Ed Brill

The Australian Bureau of Statistics is one of the most mature, invested Notes/Domino customers I have met anywhere in the world. They really understand the value of the platform they built, and in this story, are demonstrating why it makes sense to further that investment:The bureau adopted Lotus No...

ZDNet Asia has a story on how the IBM social business strategy relates to the existing business around Lotus Notes and Domino. Quotes included from Forrester's Michael Barnes and Constellation's Alan Lepofsky (who I coincidentally had dinner with last night...). But the best quote of the story came...

A few links that have floated my way in the last few days... PCMag.com: Google Engineer Fired for Accessing Teens' Gmail, Chat Log:Google this week confirmed that it fired an engineer who accessed the Gmail and Google Voice accounts of several minors and taunted those children with the information...

Earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a roundtable luncheon at the Chicago Tribune. The topic was small business in Chicago, and while IBM itself is anything but small, we do routinely work with small businesses. I know, the market perception is otherwise, but across IBM, the...

A few weeks ago, the Twitterati noticed that a netcast called "This Week in Technology" was taunting Howard Stern over his use of Lotus Notes. Stern has been a long-time Lotus technology customer, but TWiT-casters Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, and Gina Trapani had a nice laugh over it. Well, Howard re...

Not a formal announcement, of course, but an expression of interest...Earlier this week at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, IBM ( IBM - news - people ) announced new business-focused apps for the iPhone operating system, including Lotus Connections tool for social networking inside companie...

Remember the whole Comcast blocking Lotus Notes thing? A couple of years ago, Kevin Kanarski and other Lotus customers reported that there was something going on where they couldn't use Lotus Notes via Comcast broadband connections in the US. It took a while, but once I got involved and to the rig...

Having been a marketing dude for twenty years, I find that I am often fairly immune to being marketed to. I know all the messages designed to "save time and money", so traditional marketing rarely gets through to me. There are times, though, when I will eventually give in and pay attention, especi...

This came across one of my Google alerts today...I can't find anything about the site's ownership or background, so I am somewhat hesitant to post, but it is a dramatic story as told and seems relevant to this blog's readers:In the name of the Office Modernization Investment Project, UNICEF is spend...

Off-topic from my day job, but still relevant to the realm of collaboration and social networking...I'm looking for advice and guidance. It's slightly political, so if that kind of stuff on edbrill.com seems weird, please return tomorrow when we'll be back to talking about good new stuff around Not...

Oh noes, not again...The tech-savvy Obama White House is suffering the inconvenience and embarrassment of an e-mail crash that has lasted several hours this afternoon, according to published reports. The outage was announced at 1:30 p.m. during a regular briefing at which Press Secretary Robert Gib...

Gotta like when we have an advocate cheering us on to take out Exchange...perhaps what Obama's IT staff should really do is just do a mass replacement of the existing archaic Windows PCs and Microsoft systems with Macs and Linux-powered e-mail servers. For that matter, they could switch back to Lotu...

One of my co-workers sent me a link to this article earlier today, asking if I had a comment on the following quote:The cost of running Lotus Notes is killing a lot of companies. Companies like Virgin Atlantic are still going ahead with Notes-to-Exchange migrations because it's seen as worthwhilePre...

PC World covers the new report from Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz, "Notes Versus SharePoint: Which Collaboration Platform Is Right For You?":IBM still has an edge in providing third-party applications that run on Notes and Domino if companies want to use software from more than one vendor, accordi...

For the last couple of years, I've struggled with what to write on September 11. Last year, I said nothing at all, because, well, it feels at times like it's all been said already. But as an American who was profoundly saddened by loss of people I had met and worked with, along with people I had...

One of the big news stories in the tech world this week is how United Airlines stock plunged in value after an old (2002) Florida News-Sentinel story resurfaced and was mistakenly believed to be fresh news. The Times, among many others, covers it:Both human error and far-from-foolproof technology s...

Carl provides a heads-up on a Facebook virus...I received this as well...I just got an email from a trusted friend on Facebook. It said: Neil sent you a message. Subject: Hey yo. "You've been catched on hidden cam, yo: It then includes the URL to the video and also the regular reply...

Remember that whole Comcast blocks Notes thing? Well, Lotus Notes was a collateral victim of technology and policy that Comcast was using to "manage" their network traffic. Yesterday, the US FCC ruled, in a 3-2 vote, that Comcast did a bad thing.FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Friday that Comcast w...

Last November, I wrote about how aggressive Google was being at doing street-level views on Google Maps. It was cool to see my neighborhood, and much of the entire area, mapped out at street level. Eight months, later, it's all gone. The street-level views of this particular subdivision have all...

Sprint, a large mobile carrier in the US, announces that the cool new Samsung Instinct -- plus eleven other popular mobile devices -- will support Notes/Domino mail:Easy access to Microsoft Exchange Server and IBM Lotus Notes accounts will be available through Sprint Mobile Email Work, as an extensi...

Yes, I know, today was the Stevenote at WWDC (translation = Steve Jobs keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference) and there was no mention of Lotus support for the iPhone and lots of mention of support for Exchange. The story remains the same as it has since Lotusphere. Domino Web Access...

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":W...

Matt Asay comments on the recent Red Hat + IBM Open Collaboration Client lotusonredhat.com initiative:In what must have been gross oversight, Red Hat is pitching proprietary software on its website under the banner of "No vendor lock-in." The way Red Hat and IBM make it appear, simply running one's...

Today, April 24, has been designated the "Enterprise RSS Day of Action". This effort was championed by James Dellow, a frequent commentator on the use of Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies in the context of improving buisness. The goal of this day of action is to raise awareness of RSS's poten...

Now things are getting serious...A report from a researcher at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand suggests that rising temperatures may threaten beer. ...The grim results? Climate change may affect the production of malting barley, an ingredient crucial to the ta...

In the aftermath of the OOXML approval, an indictment of the process:Microsoft got what it wanted - though only after pulling every lever it could to swing early opposition in its favour. The outcome, though messy, was probably the right one. Under ISO control, future development of the formats wil...

Presumably one of the last public presentations for Mr. Rhodin as Lotus GM...During his VoiceCon Orlando 2008 keynote, Mike Rhodin, General Manager of IBM Lotus software, predicted five future trends that IBM believes "reshape the way businesses and workers communicate and collaborate." Considering...

The guy next to me on this flight is reading his Wall Street Journal. In the upper left of the front page was a courtesy sticker, indicating that he probably received the paper for free at a hotel. It reads "To subscribe, call 1-800-JOURNAL". Does anybody still do that anymore? I can't imagine a...

I am going to try to blog on this topic and don't really know what I'll get as a result. But hey. Apple had a great event yesterday announcing their new version of the iPhone software, the SDK, and what is clearly more of an enterprise focus. Only one problem from the perspective of readers of th...

The headline is a little deceptive... this was actually a great move to Apple, and a CIO who understood how to make the business case and "sell" it:Frantz set up "town meetings" with about 450 workers on all three shifts and laid out the licensing math. "I talked about the fact that Microsoft requir...

Over dinner, I said to my wife, I really feel like there is a lot of intrigue in my life right now. Reading about the ISO ballot resolution meeting for Microsoft ecma's OOXML proposal, though, takes intrigue to a whole different level:The process was complete, utter, unadulterated bull____. I'm not...

Even the US Congress thinks so...California Rep. Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, briefly outlined the ongoing saga of the White House e-mails in his opening statement, noting that the Bush administration in 2002 effectively dismantled the Automatic...

Over the last few months, subscribers and those on SearchDomino's lists have received a few e-mails regarding a company selling Notes migrations to "modern platforms" such as Microsoft. I first discussed this in December, and Greyhawk had a more recent posting about it a few weeks ago. Before va...

I almost missed it - today was National Pancake Day here in the US. At some point around lunch-time here in Chicago, Nathan Freeman tried to convince me that I needed to head to IHOP for a free "short stack". Nathan used a sales pitch that sounded very familiar to me. I was saved by my competitive...

Wired reaches back in their history to examine the first online social networks, including a Q&A with Stuart Brand, co-founder of the WELL. I was never a WELL user, but certainly knew of it in my own sysop/BBS days. One interesting point Brand raises in the interview:[O]ne thing that...

All the more reason to add a second battery for my Blackberry to the holiday shopping list...While AT&T's decision doesn't mean the end of the pay phone -- independent firms still will offer the service -- public phones will become even more difficult to find. The days when pay phones were stat...

Man, quite a conga line out there for the big news from the isles that Bluewave and BE Systems are joining up. See the details on Paul Mooney and Warren Elsmore's sites. Congrats to all for demonstrating strength of the business and of the community!...

In one of my customer meetings over the last few weeks, I heard something that at first seemed very startling, but has grown on me in the subsequent weeks. This organization, an academic concern, told us that, as they look out on a five-year planning horizon, they are predicting a major technology...

I am really amazed at the investment Google is putting into expanding the Google Maps experience. There was a lot of buzz six months ago when they first started introducing street-level views. Still, I didn't expect them to embark on an effort to cover entire metropolitan areas. With Google, thou...

Unsurprising unintended consequences of mucking with the standards process...SC 34 is one of the more important and active committees in JTC1, and has a constant stream of standards under active consideration and balloting. In anticipation of the OOXML vote, its membership surged -- with 23 new Nat...

This morning, it appears that the ISO vote on Microsoft's Open XML has failed to pass as-is. It's hard to separate spin from reality, though, so I may have to update this blog posting later. Here's what I can find: New York Times Microsoft favored to win open document vote ConsortiumInfo.org St...

In case you haven't seen the comments on my prior entry on the topic of OOXML, here's CIO.com's summary:Microsoft admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO st...

OK, so who is a fan of these Microsoft tactics? As has been reported on Slashdot and elsewhere, Microsoft basically bought the vote for OOXML in Sweden.To be able to vote all you need is to pay the membership fee to SIS and the total cost for this was 17.000 SEK (2444 USD). Of the 23 new companies...

I guess this shouldn't surprise me, given some of the other tactics I've seen used for other efforts over the years. Rob Weir is reporting on some of the "shenanigans" being used at the last minute in the countries voting on ecma's Office Open XML proposed standard, and it's been picked up by Grokl...

IBM and Novell Help PC Users Collaborate, Save Money and Avoid Vendor Lock-In "SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 07 Aug 2007: To help businesses avoid the high costs of over reliance on a single vendor, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an integrated open collaboration client for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop from...

This is good news...Through Visto, iPhone users will be able to experience secure mobile access to current and legacy versions of both Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino corporate messaging platforms. Visto will enable access that is easy to implement and administer and will alleviate IT concer...

Several articles in various publications last week about the ISO-approved Open Document Format and Microsoft's efforts to make their own XML-based document format another standard. ComputerWeekly sees something hypocritical in IBM's stance towards ODF. It is true that IBMers have been quite vocal...

A reader sent me a link to Ephraim Schwartz's blog entry about ODF vs. OpenXML. The author sets out to provide an explanation of what the big deal is in this space. The first few paragraphs tell the clash-of-the-titans story fairly accurately. But when the quotes start, then it gets kind of funny...

The Journal takes a look at Lotus Connections, and other similar tools, as an evolution of the corporate Intranet:For Jennifer Ahn, director of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Film Foundation, the need for a collaborative work space was becoming critical. Her organization has spent the past few year...

This is certainly going to be interesting to watch...In an interview with Fortune, Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleges that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice.org is accused of infringing 45, alo...

Selling point?Whether it's the congressional inquiry into deleted e-mails among White House officials or similar probes of companies entangled legal troubles, there are a host of tools and techniques that can be used to recover and analyze the data left behind. ... If an organization's e-mail syste...

During my years of international travel, I've occasionally experienced a frustrating slight. People ask where I am from, and when I respond with "Chicago", there are a few typical responses: "Oh, Michael Jordan" (Yes, he's my neighbor here in Highland Park) "Chicago -- gangsters, bang bang" (No...

I'm not writing about politics....Perino said a White House review showed up to 5 million e-mails to and from as many as 1,700 executive branch employees might have been lost when the administration converted from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook in 2002 and 2003.Oops. Link: Reuters: Rove in new co...

"Daddy, what's a 'magazine'?"....As of April 2, 2007, InfoWorld is discontinuing its print component. No more printing on dead trees, no more glossy covers, no more supporting the US Post Office in its rush to get thousands of inky copies on subscribers' desks by Monday morning (or thereabouts). The...

Over in Sametime-land, Adam Gartenberg had a briefing with industry analyst Aberdeen Group last week. Aberdeen is in process of conducting a survey, with the goal of quantifying the end user productivity benefits companies get from Unified Communications. They specifically noted that they would li...

I got bit by a DST patch myself last night (not in Notes)...so I think Kathleen has the right idea:I, along with a number of my colleagues (including the eternally patient and awesomely knowledgeable Susan Bulloch) have been working on educating customers about the upcoming DST changes for a while n...

Looks like that fast track had some slick spots...Microsoft's goal of getting governments across the globe to embrace its Office Open XML format has hit roadblocks in both the United States and abroad. In the United States, legislation was introduced in Texas and Minnesota the week of Feb. 5 to man...

At least, vindication for all those strange looks I've endured over the years...But these days, more people are enjoying that chilled morning jolt as they increasingly turn to soft drinks instead of coffee, flaunting mom's no-pop-for-breakfast rule many had in their youth. Consumption of soft drink...

David Russell pinged me that it might be worthwhile to cover a pretty big issue -- the pending changes in US daylight savings time. It turns out that Susan Bulloch was about 12 hours (non-adjusted) ahead of David's e-mail, and she writes:So what's the deal? Normally, on the first week in April, yo...

A new dimension to thinking about a "home office"....Nearly one in five small business managers read work-related e-mails and other documents while in the bathroom, and 49 percent say they work while driving, according to a new survey commissioned by Staples Inc., the office-supply retailer with hea...

Alan Lepofsky discusses some of IBM's involvement in Second Life...Hopefully by now you've heard about Second Life. IBM is extremely active in this space. Even before the hype began, lead by the efforts of Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM was helping shape the foundations for this virtual world. Sim...

Andy Porter picks up a slashdot thread and techdirt posting about a recent Microsoft patent filing:Slashdot is reporting that Microsoft have taken out a patent on "Emotiflags". To quote from the patent; "While composing an email message, a user may associate an emotiflag with the email message such...

Congrats to Andrew Pollack for the recent flare-up in coverage around his new Second Signal project. A smokin' good reference story has been posted about the Cumberland Maine fire department's use of Second Signal. As Andrew is hot to point out, the case study actually highlights, on microsoft.com...

Wow, this is big news! The acquisition will extend Motorola's mobile computing capabilities and increase the company's enterprise client base. Good Technology's wireless messaging, data access and handheld security offerings provide intuitive and advanced productivity solutions for mobile professio...

Phillip Storry muses that with IE7 out, Firefox 2.0 almost released, and many other variables, the promise of browser-based applications is getting as complicated as rich clients....And that is the point for web applications - any update to the browsers yur application is designed for must be tested...

My dad, sister, and I were just having this discussion the other day...When it comes to "cursive" -- those letter formations on the alphabet chart over the chalkboard that I struggled with in 3rd grade and that my kids struggled with in 3rd grade-- the only time I ever use it anymore is when I scr...

Via Bob Sutor, I was definitely curious what was being said about Office 2.0 / Web 2.0 "versus" technologies like Lotus Notes (and MS) at the Office 2.0 conference...The approach is built around online applications with collaboration at the core. It is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Accordi...

It's been a long time since I wrote anything under this subject, but today it seems clear that a reprise is necessary. Eight days early, Federated Department Stores has pulled down the remaining Field's signs at most of the remaining Marshall Field's locations, going from distinctive green to rep...

This is a really interesting article which discusses ways to optimize the life of your laptop battery. I just had to buy a new battery because my previously-four-hour battery had dropped to about 90 minutes. Now I know why. One thing I still haven't been able to do, after two years with an extend...

Network World looks at long-running products/brands in the IT industry that, apparently, should have been dead by now. Maybe Paul McNamara wasn't in the room at Lotusphere when I said "the idea that Notes is dead is dead"?When IBM bought Lotus Development Corp. back in 1995, the howling heard out o...

This one came my way on Friday, giving me a couple of days to get the story from the IBM side. Can't really discuss that here, but we can discuss the article itself....Accountancy group PKF Australia has started migrating its 800 or so users from IBM's Lotus Notes collaboration platform to rival Mi...

The Chicago Tribune was a better wakeup this morning than my usual Diet Coke...in covering yesterday's G-8 talks, they actually published the exact quote of where the leader of this country used the word "shit". OMG! But since the traditional media can't possibly be relaxed about everyday langua...

Well that felt pretty good....yesterday's announcement of Lotus Notes for Linux seems to have created quite a buzz, both externally and inside IBM. The blog got slashdotted again, though one of the links posted was to Notes "Hannover" screenshots as opposed to the 7.0.x work...ah well. That actual...

Merriam-Webster announced one hundred new words just added to the dictionary...Respectful of the trademark, Merriam-Webster lowercases the entry but maintains the capitalization while explaining that the verb means "to use the Google search engine" to retrieve online information. "We're definin...

Sorry for a bit of radio silence...four-day weekend for some of us state-side as we celebrate, in my daughter's words, "it's America's birthday ... we get to eat cupcakes!" Anyway, one of the geek things I've gotten around to this weekend is looking at Google Trends. Several of you have se...

Information Week discusses the varying degree of adoption of instant messaging in the corporate market...Many companies aren't sure they need it. George Chizmar, VP of IT at Apple Vacations, says IM wasn't on any business managers' requirements list when the company bought Lotus Notes. But it ca...

David Berlind, triggered by some of the coverage coming out of the Collaborative Technologies Conference last week, analyzes what "collaboration" really means in today's technology terms...When you strip collaboration down to its bare essence, you have people, you have some record of their colla...

CNET Gadgets Blog has a mention about Good Technology's release of their Domino support...On Monday, Good Technology is set to announce the addition of Good Mobile Messaging for IBM Lotus Domino to its stable of mobile computing software. The new service synchronizes Lotus e-mail, contacts, cale...

I may be in Boston, but unfortunately I'm not attending the Collaborative Technologies Conference going on across town. Yesterday, IBM's Mike Rhodin gave a plenary address, which has been covered in a couple of blogs. Stowe Boyd writes:But it is strangely bizarre and at the same time sen...

This story had escaped my attention...HP cuts back on telecommuting in the San Jose Mercury News:Mott said by bringing IT employees together to work as teams in offices, the less-experienced employees who aren't performing well -- which there are ``a lot of'' -- can learn how to work more effec...

Yellow shirts, honoring the country's beloved King Bhumibol Adulyadej on the 60th anniversary of his accession to the throne, are so popular that there aren't enough to go around. Thailand is marking the anniversary this month with elaborate celebrations to be attended by more than two dozen...

My inbox lit up like a firecracker tonight, with tons of people linking me to the ZDNet Australia review of Notes/Domino 7 vs. SharePoint Portal Server 2003. I don't have the background on the ZDNet review yet -- as in, why did they choose to evaluate these two products head-to-head, and not co...

In comments to Wednesday's blog entry on Computerworld New Zealand's interview with Ken Bisconti, Paul Robichaux -- an Exchange consultant who has done some competitive roadshows for Microsoft -- challenges Bisconti's assertion that "Frankly, those ['Notes is going to disappear' statements] a...

More on social software from this week's Financial Times...this article mentions IBM's work in paradigm shifting through concepts like Activities.Michael Muller, a scientist with IBM's Watson Research Center, has been involved in numerous projects to design and test ways of collaborating. Mr Mul...

Tomorrow, Microsoft will issue a software update to Internet Explorer, changing the behavior of ActiveX controls within certain web pages. Most software vendors are affected (not just IBM!). Several Domino community bloggers have picked up this issue. Rob Novak has been a rock star, champio...

As I've been saying, voicemail is dead. Sun's Tim Bray even says internal e-mail is dead (I don't agree at all -- not in a global company where people are asychronously available...does Tim not sleep?). Still, instant messaging is taking over.Now a generation of office workers who grew up with...

Dan Briody comments on an article in the Wall Street Journal discussing companies which ban public communication services:I'm not going to argue that these technologies are often used for personal reasons. They are. But so are phones, and e-mail, and water coolers, and bathrooms. And they do come in...

Why the computer industry is sometimes just plain weird,It's pretty ironic. Steve Ballmer is going after a company that develops billions of dollars worth of applications and middleware for Windows platforms. What's more, IBM Global Services probably deploys and maintains more Windows systems th...

I've received a few e-mails, directly and through IBMers, asking me what "IBM's recommendation" is on the Blackberry/RIM vs. NTP thing. With the requisite caveat/reminder that I am not necessarily representing the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM Corporation or IBM management, I...

An interesting subject that has been discussed here in the past. Information Week talks to the "big guns" of the analyst world: IDC, Gartner, Forrester. There is a smattering of discussion about boutique analyst firms, but there are so many that it would be tough ground to cover. It's an i...

A thoughtful analysis of the folly of discussing Notes application migration in the first place:It's the migration tool that raised my eyebrows... it's one of those things that sounds really nice on the face of it, but doesn't matter at all. The "popular templates that ship with Lotus Notes" are...

I can't decide whether my reaction is "I must be really out of touch" or "snail mail? who cares?"It will cost Americans 2 cents more to mail a letter starting Sunday. First-class postage rises to 39 cents for the first ounce.Confession time -- I almost totally missed this news. And I still read...

(Source: Seattle Times, via Peter O'Kelly) Just curious why Mr. Gates is carrying a sheaf of paper instead of a Tablet.. Also, McDonald's? Really? At least that breakfast of champions kept his mind in shape:Asked if Google represents the most formidable threat of the company's 30-year history,...

Looks like AOL has launched its new AOL Instant Messenger client , "Triton", at least in the US. Intriguing that they're using an "I AM" theme for their launch messages -- hasn't that been done before? Not just by Lotus? Looking under the covers....new catch-up features include easier audi...

This fits somewhat with my comments the other day about how Notes has a halo effect but is sometimes perceived as outdated simply for being old.The fact that the Notes demo concluded without interruption while the UMTS one fell over at the crucial moment didn't seem to matter - there's marketing...

SearchDomino has a story today about an organization running a hosted messaging environment, using Domino 6.5 and Outlook clients. Apparently, they're having problems with POP3 errors.According to Frank, someone at the hosting service told him, "Notes and Outlook do not work well together."... ...

You're right; there is a chapter in [my book] that shows how you can get involved: either being part of a blog, starting a blog, participating in talk shows, writing letters to the editor of your local daily or weekly newspapers, calling your representatives. Simple stuff. We show you how to d...

Look, Mom, I'm in Forbes magazine!Ed Brill, an IBMer who works on Notes marketing and publishes his own blog (edbrill.com), responded on July 23 last year to Radicati's bearish Notes report. He questioned whether she had ties to Microsoft and referred readers to two other blogs with far blunter...

...for no "fair weather fan" am I. Still, a few simple observations: Playing baseball the last week in October is just a bit insane. The 40 degree (F) pouring rain in Chicago the other night was just a silly set of conditions for such an important game. Playing a game that runs past midnigh...

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SearchDomino conducted a survey earlier this quarter that covered a broad array of topics in the Notes/Domino market. I'm surprised that they only received 208 responses -- but it was a rather lengthy survey, so I can sort of understand. (Note: I started to fill it out, but then realized that...

Information Week is reporting on Gartner's assessment of Microsoft's "Office 12" preview, including a recommendation to look at IBM instead:Despite many potentially powerful enhancements, most enterprises will find it hard to justify upgrading [to Office 12] during 2007 and 2008," wrote a half d...

In remembering 9/11 this year, I'll depart from the memorial-oriented postings I've done on this date for the last two years. Instead, I'd like to summarize in two words what 9/11 means for me -- carpe diem, Latin for "Seize the day". There is nothing like catastrophe to offer reminder of t...

A hardware optimization project leads to more Domino applications and cost savings...St. Helens Council assistant treasurer, Cath Robinson, added in a statement: "The mainframe migration project has enabled the council to completely revolutionise the way we operate. "All of St. Helens' legac...

More and more information coming my way about how the Lotus community and Lotus Notes/Domino users and applications are helping out with the aftermath of Katrina. Rocky Oliver has set up KatrinasHalf.com, based on the premise that a lucky lottery winner could choose to pledge half their winni...

CNN is reporting this morning that 53 countries around the world have pledged aid for Katrina recovery. While it's unclear to me why a lot of the offers haven't been accepted yet, the outpouring from the rest of the world is truly appreciated. (Comments disabled on this post -- and the blo...

This is a great story:Connectria Corporation today announced the availability of a Domino disaster recovery hosting service. Any organization whose Lotus Notes e-mail systems were disrupted by the natural disaster may receive immediate assistance to bring them online again. Connectria will offe...

It's fair to say I was in my own world for much of the day yesterday. First day back from an overseas work/holiday trip, coinciding with the release of the next major version of the product I'm responsible for selling...well, the IMs and e-mails yesterday were mostly of a "congratulations!' and...

Hmmm, I seem to have stirred things up today...Some accounts made it sound like these hires--most recently Julio Estrada and Bob Congdon, along with earlier recruits ( Gary Devendorf, Barry Briggs, and others) were poached directly from the IBM/Lotus payroll. Such is not the case (well excep...

OK, there have been three articles like this in the US trade press in the last few days. I was trying to hold my tongue, but it's hard to do in this case:Anther[sic] Lotus notable who has recently been approached by Microsoft is Ed Brill, business unit executive, Worldwide Lotus Messaging Sale...

Jonvon pointed to Joel Spolsky's latest: Hitting the High Notes. Some really cool truisms about software development in there, but first:In some other industries, cheap is more important than good. Wal*Mart grew to be the biggest corporation on Earth by selling cheap products, not good produc...

Last week, Novell announced the beta of Groupwise 7. In the press release and a few articles on the topic, Novell indicated their commitment to support GroupWise through 2015. I'm not sure what that really means, since it's pretty hard to predict the technology that will be relevant and appro...

Michael Sampson of Shared Spaces was interviewed in the current issue of IT Business Edge:Question: Are you seeing signs that vendors are better responding to their customers' needs? Sampson: Vendors are definitively focused on better responding to the needs of their customers. IBM Lotus has m...

Linus on Microsoft, mostly....Microsoft really is a fairly interesting vendor in this space. Unlike most proprietary vendors, it's one of the very few ones whose bread and butter comes directly from its commodity market, and even its specialized offerings often sell because of its near dominance...

United and Verizon Airfone have just become the first companies to receive Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval to install the necessary cabin equipment to enable passenger and crew use of wireless technology (Wi-Fi) devices on board a U.S. domestic commercial aircraft while inflight....

Many moons ago, my employer prior to IBM/Lotus was U.S. Robotics. I joined USR when there were only about 300 employees, shortly after their IPO. It was, for a time, an incredibly enjoyable place to work. USR felt like family, where everyone knew everyone (and if you didn't, there was a galle...

Good example of the value of a business instant messaging and presence tool...One company, IntelliCare, has made great strides in understanding and leveraging the intangible benefit of presence management. IntelliCare provides access to a team of nurses via the phone on behalf of health plans an...

As promised on Friday, here are links to the Q&A interviews with Steve Mills and Bill Gates. Now please, can we keep this discussion on-topic? Gates: "IBM isn't doing that much":Q: Microsoft has made some acquisitions in the collaboration software business and built some of its own tec...

Microsoft is going head-to-head with another software giant: IBM (IBM ). Big Blue's Lotus Notes software pioneered the collaboration market and now has 118 million users. Last year, IBM began rolling out a new package of applications, called Workplace, that combines collaboration capabilities w...

Well, I guess we now all know how much Microsoft paid for Groove... IDC's last estimate (2003) of Groove's revenue was US$12 million, so you do the math....Former Groove employee Michael Matthews claimed Microsoft and Ozzie, who together hold 59 percent of Groove's stock, "seek to eliminate the...

A decent assessment of the current state of the collaboration market. Interestingly, Oracle and IBM customer references are included, while Microsoft merely pats themselves on the back.Stephen Goh, managing director of Thermal, a Singapore-based industrial and commercial air-conditioning instal...

A company that has moved completely away from Microsoft technologies for some PCs, and away from everything but Windows for others:When Bill Robertson decided last year to switch 450 workers and 100 desktops at De Bortoli Wines to the open source Firefox web browser, he had the company's future...

Wow, wouldn't it have been cool to see this game...IBM failed to end Microsoft's winning streak in their charity hockey game over the weekend in Seattle, falling 9-5 to the hometown team.Link: seattlepi.com Microsoft Blog: Microsoft 9, IBM 5 ...

ok, I know it's off topic, but I still find marketing scams approaches fascinating...New reduced-sugar versions of popular children's breakfast cereals -- everything from Froot Loops to Frosted Flakes -- certainly sound promising, but consumers might want to hold off chiming in when Tony the Tig...

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When I got home last night, I read a lot of blog entries about the Microsoft/Groove deal. Probably fifty or more. A fair number of them talked extensively about what the acquisition might mean for Microsoft's competitive footing, whether it's about the technology or about Ray, what the status...

30 IMs and e-mails later, I haven't even been able to READ any of the links y'all have been mailing and IM'ing to me this morning....but yes, I know! More later....

Jon Udell attended last week's MS Office developer's conference. He grabbed an interesting snippet out of the Q&A with Bill Gates: [emphasis mine]:Attendee: Those of us who saw the webstore in Sharepoint 2001 thought, wow, that's sort of what Cairo was going to be. And now looking at WinFS...

Christopher Byrne and Tom Duff have picked up on a story that ran yesterday on ADTMag.com, "IBM Crosses Signals: Domino or Workplace?" The article seems to be a blast from the past, picking up on the ambiguity and uncertainty that used to exist in the Lotus community around the future of Not...

Recommended reading on how one analyst firm is tranforming itself to the new realities of the industry...Suffice to say that sometimes the industry analyst business looks something like the Mafia. To take the metaphor a little further, and uncomfortably close to the truth, some analyst firms...

update LAS VEGAS--Delivering the first keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates touted a partnership with TiVo during what was mainly a state of the union address on Microsoft's digital media strategy. The television recording pioneer has enlisted Microsoft in i...

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Robert X. Cringely has an interesting analysis of IBM's PC division partnership with Lenovo. I think it's an interesting analysis, but I'm blogging it specifically because ofAs the silicon manufacturer, IBM will be able to make some remarkably powerful computers and own the high-end computation...

The rumors are swirling yet again around IBM purchasing Apple and we're here to tell you, they're true! Big Blue has indeed put several offers on the table for Apple, but what you won't hear anywhere else is that Apple has counter-offered in an attempt to seize control of IBM! Our Inside Appl...

Ray Ozzie reminisces and envisionsFifteen years ago tomorrow, on Dec. 7, 1989, at an event at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., Lotus Notes Release 1.0 was born. Thanks to IBM and thousands of its partners, a well-evolved Notes is still actively in use by more than...

Engineers are trying to fix a massive computer failure at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) that has caused chaos in the benefits system. More than three-quarters of its staff could not access payment processing systems on Monday after an update to desk-top computers went wrong. ... ...

Computer Associates has tapped IBM software executive John Swainson to lead the company as its new chief executive, sources said.What's interesting is that I knew this well before the press had picked up the story. Not because I work for IBM...but because starting at 9:30 CST yesterday, I had...

TiVo, iPod, iTunes users -- check out what the US Congress is considering...Do you like fast-forwarding through commercials on a television program you've recorded? How much do you like it? Enough to go to jail if you're caught doing it? If a new copyright and intellectual property omnibus bill...

In blogging about ComputerWorld's interview with Ray Ozzie, I really wanted to make a different point than I ended up doing. Let's narrow the quote:it's not just the nature of business that's changing; it's the nature of work itself that's changing. You're working with multiple companies, and...

Computerworld has two interesting stories today.. Crossing Boundaries (interview with Ray Ozzie):Ozzie: Essentially, what we've learned in the past few years of people using Groove is that it's not just the nature of business that's changing; it's the nature of work itself that's changing. Y...

See, the .NET team recognizes the value of engaging in an industry-focused debate with competitors from IBM etc.,...too bad for the Exchange team that they don't see it the same way.At a session entitled "The Great J2EE vs. Microsoft .Net Shootout" at the OOPSLA conference here this week, softwa...

In today's earlier slashdot-related posting, Julian Robichaux comments: "I love hearing about technologies that compete against Notes. It means that Notes must doing something important and useful." Well, in that vein, here's another timely wiki-related article:Though JotSpot is still in its ea...

I received several e-mails and pings about this slashdot thread overnight. I see a couple of people have blogged it as well. It's prompted by a BusinessWeek article about wikis, specifically about Socialtext. First, I think wikis are a great tool. They are an easy way to share informat...

You may or may not have been following Robert Cringely's writings on Burst v. Microsoft. I find this case rather fascinating, as it seems to show what determined lawyers who have nothing to lose can do. This week's Cringely column (via Dan Gillmor) details a major discovery in the case -- Mi...

Forbes.com author Daniel Lyons focuses this week on cheap, open source alternatives in the software market. Oracle vs. MySQL seems to be the most prominent play, but others are discussed as well. Certainly, the evolution of software is taking place before our collective eyes. Hosted vs. prem...

Tom Duff wrote two recent articles in his e-ProWire: Lotus Developer Tips newsletter which linked to blog entries on edbrill.com. Anyone watching my referrers in the last 24 hours has seen the effect -- tons of clickthroughs. This is in addition to anyone who clicked through from the newslette...

An extensive article covering the "killer app" of instant messaging -- presence.Rebottaro is using IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing server, which supports presence capabilities within Nektar's portal of collaborative applications and online training courses. "We use presence to f...

Remember last week's momentary posting of a book on microsoft.com about migrating Notes applications to .NET? Well, on the assumption that the book lives on, in more discreet distribution channels, Tom Duff has written a detailed article for e-Pro examining the Microsoft book. Duff takes sp...

Infoworld recently reviewed instant messaging add-on products that focus on public IM products. In this sidebar article, they talk about security needs for corporate instant messaging, and say:If there's a security ideal for enterprise IM, IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing would...

A high-level view of the collaboration software market....Collaboration tool vendors are selling products to customers as diverse as states, local jurisdictions and several wings of the Defense Department. For example, the Connecting Windsor-Essex public Web portal in Ontario uses IBM's Lotus...

This Q&A with Dr. Ambuj Goyal covers several different topics. The reporter inquired about the Radicati report, so you can see Ambuj's responses on that by clicking through. There's other good stuff, too:Q: What about the general marketing of Workplace -- there is some criticism that you h...

SearchDomino filed a report about the Radicati Group messaging market analysis and the discussion that has ensued. Once again, I'll let the official IBM response, once posted, address some of the points about roadmap and future. Link: SearchDomino: Domino users fuming over Radicati report ...

New IBM General Manager of Global Business Partners Donn Atkins Tuesday said that VARs should not expect any significant changes in the wake of IBM's sudden management shakeup. "Our partners should not expect to see any radical changes here," said Atkins in a conference call after being named...

A press release Jabber issued early this morning...Interoperability between enterprise instant messaging applications received a big boost today as Jabber, Inc. announced a planned server-to-server gateway between its own XMPP-based platform, Jabber XCP, and IBM's version of SIMPLE in its Lotus...

I could be wrong about this, but having been a competitive guy for five years now, my detective instincts are pretty good. Two weeks ago, a few people noticed (and I blogged) that eWeek had started adding advertising in its RSS feeds. Steve Gillmor has written several columns for eWeek evange...

Infoworld has some coverage from the Rational Software Development Conference...excerpts here:IBM on Monday is unveiling development tools intended to boost the IBM Workplace collaboration platform. The introductions will be made at the IBM Rational Software Development User Conference in Grapev...

Back in April, I wrote about the plight of the Oklahoma State University use of Lotus Notes. The saga of a questionable Notes to Exchange migration had been unfolding at OKState for several months. Many of us met Andrew Kelley at Lotusphere, an amazing guy who spent his own money to come to Lo...

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For years, Microsoft, IBM, and others have painted visions of a future in which people could easily tap into their programs and information from whichever computer they happen to be using. But SimDesk is the first company to provide that promise in an ultra-affordable way. Individuals can log on...

Silicon.com has a collaboration "special report". Quite funnily, this particular page says it is published "in association with SharePoint Portal Server 2003", yet then goes on to comment negatively on MS's product. Funny. Here's a both-sides-of-the-story analyst quote:"Collaboration applicati...

The headline doesn't necessarily tell the whole story -- which is a partnership with IMLogic (I thought they had one of those already?)."IT buyers won't make IM decisions in a vacuum: If they're already getting software from a company like Microsoft or IBM, they'll go with them for an instant-me...

Hey, it's something about Lotus again! Over at lndcentral.com, jmichael has commented on an India Computer Express story covering the latest on Microsoft Exchange. The article itself calls Notes/Domino "emerging competition", which surprises me since I'm pretty sure my passport has stamp...

In an informal interview earlier this week, Yahoo's Chief Information Officer Lars Rabbe said the enterprise instant messenger was shelved, because Yahoo is largely a consumer company and not structured to take on the kind of support tasks and other responsibilities that come with selling corpor...

When I visited Steve Castledine a little over a year ago, I blogged about one of his neighbours who has decorated an apartment to resemble the interior of the USS Enterprise. Well, wouldn't ya know, said flat is now up for auction on eBay! What an exciting opportunity -- Steve, can you get...

Busy morning here at Inbox 2004. Looks like a few hundred attendees, from across the spectrum of messaging vendors and IT organizations interested in messaging. Bright and early at 8 AM, I participated in a panel discussion on "Client features and futures" with the General Manager for Micr...

Two good / related stories about whether Microsoft has really built a Windows Server System ready for the enterprise...is Windows Server truly ready to supplant Unix as a mission-critical operating system and is SQL Server ready to replace Oracle or DB2? Well, not really, according to even some...

Q&A with Nate Root, senior analyst at Forrester Research, about his recent "TechRankings" report covering collaboration products. Using my self-imposed guidelines, I'm not commenting on the analysis itself. But one Q&A does deserve examination:[Root:] The long-term direction is, of cou...

One of many reasons I'm looking forward to next week. From e-Promag.com:Penton Technology Media announces the relaunch of the e-Pro family of products. [Libby Ingrassia Schwarz] will be continuing as e-Pro's editor, and spearheading this relaunch and the introduction of a family of Lotus elect...

Last week I received an Email message from someone who had a rather interesting problem. He suspected that another employee in the IT department was reading his Email.Wow does this take me back. I don't really ever hear reports of this kind of snooping or unauthorized access to Notes mailboxes...

One of the first moves Epstein made when he joined the Sox was to bring in a software package called ScoutAdvisor from E Solutions, a little-known Tampa, Fla., company. Epstein had used the software, which keeps track of player talent from the minors to the pros, while with the San Diego Padres,...

Microsoft is treading water while the world is going by, according to [Dwight] Davis [of Summit Strategies]. He cited the recent announcement by IBM around their managed client to push middleware down to the desktop. IBM, in tandem with the broader Linux environment, should be Microsoft's main c...

IBM's move could actually prove to be the biggest threat to Microsoft's hammerlock on PC software since IBM was pushing its own competing operating system, OS/2, from 1987 through 1996. A confluence of factors could conspire to make Workplace the first legitimate mass-market competitor to Micr...

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Once installed, the add-in allows users to schedule Live Meeting conferences and launch into the meetings directly through the Notes client, officials said. If Microsoft is so confident that IBM is killing Notes & Domino, they sure have a funny way of showing it. Between the recent update o...

I've always found the energy placed into the Domino vs. Exchange debate wasted, given the fact that most of my customers tend to use either platform for mostly e-mail and not the more advanced collaborative features that are available. Yet, it seems that the debate tends to focus on those unuse...

Westpac has implemented a major upgrade to their IT infrastructure, including an e-mail standardization decision.WESTPAC has simplified its IT infrastructure and moved towards a single view of customers by rolling out broadband to its 850 Australian branches. ...The project is part of Westpac's...

Benincasa is looking to upgrade because Microsoft has discontinued distribution of new licenses for Office 2000 and Office 97. Benincasa is exploring his office application suite options because he is concerned about the high cost of an upgrade to Office 2003. He also wants to prevent Microsoft'...

Subtitle: Demand for software development is hot within the enterpriseIn the past two years, IBM alone has seen a 60 percent increase in the number of customers creating solutions on top of its WebSphere Portal infrastructure product. Of those projects, which comprise a range of applications bot...

The print edition of the May '04 Technology Review arrived today. A brief skim arrives at a really cool Global Invention Map (must be subscriber to access link). It ranks countries by an index called the "national innovative capacity", based on things like # of patents per million people; pr...

Washington-based law firm Shaw Pittman LLP, meanwhile, has avoided some of the control problems faced by other organizations because it deployed Lotus Instant Messenger before employees started downloading IM clients on an ad hoc basis. "We've been using [Lotus IM] for more than three years, s...

The concept of day trading isn't high on my list, but today might make me a believer. I track stocks on a number of competitors. This morning, Critical Path announced that they had sold their identity management (not messaging) solution to General Electric. The stock opened today at US$2.12....

Well, I guess it ain't all wine and roses for today's Sun/MS news:In 2001, when IBM introduced a high-end Unix server called Regatta, McNealy got a lot of laughs by calling it "Regretta." Who's laughing now? IBM has shipped 4,400 Regatta servers since 2001, while Sun has shipped only 1,900 units...

Now the real questions begin: Will this agreement really change the competitive landscape? Or is it simply a way for Sun -- which, incidentally announced the same day that it expects a hefty loss in its fiscal third quarter and is cutting 3,300 jobs to help offset it -- to get some quick cash?....

Good article with quotes from Lotus, business partner Binary Tree, and a customer who did an Exchange to Notes migration (Seybold Group). The business technology research and consulting firm Patricia Seybold Group has recently migrated from an Outlook/Exchange messaging infrastructure to Notes....

Can you guess the vendor?"License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership. More significant costs include: - Installation and deployment - Data migration and testing ... - User support such as training"Hint: You can look in the dictionary under the term "hypocrite". ...

Steve Gillmor: My candidate for most irritating spam is the several pieces a day I get postmarked "Tomorrow." ....[B]ecause their time stamp is set for tomorrow at 4:56PM and 2:12AM respectively, they float at the top of the queue, never scrolling down as new mail comes in. I wonder (and wo...

Privacy is also likely to be a limiting factor, said Turek of Nemertes Research. "There's a certain concern about accountability," she said. "It's harder to hide when everybody can see what you're doing. I think there's going to be a big resistance to that. Maybe I don't want everyone to see tha...

In a comment to an earlier posting on this topic, Tony Cocks (who works for Microsoft in the UK) wondered: "Does software release dates slipping still count as news these days? " Oh Tony, indeed it does. I think I could link a dozen stories like this one from CRN... For developers, the tandem ...

A number of ex-cc:Mailers are at Scalix, a new Linux messaging company founded by Julie Farris. Farris is now an "expert adviser" for SearchEnterpriseLinux, and today participates in the first of a two-part Q&A about Linux and messaging.How have CIOs' concerns about Exchange played out? ...

Couple of articles to point to. The first is a business-oriented article from Computerworld (thanks for the link, Tim) called "Chat gets serious".Indeed, Gartner Inc. estimates that by 2006, IM will be so ubiquitous that it will eclipse e-mail as workers' primary on-the-job communications tool...

Making something out of nothing.... As a Microsoft integrator, she said Avanade has been in talks with "the world's five largest Notes portfolios" about trialling Exchange, but was unwilling to name local customers involved in the pilot. Putting aside how blustery a statement that is, last I ch...

This can't be a particularly original realization, but sitting here awake again in the middle of the night got me thinking. There's an series of articles in the current issue of Wired on "Living Machines." One in particular, called "Beast on Wheels", talks about how to make automobiles more...

Some of you asked me about this article over the last few days...An IBM technical manager based in Sweden apparently spoke out of turn recently when he told several publications that Big Blue was working with Microsoft on porting Office to Linux. Representatives of Microsoft and IBM denied there...

Doc Searls writes in today's newsletter: In other words, Exchange is a competent product. There are lots of increasingly competent competitors that work with Linux ...but I don't see a huge market rush toward any of these solutions, even when the problem being solved is just getting off Excha...

Saw this in an eWeek article about Demo2004... Convoq, of Lexington, Mass., is headed by former Lotus Development Corp. executive Chuck Digate. I've been at Lotus for almost ten years, and this name didn't immediately jump out at me. Visiting Convoq's website helps address that memory gap -- i...

Dan Geer lost his job, but gained his audience. The very idea that got the computer security expert fired has sparked serious debate in information technology. The idea, borrowed from biology, is that Microsoft has nurtured a software "monoculture" that threatens global computer security. Geer...

and y'all make fun of IBM product and solution names... Looks like Sun announced a new messaging offering earlier this week. It was covered in yesterday's Network World messaging newsletter (not yet on the website, but it will show up in the archive here). The newsletter repeats Sun's amazi...

Good to see that Eric Lundquist, eWeek's Editor in Chief, found a useful message coming out of Lotusphere...What won't go away: The Lotus name. ... The change you are seeing at IBM is the company talking more about solutions to business problems rather than individual technology-based opportun...

Scott Kingery found this nice article mentioning use of Domino on Linux (and I assume they just mean Domino, not Notes):"We have now been using Linux for email for about two to three years and have been gradually replacing Windows," he said. "We use Lotus Domino on Linux for email as we use it...

"O" is one of the few Cirque du Soleil shows still on my to-do list... this article on the BBC online site talks about the technology behind the show -- not just music and lights, but climate control, feedback to the performers, etc. Pretty cool stuff. Glad to see it conclude with this, thou...

At a 20-year celebration for the IBM PC, Bradley was on a panel with Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and other tech icons. The discussion turned to the keys. 'I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous,' Bradley said. Gates didn't laugh. The key combination also is used when Microsoft's...

If at first you don't succeed, try try again...Ken Bisconti, vice president of Workplace products for Lotus, said the majority of the 500,000 active Lotus developers are finding comfortable ways to adopt to Java. LotusScript developers can find similar script-oriented capabilities in Javascript...

I know some of you will see this article today, and wonder what my take on it is. To be honest, almost anything I can say about it will sound like a personal attack, so I think I need to take the high road. One place I'll comment:"It's hard to understand Java without a computer science backg...

Today's question -- how does a magazine, in the same week, publish two really positive articles about the future of Lotus, and yet have a columnist go completely the opposite direction? There's an article by Dennis Callaghan about Lotus's direction and report card. The interview with Ambuj Go...

A solid discussion of the collaboration strategies of major vendors, with insights into IBM Lotus, Microsoft, and Oracle. In the modern business world, no one is an island. Everybody needs to be able to communicate, and as efficiently as possible. That is the message coming from the major colla...

As a marketing guy, I can't let this new M&Ms promotion pass without comment. This has got to be one of the best advertising campaigns I've seen for a mature consumer product in a long, long time. It involves so many elements of the marketing mix, you really have to congratulate the M&...

Apparently a graduate of the "If you say it enough times, it must be true" school of thought....Sample quotes:Today, we think we are the only Java-based J2EE-compliant suite of content portal and collaboration. ... We think we can be the only vendor that has both the whole back-end ECM structu...

Thankfully, technology now offers an arsenal of weapons to battle this burgeoning evil. GHY created its own solution, using various pieces of open- source software on IBM servers in conjunction with a Linux operating system. Vendors such as Microsoft and IBM are currently offering a variety of t...

Awww...."The company has suffered recurring losses from operations and has a net capital deficiency that raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern," the auditor said in the filing. Link (CNET): Critical Path in critical condition...

It's because every day counts that, late last year, Nektar Therapeutics began to consider deploying an enterprise portal that would speed up the process of application deployment. The company went live with IBM WebSphere Portal in January 2003, leading to an impressive reduction in cycle times....

Still, Manzi's decision to go with and stick with Notes is his claim to fame. Notes was a collaborative application well before anyone other than the Notes team, led by Ray Ozzie, really knew what that was. It was a huge risk at the time. But Microsoft didn't get it, and it gave Lotus somewhere ...

VARBusiness' first annual Tech Innovators Awards garnered 370 applications from more than 100 vendors. Products were judged on factors including newness, potential suitability for VARs and overall coolness. In the end, 24 companies were honored across eight technology categories. And the winners...

When it comes to building enterprise Web services, the entrenched Java language is maintaining a healthy lead over top contender C#, Microsoft's best-suited language for the job from its .Net toolbox, according to a new survey. The Evans Data survey of 398 programmers shows Java winning handil...

Eight years after its introduction, VOIP is having its moment. Indeed, 2004 is sure to be the year in which the technology hits prime time.... because no technology story is complete without IBM or Microsoft, rest assured that both companies are muscling in on the competition to provide a platfo...

This is a pretty interesting statistic...Osterman Research has just concluded a large, multi-client messaging survey in which we asked organizations about the potential for replacing their back-end messaging infrastructure with one that provides significantly better performance, less server load...

From a Groove press release:Groove Networks Inc., a leading provider of desktop collaboration software, today announced a customer service offering for small businesses and groups within larger organizations. Available to Groove Networks customers with between five and 50 Groove Workspace softw...

How will business instant messaging prosper within the context of IT operations? Is it the tail wagging the dog, as this author suggests, or is it just a matter of companies finding the right vendor/technology combination to work with?The rapidity with which Yahoo dumped its business IM was bre...

Ken Bisconti was in Oz the week before me... and spoke with Computerworld Australia.Claiming there has been a shift away from Microsoft's offerings, Bisconti said IBM provides incentives such as discount pricing and has an entire program to encourage companies willing to rip and replace their e-...

Just catching up on my complimentary newspapers from the last two days...this headline caught my eye for sure...TELSTRA is preparing a tender for a new email platform as part of its $100 million response to four months of serious system problems. Chief executive Ziggy Switkowski said a number o...

A good overview of why IBM introduced Lotus Workplace Messaging, as well as other interesting observations about how companies are addressing unserved/underserved e-mail users (as well as their traditional knowledge workers). The Notes client takes an unfair knock, but the rest of the article i...

E-mail as workflow, ever think about it?It was a conversation with Akiba Saeedi, senior marketing manager at Lotus, that helped me put things in perspective. "Workflow, both structured and ad-hoc, is one of the most key and most underestimated elements of what we do every day," she said. "One ...

Earlier this year, eWeek reviewed a number of enterprise portal software tools, but skipped WebSphere Portal and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Now that both products have shipped their new versions, eWeek has completed the Portal product roundup. Compared with some other enterprise porta...

In the "it's harder than it looks" category.... Yahoo is shuttering its enterprise software division and has laid off an undisclosed number of employees as a result. ... Analysts said Yahoo's de-emphasis also underscores the difficulty that media-oriented companies have when selling directly...

IBM's Larry Bowden, VP of Portal and Lotus products, authored this guest column on CBS Marketwatch. In California, Los Angeles and San Diego counties have just launched a countywide "eFILE System" where businesses can go online and file personal property statements in real-time. Before the imp...

I've had several conversations recently about my personal favourite email system, Lotus Domino, and not one of the Domino systems I see or maintain has participated in a propagation incident for either SoBig or Blaster.A long and sometimes rambling article by Steve Cassidy about the mistakes ma...

Formerly known as Lotus Sametime, Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing has long been the dominant player in enterprise IM. It offers a combination of rich client capabilities, interoperability, cross-platform support, and increasing integration into personal- and team-productivity applic...

Quoting the Inquirer twice in one week is probably dangerous, especially with this nugget: WE WERE IN SUCH a rush to file the story about IBM saying Linux was unstoppable that we missed out a piece of Deborah Magid's dialogue. Not only is Linux unstoppable, but IBM has abandoned using...

Because IBM Lotus started as a collaborative environment and an email system, it is better placed to bridge the gap between personal productivity and team-based environments. ... The workspace features of Lotus Notes, that seemed to be ahead of their time when they were first introduced, may w...

This site hosts videos of Douglas Englebart demo-ing his work at Stanford Research Institute in 1968. Yes, many of these computing technologies were developed before I was born! "the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic...

This week, The Straight Dope tackles an important, deeply puzzling question: what are all these useless keys and labels on my keyboard? In some cases oddball keys were put on the PC keyboard (or to be more precise, included in the ASCII character set, most of which found its way onto the PC key...

Well, after all the last minute legal wrangling, the US national "Do not call list" went into effect on October 1. For some reason, I haven't seen any "day two" press commenting on the reduced phone calls, lamenting loss of jobs, or whatever. Maybe I'm just not reading the right news sources. ...

I'm sure some of you are using or have tried out OpenOffice? I haven't, but I'm intrigued by some of the new features in 1.1. For example, they now have Acrobat PDF and Flash export formats. This is really intriguing to me... it's one thing to have export filters to .DOC etc., since by thems...

From Network World: Delivery of the Yahoo and WebEx product comes as rivals such as IBM and Microsoft are vying for a piece of the up-and-coming market. Microsoft on Oct. 21 will officially introduce its Office Live Communications Server enterprise IM product. The company introduced its Office...

The October issue of e-Pro magazine landed in my inbox yesterday. "Take Note" for October sneaks up on you. The first few paragraphs discuss the technology job market, how things were in the last boom, what's gone on in the recession, and predictions around what will happen in a recovery. I...

Legendary science fiction hero Doctor Who is time jumping once more, set to return to British television more than a decade after he disappeared into space, the BBC said.Just as long as they don't give the show an actual budget, it might be interesting. If they try to "sex up" this go-round, l...

I'm in my office in Cambridge for the first time in more than three months. My assistant just came by with my paper mail, as Cambridge is still the address on my business card (and where IBM thinks I work). In the mail are recent issues of both eWeek and Information Week. I have never asked t...

That said, Levine emphasizes that "it's not just for Oracle customers," hoping that the Collaboration Suite wins a broader audience. Levine acknowledges that there will be difficulties in winning through to that audience. "The Lotus base is loyal to that environment," he concedes. Gee Mr. L...

A panel of leading security experts Wednesday blasted Microsoft for vulnerabilities in its software and warned that reliance on the company's software is a danger to both business and national security. More ...

I had been wondering why there was so little press coverage of the web services interoperability event that Steve Mills did with Bill Gates last week... CNET's Mike Ricciuti has some ideas: It seems that this time, unlike back in the OS/2 days, it's Microsoft that needs some help. Gates and co...

A good overview of how all the major Java vendors are focused on bringing easy-to-use development tools or improvements to the J2EE development platform. The leading Java adherents--Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, IBM and Oracle--have ratcheted up efforts to attract software developers through a...

Couple of quick follow-ups: Thursday's posting regarding the Microsoft's Office Live launch "stunt" -- well, it was impossible to tell where Mr. Gupta actually was for these broadcasts. The pictures in the webcast surely were "canned" -- the Boston shot of Fenway Park was not a 7 AM view...

Julian R 's latest blog entry is titled "Acknowledging our existence". He muses about the place weblogs have as a source of genuine news, or "buzz", to mainstream reporters. ...because I've read things before that indicate some reluctance by "members of the press" to admit that blogs (or "we...

CRN ran several stories related to Windows SharePoint Services last Friday. Both Heini and Peter O'Kelly have linked to the "review" of WSS; even here on my personal blog, I think I need to hold my tongue on my opinion of the story (To give you an idea, sample quote: "[Lotus] Team Workplace...

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From Computerworld: The world won't change overnight. HTML-based browsers will be around for a long time, accessing Web applications. But I believe that, gradually, more and more Web applications, particularly in-house ones, will be based on rich clients. Interesting take that Flash or Sun'...

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From Infoworld: Despite noting the significance of the product's upcoming release, analysts believe Microsoft has some catching up to do. Market incumbent IBM has been selling Lotus Sametime -- recently renamed Lotus Instant Messaging and Conferencing -- for approximately five years. ... Still...

In today's snail mail, two separate envelopes from Windows & .NET Magazine, which I likely receive as the result of attending some Microsoft conference, because I certainly haven't paid for it. Envelope #1 contains one piece of yellow paper -- "National Electronic Telegram Notification",...