Ed Brill

developerWorks Lotus: Introducing IBM Lotus Domino 8.0.1 Web Access Lite mode

A detailed new article covering the use of Domino Web Access lite mode.

Lotus Domino Web Access Lite is primarily intended for users accessing Lotus Domino Web Access over slower network connections, such as when traveling. Users accessing Lotus Domino Web Access at kiosks, where typically no design information is cached, also benefit from this new mode. Some developing nations have prohibitively expensive high-bandwidth networking costs, so in these regions, Lotus Domino Web Access Lite can provide access to mail without the need for a high-bandwidth network.

This article provides an in-depth introduction to Lotus Domino Web Access Lite, including accessing Lite mode, navigating the user interface, and working with your mail, calendar, and contacts. In addition, this article covers some of the functionality available in Lite mode, such as the rich text editor, type-ahead, spell check, and the support console, and it discusses the architecture and performance results of Lite mode.

Did you know that later this year, the "iNotes" brand will return instead of using Domino to describe DWA?

Link: developerWorks Lotus: Introducing IBM Lotus Domino 8.0.1 Web Access Lite mode >

Formula1 Turkish Grand Prix

Today was a great day out on the Asian side of Istanbul at the Turkish Grand Prix.  Arjan and I sat in the 2nd Tribune, which was a great vantage point to see almost everything except the grandstand area (and even that was visible if you walked a bit).



I had never been to any kind of auto race before -- to Joel Demay's Twitter question, I can't compare or contrast with Indy or Nascar.  What I do know is that the setting for the 2nd Tribune was more than a little austere.  Basically the same bleachers you'd find at any American high school football stadium, and really nothing else but a small TV screen so far away that I couldn't even read the standings through my telephoto lens.  There were a few porta-potties, and a really awful, limited concession stand, whose queue was at least 250 meters long at one point.



Still, these corners were a great place to sit, because it was both uphill and a set of tight turns.  That meant every driver had to downshift as they moved past us, and means that I was able to get some pretty good photos, even without a tripod.

   

The race was over pretty quick -- it certainly took longer either way to or from Sultanhamet in Istanbul.  Arjan Radder and I traveled there with a couple of men from Singapore, who said they had flown to Istanbul just for the race.  They sure knew a LOT about F1 and cars in general.  It was enjoyable to talk with them.

Overall, it was definitely a unique experience to actually go to the race.  I feel like we lost a little something not being able to see the pit action or much of anything on the TV projection.  They say that the Istanbul Grand Prix, now in its third year, has been growing and attracting local interest.  They sure had a lot of empty stands and a bit of infrastructure work they could do to make it a better experience (wider bridge/crosswalks and more of them would surely help).  Still, there's nothing quite like being there, and I'm glad I did it.



I'm in Athens now, and will be working Monday.  In the meantime, be sure to check out all the pictures I've posted so far from this trip in my flickr set for Istanbul and Athens.  Good night!

Istanbul Through the Lens

I had a mostly wonderful Saturday in Istanbul today, with highlights and new memories everlasting.  Amongst the bests today included shopping and lunch with some friends from back home who just happened to be in Istanbul this weekend (and not for the Formula 1), visiting the Hagia Sofia, and a three-hour private walking tour called, "Istanbul Through the Lens".  



When I booked this tour, I did not know nor expect to be the only one on it.  It was listed on the Formula1 website amongst the things to do in Istanbul while here for the race.  So I was quite surprised when I turned up for the tour to find that my guide, Ali, was waiting just for me.  Even better, he turned out to be a Nikon shooter as well, which meant he was able to teach me a lot about my D50 and even share lenses throughout the day.



Ali is an incredible photographer, and all the moreso because it turns out it is his hobby rather than profession.  Oh my did I learn a lot as we walked through the streets of Istanbul for three hours, taking hundreds of photos using a variety of techniques, tips, and trying experiments.



I'm nowhere near done uploading shots, and I'd sure like to have some time with the Macintosh to do some editing, but today was so cool that I thought I would share some of the work we did.  For example, we spent several minutes talking about portrait or candid people photography.  Some of you are aware that I have had a tendency to shoot photos sans humans, or shy away from taking "in your face" people pictures.  Ali helped with friendly words to potential subjects, along with encouragement to me.  He suggested simple techniques like always offering to show someone the picture you've taken of them.  That all worked well with this prayer bead seller at a mosque...I'm still not sure which shot I like better.

   

If you look at Ali's work, you will see that he is a huge fan of patterns in photography, taking the detail out of the larger picture.  This is a technique I have successfully used in the past, and the Hagia Sofia provided several cool opportunities this morning.  



The tour was not inexpensive, but it was definitely worth it to learn so much in one afternoon.  Some of the things I learned from Ali -- I need more lenses (we almost never used my 70-300 zoom lens today, and I borrowed his cool wide-angle a few times), a couple more filters, an extra battery, and really, really really need a Nikon D300.

Whirling Dervish

Arjan did not enjoy the Sufi / Whirling Dervish show, but he was a good sport about going along with me.



As he pointed out to me, I watched the majority of the show through the lens.  I really struggled with low light, fast motion, and poor vantage points in order to make what appear to be 5-10 really good shots.  These Dervishes also did not seem quite to be into the show, with no emotion displayed at all.  Maybe that was part of the plan, but it was disappointing.  They also did not often position themselves in the Sufi pose of one hand outstretched to the sky and the other down to the Earth.  Not sure why.



But there were 100 other spectacular shots today in Istanbul, and this was a day of teambuilding and internal meetings.  



Tomorrow I will be on a four hour walking tour called "Istanbul through the lens".  It appears I may be the only one on this tour, which is lead by a local professional.  I can't wait to pick up some even-better shots.

Thank you also to Murat Tuzum, the Lotus sales manager in Turkey, for being a wonderful host today.



Rob McDonagh says he got something out of my Twitter stream today.... a feeling of being here.  I hope I can provide the same over the next few days of travel, both in Istanbul and in my onward stop in Athens.  Many, many more images coming to Flickr.  For now, it is a very late good night.

Reuters: PluggedIn: Free software takes on Microsoft Office

Nice mention of Lotus Symphony in the mainstream press...

Rob Tidrow, a computer programmer who has written several guides to using Microsoft Office, says that Symphony does not lack many features that even power users of Office need.

Tidrow, who just finished writing "IBM Lotus Symphony for Dummies," said he installed the IBM program on computers that his two children use, but it is also robust enough to meet the needs of churches, schools and small businesses.

"They can save hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars by using free software," he said.

What I thought was really interesting in this article was the competitive quote from Redmond...

Kirk Gregersen, a Microsoft product manager, says that cost is generally not a prime deciding factor for Office customers.

Surveys show that price is generally the eighth most important factor, he said.

Putting aside how offensive it sounds to me that a vendor with an expensive product claims that price isn't a deciding factor, the issue is that "deciding factor[s]" for Office customers have been mostly about inertia and interoperability.  With new options in the market, customers can re-open an area where they have made default, no alternative available decisions for too long, and spent their budget dollars with it.  Cost may not have been a prime deciding factor, but it is open to becoming one, whether through OpenOffice, Symphony, Google Docs, or other emerging alternatives that commoditize the existing way and create room for new options and models.

Link: Reuters: PluggedIn: Free software takes on Microsoft Office >

Lotusphere Comes to You, Istanbul

Over 300 attended today's Lotusphere Comes to You event in Istanbul.  This was the first ever LCTY here -- in previous years, Lotus has participated in a SWG Forum event, but not a stand-alone Lotus event.  Both of the reporters I interviewed with wanted to know, why now for an LCTY?  The answer -- IBM considers Turkey to be an emerging market, in the same broad category as India, China, Brazil, Russia, Romania, Vietnam, etc.  And when 300+ turn up, that seems to be solid validation of the thinking.

I did not get the chance to have too many one-on-one conversations with customers or partners here -- they were too busy!  Check out these crowd shots from the coffee break...





Tomorrow's schedule has some internal meetings, and I'm staying here in Istanbul for the weekend.  Plans include an "Istanbul through the lens" tour as well as, hopefully, a flight reschedule that will allow me to get out to Sunday's Formula1 race.  We shall see.......

Mainsoft announces SharePoint integrator for Lotus Notes

Depending on when I get a chance to replicate after this flight, Mainsoft has either already announced or is about to announce their new SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes.  First previewed at Lotusphere, this is a Notes 8 add-on that surfaces SharePoint content in the Notes 8 sidebar through the use of the Eclipse plug-in technologies.  The use case is that end-users in organizations where both Notes and SharePoint are being used for collaboration now have the ability to directly drag-and-drop between the two environments, and open documents stored in SharePoint from within the Notes client environment.

While ideally, we'd be having a conversation with Notes customers about Quickr as having similar functions to this typical use of SharePoint, the reality in some organizations is that SharePoint is "in', and not going anywhere.  Since we've seen in talking with vendors and customers that 80% of the SharePoint use case is "file server 2.0", the Mainsoft integration is a logical way to have both products peacefully coexist.

More information is (or shortly will be) on the Mainsoft website on the product page, "Integrate SharePoint into Lotus Notes" >

RIM certifies BES 4.1.5 with Domino 8.0.1

Just before I got aboard this flight to Munich, I received e-mails from IBM's Philipe Loher and RIM's Valerie Wang.  Both of them wrote to let me know that RIM is now supporting the Domino 8.0.1 release specifically with BES 4.1.5.  RIM has put a new webpage up on their website to highlight this support: www.blackberry.com/go/nd8.  This is great news, and I want to thank both the RIM and Lotus teams for getting this support done quickly.

I'm seeing a rapid increase in ISV support specifically for ND8 in the market.  The leading anti-spam and anti-virus vendors are now supporting Domino 8 on most platforms, and many of the tools vendors are as well.  All this aligns well with the hundreds of ND8 deployments we're already tracking, including 88 IBM references that have been published or are already complete.

Two new members of my team are aboard

Back in February, I blogged that my role this year at IBM Lotus would be expanding, with additional worldwide sales leaders being added for Lotus Notes and Domino.  It took a few months, but yesterday we announced internally that David Via and Gary Kearney have joined my team and are quickly getting up to speed.  David started in last month with some presentations at internal Lotus training events, and he will head to Japan later this month to continue that effort.  Gary is in transition out of a role in IBM Global Business Services, and was at The View's Admin2008/Developer2008 with me on Thursday last week to start meeting customers and partners in the Lotus world.

David's name may be familiar to some of you, as he has been in the Lotus community for 15+ years.  Most recently prior to joining IBM, he was with Wolcott Systems and was a contributing analyst to Ferris Research.  In his first two years within Lotus, David was a key member of our competitive engagement team, working on key IBM Lotus wins and defends.  Some of you may have seen David present at Lotusphere 2008 (along with Charlie Burke) on "recipes from the kitchen of a collaboration bake-off".  It's great to have David's depth and breadth of expertise on the team.  He is already plugged into some of our key 2008 efforts, including Project "Atlantic" (SAP integration).

Gary's name will be new to 99% in the community.  I made a deliberate and conscious decision to hire someone from outside the Lotus team, wanting to bring in a fresh viewpoint to counterbalance any inevitable eye towards history that David and I might apply to situations.  Gary's been a really successful IBM product sales leader, working in several different parts of the organization for over 12 years.  He came highly recommended, and says he is pretty excited to get involved in an end-user product like Notes.  In addition to core Notes/Domino, Gary will also be working with the Lotus Symphony team as they get closer to general availability of their first release and develop references, deployments,and roadmaps.

IBM typically doesn't spend a lot of time advertising our organization chart externally.  Gary, David, and I work with thousands of IBMers around the world who are directly or indirectly responsible for Notes/Domino sales to customers, along with partners and directly with customers.  It's great to have the additional resource, especially with the continued revenue growth IBM has been reporting in this product family.

I'm not sure how quickly either of them will be guest blogging on edbrill.com, but I look forward to sharing additional perspectives from them with you all in the coming weeks.

Admin2008 and Developer2008: Now that’s a great conference

There are a number of Admin2008 / Developer2008 wrap-up blog postings showing up -- Kevin Kanarski, Kevin Pettit, Jess Stratton, and many others.  It was great to be a part of the event, if just for one day.

Still, the real measure of success for a conference is what the attendees felt about it.  Today, Allison Martin (conference producer) wrote with these statistics:

The conference went very well.  The Developer event finished with an approval rating of 98.5% (up from 97% last year) and the Admin event ended with a 99.3% approval rating.  So all in all it was a very successful event!

Congratulations to Allison and the whole team at Wellesley Information Services (I know I will forget some names if I try to name them all).  Those ratings are a testimonial to your efforts, to the presenters, and to the community.  Thanks again for letting me be part of it!

Doubling down on an interesting blogger phenomena

In the last few months I've noticed an increase in an interesting communication style.  I'm on the receiving end of what has become a near-daily volley of "could you consider blogging this" kinds of requests.  That in and of itself isn't new....it's been happening for a year or two.  The requests are quite varied -- some are mass-mailed press releases, some are business partners or other vendors asking for mentions, some are customers looking for advice or help with issues, and some are IBM colleagues or others looking for visibility for their projects.

First, let me make this clear -- I like to hear from you.  I wouldn't post a "contact me" link on the blog, or feature my e-mail address in a zillion other places, if I was trying to cut down or off these external communications.  The e-mails, IMs, and other communications I get are what really help me stay in touch with the pulse of the market.

However, it's a little frustrating to deal with multiple attempts for attention.  I'm not sure there is a way to manage it, but sometimes I get the same communication three or four times -- work e-mail, personal e-mail, txt, twitter, cell phone call, etc.

The more difficult challenge these days is the "double down".  I've seen it for years in e-mail, when someone sends out a request for help.  When they don't get a response in ten minutes, they try someone else, not alerting the first person that they're now trying a second person, nor letting the second know that they've already tried the first.  Or, in an attempt to make their request more personalized, they take essentially the same communication and send it to more than one person simultaneously (or nearly so).   My colleague Jack calls this a "spray-and-pray"...in the blog world, perhaps it's like a "poke-and-hope".

The problem with these is that it almost always comes out that they've done a mass-customized e-mail.  If I see another IBMer blog about a topic that someone contacted me about, the feeling is not very positive.  I realize that I was just another port in the storm, a possible avenue for the message.  Or, sometimes, they've e-mailed the same message to a close friend of mine, and we compare notes and find that the same request came both ways.

In the end, the tactic isn't all that different than a PR agency pitching reporters (and as we all know, bloggers have in some ways become additions to the PR beat).  Still, when a story is being pitched, it is usually made clear that it is a general market pitch, or offered as an exclusive, or there is a part of the message that is hoped to be unique from the perspective of the person being pitched.  I'd like to think I add a personal and/or unique perspective to everything I post here.  Frankly, when I don't, y'all usually smell the stinker, and I get very few comments.  Thus, I'd like to find a way to continue to be approachable, useful, and interesting, without being redundant or another voice in the echo chamber.

As readers, how are you dealing with multiple similar inputs or content?

Network World: IBM unveils Quickr tools to stave off SharePoint

Some press coverage yesterday on Lotus Quickr Content Integrator...

IBM Lotus Quickr Content Integrator provides wizards and templates for moving content in mass to Quickr from SharePoint sites, Microsoft Exchange folders, IBM Lotus Domino Document Manager libraries and IBM Lotus Domino team room applications.

The Content Integrator also supports co-existence of data on multiple platforms during an elongated migration, including synchronization capabilities.  ...

The Content Integrator is based on software from Casahl Technology, which for years has offered elegant migration tools to move users between the Lotus and Microsoft platforms.

Link: Network World: IBM unveils Quickr tools to stave off SharePoint >

Admin2008: Sending a Message to Management: How to keep Lotus Notes and Domino in your Company

During Admin2008 here in Boston, I lead a birds-of-a-feather session yesterday called, "Sending a Message to Management: How to keep Lotus Notes and Domino in your Company".   There were about 80 people in attendance... as I said at the start of the session, I considered the attendance a "win" because at this very same (and equally well-attended) conference two years ago, I had 125 people attend a similar session.  The situation is improving.

I spent the first several minutes discussing the state of the Notes business, mainly in terms of statistics -- 40% market share according to IDC, 46,000 active (= on maintenance) customers, 10% growth in active end-users, revenue growth in 13 of the last 14 quarters, 850 developers within IBM working on the Notes/Domino platform, wins as big as 200,000 seat deals so far this year.  I realize that upfront five or ten minutes might have been a bit overwhelming, but the point was to show, this is a business IBM is investing in, continues to invest in, and as we move forward towards public beta of 8.5 and 9.0 and beyond releases, will be here for a long time.

Then we started open discussion. I really wanted it to be a collaborative discussion, with input from the audience as much as from me.  For a few minutes, we got some good comments and questions -- talk about positioning versus SharePoint (which I also talked about from the perspective of integration with SharePoint, more on that next week too), some solid questions about what's going on to make rollout and consumability of Notes 8 easier, end-user reactions.

From there, though, we took a turn around that dark corner and I felt like we stepped away from a collaboration, sharing kind of session to a "what are you IBM going to do about..." approach.  The first step, 22 minutes in, was the "Lotus marketing sucks" lob.  Then, as I started talking about user acceptance of Notes 8 -- that in all of the technical, head-to-head user acceptance "bake-offs" we did since notes 8 shipped, users have chosen to stay with or adopt Notes 8.  Someone in the audience started visibly showing disagreement with my statement.  Her challenge was, "I don't believe you.  In my market, you are losing every major law firm to Microsoft."  

Note that I was talking about technical bake-offs, but now we were off in a different direction, about a concentrated "groupthink" situation going on in one industry segment, without (in many cases) any technical evaluation or business case.  I tried to explain that these variables are different in every company that considers moving away from Notes, and that looking at what is going on in the business that is causing the consideration or migration is critical.  Unfortunately, it seems a few came to the session looking for "silver bullets" -- the answer on what specifically to do next.

Problem being, that answer is different from company to company, industry to industry, and even country to country.  A lot of the information and technology used is the same, but the tactical how to do it is different.  

My hope in running the Birds of a Feather was to share some practical experiences and ideas, some information, and make some contacts and introductions.  Perhaps the title was a bit misleading -- we simply can't go into a room with 75 different companies for 45 minutes and come up with the single right answer for all.  But I am always happy to have the individual conversation -- I, and my team, and our SWAT teams, and our specialists, etc.  

As I said at the end of the session, I was also at the "meet the experts" from 6 PM to 7 PM last night, and would have been happy to carry on the conversations from the Birds-of-a-Feather (which ran over time to begin with).  Alan Lepofsky and I had six guys sit down with us at the start of the hour, and only one or two other attendees joined as the evening progressed.  I am not sure if the full table scared off anyone else from joining -- if so, my apologies, we really WANTED to talk to as many people as possible!  Be sure to reach out to me via e-mail, IM, twitter, or comment here.

See you all next time!

ChiefTech: Social Productivity: A strategic choice or Web 2.0 revolution?

James Dellow follows up on a Sam Lawrence thought regarding social productivity...

It reminded me that many years ago I heard Dale Chatwin talk about the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a government organisations, as a Lotus Notes case study. A quick search actually turned up a case study (PDF) about this particularly story, which dates back to the 1990s. It makes interesting reading in light of Sam's ideas, since this organisation did exactly what he describes as "Social Productivity" - they developed databases ....

Even closer to Sam's vision, the organisation's "elimination of desktop word processors" means that for majority of users at the time the office suite was embedded as part of the Lotus Notes "browser" (i.e. the Lotus Notes client).  ...

I wonder if they were attempting to do this now, what would be more important - the strategic decision to implement a social productivity approach or the quality of the user experience in our Web 2.0 environment. What do you think?

It's interesting to see this public discussion of the Australian Bureau of Statstics and their use of Notes.  I have been fortunate to meet up with the ABS Notes team on a visit to Canberra in late 2006.  The ABS case study referenced by Dellow's blog -- over 30 pages long -- documents what continues today to be one of the most advanced, most on-target uses of Lotus Notes that exists anywhere in the world.

The ABS team made a strategic decision a decade ago to "live in Lotus Notes", and proceeded to build their applications around the idea that Notes would be the window to all knowledge in their organization.  As it says in the case study:

The ABS has, in fact, long been internationally recognised as the world's leading organisation in handling information and knowledge in the domain of statistics.

and they are not being boastful when they say it.  Some incredibly impressive stuff, well worth reading.

What to make of Dellow's closing question -- how would this be approached in today's web 2.0 environment?  Many of today's collaborative software products are optimized around the idea of collaborative editing, while others (including Lotus's own Quickr) still are modeled around a check-in check-out, sequential workflow mindset.  Is there a  "right" approach?

One side note: The ABS team deserves special recognition for somehow figuring out my home address and mailing me a Christmas card there in both 2006 and 2007.  They certainly didn't get it from me.

Link: ChiefTech: Social Productivity: A strategic choice or Web 2.0 revolution? >

White House e-mail again in the news...

While I was off teaching at the Lotus Top Gun training class (for new IBM Lotus hires and business partners) today, several readers sent me links to various news reports on the latest in the US White House e-mail story.

From Ars Technica, "An elephant never forgets? George W. Bush's lost e-mails":

When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.

Instead, the White House has instituted a comically primitive system called "journaling," in which (to quote from a recent Congressional report) "a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a 'journal' e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees." These would be manually named and saved as ".pst" files on White House servers.

One of the more vocal critics of the White House's e-mail-retention policies is Steven McDevitt, who was a senior official in the White House IT shop from September 2002 until he left in disgust in October 2006. He points out what would be obvious to anyone with IT experience: the system wasn't especially reliable or tamper-proof.  ...

Even more troubling, due to a lack of redundancy and proper access controls, anyone with access to the White House servers could have tampered with or deleted the e-mails in the archives. And without adequate logging facilities, there might be no way to determine who might have tampered with the files or what might have been changed.

Over 1000 diggs and four pages of discussion tagged onto that article.

Slashdot also picked up the Ars Technica article, over 500 comments logged there.  There, of course, you get more noise than signal, but there are some funny one-liners, including:

"Upgrading our Lotus Notes with Microsoft Exchange allowed White House staff to cut jail time by more than 83%."