Ed Brill

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1. 1  Peter Wilson  | 7/12/2007 4:56:39 PM

   Yay !!! It includes screen captures :-)

   Pete

1. 2    | 7/12/2007 11:24:13 PM

   Deleted - no anonymous comments allowed

1. 3  Christian Tillmanns  | 7/13/2007 12:38:11 AM

   @2 Nope, don't need it. Probably most of us know how to install Notes correctly. The thing that crashes the most here is IE7... for those poor souls that still have to use it because Quickr runs better on it.

   PS: Bill Gates? Isn't stealing somebody elses personality a federal offense?

1. 4  Ralf M Petter  | 7/13/2007 1:10:45 AM

   @2,3

   Ok it is not correct that notes crashes 5 times a day actually notes crashes are very rare, but it is a valid point, that it is a shame that Notes is not able to detect crashed processes and kill this processes on restart.

1. 5  Erik Brooks  | 7/13/2007 4:55:54 AM

   Anybody else find it a little funny that the opening screenshot has Photoshop running in the taskbar? It almost seems like a vaporware announcement. :-)

1. 6  Jim Casale  | 7/13/2007 4:56:39 AM

   @4 You can use nsd to kill any hung processes. NSD -kill from the Notes program directory. You can even create a batch file and kill the processes without even knowing where Notes has been installed.

   But I do agree they should have that functionality on startup of Notes

1. 7  Erik Brooks  | 7/13/2007 5:11:20 AM

   And while you've got me looking...

   Page 3's opening screenshots (productivity editors) are framed in an image viewer. I.E. they are screenshots of screenshots, not screenshots of the apps.

   Page 3's "Samantha Daryn" screenshot has some serious copy/paste sloppiness in the "File" and "Edit" menu area.

   Hopefully somebody will put that last bit of polish on before this gets released to the CxOs of the world.

1. 8  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com/ | 7/13/2007 5:40:37 AM

   "More than 130 million people have used Lotus Notes and Domino software in both small and large organizations worldwide."

   "have used" ?

1. 9  Pranav  | 7/13/2007 6:03:03 AM

   The document mentions that ND8 has "mail recall". I'm using Beta3 and that doesn't show the recall options in the Actions > Tools menu. Is is expected to be added in the general release?

1. 10  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/13/2007 6:50:21 AM

   @3/7 - Alan and I had both asked that the screenshots be fixed before broad announcement of this paper. I looked and thought they had been...apparently not carefully enough. I'll follow up.

   @8 As to weird tense, I believe it's an acknowledgment that not all 130 million licenses are in active use, any more than Microsoft's 400 million Office licenses are. IBM's lawyers like to be precise, I know this is a foreign concept at Microsoft.

   @9 Mail recall has been in all betas, but the mail template must be updated to access it (and the server must be Domino 8 to actually use it). Perhaps you're not running the mail 8 template?

1. 11  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com/ | 7/13/2007 7:12:31 AM

   @10 Thanks for the clarification Ed, would you happen to know how many are in active use?

   If memory serves, we used to say it was something like 126 million, but that was a few years ago. Seems odd that 4 million would account for all other licenses over the previous 20 years when our fathers used it, and the growth since then of course.

1. 12  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/13/2007 7:45:13 AM

   Gary, thanks. I would happen to know how many are in active use. It's less than 130 million. The 126 million number you reference was likewise a cumulative license number.

1. 13  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com/ | 7/13/2007 8:53:16 AM

   @12 Oops... in which case I wasn't precise when I used that number at our events - my understanding had always been that it was the current install base (active users).

   Is there a risk that using the cumulative license metric may be a little confusing when it says 130 million “people" though ?

   e.g., A single person may have used Lotus Notes at more than one company;

   e.g., The same person may be associated with more than one license even at the same company as they purchased 4, 5, 6 & 7

   If MS were to use the same standard, they’d be claiming in far in excess of 1 billion people.

1. 14  Volker Weber http://vowe.net/about | 7/13/2007 8:56:11 AM

   That is an interesting dance around meaningful numbers.

   There was this big push auditing licenses with the help of KPMG. Published cumulative numbers did go up significantly from before to after this initiative. There are many possible explanations. Former numbers may have been padded during the seat wars, customers were mostly not underlicensed (why scare them with an audit?), net growth achieved was minimal because an equal number of customers defected, etc. etc.

   The meaningful number is the number of seats with active maintenance because those are customers who bet on the product's future. You know THAT number, and I leave it to you to disclose. It looks less impressive than 1xx million. ;-)

1. 15  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/13/2007 9:28:28 AM

   Sure, but it [number of active seats] has been growing over the last three years and is at its peak over that time period.

   What we have disclosed publicly is the number of active organizations using Notes/Domino, which was about 43,500 at the start of 2006 and 46,000 at the start of 2007.

   @vowe, The audit "push" actually has not increased licenses sold in any material way, since it is more often maintenance that is the issue in software audits than unlicensed users. This is just my experience with the half dozen that I was ever involved in...I don't think there has been such a "big" push (certainly not worldwide).

   @13 Gary, MS -is- using the same standard. Since Software Assurance has never been required, and the channel for MS has often included shrinkwrap retail, MS has no way to track whether licenses procured are the same user licensing a new version of a product or an actual "new" user. Most of the analysts I've talked to recognize that MS often re-sells the same license, since Software Assurance has been a bad bet for so many organizations (with 4-5 year release cycles for most MS products).

   At least in IBM's case, there's no shrinkwrap (hasn't been since R5, I think) and all licenses now require a year of maintenance. When a customer renews maintenance (including maintenance after license), that is not a new "user"/seat.

   To vowe's point, the number of maintenance seats for Notes/Domino is at its highest in three years. Those are the customers betting on the future, and since the trend line is in the upward direction, that seems indicative of the health of Notes/Domino. And we still have 2006 market share numbers forthcoming.

1. 16  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com/ | 7/13/2007 10:00:28 AM

   @15 Thanks again for the clarification Ed, though I'm not convinced that the majority of people reading the brochure will make the connection that it's a cumulative license calculation and not related to the number of users in the workforce today using the product on a daily basis.

   The number of customers seems to have dropped by 14,000 in the past few years - we used to say it was 60,000 customers way back when { Link } ... or was one of the numbers imprecise ?

1. 17  Murray  | 7/13/2007 10:14:52 AM

   "Help your executives understand the new release..." ! We have enough problems making our "executives" understand the benefits of moving from R5 to ND7. ND8 will sadly remain a pipedream.

1. 18  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/13/2007 10:20:11 AM

   The 60,000 calculation was the one that was, unfortunately, imprecise. What we found early on when I took over this role is that we were counting multiple sites per organization as separate "organizations"... when we relooked at this we came up with an ~40K actual organizations number at that time. You can see the trajectory from early '05 to early '07 in terms of 120 MM licenses -> 130 MM licenses.

1. 19  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com/ | 7/13/2007 11:21:34 AM

   @18 To help see the trajectory can you confirm that I understand this cumulative license number correctly. The 10MM delta in the past two years is the total number of licenses purchased by existing and new customers during that period - is that correct?

   If so, isn't that a slow down in growth rate on the previous 20 years? (120MM/20 years, bearing in mind majority of license growth came after 1996).

   If 5 million users move to other platforms during that period (hypothetical), would the number remain 130MM?

1. 20  Volker Weber http://vowe.net/about | 7/13/2007 11:36:23 AM

   Gary, that is the nature of cumulative numbers. They never go down and it is precisely the reason why they are not meaningful.

   Active maintenance and new licensees are the numbers to look for. Everything else is history.

1. 21  Gary Sweeting http://garysweeting.blogspot.com/ | 7/13/2007 5:28:35 PM

   @20 Thanks Volker - that was my understanding too. :-)

1. 22  Jeff Picco  | 7/13/2007 6:42:06 PM

   I love the license debate - always entertaining.

   I did enjoy the Adobe Photoshop cameo. I was also surprised that IBM would be using such an expensive piece of software considering you are pushing 'productivity editors' as a potential replacement to other expensive software.

   Good times, good times. :-)

1. 23  Alan Lepofsky http://www.alanlepofsky.net | 7/15/2007 8:43:17 AM

   @22, Sorry I'm late to this thread, but as far as your Photoshop comments, it is not IBM using "such an expensive piece of software", it is our Marketing Agency, who of course uses Photoshop. No they were not making fake screen shots or anything ridiculous like that (although humans seem to love to find things wrong with everything), they were more likely resizing images and colour balancing them for the brochure. However, I find it unacceptable that they did not either a) close Photoshop before the final screen shot, or b) hide the task bar completely. So, yes it is bad that Photoshop is shown, but no, this is not some evil IBM issue.

1. 24  Rob Ingram http://www.dominoblog.com | 7/17/2007 8:26:13 AM

   @9 - Gary - Message recall action menu is context sensitive. You have to be in the Sent or All Documents view (and selecting a sent email)to be able to recall a message and see the menu. I believe this was in the beta code. There is also an action button and right click option. For the recall request to work, you would need a Domino 8 mail server running at the receiving mailbox.