Ed Brill

Off for a few days

It's been pretty quiet on the blog side of things for a couple of weeks, mainly due to some short vacation stretches, but also the intensity of the end-of-quarter period and other goings-on in my personal life.  There's some irony to the silence, because the last two weeks have seen an incredible amount of interesting activity at work -- finalizing the business plan for Notes/Domino 8.5.1, starting discussions around "Notes 9" (in quotes because no formal announcement has been made), getting Symphony 1.3 out the door, seeing some great activity for products like Alloy, and looking at requirements for the next version of our hosted Notes offering, LotusLive Notes V2.  Oh, and I've been discussing with my colleagues in marketing about some cool new end-user awareness work they have in the pipeline...working on a guest blogger to tell you about this.

On the other side of a few days' vacation I have an important customer meeting and then three days of exec-u-training at the IBM Learning Center in Armonk, NY.  Things will continue to be a little quiet on the blog for another week or so.  I'm hoping that the intensity of schedule will build up a pipeline of blog topics...with all of the above going on, seems like there should be a lot to say.  Some of it is still "too early" but I think it will be worthwhile to bring some of these topics out for discussion soon.

For my American readers, have a safe and happy holiday.  For all, keep an eye on my Twitter stream for more frequent bits of news and discussion.

Lotus Mobile Connect

This week will mark nine months since my return to product management.  What I love about product management, as I think I've said before, is that every day brings an unlimited amount of opportunity to get involved in "stuff" -- the tactical and strategic decisions around what products we build and how they are brought to market.  The key to being successful in product management is to know which of those daily opportunities present the ability to be impactful, and which ones are too tactical or time-wasting.  For me, this is especially interesting triage because I own or contribute to a whole range of products -- not just the Notes/Domino core, but also Symphony, Alloy, Notes Traveler, and even lesser-known products like Lotus Mobile Connect.

I'm going to guess that most of you haven't heard of this product.  It is a VPN product that used to be WebSphere Everyplace Connection Manager (WECM).  I use it every day to connect my MacBook to the IBM corporate network...but it's an app I almost never think about.  See, Lotus Mobile Connect has one advantage over other VPN clients I've used before -- it's persistent.  I started it at some point, logged in, and never have to re-connect.  When I take the laptop out of standby, it re-establishes the VPN connection.  It even has roaming support, so if I switch networks, the connection remains intact.  Lotus Mobile Connect also has support for a gazillion clients and devices, and even has a client-less access mode to support tools like Lotus iNotes.

Lately, my team and I have been talking about plans for Lotus Mobile Connect.  One aspect of that decision-making is understanding where we are at in the market.  I realize that VPN software is pretty commoditized at this point, but perhaps it will be useful to some of you to know that there is another option available with an IBM Lotus name.  And hopefully, some of those interesting tactical decisions over the last few weeks will lead to something more interesting for Lotus Mobile Connect in the future.

What kind of applications do you run on the Notes client stand-alone?

Having some interesting discussions these days about the Notes client as an end-user tool all by itself.  In most organizations, the value of Notes is tied directly to the Domino server deployment -- in other words, everyone is running apps that are served by Domino or integrated with Domino.  The personal address book, journal, plug-ins/widgets, and Symphony are components of Notes 8, though, that deliver value in the end-user's own desktop environment, not related to a connection to Domino.

Are there other Notes applications that you and/or your organization use widely that run stand-alone on your Notes clients, not connected to Domino?  Is this a big portion of Notes usage in the market today?

Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime announced at Enterprise 2.0

This is pretty cool stuff...

IBM today announced that a new service, Virtual Collaboration for Lotus Sametime, is now available. The service allows Lotus Sametime users to set up and use virtual meeting spaces securely behind-the-firewall with avatars. ...

Using Sametime 3D, people can select colleagues from their Lotus Sametime contact list, and then invite them to participate in a virtual meeting. Participants can meet in a boardroom, an auditorium or a collaboration space.

Once they enter the virtual meeting, avatars can use text or voice chat, or both, to communicate. They can then share presentations or other materials, and take notes using virtual flip charts. In the collaboration space, they can share ideas and other information on a brainstorm wall. Participants can then store, update, prioritize and vote on this information. Content can be imported and acted upon both in and out of the virtual meeting space.

Link: Made in IBM Labs: Secure, 3D Meeting Service Now Available with Lotus Sametime >

A week left to go in Microsoft’s FUDscal year is when the lies come out

Those wacky Microsoft salespeople are at it again, taking a regular play out of their playbook for recycling as they try to close those last "Notes Compete wins" in order to stay employed.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, so twice today, I've been asked to "prove" that 8.x is not the last release of Notes/Domino.

It amazes me that a company that goes 3-4 years between major releases ever tries to use this technique.  We've shipped major releases of Notes/Domino on a 12-24 month cycle going all the way back to 2002.  Since Notes 6, Microsoft has managed to eke out two releases of Office, Exchange, and SharePoint.  Those software assurance dollars have been essentially thrown away, especially as it pertains to the Windows operating system.  Still, in a "do as I say, not as I do" measure, the FUD spins up to high cycle at this time of year, and they will throw out any old tired technique.

It's really getting old, guys.

In my current Notes/Domino strategy presentation, we talk about a next major release, likely to be called "Notes/Domino 9".  It's only in quotes because it's not a formal announcement.  We've been busy building 8.5.1, and haven't wanted to lose sight of that.  But remember how we announced "Hannover" before we had shipped Notes/Domino 7?  I assure you we will be talking about the next major release of Notes/Domino in detail well before we ship 8.5.2.  The hundreds of people building Notes/Domino today are on a mission, and that mission is going to run for a long time to come.  Heck, at 20 years old in December, we're just getting started!

Microsoft might be willing to say whatever it takes to get things done right now because so many of the things they've said before are failing right now.  At Gartner's recent portal and collaboration conference, analyst Matt Cain's presentation on e-mail even highlighted the Lotus Notes client as a model for the future of e-mail.  That's gotta sting in Outlook-land.  Wish I could quote the presentation directly, but I'm sure someone who was there will chime in with Cain's exact quote.  Another good example is the recent bankruptcy filing of one of their case study references for migration to Exchange Online, Eddie Bauer.  Guess that whole migration-in-a-weekend thing didn't help much.

Meanwhile, I'm hearing that my own sales team is closing deals with customers who had made decisions to migrate to Microsoft and have decided to rethink that.  One of these days, I'm going to get someone on record as saying "our migration to Exchange cost way more than we thought, and we are still running Notes years later".  You know who you are.

I would encourage anyone who is hearing this kind of FUD in their organizations to outreach to me or anyone in their IBM sales team.  I'd love nothing more than to make that "trusted" Microsoft salesperson just another hustler trying to close a deal.  It has certainly happened before.

Guy Creese: Looking for People to Interview on Productivity Suites

I suppose my mere linking to this violates Guy's request, but since my team and I are speaking to him tomorrow, I certainly want to help him out:

As I hinted in yesterday's post, I'm writing a quadrant report on office productivity suites. The list includes:

   * Corel WordPerfect Office
   * Google Apps, Premier Edition
   * IBM Lotus Symphony
   * Microsoft Office
   * OpenOffice.org
   * OpenOffice.org, Novell Edition
   * Sun StarOffice
   * ThinkFree
   * Zoho

While I've talked to some reference customers supplied by the vendors, I'd like to talk to some customers who haven't been cherry-picked. So if you're an IT manager responsible for purchasing one of the above packages and are willing to spend half an hour answering 36 questions, I'd like to talk to you.

Guy is with Burton Group.

Link: Guy Creese: Looking for People to Interview on Productivity Suites >

Two more awesome Domino 8.5 DAOS success stories

Caught a couple of blog entries highlighting real-world success with the Domino 8.5 DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) feature, with 25-50% savings in their real-world environments.

Dutch partner Eniac Essentials posted a story of a customer with 7000 Domino users and what was 4 TB of mail...

We where able to reduce the storage on the archive servers with around 750GB in total, this cleared the way to archive mailservers again an perform the same DAOS action again on newly archived files and added storage making 400GB of space in the mailservers.

    * Arch01 uses 950 GB for NSF data and 325 GB for DAOS, while the logical size of all NSF files is 1,7 TB
    * Arch02 uses 1430 GB for NSF data and 275 GB for DAOS, while the logical size of all NSF files is 2,0 TB

Since we now use DAOS we can change our back-up strategy, total back time is reduces with several hours in total.

The University of Windsor (Canada) also posted a "DAOS Rocks!" blog entry, including smiling faces of administrators:

1.3 GB on a server with DAOS versus 3.1 GB on a server without DAOS. Just by converting the mail file replica on TRITON to ODS 51 and enabling DAOS on it (compact -c), I brought the size down to 1.3 GB (see fig2). I just recovered 1.8 GB of disk space from one mail file.  ...

Overall, we recovered about 200 GB of storage space on each clustered server after implementing DAOS. 3 x 200 GB, that's 600 GB of space back to the pool.  ...

After we implemented DAOS on all mail archives on HADES, we recovered 600 MB of storage space on that partition. That's more that 1/3 of the space previously used to store these files.

We're turning some of these into reference stories, and am always happy to have additional real world successes to highlight.  What's yours?

I’ll be at IamLUG in St. Louis in August

My summertime travel schedule is shaping up and I'm excited to confirm that I will be part of the first Iam Lotus User Group, 3/4 August in St. Louis.  Some of the speakers and sponsors have been announced for the event and include "names you must know" from the Lotus community and other events.  Early session lists are up, and more are being added.  Should be a great week, on many fronts....

A few weeks later, I'll also be at the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference in Chicago on August 27/28.  From the looks of the travel schedule, I'll be coming home directly from an Australian visit the day before, so it will be worth the price of admission to see me present immediately after 24 hours in transit.  Both events are sure to be timely as we get closer to 8.5.1 release and talk about 2010 and beyond.

Lotus Symphony 1.3 availability announced!

Lotus Symphony 1.3 has been announced!  The press release and some early coverage are available:

IBM's alternative to Microsoft Office 2007 makes cost-free document software a legitimate option for many companies around the business world which want to realize cost-efficiencies in the current economic climate but require assurance of the quality and reliability of the technology. ...

"IBM is delivering on its commitment to free businesses and consumers from having to pay licensing fees over and over just to access their own personal or company information," said Kevin Cavanaugh, VP of Lotus Software. "Now, it will be much harder to justify paying Office licensing fees when you can preserve and access your Office documents for free using Lotus Symphony."

The press release highlights additional customers who are deploying or piloting Symphony, and the real cost savings associated with their choice.  Surveys indicate that 25% of Notes customers are piloting or deploying Symphony as part of Notes 8.x client upgrades.  A huge win for the power of the product, and its price tag.

Symphony 1.3 adds support for reading Office 2007 file formats (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) so when your friends at Microsoft send you something, you'll be able to read it.  This was one of the remaining deployment blockers for some organizations.  The development team put a huge amount of effort into performance and fidelity of these Office 2007 format readers....way faster and better than what's in OpenOffice today.  We'll contribute back some of the key components as appropriate to the OpenOffice.org community.

There are many other improvements in Symphony 1.3, including better launch/load on the Mac, better table-of-contents generation, better mail merge, and better data pilots.  Congratulations to the entire team on their achievement.

Now, we will shift gears and focus on the next major release of Symphony, targeted for 2010.  In this version, we will incorporate the OpenOffice 3.x base, ODF 1.2 support, VBA support, and other key enhancements.  The Symphony is just warming up :-)

Link: symphony.lotus.com: Download Lotus Symphony 1.3 today >
Link: IBM: IBM Unleashes New Symphony for Millions of Microsoft Office Customers >
Link: ComputerWorld: Lotus Symphony now reads Office 2007 documents >

Lotus Symphony has Microsoft flailing for new Office distribution model

In January, IBM announced the first pre-load agreement for Lotus Symphony with our partner Archos.  The Archos 10 netbook includes Symphony as part of the out-of-the-box functionality.

Last week, Archos announced a new 10s netbook.  Interestingly, the 10s includes Office 2007 -- unusual for any laptop or netbook.  Normally, adding Microsoft Office to a new PC is an additionally-purchased item -- at Dell and Lenovo right now, this charge can be anywhere from US$90 to US$150 for basic editions.  Yet the Archos 10s netbook comes with Microsoft Office for free:

ARCHOS is granting you a 12 month free licence. Beyond this period, you can choose whether you want to buy it or not. It's your call.

OK, wait a second.  A 12-month timebombed version of Microsoft Office?  This is a brand-new approach from Microsoft...not available from the big names.  Of all the places for it to crop up, it shows up with the organization that happens to be IBM's first OEM agreement distributor for Symphony.

Microsoft is scared of Lotus Symphony -- scared enough to give away Office.  Sure, they probably figure the "hook" is that the netbook user will use Office for a year and then be likely to license it...try and buy is not a bad distribution tactic.  But it's one that they are not using anywhere else.  For good reason, too.  Microsoft's financials indicate that over 80% of the revenue for the Windows operating system comes from OEM distribution.  The percentage is likely lower for Microsoft's Business Division, which has those lock-in Enterprise Agreements in place.  Still, OEM is a pretty important part of the $19 billion division's revenue.

If a 12-month try-and-buy were to become the norm for Microsoft Office distribution, a whole lot of $90-150 purchases would be deferred, perhaps never to happen.  All the more reason why consumers should be wondering right about now why this one particular Netbook is going to come with Microsoft Office for free, while PCs charge extra?  This must be what Microsoft meant in this March quote from Stephen Elop:

"There are new ways to package and monetize SKUs that are unique to the netbook market. From the Office perspective if someone is spending just a few hundred dollars on a netbook, how much will they spend on productivity software?"

The Motley Fool got it right two weeks ago when they said that "Microsoft Fears the Netbook".  That fear is translating into a desperate move to give away Microsoft Office.  

The response from other PC and netbook manufacturers is obvious, right?  Give me a call -- we'll happily put together an agreement to help you distribute Lotus Symphony at no charge, too.

Guess the vacation location 09: Part 2

This game is a lot less fun when the very first guess on the very first picture gets it right.  At least with Starbucks as the food chain last year, I kept y'all guessing a little while.  Another good option would have been a picture of a Toyota Prius -- the unofficial local mascot.

Here was part 2, which, combined with part 1, pretty well would have given it away anyway.  My Nikon was inadvertently left behind in Chicago, so the very noisy picture below is the best we'll get this trip.  In person, the pandas were much cooler. The outdoor, daylight pics are pretty good with the Casio, and we're having a good time this week.  Was great to see Jack Dausman briefly today (who very kindly brought some momentos from his employer for my daughter), too.  Heading home Wednesday and back at it all on Thursday.  I know, a very short vacation, even by US standards, but I have more time off coming up (and will write more about that shortly).

Guess the vacation location 09: Part 1

Nokia E72 announced today; first mobile phone with Lotus Notes Traveler pre-installed

Earlier today, Nokia announced the new E72:

Swift, slim and resourceful are three words that accurately describe the new Nokia E72, which was unveiled at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore today. Nokia's latest full QWERTY smartphone brings a rich mobile email and instant messaging experience right out of the box, making it the ideal device for people that want to be productive in both their personal and professional lives.

I was especially happy to see this in the press release:

On top of these developments, for the first time, owners will be able to set up instant messaging (IM) accounts provided by Nokia Messaging direct from the homescreen. ...These new IM features are complimented by Nokia's range of email solutions with a lifetime license for Nokia's mobile email and IM service, Nokia Messaging, as well as onboard clients for Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler.

The Nokia E72 thus becomes the very first mobile device to feature out-of-the-box support for Lotus Notes Traveler.  The Lotus brand and Nokia teams are proud of this milestone.  Can't find any screen shots that feature this support yet, but when I get them, I'll update this post.

Link: Nokia.com: Nokia E72 unveiled -- pics and video >

Reflections on 15 years at Lotus

I started working at Lotus Development Corporation on June 14, 1994.  My story today is hardly the longest tenure or most unique among colleagues who have been here for 20 or more years.  Still, it seems like a fairly opportune moment, especially in the solitude of a vacation trip, to reflect on the last fifteen years of my professional life.

When I joined Lotus in 1994, I had been a cc:Mail administrator for a couple of years.  I was responsible for the first major rollout of Lotus Organizer 1.1 for group scheduling, and I had been trained as a Lotus Notes 2.1 administrator.  Lotus products were behind a lot of my success as an IT guy.  In short, when Jon Raslawski called and asked if I wanted to interview for a sales engineer position at Lotus, I was on cloud nine.  I was interviewed by seven different people (and hurriedly bought two suits and three ties) before receiving the coveted job offer.

My instincts at the beginning were not quite so honed.  I was worried that I had joined Lotus "too late", and that four years in, perhaps Lotus Notes had peaked already.  This was reflected in my question to Jim Manzi during "Pespectives", the two-week sales training class for new hires.  I asked Manzi, "What comes after Notes?"  He replied, "more Notes".  And he was very, very right.

In 1994, I spent a fair bit of my time as a sales engineer on products like SmartSuite, cc:Mail, Organizer, even Lotus Improv.  Notes still cost US$495 a user and ran on OS/2 servers.  There was no Exchange, and my main competitive worry with Microsoft was around Office 95.  We still shipped shrinkwrap boxes of software, and were just starting to introduce "Lotus yellow".  During one of my first sales calls, I wanted to take notes in Notes on the conversation with the customer...popped out my monochrome Compaq 386/25 laptop....and was promptly told by my sales partner to use a pen and paper in order to be "quiet".

I wasn't much for the rumor mill in the early days.  I was on a sales call at Motorola, one of my early large clients, when one of the sales reps mentioned that word on the street was that either AT&T, who was building Network Notes, or IBM, who was working with Lotus on SmartSuite for OS/2, would buy Lotus.  In the era before the Internet, I found out about the IBM acquisition through a phone call (to a landline phone, of course) from my mom, who had heard the news on the radio.  Oddly, word had not even made it around the Lotus Chicago office yet that morning.

With much hindsight, IBM should have integrated Lotus into the bigger company much sooner.  It was awesome to operate as "Lotus, we're part of IBM" for a long time.  Clearly, many of the things we did back then (yes, including Denis Leary and R5) were unique traits of being a subsidiary and able to act independently.  But Lotus wouldn't be here today if it were not for IBM, and IBM brought much-needed structure and rigor to the organization.  There is nothing that riles me up more than when I hear how IBM is killing Lotus (or Notes specifically), or how IBM will do to Lotus Notes what it did to OS/2.  When IBM acquired Lotus, we had sold around 3 million licenses of Notes...or more than 142 million since.  Even if some of those were shelfware or whatever, so what.  Under IBM, Notes has grown into a significant and successful business.  There are some amazing memories of the time when Lotus was operating independently, but plenty of challenging times, too.

What I originally envisioned as a two-year job has turned into an incredible, exciting, and successful career.  I have held nine different positions over the last fifteen years, including three product management roles, two four-year sales stints, and a slew of marketing and strategy jobs.  I moved to Boston from 1998 to 2000 to be part of the product organization around Notes...a couple of trips to Lotusphere and a week spent in Cambridge had convinced me how exciting it would be to actually work on building the product and market.  I would say those two years were my coming of age.  I started traveling the world, doing multi-million dollar deals, and making decisions with real impact.  The 75 or so of us who were Notes product management and marketing back then all share some great memories...I think 2/3rds of that team still works in IBM, and most continue to work in Lotus-related positions today.

The early part of this decade was a rapid succession of different positions.  I was one of IBM's early pioneers for telecommuting, and an early adopter of blogging and other social media tools as part of my job.   The positions I held from 2000-2004 taught me a ton about operating a business...that was my on-the-job MBA.  In 2004, I was fortunate enough to be in the right place when Ambuj Goyal started the process of increasing investment in Lotus Notes, and a product sales position was created for me.  The irony at the time was that the very week I moved into that job, my career was embroiled in controversy as a result of this blog and an analyst firm's astroturfing.  The analyst firm said Notes was dead, and when I asserted that not only were they wrong, it was my personal mission to ensure they would be wrong on all predictions, they tried to have me fired instead.  Today, if you go back and read the analysis, they were wrong on all accounts (both Lotus- and non-Lotus related), and well, I would say my career did OK in the aftermath.

2004-2008 is when many of you first met me, on this blog or at conferences or user groups.  Though there were many battles, externally and also internally, these years put Notes back in the revenue growth column, and solidified many of your investments.  The competitive landscape was incredibly challenging, with Microsoft (by my estimate) spending $100 million to try to kill Notes.  Yet for four straight years, we grew revenue and the active number of end-users on maintenance contracts.  The coming together of the Lotus community was and is absolutely a key part of that success.  My own personal sense of accomplishment from this time period is measured in your success, and in knowing that every one of us, perhaps even the naysayers and egobloggers, helped get Notes where it is today.

Eight months ago, Bob Picciano, Kevin Cavanaugh, and many others brought me into the IBM executive ranks.  While my perspective and workload have changed, my passion has not.  I now work with a team of incredibly talented professionals across development, sales, marketing, and my own organization.  We have great ideas, and we're making as many of them happen as we possibly can.  Some problems are hard when you work with a set of products which have been in market for twenty years.  Others are simply opportunities for creative, smart business thinking.  Every day brings limitless opportunity to get involved in real-world decisions and customer situations, and the biggest challenge of the job is deciding which ones will be most impactful.  Some of our daily victories will never be celebrated in the public eye, while others are page one news in the Wall Street Journal.  No matter which type are on the agenda any given day, it's always going to be something interesting and challenging.

There is no way I would have hit this fifteen-year milestone without your daily inspiration, support, passion and creativity.  There are few jobs in the IT industry where the entire marketplace contributes directly to the success of a product or solution.  I'm frequently asked how much time I spend on the blog (or other social media) every day, and of late, my answer is, it doesn't matter.  It is some of the most valuable, interesting, and inspiring activity for me every single day.  For that, I thank all of you, past and present, who have been part of my career.  

Some day, I will write a book about the business side of Lotus Notes.  That book has been in my head for a long time.  I'd love to tell you more of the stories of the events, activities, and personalities that shaped this product's 20+ year history.  But I can't, not yet.  For while I have worked on this product a long, long time, I am but one of thousands of people who have been part of that fantastic story.  More importantly, we're nowhere near ready to write the climax, not even close to the last chapter.  It may be fifteen years today, but there is still much to do in the future.

Craig Roth: E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light

Burton Group's Craig Roth is thinking about e-mail overload:

The most popular "overload" topic in offices today is e-mail.  But after all these years of incremental improvement to IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, surely there can't be any low-hanging fruit left to pick to help people manage inbox overload.  Or is there?  ...

Here I use it [his Enterprise Attention Management Conceptual Architecture] as an intuition pump to reveal a set of potential enhancements to e-mail software that would improve its attentional characteristics.

Click on the thumbnail below and scroll around to see the ideas that came out of my informal analysis of e-mail.

Craig pinged me and asked, how many of these does Lotus Notes do?  I found a number of his ideas that are addressed, or can be through customization, within Notes/Domino.  But I thought a more interesting exercise, and a good way to keep the blog busy for a couple of days while I'm on vacation, is to ask you which of these attention management issues you've addressed in your e-mail environment.  Surely, someone will pay attention to this blog entry?

Link: Craig Roth: E-mail Overload: No Cure, but Enterprise Attention Management Can Shed Some Light >