that Microsoft sell) offer such a thing – it’s called ‘free time search’. Unfortunately, many people are either too lazy to use free time search, or maybe just don’t know how – I say this because most of the meeting invites I get are for times that I’m already busy. Not using free time search should be added to the calendar and scheduling bad habits.

Sarcasm aside, free time search works fine within organisations, although some people do their best to scupper your best attempts to find a convenient time. I have known people to be apparently busy every day, but the reality is that their days are marked with an all-day event reading ‘working in Staines’ or even ‘pancake day’ – neither of which really prevent a meeting or conference call. But what about scheduling time with people outside of your organisation? Unless there’s an organised and maintained link it’s difficult to achieve. Tungle offers a way to solve this.

What does Tungle do? It allows you to upload and sync the contents of your calendar from a number of sources, and then present the free and busy time to contacts on the web. Your contacts can see when you’re free (not necessarily the meeting details), suggest some appointment times, and then Tungle does the job of arranging the meeting between the two of you and provides the invites.

A partnership between Tungle and IBM Lotus was announced at Lotusphere – see here for details. The Tungle plug-in for Notes, now in beta, provides the synchronisation between your Notes calendar and the Tungle service. This means that you just have to update one calendar for your internal and external colleagues to see when you’re free.

Click on the purple button for a view of the Tungle calendar with my free time.

Going to Lotusphere? Do you use Lotus Notes? Do you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry. If you answered ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘yes’ to any of the others, then you’ll be interested in some resources offered by Geniisoft and The Turtle Partnership.

Firstly, Ben Langhinrichs has once again provided the Lotusphere agenda and session planning database. This is a Notes application which you can store locally, and then inspect the sessions and add them to your personal calendar.

The Turtle Partnership have taken Ben’s application and hosted in on their server, so you can get up-to-date information via replication. You can open the application from lotusphere.turtleweb.com and then grab a replica.

If you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry you can also access the session information from native mobile applications (created by The Turtle Partnership) on these two devices. Check the Turtle Partnership’s blog for instructions, but the easiest way to grab them is to go to the respective app stores for either device and search for ‘Lotusphere’.

Many thanks to Ben and the Turtle team for providing these resources to the Lotus community. I hope you’re kept in free drinks for the duration of Lotusphere.

Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called Twitter, apparently it’s quite popular. The Lotusphere team will be updating the Lotus Knows Twitter stream with information about the event. So if you’re attending, or if you’re stuck somewhere less interesting and want to keep up with the latest news, you should follow LotusKnows.

Here’s a very handy Notes side-bar plug-in which has been knocking around since the middle of 2009 but has really come into it’s own with the latest release. The File Navigator plug-in does what it’s name suggests… it allows you to access your file system from the Notes side-bar, perform a set of actions on the files and folders, and drag and drop files to and from Notes documents and e-mails (not that I’m condoning sending file attachments in e-mails of course – there are other ways to share files).

The plug-in also has a number of other useful features – adding favourite folders to the top-level navigation, adding shared network drives, and converting e-mails to EML files.

The File Navigator plug-in is available from OpenNTF.org (if you’ve registered and logged in), and can be installed from a local update folder or from the Notes widget catalog (it’s easy, but the instructions are included). Congratulations to the guys for creating this, a fantastic piece of work.

Standard Life have spoken at Lotus and BlackBerry events in the past couple of years, but here’s an excellent write-up of how they use BlackBerry devices to extend the value of their Domino infrastructure and how they have provided BlackBerry-based access to their many TeamRooms.

Despite it’s small number increment, IBM Lotus Notes / Domino 8.5.1 is really a very significant release – not just because of the many new capabilities and improvements, but because it’s the version that many organisations have been waiting for to deploy. It’s nine months on from 8.5 and that extra time in development does show in an extremely positive way. I haven’t upgraded my Linux client yet, but the Windows and Mac versions provide a far better user experience.

Many other blogs and news sources are covering this today, so I’ll be brief. As you’d expect you can get more detailed coverage at edbrill.com and if you’re feeling really brave you can wade through the full announcement letter. For those of you with less time to spare, here’s an overview…

• Oodles of new features in the Lotus Notes client
• Lotus Traveler now supports the Apple iPhone
• Many improvements to Domino Designer, including new LotusScript and Java editors
• Significant improvements to the process of building composite applications
• Simplification of the licensing model, down to two Client Access Licenses (Messaging and Enterprise)
• Domino Designer is now a FREE DOWNLOAD
• Some bandwidth-reducing improvements to DAOS

Notes / Domino 8.5.1 is scheduled to be available for electronic general availability on Monday 12th October 2009. My general advice to anyone is ‘upgrade’.

I was perusing PlanetLotus today and an interesting blog post from Vaughan Rivett caught my eye – what’s the worst email in-box that you have ever seen? Vaughan tells the tale of a user with a mail box weighing in at 11 gigabytes. This is what’s known in the trade as either a) hoarding or b) bad management. Mail boxes of that size could never be tolerated at IBM, because like so many companies we impose a mail quota – your mail box gets to a certain size, some things stop working, and the functionality isn’t given back to you until you’ve fixed the problem. But is that fair? After all, was it the mail box owner at fault?

I’m speaking as someone who recently had to concede that, after more than 10 years with a 150 mb mail box quota, I could no longer keep it within the limit every day – I was spending too much time managing the volume, so I had to apply to go up to the next level, 250 mb. Why, in an organisation with a rich collaborative infrastructure, was this necessary? I put it down purely to my change in role – suddenly I was communicating with many more people and there was an increase in data flying around. It reminded me of a slide I sometimes use on less serious occasions, such as the recent keynote at Collaboration University. Entitled ‘about me as an e-mail user’ it explains that I don’t like having a scroll bar in my inbox and I resent anyone who…

• Forces me over my mail quota
• Sends me two e-mails when only one was required
• Marks everything they send as high priority (yes, I know who you are)
• Starts an e-mail with “I know you’re busy but…” – but what?
• Sends me an e-mail and then immediately Sametimes me or phones me to ask if I’ve read the e-mail
• Continues to reply-to-all way past the point where I’ve ceased to be involved or interested
• Only knows how to use PrtSc rather than Alt-PrtSc

So in summary, just about anyone who sends me an e-mail.

A couple of years ago I did a small survey of some of our customers, not big enough or detailed enough to draw any great conclusions from, and asked the question…

In terms of e-mail efficiency what would benefit your organisation the most – improvement in user practises around e-mail, or operational improvements?

71% said user practises, 29% said both, but no-one (0%) said operational improvements alone. So the conclusion is that end users need to be given the tools in order to become more efficient with how they disseminate information, but they also need some clarity about the right tools to use and when.

I believe that we’ve added the right things to the Lotus portfolio to help end users to realise better collaboration and knowledge management – simple things that make a difference. Firstly, think how your typical e-mail user would share a spreadsheet, document or presentation with a colleague (or group)… we all know the right thing to do is to post it to a collaborative space (which hopefully supports the business activity associated with the content) and then notify people of the content via e-mail. However, most e-mail users have escaped from Utopia via a small hole in the fence, so they’re just going to shove that file attachment in the e-mail regardless of the storage or content revision issues.

That’s why I love the Quickr approach – because it supports the users’ long-ingrained behaviour (shove in the attachment) but at the point of sending it offers to place the file in a document repository. The recipient sees a set of links, and they click to navigate to the content. Simple. So collaboratively we’re doing the right thing, but we haven’t interrupted the user’s normal pattern of work (in my head I’m picturing people grunting like Cro Magnon man did when he spotted a bison wandering across the Paleolithic plains, but instead they’re saying “ugg, file attachment”). The added bonus with Quickr is that you can also take existing file attachments that Cro Magnon man sent to you in the past and offload them to a Quickr place – you can retain the e-mail with the link replacing the attachment.

The other thing I love telling people about is Connections Files. To fully embrace the idea of Connections Files you do have to discard the caveman instincts and post that file… no, not in an e-mail, in your Connections file-space. Yes, I know this goes against years of bad habits, so the important thing is for users to realise the benefits. The first benefit is to other people – you are not contributing to ruining their day by sending that quota-busting spreadsheet. Okay, so you don’t care about their quota, how about a benefit for yourself? Have you ever sent an e-mail with a file attachment and then later someone else wants the file? And then someone else a bit later? This used to happen to me all of the time, but not any more. Rather than having to repeat the process of create another e-mail, type in the subject, find the file attachment in a folder (hmmm, which folder), add an explanation – I just share the file. The file in question is posted in Connections Files and I add another name to the share list. An e-mail is automatically sent, and the recipient grabs the content but doesn’t have to worry about the volume of data. If the file is updated, I simply add the update as a new version and note the changes.

Another great way to share content, in the context of a business activity, is Lotus Connections Activities, but I’ve already covered that in an earlier post.