Ed Brill

Taking Notes podcast episode 83: XPages

Just finished listening to the latest Taking Notes podcast, which interviews John Head and Rob McDonagh about the new XPages development features in Domino 8.5.  John and Rob are both Notes/Domino design partners, so they share their insights from the recent workshops in Westford and the latest betas.  Both have written on their blogs about XPages, but the podcast takes it into much more detail about what can actually be done with XPages and Domino 8.5.  They hit all the buzzwords, too, so that you can explain to your bosses why it matters.  It's a long one at 52 minutes but worth a listen...

Link: Taking Notes podcast episode 83: XPages >

Lotus Collaboration and Portal Technical Conference, Sydney, September

My colleagues down under have announced a technical conference to be held in Sydney the week of 15 September....



On the 15th, they'll hold the annual "Lotus Collaboration Summit", which is a free product/strategy event similar to those which were done worldwide last year in the second half of the year.  Then, from the 16th to the 19th, they'll hold the Lotus Collaboration and Portal Technical Conference, a four-day, deep dive event with five separate tracks of deep dive technical sessions.  The price is AU$2990 per person, but the Aussies have put in place a buy 5, get one free discount as well as a discount for IBM business partners.

There has been a lot of demand from the ANZ market for a local event on the size and scope of Lotusphere, or the Lotus Fusion event from years past.  While not a full week freebie, this set of events will deliver on both the strategy and on the technical content that you've asked for.

The Wall Street Journal: Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures

The Journal comments on a new Forrester Research report:

A new study by Forrester Research reviewed 90 blogs run by business-to-business companies in the Fortune 500, and surveyed about twice that many B2B marketers. Like most businesses, these companies want to use the Internet to reach their customers. But because B2B companies are selling to people who follow their products professionally and not for pleasure, they face a greater challenge than companies that sell primarily to consumers.

They're not handling that challenge well: Forrester found that most B2B blogs are "dull, drab, and don't stimulate discussion." Seventy percent stuck to business or technical topics, 74% rarely get comments, and 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news. Not surprisingly, 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies--the rest call it somewhat or highly significant--and the number of new corporate blogs among the companies Forrester tracks has dropped from 36 in 2006 to just three in 2008.

What I can't figure out is, what's the problem with "stuck to business or technical topics".  That doesn't by definition mean that the blog is boring, though I have heard from many of you that the fact that I occasionally inject some non-Lotus/industry aspects into this blog is part of what keeps it interesting.

My own early foray into "corporate blogging" (on lotus.com/weblog) was a failure because of a then-restrictive set of IBM web policies and the inability to interact.  However, looking at the IBM developerWorks blogging cloud these days, I would say that we have some bright, imaginative, thought leaders from IBM who are blogging and keeping it interesting.  Mary Beth Raven has, I believe, the most hits of any blog on the ibm.com infrastructure, and she's not dull, drab, or without discussion.

I haven't read the full Forrester report yet -- adding to the to-do list.  Maybe they meant senior executives who are blogging?
Update 3 PM CDT: I've read the report.  It seems like the downfall of the report is that the entire focus was bloggers on the actual F500 company websites.  There did not seem to be any account of the many bloggers for F500 companies -- like IBM and Microsoft, but also many others -- who blog on their own websites but speak mostly to corporate/B2B audiences.  Perhaps a broader look at blogging in this segment would include a view of the rest of us who are "off-site".

Link: The Wall Street Journal: Most Corporate Blogs Are Unimaginative Failures >

AustralianIT: Berry has corporate edge over iPhone

AustralianIT attempts to take the hype factor down a notch towards reality...

The iPhone, after all, has an extremely high lust-after factor, and people, from the average punter to big end of town executives, can't wait to sample it when it hits Australia on July 11.

Two key stumbling blocks for iPhone adoption in the corporate arena are security -- especially for the push email component -- and compatibility with other enterprise applications such as SAP.

Qantas CIO Jamila Gordon says more work is needed to convince her that the iPhone is on par with the BlackBerry. "The BlackBerry is a tool we use all across our organisation. We haven't tested the iPhone yet because it isn't a priority."

Qantas isn't in a rush to examine the iPhone and that decision appears to be well-founded, as recent research by Gartner reveals that Apple still has a long way to go before it catches up with the BlackBerry in security.

"For a platform to be considered mature, many security advocates require at least two things: time to let the platform percolate within the community of hackers to demonstrate it can resist threats," Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney writes in a research paper, and "access to the platform's insides by third parties, which can assess whether additional add-on measures are required to make the platform secure".

The article then goes on to acknowledge that this is a when, not if, question, but that questions about when do remain.

Link: AustralianIT: Berry has corporate edge over iPhone >

How about an executive briefing on Lotus strategy?

Often times when we get on a topic about Lotus's strategy, direction, or marketing, I receive comments along the lines of, "I get it, but my executives don't".  Last week, this lead me to have a conversation with Dave Montgomery, who is one of the managers at the Lotus executive briefing center, currently in Waltham, Massachusetts.  The briefing center is a great resource for getting messages about Lotus to a large group at your organization, straight from the decision makers, architects, executives, and subject-matter experts within Lotus.  All too often, though, this tool is overlooked.  

Especially with decreased business travel, some customers have been reluctant lately to make the trip to the briefing center.  Of the executive briefings I've done this year, none have been in the Massachusetts center (though my team has covered some briefings there).  Customers have been going more "local" to get the content they're looking for, and we've chosen to fly speakers around a bit more.  The content is very good, but not every one of our lab leaders or product architects can be on the road to customers all the time.

When I first joined Lotus, doing briefings in Cambridge (or, when the new center is complete, in Westford) created a feeling of going to the mountain top...to the absolute best place to get the best information.  Today, it feels to me like we can deliver a lot of that information through other channels or in other ways that are effective.  

All of this is leading up to some market research.  If your organization is the type that sees vendor briefings as useful, what makes them useful in 2008?  What would drive your management team to come together at a vendor facility?  Choices would be things like the location, the expertise, the agenda, the "extra-curriculars" (a great city to visit, good dinner before/after the briefing, sports tickets).  Are you doing more or less of these kinds of face-to-face briefings?  What other methods are being used to communicate similar information?  Would it be more or less useful to stay focused on one brand or product line (e.g. a "Lotus briefing") or broaden out to other topics (an "IBM briefing" or "IBM software briefing")?

And if this topic is all new to you, you can find out more about IBM Executive Briefing Centers on the web.  That particular page seems to cover only centers that do briefings on IBM Systems...but there are more that cover software.  Also, conversely, some of the briefing centers (Raleigh and Austin, for example) are equipped to cover Lotus topics in addition to other brands or divisions.

Last, if you think that the era of the all-day, face-to-face briefing has passed, you can say that, too.  But tell me what you are doing instead to get this type of information...or how you would envision doing it right in the future.   Thanks!

New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip

A column by IBMer Luis Suarez appears in today's New York Times concludes with a rather provocative position:

E-mail can become extinct, if not repurposed altogether, even at big companies like I.B.M. An e-mail in-box no longer needs to be like Pandora's box.

Let me quickly say that I completely agree with the second sentence, but entirely disagree with the words (though, perhaps, not the spirit) in the first.

Luis writes further:

I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

It's not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction. ....

THINK about whether my experience could work for you. Think about how to use social networking tools to eliminate spam and to avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people. These tools can also save you from an accumulation of online newsletters that never get read, and from those incessant project status reports that clutter many in-boxes.

For the most part, Luis is expressing what most of us in the collaboration space have been saying for the last ten years.  Collaborative software empowers people to share information and be more productive in more ways than ever before  However, i completely disagree that it renders e-mail to dinosaur status, though that has been predicted in various forms for nearly ten years.

If you have seen me present recently, you've seen me get to a slide like #18 from my recent ILUG/DNUG presentation and talk to this -- how many of you get 100+ e-mails a day?  Lots of hands.  How many of you are seeing your e-mail volume decrease?  Far fewer.  

Personal experience -- even though my responsibilities have increased, my e-mail volume is, for the most part, declining slowly over the last 12 months.



That slide has a key phrase -- Your in-box is a catalyst for productivity.  Even if you move all of your collaboration to other tools, there still needs to be a prompt, a push, a tickle, an alert ... something that draws you into the collaboration.  For as much as this industry has driven towards contextual collaboration -- and I believe that Notes 8 delivers on that far better than any other tool in the market -- it is still the ultimate challenge to draw users into the collaborative realm.

For example, in a strange-but-true aspect of my job at IBM, few of the people I work with on a daily basis read my weblog.  I completely agree with Luis that blogging has a significant benefit in that it helps you "avoid repeatedly answering the same question from many different people".  But in my world, that has only been a reduction, not an elimination.  I can't choose how you as customers, partners, colleagues, or industry figures choose to obtain information about Lotus Notes.  

If I blog about something, it will definitely reach a segment of my "customer" base.  But many key IBMers will never see it (even if I started cross-posting to my internal w3 weblog, which is time-consuming), and that leads to e-mails, instant messages, phone calls, discussion forum postings,and all other manner of information-seeking.  Thus, while I applaud and am proud of Luis's thought leadership, I know that it is far easier to give up e-mail in a role such as his.  In my role, my customers determine the method, urgency, and bandwidth of our communication.

Ruth Kaufman left a really insightful comment on my twitter stream and on this blog last week.  In many organizations, there are impediments to e-mail as a productivity tool.  Compliance, security, "mail jail", all of these get in the way.  In some companies, such as a customer I met last year, that has lead users to find their own tools -- they don' have to worry about a 200 MB mailbox quota if they are using Google groups or a public wiki.  However, there are a heck of a lot of risks -- and definitely some organizational knowledge loss -- when going outside the firewall.

Thus, for me at least, the right direction forward is a model that brings together all of my collaborative tools.  A way in which I can work with things like instant messaging, discussions, activities, shared spaces, and external tools like web content, Twitter, RSS feeds, and widgets.  If all of that comes together in an "inbox", and contains one-to-one or one-to-group asynchronous communication, too, then I can dig it.  It doesn't necessarily have to be something separate (as was discussed a few weeks ago on Jive CMO Sam Lawrence's blog)... in fact, I think I already have a tool that does all of the above.  Does it sound familiar?

Link: New York Times: I Freed Myself From E-Mail's Grip >

My resume as a wordle

Since the meme is going around....



Wordle was created by IBM researcher Jonathan Feinberg  Very cool!

Link: Make your own Wordle >

Impersonated on my own website

I guess the only surprise here is, why it has taken 4½ years for this to ever happen.

Since there is no identity validation for comments on this site (as with many blogs), anyone can post under any name.  By site terms, though, comments must be posted using one's real name and a valid e-mail address.  Over 35,000 comments have been posted here, and less than 100 of those are pseudonyms (mostly in cases where I just didn't catch it in time).

Before this week, though, I had never seen anyone post comments using my name.  Until this week, when I started going after one troll who used anonymouse.org to post here.  At first I just deleted his comments, then I blocked the IP for that site.  Still not enough.  Last night, he posted two comments using my name....



Now, there was one tell-tale sign that these weren't from me.  Each comment was signed.  I don't sign comments.  But otherwise, I realize that readers would assume these would be comments from me -- there's no history here of impersonation, so...

I deleted the comments, as well as the responses they quickly drew.  NO, 8.5 is not the last version to support the Mac platform.  But yeah, clever way to get attention.  Sigh.

I'm not quite sure what to do about this.  I've seen a few blog implementations (including some Dominoblog ones) where comments from the site owner get highlighted differently.  If that would work when I comment via blackberry, browser, or Notes client, I will look into something like that.  I could also post IP addresses with comments, but again, I travel a heck of a lot.  Open to suggestion, because once again, my trust in humanity got me stung (thankfully just a small bite this time).

Dear Comcast New Jersey subscriber -- next Friday, go to bed at your normal bedtime.

Fresh snack

The shop was closed, so I really can't explain.

And what did all that marketing get them?

Via Duffbert, I just had an interesting read of the transcript from Unify Corp.'s 2008 year-end earnings call.  Unify, as you may recall, is the company whose migration product from Notes to Microsoft, Composer, was aggressively marketed to SearchDomino subscribers from December 2007 until a few months ago.  By our collective reckoning, their mailing went out at least four times to SearchDomino mailing lists.... could have been hundreds of thousands of impressions.

In their earnings transcript, Unify's president, Todd Wille, discusses the success of Composer in the Notes environment (emphasis mine):

In 2008 we started to gain momentum with our Composer migration business. To recap, we closed eight deals for fiscal 2008, for bookings of $1.1 million, and as I said earlier, the eight deals were six pilots and two full-scale migration projects.  ...

We have a total of eleven Composer customers to date.  ...

Today we have eleven final proposals out to customers and of those six are pilots.  ... Out of the six pilot deals we've won since January 1, Microsoft has paid for three of them.

So let's recap:

• Eleven customers to-date, but eight deals in 2008.  So they came into this year with all of three Composer for Notes customers.
• Closed eight deals -- two full migrations.  Out of some 65,000 plus Notes customers (actively on maintenance with IBM or otherwise), the success rate is 8/65,000..
• Six of those were pilots.  Three were paid for by Microsoft, which means that 50% of the time, customers couldn't be convinced to invest on their own.  We don't know if those pilots will become actual migrations or not.
• They have proposals out for six more pilots and five final proposals (presumably, to five of the six pilot customers), meaning they have introduced the potential to up their customer count to 17.
• The six pilots and two full-scale deals generated US$1.1 million in revenue.  That means the cost of the migration tool -- not the migration, just the tool and services for the tool -- is in the six-figure range.

This doesn't exactly seem like the groundswell of "everybody's migrating" that the competition likes to portray.  Actually, very little empirical evidence supports that theory.

Putting all this in context of Microsoft's competitive effort is where it really gets interesting.  See, Todd Wille goes on to say that

The Notes-compete initiative continues to be one of the top three corporate initiatives for Microsoft.  ... over the last year, and continuing this upcoming fiscal year, they've got two, three or four key initiatives that really the whole company focuses on in addition to their normal goal setting. And one of those key initiatives is this whole Lotus Notes initiatives ... IBM identified as one of their major competitors, those two reasons have led this to be one of the key initiatives for them as a company last year and this going forward year.  ... And it goes all the way to the top of Microsoft and all the way down, is that this initiative is important and it's funded and that bodes well for us.

Ah yes, Notes Compete.  Entering Microsoft's fiscal 2009, this must be what, the fourth year they are running Notes Compete.  By my own estimation, Microsoft has put $50 million or more into this effort over the last four years.  If we take into consideration investment in business partners, marketing, events, and MS-funded migration services, it's probably even more.

And yet, through it all, Notes revenue has grown for 13 of the last 14 quarters (and for Lotus as a brand, it's 14 of 14).  The installed base of active Notes end-users grew by 10% from 2006 to 2007.  IDC reported that IBM gained share while Microsoft lost share from 2005 to 2006 (their report on 2007 is still not out yet).  The rate of customers deploying Notes/Domino 8 is faster, according to support calls and tracking surveys, than Notes/Domino 7.  Meanwhile, IBM has picked up a bunch of new wins, too.  We've got press releases in development, and some news is already out.  

Have there been customers that have migrated, begun migrating, or attempted migrating from Notes to the Microsoft platform?  Absolutely.  Have they been successful?  Some have.  Have they been able to demonstrate any actual ROI, TCO benefit, or other positive impact on their company's bottom line for doing so?  I still haven't seen that case study.

MIS Australia: NSW schools dump Outlook for Gmail

The NSW Department of Education and Training has awarded a tender that I had the opportunity to learn about from them when I was in Australia last November...

The New South Wales Department of Education and Training will dump one of the world's largest installations of Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange email and platform and issue its 1.3 million school students with Gmail accounts instead.

The plans will see SMS Management and Technology implement the new Gmail system in partnership with its sub-contractors Google and Telstra, under a three-year deal expected to be worth [AUD]$9.5 million over three years, with a two-year extension option.

The previous Microsoft system, installed by Unisys under a contract initially worth $33 million over three years but extended by another three, was built in 2003, but only actually reached students during 2007.

Some interesting discussion points here.  

In the education space, both Google and Microsoft have "free" hosted mailbox offerings.  They both have chosen to compete in this student e-mail segment in non-traditional economic terms... at the moment, no, IBM doesn't have a similar offering, and I'm well aware of the implications there.  [IBM chose not to bid on the NSW DET tender]

Still, I put "free" in quotes for a reason.  The article indicates that this contract is worth AUD$9.5 million over three years.  On the surface, that's AU$2.43/user/year...inexpensive indeed, but I thought this was "free"?  A lot of organizations have been throwing around Google's US$50/user/year enterprise mail offering, but not considering the additional costs to make that service operationally useful for them.  Here's an example of hard costs beyond the service provider fee.

Also, the use case here in quite different.  Of those 1.3 million students, many will, by NSW DET's own indications, never access their account -- younger grade school students have little need for school-based e-mail.  Others will get a couple mails a day/week/month.  It's hard to determine what the real operational costs per user will be.

Last, this is an e-mail only decision.  Out of scope were productivity tools, collaboration, and even instant messaging.  All of those would change the functional, and cost, profile quite a bit.

This will be an interesting deployment to watch.  The DET told me that one of their visions around this tender was that students would be using smartphone devices as their primary client to access the system within five years.  I've repeated that a bunch of times in presentations and meetings since then, as it is an interesting vision for all segments of the market.  But it definitely forces a decision for a lowest-common-denominator decision on what service and interface to provide.

Link: MIS Australia: NSW schools dump Outlook for Gmail >

(Aside: MIS Australia has some weird technology in place that prevents text selection from the browser.  I typed in the quote from their article manually.  Seems like a rather backward-looking way to try to enforce copyright)

Update on Notes 8.0.2 performance improvements

In previous entries on this topic, I've mentioned how the development team has put significant focus on improving the performance of the Notes 8 client in the upcoming 8.0.2 release (planned for Q3, target: August).  In the last couple of days, it's become apparent that 8.0.2 is going to address the main concerns that have been expressed about the Notes 8 standard configuration, both in terms of performance as well as in terms of footprint.

To summarize the development efforts to improve Notes 8.0.2:

• The startup sequence for the client has been re-ordered, so that  we load only the code necessary to get to your Inbox most quickly, loading other necessary components either in the background, or when they are accessed by the application.  Mary Beth Raven discussed this at ILUG2008 a few weeks ago, and the attendee reaction was incredibly favorable.
• The memory footprint has been reduced by ensuring that the client only loads code into memory that is needed.  Some redundancies among different modules -- such as the embedded Sametime code -- have been reduced or eliminated.  Some unused Eclipse components are no longer loaded altogether.

The results are impressive.  Our development team is benchmarking on an IBM ThinkPad T30, which is a 2 GHz Pentium 4 processor with 1 GB of RAM installed.  On this machine, the Notes 8.0.2 standard beta hums.  

• The "cold" startup time (first load for Notes, nothing in cache) has been reduced 50% versus Notes 8.0.1.  The "warm" startup time (Notes has previously run) has been reduced 67%.
• The working set memory footprint has been reduced by more than 20%.  It's still more than Notes 7 or Notes 8 basic configuration, but not by the orders of magnitude we've seen so far.

The data I'm looking at in writing this blog entry is two weeks old... and both of these numbers have been improving week to week during the engineering phase of 8.0.2.  

Some customers are waiting for these results before implementing Notes 8, and I understand that.  The good news is that Notes 8.0.2 addresses some of the concerns we've been hearing since shipping Notes 8.  Many customers don't need to wait, though, and can deploy in their current environments -- just like the over 40,000 IBMers running Notes 8.0.x today in production, and the 90+ customer references published for Notes/Domino 8 already (most of these are in IBM's internal reference database, as opposed to public ibm.com...we are working on getting more of them on the external website).

Notes 8.0.2 is in beta now.  If getting ahold of the beta code would help accelerate your deployment, let me know (via e-mail) and I'll see if I can get you into the program.  The odds of success increase if your company will be a reference for Notes 8 :-)

Back from vacation...

OK, so we had a good time.



The £30 (each) "champagne flight" on the London Eye was one of the best bargains of this trip.  There were only six of us plus a host in the capsule, we were able to bypass all the queues, and it was a fantastic view last night.  A thoroughly enjoyable time.

We also had a special treat as my colleague Gareth Cook invited us to Windsor Castle on Sunday.  Gareth's family lives and works on the castle grounds, and his father was quite a generous chap and took us around for a guided tour on a beautiful Sunday.  Thanks, G, and cheers to you and Dad for an amazing Sunday morning.

I have to admit that this trip, I felt the squeeze of the US dollar more than any vacation in recent memory.  When quick takeaway lunches for two translate out to nearly US$30, or a mediocre dinner costs $70, and a very good meal (Ze Kitchen Gallerie in Paris) is over US$200 (with only a couple of glasses of wine)... or when admission to the Tower of London racks up at US$65 for two... well, it all adds up, fast.  Other than the aforementioned taxis to and from CDG airport, we took no other taxis, and relied 100% on busses and metro/underground passes.  It is possible to enjoy London and Paris without breaking the bank, but the days of going on $25 a day are long in the past.  

As any regular reader knows, I do love spending time in Europe...but...it may be a while before the whole family piles over again.  For now, it's back to reality...and for next time, it's going to be another part of the world.

Seven recent URLs worth reading

During my travels the last week, there have been a huge number of interesting postings on Lotus community blogs that have been worth reading.  I haven't had a chance to link to them all real-time, but as a summary, I suggest you check these out:

* Andrew Pollack on Lotus' Project "Atlantic":

Here's what made such a great impact on me:


It's a real integration, not a database driver. IBM and SAP have worked together to create an interface on the SAP side that's easily called from a bit of software that sits next to Domino and works with things at the higher level of workflow objects on the SAP side rather than table level integration.

* Rob McDonagh on XPages, being introduced in Domino 8.5:

Along with Andrew, Nathan and John (and quite a few others), I was at IBM in Westford this week for an class on XPages. We spent most of our time saying things like, "But that means we don't have to..." or "That means now we can..." The possibilities are endless. And I'm really - really - impressed. I've been beating IBM up privately over the fact that the shiny new LotusScript editor isn't in 8.50, and I thought that DDE without it wasn't enough of an improvement to bother with. I was wrong. Completely, totally, utterly wrong. If 8.50 included XPages and nothing else, it would still be the biggest thing that's ever happened to Domino development.

That's a pretty big endorsement, especially from a customer...read what the business partners who were there wrote as well:

* Nathan Freeman on Xpages, includes a tutorial:

In the form of the now-ironically-named Xpages, the Yellowverse is going to get a lot of long-standing problems solved in a very short time.  Much like learning to live with people that can walk through walls or read minds or shoot lasers from their eyes, it's going to require some getting used to.  There will be prejudice, and a longing for the "old ways" and a few reactionaries will probably even want to do away with this new super-species of design.  But those who embrace it will find themselves quickly getting back to building Super Human Software.

* John Head on Xpages:

XPages is going to change everything you know about Notes and Domino development. Why? Because it makes industry standard, and easy to hire skills, forefront in Domino. XML, JavaScript, and CSS is the core of XPages. You can take any web developer out there and get them building Domino XPages fairly quickly. You can take any Domino developer, who is scared of Java, and give them XPages and they will run wild.

XPages has the chance to be the first major revolution of the entire product since Notes 4.0, when LotusScript was added to the product. Remember those times? The explosion of the LAEC market. The BP and ISV groups cranked out products and tools. If anything can bring back a time of pure growth in the Domino world, it is XPages.

* Lotus Symphony review in CRN:

The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless. While Open Office was a nice alternative, Symphony looks and works much more elegantly while keeping the free price tag.

* New IBM "Choose your collaboration destiny" flash demo: This interactive website helps users understand the value of using all of the Lotus product solutions together -- Notes/Domino, Sametime, Connections, Quickr.

* New IBM blog on Mashups, "Mix and Mash" (also hosted by PSC)

On the occasion of the marriage of Ben and Jo Rose

After a nine-hour journey door-to-door from our hotel in Paris to our hotel in Ascot, we were finally here for what we were here for -- the wedding of Ben Rose and Jo Lister.



As for the journey, my wife was able to experience first-hand why I consider CDG and LHR the two worst airports in the world.  The inefficient Air France bus ran 75 minutes late from Gare de Lyon out to the airport -- we eventually gave up and took a taxi.  But there was no hurry -- our 9:55 PM flight was delayed, we were told, "about 20 minutes".  We cleared immigration and went to the British Airways lounge -- only to find out that, at CDG, British Airways' lounge is NOT open to flyers with status on other oneworld airlines.  It made no sense to go to the gate -- we would have to clear security, and beyond that was only a seating corral.  Still, when the delay became 11:20 instead of 10:20, the rest of the airport closed up, and we went in.  Very shortly thereafter was the announcement -- the inbound aircraft had a problem, and we would likely depart around midnight.  When another BA flight arrived, one would have thought we would be all set -- but instead, it was unloaded and put to sleep for the night.  (It was, horror of horrors, an A320 instead of a A321, so I suppose they couldn't substitute it cleanly).  We finally departed around 1:15 AM...more than three hours late for a 40 minute flight.

For what it is worth, both ways we've passed through Heathrow Terminal 5, and it is a delight.  Everything flows well for humans, and our baggage came out quickly.  The arrivals area has exactly the kinds of facilities an arriving passenger needs, in a clean, logical flowing terminal area.  There are great restaurants and shops, and BA really did well on the lounges.  For all its initial heat, T5 is highly recommended -- shame about the airport it is connected to, though.

I wish we could have taken the Chunnel train, but our destination made that somewhat impractical.  Ben and Jo's Saturday wedding was at Sunningdale Park in Ascot, and getting out this way from the Chunnel terminus would have been a long series of steps.  In the end, it probably would have been faster and more reliable, and I can see why neither BA nor Air France fly the Paris-London route much anymore.  Most of the passengers were in transit or foreigners who went with air travel over trains.  

Ah well.  It was only important that we were here.  Ben and Jo had a beautiful small wedding, with about 75 family and friends in attendance.  We enjoyed meeting their families, and talking with friends who were previously only known by name.

This trip was built around attending Ben and Jo's wedding, which I wouldn't have missed for the world.  Ben has been a good friend for several years, after we initially met in-person at a conference in 2003.  In those five years, he has helped me through many life transitions, and we've developed some very good shared memories.  Jo and Ben have known each other since 1997.  She is a wonderful woman and I've enjoyed meeting her at several occasions over the years.

It is one of the fortunate side effects of the Lotus community that many of us have developed close, deep, and lasting friendships after having met online or in some other way connected to our work.  Over the last few years, I've attended weddings, visited homes, met for coffee/drink, or just grabbed a meal with dozens of customers/partners/industry figures/blog readers.  This is, to me, one of the most fulfilling aspects to being in the community -- the human connections.  My wife and I were honoured to have been guests at Ben and Jo's lovely wedding, and wish them the best for their future.

Three more days of vacation, starting with a trip to Windsor Palace this morning.  Even that has a story related to Lotus.