dadams.co.uk

Warren Elsmore has announced that the UKLUG meeting will take place on the 18th and 19th of September 2008 in London. This follows directly on from Collaboration University (which you’d be mad to miss) so a busy week for those who follow the divine Lotus path.

The UKLUG 2007 meeting was a great success, although the free venue very generously donated by ComputaCenter had a limit of one hundred attendees. This meant a large waiting list and a great many disappointed people. But buoyed by the interest and the turnout, not to mention the number of customers prepared to stand up and talk, Warren is planning two days this time round, and a venue that can accommodate at least two hundred people and possibly two tracks.

Like the SNUG (Scottish Notes User Group) and ILUG (Irish Lotus User Group) events, UKLUG will be free (and by the way, is not an IBM event). To cover the costs we’ll be looking for sponsors - this is a big ask given that many of the usual suspects will already be funding ILUG, which this year is a whopping three-day event on the 4th to 6th of June (in Dublin, of course).

As for SNUG (you’ll appreciate we couldn’t call it SLUG), planning gets under way this week, and I think we’ll be looking at a Spring event.

A big thank you to the passion of everyone who makes these events possible… Warren and Kitty, Paul Mooney, Bill Buchan, Matt White, Julian Woodward, Tom Duff, Mike Smith, and apologies to anyone I’ve missed. Not to mention Graeme Clark and all the guys from Standard Life, Mark Calleran from the Salvation Army (a big hit last year and a huge appreciation of the work that his wonderful organisation does worldwide), Brian Ford from HSBC, Neil and Darren from Prudential, Steven Haugen from Scottish & Newcastle, all of the other customer speakers, and last but not least, the very generous sponsors.

Okay gang, it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for… you can now register for the UK Lotusphere Comes To You 2008 events. We’ll be back at the wonderful Radisson Hotel at Manchester Airport on the 3rd of April, but the London event sees a new venue this year… none other than Wembley Stadium. Yes, they’ve finished building the function rooms, so join us on the 1st of April. I was there late last year for an event with the Portal Partnership, and it’s a fantastic venue. A word of warning though, if you go on the stadium tour, keep off the grass… they have snipers on the roof.

This year we’ll be doing things in the sessions slightly differently - stayed tuned for more details on that. Who knows, you could even be taking to the stage yourself.

Also out of the bag are the names of the guest speakers… crikey, Alan Hansen. Not bad eh? Six hundred and twenty-one appearances for Liverpool, and fourteen goals. Well, he was a defender.

I rather like the idea of SlideShare.net - being able to upload an Open Document Format presentation (or PowerPoint, if you must) and sharing it with the world in a slideshow format. However, until tonight I hadn’t got round to uploading anything. Last year I was going to share my ‘Notes 8 Top Ten’ presentation (in Spinal Tap-style, it has eleven features listed) but it never hit the top of the to-do list… it may do soon. Numerous Lotus Notes alumni (Ed Brill included, of course) have shared their content so there’s no shortage of slides.

As we’re having some success against Microsoft Exchange at the moment, I thought I’d post some of the slides I’m using. The basic premise is that Lotus Notes / Domino have been subject to a consistent upgrade-able architecture (with continuous improvements) throughout their history, whereas with Microsoft Exchange… well, it’s not my place to tell you about the Exchange roadmap, so go and ask Microsoft.

| View | Upload your own

Okay, probably a bit late, but better late than never (and ‘never’ was an option). Ed Brill somehow managed twenty or so posts during Lotusphere, and managed to take part in a boat race, and suffered a nasty verbal attack from a blogger who is less important that he’d like to believe he is (more on that later).

Personally I was worn out after live-blogging the Opening General Session - the announcements came so fast there was scarcely time to note all the details and take it all in. However, the following three days provided some opportunities to gather more details. I’ll just quickly mention the Lotusphere grand night out to Universal Islands of Adventure where we achieved the impossible… four major rides in two hours. Imagine doing that during the day in a school holiday. Four major rides in eight hours would be a more realistic expectation. Those rides were the Incredible Hulk (0 to 40 mph in two seconds), Spider-man (that was the best by far), Jurassic Park River Adventure (steep drop, wet jeans), and the thankfully over-quite-quickly Dueling Dragons (the mere memory turns my stomach). And the experience wouldn’t be complete without myself and a colleague threatening to kill another colleague for insisting we went on the second two rides after eating.

Anyway, back to Lotusphere. If I had to pick some highlights it would be the following:

• Russ Holden’s presentation on Domino 8.0.1 and ‘Next’, now known as 8.5. As Chief Architect Russ deserves the plaudits for the continued improvements (database compression, space saving on file attachments, native Active Directory authentication, to name but a few) while maintaining a consistent upgrade-able architecture. Yes, an architecture that has a roadmap and doesn’t require rip and replace migrations for every upgrade. Microsoft Exchange customers take note.
• Quickr 8.1 - fantastic update to an already fantastic product. Anybody who believes SharePoint Services to be the pinnacle of collaboration needs to broaden their horizons very soon.
• Sametime futures - near futures in fact. Some of the guys from Sametime Product Management and development showed some things that will hopefully ship this year… an Ajax web client, local client proxy, on-the-fly translation, an ad-hoc meeting place. All this in addition to Sametime Advanced (expected within a couple of months).
• Connections 2 - awesome. If the new home page and the improvements to Community pages weren’t enough, the next version of Activities will blow you away. Loads of new options to make management of an Activity more flexible, and best of all, customised forms (boy, do we have some great Ajax skills in the development team). I was sitting next to a customer from the UK, and he was bowled over (as was I). Watch out for this mid-year.

I mentioned that Ed Brill suffered a verbal attack from a blogger… Dan Lyons is a writer from Forbes who also masquerades as Fake Steve Jobs. Normally I find the blog amusing, if not a little foul-mouthed, knowing that the author actually works for a serious business publication. For some reason Mr Lyons found it necessary to launch a tirade against Lotusphere and Ed in particular. He called Ed a “marketing f***wit” and referred to other people who work for Lotus as “retards”. So suddenly this went from amusing to insulting. Lyons went on to write:

“What really saddens me, however, is the idea that somewhere out in some forlorn sad corner of the world someone is actually following this live blog and actually cares what Lotus announces and maybe even wishes he could be there in Orlando to experience the rock concert excitement in person. To those people I say this: I will pray for your souls.”

Given that Lotus is in the clear second place position in the messaging and collaboration market, leads the market for real-time collaboration and enterprise portals, has over 46,000 customer companies using Notes / Domino worldwide, and gained market share during 2006 (source: IDC and Gartner Dataquest), I would say that many businesses do care about what Lotus announce. Mr Lyons however demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge about the Lotus portfolio, and as he is a journalist I would suggest he does some research before publishing such as article in the future… even if it is done under a pseudonym distancing himself from his employer.

Furthermore, Ed runs a blog which attracts thousands of hits per day. He doesn’t have to pretend to be someone else to get that attention, because what he writes has value to the people who read his content. Consider that Mr Lyons. You can insult the Lotus brand, and anyone with any sense will see it as ill-informed crap. The Microsoft fan-boys will find it amusing and join in, but that’s to be expected. Now go and get a life, rather than hanging on the coat tails of someone who probably wouldn’t give you twenty seconds of attention.

And by the way, the real Steve Jobs loves Notes 8.5 for the Mac.

(11:05 EST, 16:05 UK) - I’m waiting for the opening general sesison to start… like many of our UKISA colleagues I’m attending the re-run, necessary because the numbers this year mean they couldn’t accomodate everyone in one go. It looks like it’s going to start late as many people are still coming in and trying to find seats. This is supposed to be half the attendees, yet the room looks full.

(11:21 EST, 16:21 UK) - the symphony (ho ho) orchestra have completed an outstanding set and preparations are being made for Mike Rhodin to enter the stage.

(11:23 EST, 16:23 UK) - Mike arrives and cracks the symphony gag. He then says that the first run of the session this morning was a rehearsal, and goes on to explain the theme of ‘Emergence’ (getting the big picture from patterns and using it to your advantage).

(11:27 EST, 16:27 UK) - the guest speaker is Bob Costas, a sports commentator. Well done to everyone who said it was going to be William Shatner.

(11:43 EST, 16:43 UK) - Mike Rhodin has returned to the stage and is discussing modes of collaboration.

(11:55 EST, 16:55 UK) - no announcements yet, but the ground has been set for Lotus Connections, composite applications and mobile working. Oh, an announcement that Lotus and RIM will work more closely on content and applications.

(11:58 EST, 16:58 UK) - .Dr Vishal Sikka, the CTO of SAP comes to the stage. ‘Atlantic’ will allow Lotus Notes to access key SAP applications. Ron Sebastian (of course) provides a demo of a composite application.

(12:03 EST, 17:03 UK) - Alistair Rennie arrives to talk about Notes and Domino. He is joined by Russ Holden and Jeff Eisen for a light-hearted debate. Jeff talks about Notes on the Mac, Ubuntu Linux and Traveler (including iPhone support).

(12:07 EST, 17:07 UK) - Russ counters with improvements on the Domino server (storage and performance), and the new Domino Web Access Lite. Jeff then talks about ‘My Widgets’ which Ron demos along with Quickr integration and new calendar scheduling options.

(12:15 EST, 17:15 UK) - Ron demos Domino Web Access Lite and the iPhone edition.

(12:17 EST, 17:17 UK) - Russ discusses Domino 8.5 - directory freedom, Notes ID vault, and reducing file attachment storage. Also, a new appliance for Domino virus and spam protection. And then, Web 2.0 for the Domino server. Maureen Leland comes on to talk about improvements to building and rendering web applications, and demos improvements to the Domino Designer (which will be an Eclipse application in 8.5).

(12:25 EST, 17:25 UK) - Kevin Cavanaugh arrives to talk about Symphony. He says that it allows businesses to move away from proprietary document formats and strangle-held budgets. He then announces that beta 4 will provide new APIs to extend Symphony’s functionality.

(12:30 EST, 17:30 UK) - Bruce Morse wishes Sametime a happy 10th birthday. Outlook users made up a third of new Sametime customers in 2007. Sametime Advanced and Sametime Unified Telephony are discussed, and Ron provides a demo.

(12:42 EST, 17:42 UK) - it’s Portal time with Larry Bowden. He says that Websphere Portal has been #1 in the market for a decade. Larry talks about portal-based dashboards providing content to Quickr, Sametime and Notes. And another set of demos from Ron - Portal / Connections integration, embedding of rich media, tear-away portlets, integration with Forms, a Forms web-based designer (Total Forms)… crikey, loads there.

(12:53 EST, 17:53 UK) - it’s Jeff Schick to talk about social networking (and probably Connections). He also talks about Quickr - clearly a move to couple the two more closely - and says that version 8.1 will add more value, especially to Lotus Domino customers. Integration with FileNet and Content Manager is discussed. Ron gets a break from the demo and Suzanne Minassian takes over. ‘My Files’ and the media library are demoed.

(13:04 EST, 18:04 UK) - back to Jeff for an announcement of on-the-fly language translation for Connections, And here we go, Connections 2… customisation, attention management, widgets and mash-ups, Atlas for Lotus Connections (visualisation), off-line access / synchronisation, and mobile access. Suzanne demos.

(13:14 EST, 18:14 UK) - Jeff talks mash-ups. “Makes SOA work the desktop”. Jeff announces Lotus Mashups, a graphical browser-based tool for application assembly.based on open standards. Suzanne demos, building an application that starts as an organisation chart but then includes salary and HR data. Funky.

(13:19 EST, 18:19 UK) - back to Mike. Big drum roll followed by a big SMB announcement… Lotus Foundations, a collection of integrated servers for all-encompassing services. Mike then pulled a Domino-configured Nitix server from an envelope. And then ‘Bluehouse’, solutions for small businesses. Another demo from Ron.

That’s it… a lot there, I could hardly keep up.

In a post in November last year I mentioned that in addition to the the ZDNet videos I had recorded a video interview for vnunet.com. I was sent a first edit shortly after, but I only recently remembered to chase up on where it was on the vnunet.com site… so you can now view it here.

This was a much easier format to work with than the ZDNet whiteboards. Compared the utter nightmare I bestowed upon the very patient ZDNet producer (the guy really was a gem), Andrew Charlesworth and I did this in just one take (although we recorded a second to help the editing process). One thing I do realise now is that I couldn’t have a career in broadcasting (always fancied being a chat show host) until I get rid of the errrs and errrms.

I won’t be getting much sympathy from my colleagues who aren’t attending… sorry guys. Last night I started working on an annual dilemma… which Lotusphere sessions to attend. I’ve said before that this is the hallmark of a great event, being spoilt for choice. I’ve identified fifty-four (yes, 54) sessions that I want to attend, but the four-day schedule means I can only attend eighteen. Prioritising is tricky when you don’t want to miss anything, but I shouldn’t be complaining (I’m not, this is a nice ‘problem’ to have).

Also of note this year is the fact that the opening general session (featuring Mike Rhodin and his team, a guest speaker - last year it was Neil Armstrong - and a heap of announcements) is having to be repeated to accommodate everyone - a happy symptom of the ever-increasing attendance. Let me just repeat that - ever-increasing attendance.

My frolleague Brendan Tutt and I will be live-blogging again this year (in our IBM-internal Lotusphere blog), and I’ll paste the highlights into this blog too.

Addendum: ooops, I nearly forget to thank Ben Langhinrichs of Geniisoft for once again providing the Lotusphere session application for Notes, a nifty tool which lists the sessions and what else is going on at the same time, and then adds the selected sessions to your Notes calendar. Thanks Ben.

This is something I’ve never done before… posted an entry and then changed it completely later the same day. The following is a re-thought entry about the same topic, but a bit more balanced.

I like to peruse the technology news page of the BBC’s news site as I find it one of the best ways to find out what Microsoft are up to and how it’s being positioned to the public. I do subscribe to a couple of Microsoft-centric newsfeeds, but the BBC’s news site is one of the most read on the planet, so it’s important to see what’s going on there.

We’ve had several heated conversations in the office about the fact that Microsoft seem to get a lot of coverage on BBC News… too much, way too much in my opinion. Around the time of the launch of Windows Vista it seemed that BBC News was like Microsoft’s own PR agency and news service rolled into one. To be fair, some other companies get a lot of focus… Apple for example, and I’ll admit to double-standards and say that I don’t have a problem with Apple getting a lot of airtime. IBM get very little coverage in comparison to Microsoft, and the Lotus brand get next to nothing (do a search on Microsoft and IBM and compare the results).

I took this conversation further on a couple of occasions. Shortly before the launch of Sametime 7.5 there were security restrictions and all kinds of problems at the airports in the UK, and I considered how relevant real-time collaboration was. Surely the market leader in real-time collaboration bringing out a new version and tackling some of the issues of business travel was news-worthy. Well, apparently not, yet at that time Internet Explorer 7 was getting a lot of coverage.

The drivers behind what the BBC decide to cover have been explained to me - basically what the BBC think their readership would be interested in and what has a broad appeal. Microsoft and Apple are news-worthy. I was told that “the BBC don’t do product announcements” but I blatantly disagreed with this. Have a read of this article and see if you think it’s tantamount to a product announcement. And to be fair, Apple get the same treatment. Think about that idea of what the BBC’s readership would be interested in… are they given the opportunity to be interested in other options when other software vendors aren’t granted an equal shout? Lotus Symphony, a free alternative to Microsoft Office, should be of interest to consumers and businesses - not just because it’s free but also because of the importance of the Open Document Format. However, there has been no coverage of Symphony.

The one that really had me ranting (I know, hard to believe) was a few years ago when the Beeb ran a story about Microsoft outlining the future of e-mail. They mentioned that Microsoft would introduce e-mail which couldn’t be forwarded or copied to another recipient. At the time of that article that capability had been in Lotus Notes for a few years already, yet Microsoft were getting the credit for a future vision. Microsoft the great visionaries? No, just a case of Microsoft getting the airtime.

So, with this in mind (and here’s the point of all this), they’re offering you the opportunity to post questions for Bill Gates, “one of the most important men in technology over the last three decades”. The man who invented oxygen, food, television and, of course, the internet.

The BBC deliberates your line of questioning… “Perhaps you have always wanted to know what the inspiration was behind Windows. Maybe you want to know what it is like being one of the world’s richest men. Or maybe you are more interested in the philanthropic career he has planned after he steps down.”

I know the answer to what was the inspiration behind Windows… it was the Apple Mac operating system. And as interesting as all those other questions sound, I’d just like to know about the roadmap for Microsoft Exchange (as it’s clearly too big a secret to share with the world). And actually I asked that one (can’t see it being selected), and just for fun I also asked “how many Zunes have you sold and when will you admit that Apple are just completely kicking your backside in that market?”.

The BBC have a charter which includes impartiality, so surely this means that Sam Palmisano will be next week’s guest question-answerer, followed by, oooh, perhaps Larry Ellison the week after. Maybe Steve Jobs (well, that wouldn’t surprise me). But probably not.

One thing I try to avoid is the fairly pointless feature war between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook… not because I think Notes will lose (far from it) but because it detracts from the true business value of the Notes client (collaboration, security, off-line usage, etc).

However (do you know where this is going?)… one thing sure to spark off at least fifty comments on Ed Brill’s blog is any entry that pitches Notes against Outlook. Whether it’s feature comparisons, usability, look ‘n’ feel or the fact that “everyone likes Outlook and uses it at home” the debate becomes heated.

So, with that in mind, I was interested when Ports informed me of an entry in the Microsoft Outlook Team blog. The article describes how an Outlook 2003 user could configure Outlook so that all messages, even those that were sent by the owner of the inbox, could be seen in threads in the inbox. Now, you’ll note it specifically says “Outlook 2003″ so I’d be interested to know if the same procedure is necessary in Outlook 2007 (answers here please).

The solution to this dilemma is to take all of the messages you sent and throw them back into the inbox folder. They call this the “Ultimate Inbox”. Personally I think this sounds like the ultimate nightmare. Your inbox is for incoming e-mails. Good e-mail management says that you should deal with e-mails, place them in folders, mark them for follow-up, archive them, or delete them. A clean inbox says you’re in control and can focus on your real job. An inbox with hundreds of e-mail means it’s out of control. Why the hell would you want to add more e-mails to your inbox?

Okay, perhaps I’m spoilt with Notes 8. The message threads in Notes 8 will draw the e-mails together regardless of where they are, whether they’re ones I’ve sent or ones I’ve received and placed in a folder. And it doesn’t matter where you look at the thread - you could start in a sub-folder or the ‘all documents’ view.

Finally, consider the fact that many people say Outlook is easier to use. Then take note of part of the instructions from the Outlook Team’s article:

“This rule makes copies of outgoing messages so you’ll end up with two copies, one in your Inbox and another in your Sent-Items folder. If you have a small mailbox quota you should prevent Outlook from keeping a copy of outgoing messages in the Sent-Items folder, clear Save copies of messages in Sent Items folder in the dialog below (screenshot omitted). Now you have the Ultimate Inbox!”.

The Ultimate Inbox which is potentially storing two copies of every e-mail. Personally I think Notes 8 offers the ultimate inbox. And we haven’t even started on the subject of searching yet.

Both Alan Lepofsky and Ed Brill have posted articles about extending Notes 8 through plug-ins and composite applications… but I thought I’d share this one with you, a great example of something being rolled out within IBM. Chris Freestone of the Lotus Technical Sales team here in the UK has developed a plug-in which provides members of the Financial Services business unit with a quick reference guide to who in Technical Sales (across the five IBM software brands) has expertise in which products.

The data source at the back-end is a good ol’ Domino database, but it could be anything (just a matter of Chris telling the Eclipse plug-in what to read). And you can see from the screenshot here that the names are made live by the wonders of Sametime… double-clicking starts a conversation with the person you’re looking for (even if they’re on a mobile device).

This is version 1.0, and I know that Chris already has some enhancements planned for the next upgrade (actually this should be version 1.0.1 because he did a small tweak to make it automatically collapsed when opened).

So, it’s a great example of quickly and easily extending Notes’ functionality, addresses a business requirement (quickly finding and connecting with people), and also demonstrates integration with other plugged-in solutions (i.e. Sametime). Nice one Chris. Try doing this with Outlook.