Off for a few days
July 2 2009
It's been pretty quiet on the blog side of things for a couple of weeks, mainly due to some short vacation stretches, but also the intensity of the end-of-quarter period and other goings-on in my personal life. There's some irony to the silence, because the last two weeks have seen an incredible amount of interesting activity at work -- finalizing the business plan for Notes/Domino 8.5.1, starting discussions around "Notes 9" (in quotes because no formal announcement has been made), getting Symphony 1.3 out the door, seeing some great activity for products like Alloy, and looking at requirements for the next version of our hosted Notes offering, LotusLive Notes V2. Oh, and I've been discussing with my colleagues in marketing about some cool new end-user awareness work they have in the pipeline...working on a guest blogger to tell you about this.
On the other side of a few days' vacation I have an important customer meeting and then three days of exec-u-training at the IBM Learning Center in Armonk, NY. Things will continue to be a little quiet on the blog for another week or so. I'm hoping that the intensity of schedule will build up a pipeline of blog topics...with all of the above going on, seems like there should be a lot to say. Some of it is still "too early" but I think it will be worthwhile to bring some of these topics out for discussion soon.
For my American readers, have a safe and happy holiday. For all, keep an eye on my Twitter stream for more frequent bits of news and discussion.
Post a Comment
- 2
Dvir Reznik http://dvirreznik.blogspot.com | 7/2/2009 10:31:57 AM
Take all the time you need Ed, you've earned it!
And happy 4th of July weekend :-))
- 3
Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 7/2/2009 2:14:55 PM
Is this a follow-up to the promised guest blogger offer from the first Blogger BOF at Lotusphere 2007 { Link } ? :-)
- 4
peter b | 7/2/2009 5:00:38 PM
Just on names...
I like to sound of "Notes 9"
Kinda rolls of the tongue nicely
- 5
Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/2/2009 9:25:24 PM
@1 Symphony 1.3 is also derived from OpenOffice, just an older version. A lot of the work that was done in Symphony by our own lab teams has been contributed back to the OpenOffice.org community.
It is true that the next major release of Symphony will be based on the OpenOffice 3.x codestream, but I do not feel like there is a major deficiency until that time. We have won numerous awards and are seeing deployment or pilot in a large number of organizations worldwide, both those using Notes today and non-Notes customers. All IBMers have Symphony today and we are turning off MS Office licenses internally.
There's a very long-term commitment here and one which I've written about more than once (check the Lotus Symphony category on the blog { Link } ). Happy to discuss further.
- 6
Christian http://www.cubetoon.com | 7/3/2009 4:35:47 AM
Ed,
I must have missed something really important within the past few months. Didn't you state in one of your previous posts:
"wait, let me be bolder, we will not call it Notes 9."
So why contain all more recent posts references to "Notes 9"?
{ Link }
- 7
Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/3/2009 5:37:08 PM
I did say that. I think I'm coming around to the idea that, at least as a directional indicator, it makes sense as a label. Otherwise, it's too easy to be spun as FUD. So, we'll see.
Hello,
Just a note about Symphony 1.3 where we tried it and also learned from IBM colleagues that have used previous versions. It seems like a longer way to the finish line by doing your own version of Symphony instead of just using the "real thing". The end result is that things like file conversions etc.do not work properly and the user community really struggle.
I really like the idea of having an integrated IBM platform with all the office tools (remember that from the good old Lotus days :) and to give the "Evil Empire" som real competition is always a treat - but why go the long way round?
Word has it that you will be using the OpenOffice 3.x source code and that this should benefit the platform so that Symphony is no longer stuck in the back waters of office tools.
With Microsoft making things more difficult for companies to both stay compliant but also to integrate their products with others the prospect of an open software at a much lower price becomes much more interresting. It is quite reasonable to assume that the companies can step down a bit in functionality for the regular users since most of them never use much more than "OESPC" (Open-Edit-Save-Print-Close)
We have seen that at least 80% of the user community could do just fine with a more basic client and then the rest could have the full MS version.
However to venture out on any such migration demands reassurance and long term strategy - very much so from IBM - before a big company can go down this path. The effort of changing/training support staff, rolling out the new platform, etc.
Anyhow - we will need to do a business case and a proof of concept when the time is right... until now this has not been the case.
Any news or feedback on this topic is very interresting.
Thank you
//Joachim