Ed Brill

IBM Lotus announces availability of Notes 8.5 and Symphony 1.2.1 at Macworld Expo

Live from the Moscone Center in San Francisco...

IBM today announced that the new IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 collaboration software with social computing features, is now available for all Mac OS X Leopard-powered computers.  In addition, IBM's free Lotus Symphony document, spreadsheet and presentation software will be available later this month for the Mac.

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software, celebrating its 20th year in 2009, has grown to more than 140 million licenses sold worldwide.

"To ease the mounting pressure on businesses to constrain costs, Notes 8.5 provides 'open' social computing benefits at substantial savings to businesses because less storage space is needed," said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, messaging and collaboration, IBM.

"The blazing speed of Apple's award-winning hardware combined with Mac OS X, the world's most advanced operating system creates an ideal platform for collaboration software applications like Notes," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "We're excited to see IBM's continued commitment to the Mac platform with its latest release."

Lotus Notes 8.5 affords significant storage savings over previous versions. Notes has an intelligent storage savings feature that ensures that only one copy of an attachment is kept on the mail server, resulting in an estimated 40 percent space savings.

"Notes 8.5 has allowed our Mac users to make full use of a non-Microsoft environment with all the advances of the latest Notes functionality," said Mark Calleran, Chief Information Officer, The Salvation Army, International Headquarters.

The entire Notes/Domino 8.5 release became electronically available in English earlier today.  Obviously, this multi-year effort has many facets -- a Domino server that majors in "messaging economics" for administrators, XPages and new tools to reinvigorate the Domino web application development environment, and the first Notes 8 deliverable for the Macintosh.  We chose the approach of announcing Notes 8.5 and Symphony's Mac release at Macworld Expo to highlight the surge of activity around Apple in the enterprise, and why, working together with Apple, we see IBM Lotus as a key piece of the Apple+enterprise equation.

Symphony 1.2.1, which includes the first Mac OS X version of Symphony, is expected to ship before Lotusphere.  

The decision to release 8.5 today and announce at Macworld Expo will attract a lot more mainstream media attention for Notes and Symphony than if we had waited for Lotusphere or quietly released in the last week of 2008.  I love the surprise factor., too, though it has been admittedly different to sign up for a "no pre-announce" approach.  Hopefully the hints and comments I made during December now become clear.  Our engineering organization knew the importance of meeting their goal to complete this project in 2008, but for a change, we decided that the marketing opportunity was much stronger to coincide with our first ever exhibition of Notes at Macworld Expo.

At Lotusphere, we will clearly emphasize the fullness of the Notes/Domino 8.5 family, right from the opening general session.  Today, we focus on the end-user -- and from what I've seen in the first two hours that the Macworld Expo has been open, we're opening quite a few eyes.

In the midst of all of this, PSC upgraded this blog server to Domino 8.5 -- and it took all of about ten minutes, no risk.  Very cool!

Links to information and coverage below.

Link: Channel Announcement: Notes/Domino 8.5 >
Link: IBM Delivers New "Social" Notes and Free Symphony Software for All Macs >
Link: Notes 8.5 screen shots on Flickr >



Link: CBRonline: IBM makes notes on Mac users >
Link: Computerworld: Macworld: IBM finalizing free Symphony office suite for Macs >
Link: Mass High Tech: Lotus Notes 8.5 land on Mac OS X >

Congratulations to the two winners of free Lotusphere passes from TechCrunch

In case you missed it over the holidays, TechCrunch published a story on Notes/Domino on December 24th, entitled "Two free tickets to Lotusphere--is IBM's Lotus Notes Out of Touch With Web 2.0 World?"  The article is an interview with myself and Kevin Cavanaugh, VP for Lotus messaging and collaboration products.  Readers were encouraged to discuss the article, in part to potentially win a free pass to Lotusphere.  As of yesterday, well over 125 comments were posted -- a heck of a lot for a TechCrunchIT story.  Some came from Lotus community members looking for a way to still get to Lotusphere, while others were from ISVs, casual readers, or people who hadn't seen Notes in years.  

We gave TechCrunch two passes to give away, and earlier today, they confirmed that the two are going to Curt Stone and Roland Reddekop.  Both of these guys are active participants in the community, and were part of the interesting discussions on the TechCrunch site.

I'm glad it was TechCrunch giving these away and not me -- there were easily fifteen people in the discussion that I thought had good stories on why they should win.  The discussion was mostly at a higher level, and it seemed like readers were (again, mostly) open to hearing about the latest from Lotus.

As author Jeff Widman pointed out in the article, Notes and Domino have been around for 20 years, and have been growing for 16 consecutive quarters.  We're obviously doing something right, and having our story heard on a widely-read site like TechCrunch helps validate that.

Of course, TechCrunch wasn't the only way that IBM has reached out to the community around Lotusphere 2009.  As I've mentioned previously, we have our first major blogger program at Lotusphere 2009, with special activities, interviews, and surprises for the ~25 bloggers participating (who received no-charge passes to Lotusphere, similar to press and analysts).  You'll hear a lot more from them in just twelve (!) days' time.....

Headed to San Francisco for Macworld Expo

This morning, I'm en-route to Macworld Expo in San Francisco.  Fine, no Stevenote, but I'm sure it will be pretty interesting.  

I'll be at the conference on Tuesday, and you can visit IBM at booth 3418 in the north hall.  The Lotus brand hasn't been represented at Macworld Expo for many, many years, and we'll be there along with colleagues from other IBM software brands.  I'll be back here with an update -- around the time that the Macworld Expo show floor opens, on Tuesday afternoon (US pacific time). Hope to see some friendly faces (and make new ones) at the Moscone tomorrow!

Lotusphere 2009: Last call for Lotusphere Idol submissions

With the Lotusphere kick-off being just a little over two weeks away, I wanted to offer one last reminder that we are taking submissions for the 2009 edition of Lotusphere Idol!  We've received a number of abstracts already -- in fact, more than we can accept -- but just in case someone was still thinking about it, there's still a few more days where we'll consider additional abstract proposals.  

All of the details can be found on Paul Mooney's blog: Lotusphere IDOL - call for abstracts >

2008: The blogging year in review

As has been tradition here for the last several years, the end of year marks the anniversary of starting this blog -- now over six years ago -- and a time to reflect.  This has been an incredible and busy year, with many opportunities and changes.  It has been hard to summarize or highlight, given all of this.  I find myself a little less introspective, too...I am so excited about January that it is momentarily difficult to summarize the past.  Still, this effort has been a helpful one each of the previous years, and the down time between holidays seems like a great opportunity to reflect.

The basic statistics

• edbrill.com:
  • 520 new blog postings, 7736 comments (average 14.88 comments per posting).  Thank you for making this weblog an interactive discussion.  Your input is what makes the difference -- I can talk to myself anywhere. :-)
  • 215K visitors, 610K visits, over 1 million pageviews.  These numbers are slightly down from 2007, but I also wasn't blogging as frequently (especially after the October job change, plus the use of Twitter) .  I also suspect more are following via RSS, but I don't track those hits at all.
  • Top five blog entries according to Google analytics: Interestingly, three of the top pages are all pre-2008!  The first "Hannover" announcement; "arigato gozimasu", Notes/Domino 8.0.1 announcement, iPhone 2.0 release, Modify Notes 6/7 letterhead.
  • Top five countries visiting edbrill.com: USA, UK, Germany, Australia, Canada.  There was one visit all year from Antarctica, three from Cuba.
  • 32% of visits come in from Google and other searches; 32% are direct visits; and 36% come from referring sites.  Top referrer: PlanetLotus.org.
  • Browser profiles: 50.39% Firefox, 41.32% Internet Exploder, 4% Safari, 2% Opera, 1% Chrome.  90% Windows.  Mac now at 7% (up 1% Y2Y).
  • Technorati rank: Still in the top 25,000 (which amazes me given the explosion in blogging...even skeptical analysts now blog).  Alexa.com ranking: 268,421 which is slightly up from 2007.
• 2250 Twitter updates -- for a tool that I wasn't using until March of this year, it has proved to be quite useful.  How?  Twitter does two things: 1) It replaces blogging for tactical entries such as links to things that I am reading about, and 2) along with Facebook and LinkedIn, it deepens the relationship between us.

What happened this year

• Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 and 8.0.2 shipped, with 8.0.1 delivering additional new features and 8.0.2 addressing performance and resource requirements for the Notes 8 client while delivering iNotes for the iPhone.  Deployment of Notes/Domino 8 accelerated rapidly, with nearly 50% of Notes customers indicating in surveys and support calls that they have begun or completed ND8 rollouts, 15 months after release.  The Notes/Domino 8.5 development effort finished up and readied for an early 2009 launch.
• The Notes/Domino business continued its growth pattern which started in mid-2004.  In July, IBM took the unprecedented step of press releasing specific financial performance for one product family, rather than aggregating brand information, to demonstrate how successful Notes/Domino has been.  Bob Picciano mentioned that thousands of organizations became new Notes customers this year, with wins as large as 300K users and as small as individuals using Notes for productivity.  The Notes/Domino software business today is nearly 50% larger per-annum than it was five years ago.  Just software.
• Lotus Symphony shipped, and also released a 1.1 and 1.2 version.  Symphony has been downloaded over 3 million times, and the first reference stories have been published or announced.  In one recent customer engagement, we found that Symphony provided the client an opportunity to save over US$20 million in licensing and operational costs.  IBM's Project "Liberate" has many more such stories and continues to help organizations reshape the way they spend IT dollars on commodity products.  Symphony received several awards throughout the year, including CRN 2008 Product of the Year and Datamation Product of the Year.
• Mobility was a major theme for the year, with IBM releasing Lotus Notes Traveler as well as an "ultra light" mode for iNotes.  IBM partners like RIM and Nokia made major enhancements to their integration and delivery, iNotes was a "staff pick" for the iPhone, and carriers began announcing specific support for Lotus.  Watch for more in this area in 2009.
• Hosting, cloud computing, and software as a service all became buzzwords du jour, with little still separating hype from reality.  IBM announced Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging in October and went into beta with Lotus "Bluehouse" in May.  Microsoft used Exchange Online and BPOS as competitive catalysts, but analysts quickly saw through the tactic.
• Lotus introduced the "Protector" brand family for mail security, with more to come in 2009.  Project "Atlantic" made its way out of the labs to early customers, and will ship its first release in early 2009.
• I upgraded to a Blackberry Bold and haven't looked back.  While I am also a fan of the iPhone (in a household that is all Apple -- Mac, iPod, iPhone), this is the best business mobile device so far.  That it also has great personal features is a nice bonus.  I've only added a few apps to the Bold -- Sametime, Facebook, Twitter, and gMail for personal mail -- so I know there is a lot of potential still in this device.

What didn't happen this year

• As I predicted at the start of the year, the "Notes is dead" meme is dead.  Even Microsoft has stopped trying to convince customers that this is the case.  If anything, this year's incredible amount of activity around the Notes/Domino family has assured a long and successful road ahead.
• Though from time to time I hear that I'm spending too much time on the competition, only 40 of 520 blog entries this year focused on Microsoft as a competitor -- less than 10%.  There are many reasons. Microsoft didn't publish a case study of any major customer receiving tangible benefit from attempting to migrate their Notes applications to Microsoft.  If anything, their body language shifted mid-year away from the notion that Notes applications can or should be migrated to something else, and instead to the idea of trying to minimize Notes in the future.  Customers still weren't buying the story, with Microsoft acknowledging by end of year that customers who have supposedly made migration decisions but haven't actually migrated are their biggest credibility challenge in this space.  As a slight-of-hand trick, they instead tried to interject hosting and Exchange Live Online into the mix.
• I still didn't implement an updated UI for this blog.  Steve, we really need to get to this!

2008 Travel

• About 147,000 flying miles. One of my busiest travel years ever.  Numerous trips to Europe were the main reason for the big number.  Events, successful customer meetings, and a little bit of personal travel.  Yes, that's a big carbon footprint for the year.  A lot of e-meetings, though, too.  This was a year where I broke my two-night-minimum hotel stay frequently -- like Paris-Bremen-Dublin where I barely knew what city I was in for each event.
• New countries: Turkey, Greece.  Overall I visited thirteen countries this year: Germany, Ireland, UK, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil.
• New cities: New dots on the map this year, including some great side trips like the tour of Roman Switzerland, the Mayan Riviera, Embu des Arts, and a whole bunch of new German cities.
• New airlines and airports: Turkish, Olympic, TAM....IST, ATH, BRE, STR, CGH, SDU, GIG, GSO, BUR.
• Cool memories: Lunch on Lake Geneva, "M" restaurant in Wiesbaden, Porcão in Rio, Xcaret, a customer meeting with "bling", champagne on the London Eye, Ben & Jo's wedding, Kathleen and Atom's wedding, 212 km/h on the Autobahn in an S-Class, everything about Istanbul, Acropolis by night, getting promoted.  And one I didn't blog -- my wife and I celebrated our first anniversary at L2O restaurant in Chicago, named by Esquire as the best new US restaurant in 2008.  Check out that blog, it really is an incredible place.

Looking ahead to 2009

In the past, I have used this section of my year-in-review to make predictions about the year ahead.  Now that I'm back in product management, the irony is I can't say much about the future until the time is right.  On a professional level, 2009 has much opportunity and promise.  My team has so many great projects and ideas, and you'll start to hear about them next week.  Lotusphere 2009 promises to be as exciting as ever, and the Lotusphere Comes to You schedule is building out fast.  Individually, I hope to learn how to use GTD and other management tools to keep moving this business forward, and bring innovation and opportunity to the fore.  On a personal level, we are already making plans for some exciting travel throughout the first half of 2009, in addition to balancing that with more time at home.

For you,  I thank you for reading and being a part of a very special product community.  While some seem to decry the "yellow bubble" as being insular, I see quite the opposite.  We grew the number of bloggers on planetlotus.org this year by 15% or more.  Every google hit that lands on a Lotus community blog site has the potential to be introducing someone new to 300 of their future colleagues and friends.  It is no coincidence that the growth and continued success of Notes/Domino over the last four years coincides with the increase in the participation and "connected-ness" of the online community.  All of you who particpate, as lurkers, readers, commenters, bloggers, tweeters, Facebook/LinkedIn-ers, YouTube-ists, Diggers, or even good old fashioned LNotes-L posters are all helping to increase the awareness and reputation of where Lotus Notes and Domino are at in the market today.  Do not let the detractors convince you that any of this is a waste of time.  I know first-hand, everywhere I go in the world, that this community is what makes Lotus Notes what it is today.  While there have been days that I have considered "what's next", in the end, I wouldn't trade that sense of being a part of something special -- for anything.

Matthew White: It’s painless moving to XPages

A very strong endorsement (and counter to some recent chatter) about the benefit the XPages approach brings to Domino 8.5:

IdeaJam "Classic" is a good Domino web application (if I do say so myself), but to work on the design of it requires any developers that help us to have a serious amount of experience with Domino web development (I'm talking like 5 years plus). But with our XPages version there really is none of that history required, all the new design elements can be worked on by a developer with the same experience as me, or indeed any other XPages developer, 3 months. It means that we can go from having to worry about all of the Domino "hacks" to make things work, to concentrating on the important stuff... developing a kick-ass application for our customers.

Link: Matthew White: It's painless moving to XPages >

Flashing lights in the rear view mirror

A few weeks ago, a driving trip to a customer in central Illinois was interrupted by a representative of the Illinois law enforcement community.  This was more than a bit surprising to me, as it has been many years since I was pulled over for much of anything.  I was further confused since I was driving less than the speed limit, wearing my seat belt (as always), not holding a cell phone, and operating a car in normal working condition.  In fact, I couldn't think of anything I had done incorrectly as I slowly passed the police vehicle on the shoulder of Interstate I-55 south of Joliet.

Well, it seems that I had violated State of Illinois code 625 ILCS 5/11-907(c), also known as "Scott's Law".  Illinois and many other US states have a "move over" law, which requires you to move at least one lane away from a stopped emergency vehicle if possible.  I didn't know this law.  Of course, "ignorance of the law is no excuse".  I hoped that my honest admission would suggest to the officer that only a warning was necessary....unfortunately, he was a man of few words, and issued me a citation on the spot.  OK -- I did something wrong, I should be cited.

If only that were the whole story.

It turns out that "Scott's Law" is not a simple traffic violation.  You are required to appear in court, the fine is variable between US$100 and US$10,000, and your license can be suspended.  Officer Friendly (I didn't get his name, so we'll call him that) handed me the ticket, which ordered me to appear in court in Morris, Illinois (80 miles from home) on December 24th -- yes, Christmas Eve -- at 7 AM.  

The more I read up on this law, the more I was stunned at the abuse of legal authority.  The law's intent makes perfect sense.  Emergency personnel are in a hazardous situation where they are outside their roadside vehicles, and errant drivers have injured or killed in collisions resulting from this situation.  But there are no shades-of-gray in the Illinois statute -- in my case, it was a clear day, I slowed down as I approached the stationary police car, I moved far enough away to be safe (but not far enough), and I was aware of where the policeman was as I passed.  There was no real hazard to the situation -- not in the same way as if someone drives recklessly at 85 MPH.  Still, no matter, the law is the law, I guess.  

The threat that my license could be suspended for this incident left me stunned for days, and I eventually did some research on the web and hired a lawyer.  What I learned was that the State Police are quite fond of writing this violation (especially to drivers ignorant of the law, like me), and the Illinois courts have just as much fun handing out fines.  Though Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn got off with a warning, none of his readers did.  It seems that our Illinois state government, while not busy with other activities, realizes the penalty is too harsh, though.  Effective next week, Illinois won't suspend driver's licenses arbitrarily for this violation.

As for me, hiring a lawyer was the best thing I could have done.  She handled the court appearance and negotiations for me, so that I didn't have to drive back to Grundy County on Christmas Eve.  I ended up pleading guilty (to lesser charges), which chafes me to no end -- but a law is a law.  My fine was $185, and I'm on court supervision for six months.  Guess I won't be trying any 212 km/h maneuvers here at home anytime soon, but the case is closed.  

I wrote this blog entry for two reasons -- 1) because I think many, many drivers in the US do not know this law and others like it, as evidenced by how many whizzed by in the right lane while I was pulled over, and 2) because in preparing to publish a year in review, I found several comments throughout the blog reminding me that it is OK to write about my personal life here.  Admitting I violated a traffic law may be a little more on the personal side, but hopefully others will learn from my mistake.  Besides, the customer I was visiting that day already heard this story -- it got the meeting started on a much more human level, and set up a really good interaction for the hours to come.

Intranet Journal: Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 On the Way

As the countdown continues, John Roling profiles the Notes/Domino 8.5 release in Intranet Journal:

The Domino server is really what gets the bulk of the improvements in the 8.5 release. One that may have some of the biggest impact is DAOS or Domino Attachment Object Storage.

Simply put, DAOS is a way for your Domino server to store attachments to your file system instead of inside a Notes database itself. When DAOS is enabled, attachments are removed from the database and placed in a folder on the server. The server creates internal pointers so a user still sees the attachment but doesn't realize it's not really in the database. ...

If you extrapolate this over your entire user base, the space savings on your server could be huge. And it doesn't stop there, you can enable document compression on the server, and IBM says you can see up to 30% disk space savings as well. So it seems with these two features alone, you'll get immediate return on your upgrade investment.

I don't want to over-sell DAOS and sell-short on all the other great features, but this is one immediate way to get instant payback for the upgrade.  Then you get the benefit of hundreds of other new features, like the Configuration Tuner, ID file management improvements, and many, many others.

Link: Intranet Journal: Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 On the Way >

TechCrunch: Two free tickets to Lotusphere--is IBM’s Lotus Notes Out of Touch With Web 2.0 World?

Kevin Cavanaugh and I were interviewed by TechCrunch's Jeff Widman earlier this week, talking about Lotus Notes and its position in the marketplace today.  The interview just posted on TechCrunch.com and TechCrunchIT.com.


As you can see, we're looking for some provocative conversation -- and I am quite confident we'll get it from the TechCrunch crowd, even without the incentive of Lotusphere tickets.  Widman asked us great questions about user perception, consumerization, and marketplace realities.  He also throws in a quote from Eric Mack with Eric's perspective on where Notes and user productivity is headed.

Link: TechCrunch: Two free tickets to Lotusphere--is IBM's Lotus Notes Out of Touch With Web 2.0 World? >

LotusUserGroup.org: Bob Picciano interview

Just got a chance to listen to LotusUserGroup.org's interview with Bob Picciano, the first in their "Live from Lotusphere 2009" series.  The 20-minute listen covers topics which many of you inquire about regularly, and gives you a chance to hear some of our key messages straight from the top.  Bob discusses some recent customer wins, internal deployment, plugs Symphony many times, and hints as to the Lotusphere guest for the opening general session.  LotusUserGroup.org is even running a "guess the speaker" contest where you could win an iPod Touch.

The embedded media player didn't work for me, but I downloaded and took a listen...

Link: LotusUserGroup.org: Bob Picciano interview >

Ferris: Microsoft Exchange Online Won’t Particularly Facilitate Notes-to-Exchange Migration

Ferris's Nick Shelness cuts through the hype on Microsoft's Exchange Online announcement and its reality as applied to Notes customers:

The November 17 announcement of Microsoft Exchange Online included a case study in which a company migrated away from Notes using Microsoft Exchange Online. This is mainly marketing gloss.

Microsoft has been announcing the death of Notes for five years. Ferris survey data indicates that in the enterprise, Microsoft and IBM/Lotus are on the whole maintaining their penetration.  ...

Ferris, therefore, expects to see a rash of pilot Notes migrations to Microsoft's Online offerings. Whether these will progress beyond the trial stage, only time will tell. We suspect that many of them will not.

So it looks like Microsoft got about a month of runway to try to use their latest competitive distraction...and it has been a massive fail.  As we wind down the year, we're seeing wins in customers that have been previously announced as supposedly-migrating to Exchange Online,  We're getting traction with IBM's Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging, and it's leading to some really interesting discussions with customers about "messaging economics" overall.  That's Ferris's point -- the full cost picture really needs to be evaluated, and even an informed analysis won't justify a migration, ever.

Link: Ferris: Microsoft Exchange Online Won't Particularly Facilitate Notes-to-Exchange Migration >

Gartner: Q&A: Symposium/ITxpo Frequently Asked Questions on IBM Notes/Domino

Gartner just published a Q&A document covering some of the questions they received around Lotus Notes and Domino at their recent Symposia events.  The questions are provocative, but reflective of the inquiries that Gartner is receiving around the future of Notes/Domino in the market.  The answers make a few key points clear: that migration is costly and typically not justifiable, that IBM will continue to deliver Notes/Domino in the foreseeable future, and that Notes/Domino 8 is delivering benefits (and wins) in the marketplace.  Thus, this is an important report -- while balanced and challenging IBM in a number of places, the overall point is clear -- Gartner is not pushing customers to migrate to Microsoft.

It's a copyrighted report, though only US$95 to acquire if you are not a Gartner client.  I don't have distribution rights so you'll want to check out Gartner.com for the report.  

Link: Gartner: Q&A: Symposium/ITxpo Frequently Asked Questions on IBM Notes/Domino >

In praise and defense of my hosting provider

Last week, I inadvertently slighted my hosting provider in the process of deflecting an attempt to change the subject on a blog posting.  I wrote:

edbrill.com [is] not [a] "mission-critical" mail server, and in my case I certainly wouldn't ask PSC to run it on a UPS, cluster the server to a remote site, etc.

This wasn't really fair to PSC, because they have invested a huge amount of time, money, and effort in hosting edbrill.com for more than five years.  They do run the system quite reliably and invest way more than indeed I would ever have asked them to do.

John Head explained the infrastructure and commitment that PSC makes:

PSC has a dedicated server for the blogs that we host. It is a nice Dell PowerEdge server with dual quad-core processors and 4 gigs of ram. Nothing huge but a decent machine. ...[The blog and ideajam] servers are in a server room that is climate controlled and controlled by multiple UPS power devices. The blog server has nearline and tape backups. ... When I look back at 2008, I can easily claim 99.7% uptime. We have not been down over 26.25 hours this year. I bet it would turn out to be higher, but we do not keep track of that for these two machines. We have had some issues with all of our network providers in 2008 (we have multiple internet connections as all sites should have) and are doing infrastructure upgrades to attempt to solve that problem going forward.

One of the reasons the blog server is not four or five nine covered is that I upgrade that server to the latest beta's and design partner code drops all the time. Why? It provides one of the highest traffic public Domino servers and I let the folks from IBM see the HTTP and server logs when we have issues. I know they have super testing facilities in Westford to put Domino beta's thru the ringer when it comes to traffic, but this is real world. I know of two bugs that were fixed in just the 8.0.0 timeframe before the product was released because of the blog server.

Google analytics has tracked over a million pageviews on edbrill.com so far this year, and that doesn't include pretty heavy RSS traffic or those who filter javascript.  That PSC has delivered all of that for my blog, and a dozen other sites, completely at no charge is a huge gift and one that keeps on giving.  Too often, I and the others living here take it for granted, but we should not.  Thank you to all of the team at PSC, and congratulations on your recent Lotus Awards win.  You guys are awesome.

Times Online: With your head in the clouds

Nice to see friend and colleague Mr. Darren Adams quoted in the Times...more mainstream media attention for Lotus in the UK:

Employers are experimenting with the new ideas of social networking, instant messaging and wikis to assemble and manage teams of the best people for any particular project, even though the members may be dispersed round the globe.

At the heart of the collaborative working revolution is unified communications, computer networks that carry all the different forms of communication simultaneously and interchangeably. People can choose the most appropriate method, or combination of methods, from instant messages, through whiteboard presentations or voice calls, and change from one to another while communicating.  ...

The most important element of the new communications is instant messaging (IM) says Darren Adams of IBM UK, supplier of the widely-used Lotus messaging system.

"Where it is adopted, forty per cent of email is replaced by IM, which cuts the amount of time people spend exchanging messages," he says.  ...

IM can also be used to store expertise, Mr Adams points out: "Here at IBM we have a culture of not going direct to experts but asking it in public, so everyone can benefit from the answer and the expert does not get asked the same thing again and again."

Questions and answers are tagged so others with the same problem can locate the answer with a simple search -- an incredibly powerful way of hanging on to knowledge that used to die when the expert left or retired.

and that's just from page 1 of the interview.  Good work, Daz!

Link: Times Online: With your head in the clouds >  (Thanks, Stuart D)

Happy birthday, PlanetLotus.org

A big congratulations and thank you to Yancy Lent... PlanetLotus.org turned one yesterday!

For a long time, the community had talked about a need to aggregate all the various blogs and websites covering Lotus software.  Early efforts included dominoblogs.com and various OPML lists.  Nothing quite seemed to deliver.  Yancy launched PlanetLotus a year ago, and it now aggregates over 300 blogs and feeds into one convenient page.  There is also a consolidated Twitter stream, event calendar, downloads, job listings, and other tools.  In short, along with sites like LotusUserGroup.org, PlanetLotus is a must-visit for me.  In fact, I almost always have PlanetLotus.org open in a tab in my browser, and since it auto-refreshes hourly, I'm constantly aware of what's being said in the online world about Lotus Notes/Domino, Symphony, etc.

PlanetLotus has clearly changed the way the community blogs.  People who write infrequently know that they shouldn't obsess over their RSS subscribers, as a whole group of readers will automatically see their post.  New voices have been encouraged.  Multi-lingual participation has greater visibility.  There have been a few interesting dynamics to work through along the way -- community "conga lines" happen less frequently, as people see that what needs to be said has already been said, and there have been interesting games played with "who can top this!" headlines designed to draw hits.  Still, as a whole, the community is even closer and more vibrant than ever before.  This is clearly a huge net plus.

It seems that somewhere around 10-15% of my overall website traffic now arrives through PlanetLotus -- and about 40% of all "referrer" click-throughs. Yancy's site is a success and just keeps getting better.  Thank you to those reading and participating in PlanetLotus -- I've even put the URL on my business card.