Ed Brill

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1. 1  Stuart McIntyre http://blog.collaborationmatters.com | 9/3/2010 8:39:45 AM

   "For a long time, the version of the mail template that IBM offers internally has included a categorized view like this. High priority messages are in a separate twistie, calendar workflow/invitations are in a separate twistie, etc. "

   And in one fell swoop, you've hit the issue. This type of view was never easily available in the product as shipped. I've seen IBM's using this categorised view for years, and have never once seen it in use at a customer. A great shame.

   You're right of course, Ed, Notes had a lot of these 'new' GMail Labs features, the issue is how do we:

   a) make customers/user more aware of them

   b) make more corporate IT departments actually deploy them to users and evangelise about their presence.

   I'll be interested whether Lotuslive Notes does this any better - will you be presenting the very best of Lotus Notes to subscribers and users of that service?

1. 2  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 9/3/2010 8:39:55 AM

   Surely the point being made is that an algorithm, albeit a simplistic one, is kicking in to automagically sort the priority of one's inbox based on various flags, sender, etc., etc. Sorry, but Lotus Notes did NOT do that first.

   Wider point taken of course. But you know the saying:

   { Link }{ Link }

   :-)

1. 3  Catalin Acatrinei  | 9/3/2010 8:46:54 AM

   There is one catch; take a look at the slick gmail interface, and then at lotus notes interface.

   Overkill is the word you are looking for...

1. 4  Tim Tripcony http://xmage.gbs.com | 9/3/2010 8:55:11 AM

   The trouble is, this happens all the time...

   For instance, I bought this shiny new "revolutionary" device in April that is made by Apple. Its primary user interface is a grid of square icons. Linux distros tailored for netbooks often serve up a similar user interface. This brand new, never been tried, grid-of-square-icons thing really seems to be catching on... wait, isn't that precisely what the Notes workspace has looked like since I was 11 years old?

   There's been a trend over the last few years toward abandoning the age-old relational database structure for a document-based (a.k.a. "NoSQL") format. NoSQL implementations such as Cassandra, Hadoop, and CouchDB are not only gaining traction in developer mindshare but also run some of the most heavily used public sites, including Facebook, which recently exceeded the 500 million user mark. This shift away from a relational structure seems to be such a good idea, it's amazing in retrospect that nobody thought of it sooner. Oh wait... Couch, one of the first NoSQL database formats to gain much attention, was modeled almost entirely on NSF... by a guy who used to work at Iris.

   I'm sure if I spent just a few minutes thinking about it, I could come up with a dozen more examples. So, given how many facets of Notes/Domino were revolutionary when first unveiled, and have since been - or are now being - imitated by others, how is it that nobody seems to know?

   Did you know that there are at least 30,000 guys (across about 800 local chapters) in the U.S. alone who get together weekly to sing barbershop music? They have an annual convention that includes a quartet contest where, to win, you have to be so good that some quartets have been singing together for 20 years before they finally take home the gold. There's at least one active chapter in most major cities in the country... where I'm living right now, there are 5 within an hour's drive. Yet nobody knows this society ({ Link } ) exists, because barbershoppers only talk about barbershop with other barbershoppers.

   Yeah. It's kinda like that.

1. 5  David  | 9/3/2010 9:20:49 AM

   I'm sorry Ed, but I cannot agree with you on this one. First, Notes has never had an *intelligent* way of prioritizing inbox. Second, Notes has never had en *easy* way to let business users categorize their email. Third, IBM unfortunately, does not *understand* what's wrong with that, not even today.

   Sadly, I was expecting reactions like this in the yellowsphere.

   "For a long time, the version of the mail template that IBM offers internally..." Excuse me, did you say *internally*?

   And yes, high fives about "our" color make me sad today.

1. 6  Thomas http://www.notessidan.se | 9/3/2010 9:36:31 AM

   { Link }

1. 7  Nathan T. Freeman http://ntf.gbs.com | 9/3/2010 9:44:17 AM

   A feature that requires a design modification to the template isn't a feature. It's a cop-out.

   If this were policy-driven, then MAYBE you could call it a feature. But by the logic in this post, you might as well say that Lotus Notes has long had the feature of drag-to-forward a message to a contact, because all you have to do is replace your mail template with the OpenNTF Mail Experience. Template modifications aren't a feature of the product.

1. 8  Steve http://steveyeo.wordpress.com/ | 9/3/2010 9:50:56 AM

   The selling factor here is that in theory it doesn't require any user interaction. From my experience of the Categorised view in Notes is that it relies on the sender to mark something as important rather than what you deem as important. Once the users are aware of this everything will be marked as important and we are back to where we started.

   This is where I see Google's offering differ, it gives the recipient the ultimate control over the mail flow and that is how email should be, email or any other technology should not have the power to control you are supposed to control the technology.

   Steve

1. 9  Chris Knoblock  | 9/3/2010 9:51:05 AM

   In technology, you're only as innovative as the features your customers actually know about.

1. 10  JFranchetti  | 9/3/2010 9:53:10 AM

   Not sure that simply having a categorized view of your mail (that users or developers have to setup) is the same thing. You could do that in pretty much any mail client for years.

   Google has made it an offering, made it simple\clean, and added some search logic (and user rating capability) to determine the most important items to you.

   What Google did isn't ground breaking, though they are getting some good PR, as everyone can relate to the fact that we each get too much email and that is hurting productivity. What scares me most is that even have David Allen seems to be getting on board with gmail now: { Link }

1. 11  Keith Brooks http://www.vanessabrooks.com | 9/3/2010 10:00:10 AM

   This is one of those things you knew about once, did and can't remember anymore how/where/why it gets configured.

   And what is in use inside, should make it to the outside if it helps productivity and could be set by a preference or policy if someone prefers it the other way, just like conversation thread versus standard inbox view. Make this option 3 and I guarantee it will start getting used by someone outside IBM.

1. 12  Richard Schwartz http://www.poweroftheschwartz.com | 9/3/2010 10:07:35 AM

   Count me as one of those who believe you are misconstruing the value of what the GMail feature actually delivers. Sure, you can set up Notes to organize messages in a variety of ways, including by the (sender's opinion of) importance. Outlook can do that too... and that's an out-of-the-box feature, not a customization.

   But the new GMail feature is doing algorithmic classification of messages, and that's something you don't have in the base Lotus Notes and Domino products. You don't have it even though you've had a close relative of it, SwiftFile, for how many years now? The research papers go back more than a decade, but it's never been fully embraced as part of the core product, which is a shame.

   And last I checked, SwiftFile is still a client-side feature that enables some shortcuts for manual classification, rather than actually doing automatic classification on the server before the user actually sees the message. So in this case, Ed, I have to say that Lotus was in fact a leader in algorithmic classification of email, but, if this new GMail feature actually delivers good results, Google is about to blow by you.

1. 13  John Garmon  | 9/3/2010 10:31:19 AM

   Judging from DWA (or is it iNotes), IBM has not (as of 8.01) produced a functional email client. This looks like Beta software!

   Google mail is SO SIMPLE and it works properly. ...oh, and the Calendar is MUCH better!

   john3

1. 14  Rob McDonagh http://www.CaptainOblivious.com | 9/3/2010 10:52:12 AM

   @12 +1

   Manual categorization DOES NOT equal "Priority Inbox", by any stretch of the imagination. The equivalent feature to categorization is GMail's label feature (a different implementation, sure).

1. 15  Keith Brooks http://www.vanessabrooks.com | 9/3/2010 11:10:53 AM

   @13 personally I find gmail's UI horrible.

   Can't ever find anything like reply/forward are in non obvious locations and multiple steps to do basic tasks even get tedious. And why when I reply do I have screens of emails before I find where I can reply?

   And that is a good UI?!

1. 16  Roger Moore  | 9/3/2010 11:22:11 AM

   I think you didn't get it.

   Lotus Notes:

   "High Importance" is setup by the SENDER of the e-mail. So if everyone and his mother thinks their e-mail is important, you are screwed. After a while you might as well just use "High Importance" as your inbox and "Normal" for Spam/Broadcasts.

   Gmail:

   "High Importance" is setup by YOUR behavior on your e-mail. Which notes you usually read? What do you reply to? Is the sender in your address book? Among many other variables.

1. 17  Craig Boudreaux  | 9/3/2010 11:43:23 AM

   @15 All those functions are there, but without the clutter. Also, I've talked to people who really appreciate the type of email treading that gmail provide. One can argue that Notes does this too, but it doesn't always work well.

   @9 I second that. If no one knows about the feature or doesn't know to ask the admins for it, it's not a feature...

   I wonder what a company could do about that. Surely there's some facility that's been invented for telling customers about the great features of a product. :-) Wait a minute, sounds like Google has 'invented' that before IBM too.

   When IBM scoffs at Gmail, I worry, because it feels like that they don't understand the draw, meaning they don't understand the competition.

1. 18  Keith Brooks http://www.vanessabrooks.com | 9/3/2010 1:16:21 PM

   @17 yes the functions are there, never said they weren't, but finding them is the problem.

   I never find gmail to be easy to get in and use. Unlike the ease of us I find when I use yahoo mail or notes or even outlook.

   Is it a different UI and theory of usage, perhaps that is why I find it so difficult. But then I also am annoyed that it is not customizable to the way I want to work with my email, unlike Notes which is wholly customizable, albeit sometimes under cover as this post has shown. But 99% is right in front of the user.

   Where is my drag n drop to a folder in Gmail?

   Right no folders so why can't I drag n drop to a star or a label?

   Yes I am a mouse person, not a keyboard shortcut person or a drop down person.

1. 19  David (The Notes Guy in Seattle)  | 9/3/2010 6:46:25 PM

   It sounds like there are two issues here:

   1. Does the categorized inbox feature in Notes equate to the importance feature of Gmail?

   2. Where is the marketing effort on these features?

   To the first issue, what is important to the sender is irrelevant to it's perceived importance to the recipient. "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." Also, many people either never use the importance feature or over use it. As @12 mentioned, Swiftfile technology applied to the relevance would be great and would more closely match the Gmail feature.

   To the second issue, it seems the usual message: Yet another feature that goes unused for lack of education/placement/marketing. Ah yes, the "M" word. Reality check: Some IBMers still use basic mode because they don't know any better. ( Read on: { Link } )

   Ed, your post would be much better received if it came out BEFORE Google announced their feature. Saying "Notes can do that too." doesn't distinguish Notes from the competition. It makes it just like the competition. Just imagine how anti-climatic the response would have been to Google if that had happened.

   That's the perspective from here in Seattle anyway.

1. 20  Erik Brooks  | 9/3/2010 7:31:58 PM

   Looks like I'm late to the party. Everything to be said's been said.

   The big problem is what Tim says @4. Wait until Google announces they've got offline replication in Google Apps. Or document-level security. Or field-level encryption.

1. 21  Peter Presnell http://www.yellowverse.com | 9/3/2010 8:00:45 PM

   Lately I feel Tim Tripcony has been very insightful with his comments on a few contentious issues. So let me steal a couple of his quotes and combine them into a single thread...

   Lotus Notes is a great application development platform that just happens to also do e-mail. In many regards it has been revolutionary in many things that it has done but precious few seem to know about this. This includes the way it has integrated e-mail into a non-SQL application development environment. So while I agree that the existing categorized view isn't really the same as GMail's smart in-box, I would think a smart in-box isn't really what people need to manage their day in a modern world. E-mail is becoming so yesterday. What they need is the ability to sift through data from e-mail, applications, RSS feeds, social forums etc and consolidate them all into a single list. And then to have that list adjust to the context of what they are presently working on. After all what is important to me now really depends on what is on my mind at this time.

   Just imagine how much attention the press and IT community should give to an offering like that... WAIT.... have I just described Project Vulcan???

   GMail's smart inbox is really so yesterday. Project Vulcan is so tomorrow.

1. 22  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 9/3/2010 8:05:31 PM
   
   

   @21 "Project Vulcan is so tomorrow."

   Exactly. I figured that was my follow-up blog post :-)

1. 23  JFranchetti  | 9/3/2010 9:25:29 PM

   Interesting post from an IBMer that makes a great Vulcan lead in.

   { Link }

1. 24  Peter Wilson  | 9/4/2010 5:11:36 AM

   The good news is IBM will have a lot of Exchange customers to try and win over by the time Project Vulcan is available :-0

   Pete

1. 25  Olaf Boerner http://www.bcc.biz | 9/4/2010 8:08:13 AM

   This is a perfect example why Notes has a poor reputation at endusers when they compare the standard mailbox with Outlouk which has categorized views of of the box. We all know that this is not a technical issue for Notes.

   We could do more with Notes to provide productive inboxes but due to the increasing mailtemplate complexitity customers are now switching back to standards. OpenNTF is great but not an option for most enterprise customers.

   @24: perhaps a strategic approach. Let customers move to Exchange and a win back will be counted as new license. At least for the sales reps.

1. 26  Edward http://www.google.com/a | 9/4/2010 9:47:05 AM

   The categorized inbox (along with the "All Messages\By Person" view) were two of the best internal IBM customizations to the mail7.ntf template. However, I could never explain well to customers (or other IBMers) why these customizations couldn't be enabled with one click in stock mail7.ntf template. It's little tweaks like these that could make Notes mail work better.

   Biggest difference between Notes & Gmail? At least two to three orders of magnitude of users. Consider the consumer Gmail users who could persuade their IT management or CxO that Gmail works so well, everyone in the company under 35 yrs old uses it at home, and it's $x cheaper than our current XYZ mail infrastructure.

   @12 hit the nail on the head. Gmail doesn't honor the importance flag because frankly, I don't care that you think YOUR email is important. If it's important to me, I'll know. This is to deliberately avoid the widespread abuse of the importance flag, as seen in every workplace all over the world.

1. 27  sewa mobil http://griyamobilkita.webs.com | 9/4/2010 9:56:44 AM

   Nice article, thanks for sharing.

1. 28  Rick Sizemore  | 9/4/2010 12:54:09 PM

   There are some aspects of this that I think folks are missing, and the claim of Notes having prioritization first confuses the matter as well. The question isn't why doesn't IBM provide an algorithm that does this as an option at least, it's how is Google providing the algorithm with data?

   The method to prioritize is similar to the algorithm that Google already uses to provide targeted advertising within Gmail and search. To get this data, Google must examine the content of your messages, track your interaction with messages that have certain characteristics, and store the results in a database.

   The architecture of Gmail itself means this data is not segregated to only you, your company, and in many cases region of the world. User's content live on multiple physical servers spread around the globe, but the same physical server will also host many other organizations and individuals. It is a true mail cloud, only the users unique identifier differentiates your mail content with any other when it's inserted into the database and spayed at available servers, the very next record may be my personal Gmail. Similarly, the content of the database where your habits are abstracted so they can actually prioritize a message is also shared.

   The value to the end user is obvious, you get message priority, that learns based on your behavior. The value for Google is that this is another aspect of user behavior they can model, and then apply the their actual business, which is advertising.

   There are, however, concerns with this architecture and business model for an enterprise, you have to trust that your information, personal or corporate, won't be used in contradiction to your wishes, both now and 5 years from now. In some countries, there are specific laws governing privacy in email, so even the abstracting of content begins to fall in the gray area. As an enterprise, you may be liable for breaches of security, but usually that is a direct attack on the data, not the ongoing operating practice of your hosting provider.

   The prioritization feature could be added to Domino, or Exchange, both on premises and in the cloud, and actually maintained in a private container for just your organization. In the case of IBM, there was an actual internal project to do just that a few years ago, but the whole local privacy laws complicated who could do what. (Ed or another IBMer could maybe comment on that)

   You could implement a similar system on the local Notes client as well, leveraging a full text index and adding behavior tracking. It would be a resource hog, but potentially useful, and all the data would be locally resident instead of the corporate cloud or public cloud thereby bypassing any local legal issues. You could to the same in Outlook, Thunderbird, etc, it's not a function of the client really.

   Priority Inbox is a nice feature, I turned it on in my gmail account, but the use of the feature has a whole host of concerns that an enterprise, or an end user, would want to address first. Whenever I've talked with the gmail team I've always been impressed by their technical ability, they are very bright, very forthright, but most haven't had experience with the environment that the enterprise lives in. A company is like a really big family, where the enterprise is more like a neighborhood where fences make good neighbors, to simplify a bit.

   On premises hosted enterprise email, basically IBM and Microsoft, dwarf the number of gmail users, private, public and corporate, both individually and combined. There are reasons that a company choose to host in the cloud, as well as internally, privacy, data integrity, trust, fear of change (OK maybe that's not a great reason, but true none the less). The gmail model only provides one method, and the only business value Google gains in hosting mail, is the ability to mine user behavior to support they're actual business, advertising. There's nothing wrong with that, they're honest enough about it, but most folk tend to gloss over it when talking referring to them.

1. 29  Marco Foellmer http://ebf.de | 9/5/2010 4:09:41 AM

   Ed, I would really like to see the IBM mail template for my customers since ages. When it will be happen? IMHO it is not fair to compare a public feature of gmail with a private IBM Mail template. Please make the template available.

   @25 Olaf, I do not really see win backs here in Germany after the customers are switched to MS Exchange or Google Mail. Let's keep them on Notes. ;-)

   cheers marco

1. 30  Erik Brooks  | 9/5/2010 7:30:12 AM

   To follow up to my own post @20:

   "Wait until Google announces they've got offline replication in Google Apps. Or document-level security. Or field-level encryption."

   ...or a "Nifty Fifty."

   Things to think about...

1. 31  Marky Goldstein http://www.rosa.com | 9/5/2010 8:27:39 AM

   Gmail is cool, but we are missing Folders. We hope that Google learns to listen to customers, too often they seem to think they know better... but if Google turns into a customer driven company, well then, ...

1. 32  Bob Balaban http://www.bobzblog.com | 9/5/2010 11:26:41 AM

   Ed, did IBM patent the idea?

   If so, maybe it's time to send a little note to Google, "Say hello to my li'l (lawyer) fren'"!

1. 33  Done Notes-in’  | 9/6/2010 5:57:37 AM

   Sat here today, with a company announcement in-front of saying that we are moving away from Notes the only thing this blog post made me think was - It's all well and good that Notes did it first but what did they DO with it?. Judging from your own posts it would seem nothing.

   "But apparently, few people know that. Or maybe, few people care…"

   They know and care because they are told about! I've been working with Notes for 15 years plus now and never knew nor have ever been told about the Pick Inbox Style Agent.

   It's been a fun ride but I am stepping off the yellow train this month and concentrating on something that will give me a future.

1. 34  Nigel Jones http://cherrybyte.blogspot.com | 9/6/2010 11:22:01 AM

   I think the key wins here for google are

   - simplicity / ease of use

   - automation

   - learning

   - recipient preference not sender preference

1. 35  Gabriella Davis http://Http://blog.turtleweb.com | 9/6/2010 7:17:49 PM

   Having read all the comments here I'm chiming in because no-one has made the one that jumped into my head when I read about priority mail. Here's the thing - I don't care how clever the algorithm is currently, I don't want it deciding for me what mail is important and what isn't. I receive approx 150 non spam emails a day which I manually manage and file. Whilst I'm working on a particular project or troubleshooting a problem THAT day THOSE hours are when those emails are critical to me and I may send / receive 70 or them. That doesn't make those addressees or that subject or topic high priority for me beyond that. Tomorrow something else is important and those messages less so. An email from one person today with something I need or from me to them updating them doesn't make all their mail important to me

   Having worked with and supported mail systems since 1988 my experience is that everyone has their own often unique and indecipherable way of managing their mail (marking actionable items as unread documents for instance). Google priority mail with it's one size fits all solution doesn't meet the needs of those users IMO

   Oh but +++1 to Swiftfile being supported and extended to the Mac (I can dream can't I ?)

1. 36  Gabriella Davis http://Http://blog.turtleweb.com | 9/6/2010 7:17:51 PM

   Having read all the comments here I'm chiming in because no-one has made the one that jumped into my head when I read about priority mail. Here's the thing - I don't care how clever the algorithm is currently, I don't want it deciding for me what mail is important and what isn't. I receive approx 150 non spam emails a day which I manually manage and file. Whilst I'm working on a particular project or troubleshooting a problem THAT day THOSE hours are when those emails are critical to me and I may send / receive 70 or them. That doesn't make those addressees or that subject or topic high priority for me beyond that. Tomorrow something else is important and those messages less so. An email from one person today with something I need or from me to them updating them doesn't make all their mail important to me

   Having worked with and supported mail systems since 1988 my experience is that everyone has their own often unique and indecipherable way of managing their mail (marking actionable items as unread documents for instance). Google priority mail with it's one size fits all solution doesn't meet the needs of those users IMO

   Oh but +++1 to Swiftfile being supported and extended to the Mac (I can dream can't I ?)

1. 37  David (The Notes Guy in Seattle) http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/TheNotesGuyInSeattle/?lang=en | 9/6/2010 11:12:58 PM

   To clarify, @33 is not me. My job went to India this time, not Redmond. I'm going to continue using the software personally even if my profession leads me in other directions.

   @33 - To borrow and adapt a quote from Lance Armstrong: "It's not about the software." The strength in your skill set is not knowledge about the details of a product. It is all the skills you have developed and experiences you have gathered in the process that cannot be learned from a book which differentiate you. As a computer professional, you must be able to adapt to new software, whether it is a new version, a new product within the brand, or a new brand altogether.

1. 38  Steve  | 9/7/2010 2:53:32 PM

   I'd like to see tagging available for the inbox vs folders or categories. It would be nice to tag messages, be able to search by tag, maybe even have a tag cloud in the sidebar with ranking on the tags etc, etc, etc.

1. 39  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 9/8/2010 7:33:21 AM

   I've said it before, I'll say it again. Prioritisation is something that should be decided by the recipient, not the sender. I know some people who send every e-mail as high-priority, and 9 times out of 10 they're not high-priority... not to me anyway.

   A far better way is using two visual indicators... colourisation (who was the mail sent from) and the recipient icon (who was it sent to). If a mail arrives from my boss - or from someone I'm working with on an important project - and it was sent just to me, chances are that's important.

   Also, agree with Gab @35 - each to their own, and there probably isn't a mail app on the planet that has everything that absolutely everyone wants. But with Notes customisation you could get near.

1. 40  Harris Huckabee  | 9/8/2010 11:57:09 AM

   @36: I'm with you on two things... what was important yesterday is not important today and even less important tomorrow. I flag my priorities with timestamps that age so that they eventually drop down the list.

1. 41  MarvinK  | 9/9/2010 11:43:04 AM

   I definitely don't think the ability to sort based on importance a sender gives an email is much of a feature--and definitely not comparable to what Google is doing.

   In my experience more of the emails labeled as high importance are ones that people typically give low priority and the sender knows it, and hopes they can trick the reader. I'm thinking stuff from the Safety committee or someone who wants a form filled out, etc... In any case, they certainly wouldn't correspond with what I'd consider my most important email.

   On the other hand, the color coding is probably a more useful Notes feature.

1. 42  Steve  | 9/17/2010 1:37:53 PM

   I find this funny. The built in view included from IBM is completely lame.

   1. I agree with the one point made here that I want to set the importance, not have it set by the sender.

   2. Why would IBM include a categorized view that has sortable columns? I had to laugh at that one. If the regular ol' user clicks on a sortable column, poof the categories are gone, back to a flat view. Guess what's next, the call to the help desk, I lost my categories, my inbox is all messed up.

1. 43  David  | 9/18/2010 6:28:50 PM

   I once attempted to define what notes was in a simple phrase, You know... the elevator speech. A "Notes-O Phile" argued with me, but he was incapable of completing the exercise. As Yoda said, "..and that is why you fail. "

   Notes mail is a moot point. The final remaining vestiges of Notes I have seen are as applications of a home grown variety, usually developed by a subject matter expert rather than a propeller head. They are typically laden with business logic and are ugly things that simply work.

   IBM would be wise to understand this point. The ability to quickly create a workable, scalable, enterprise level application by a regular Joe is what Notes was and always should have been.

   Notes got something right. Now is the time to understand what what that something was and start with a fresh slate and build a silver bullet.

1. 44  Rick  | 9/20/2010 11:12:30 PM

   Sigh..