Ed Brill

Of late on Twitter, I've mentioned a few times that I am in the process of re-reading all my old blog entries going all the way back to 2002. I expect I'll be able to say why, soon....

Anyway, I've now caught up to mid-2007, just before Lotus Notes 8 shipped. A number of blog entries I wrote at the time covered the then-new Notes feature of being able to recall a sent mail message, and whether it should be on by default.

Notes 8 has been in market almost five years, and I found these older blog entries an interesting prompt to reflect on this feature. At the time, competitively we were getting pummeled on it. Novell Groupwise customers simply wouldn't consider switching to another platform without it, and Outlook/Exchange 2007 had implemented a rudimentary form of the feature (enough to get the proverbial "check box"). Our engineering team was never content to check box a feature, so when they implemented mail recall, they made sure it would work across multiple Domino servers, multiple recipients, messages that had already been read, etc.

Five years in, I am not sure how often this feature has truly been used. I maybe have tried to use it half a dozen times myself, and it rarely seems to actually "work" in my own environment. I also think in the era of always-connected smartphones, the idea of pulling back something you send has limited utility today.

I first wrote about it conceptually in 2003, immortalizing a 1994 incident at my former employer where someone would have begged for recall when they inadvertently did a reply-to-all on an email that went to everyone in the company.

So, I am curious -- do your organizations use Notes 8's mail recall feature? Have any good stories about it?

I've just finished lining up my travel for next month and it's going to be quite the scorcher. First, I will be on vacation in Arizona US for several days, where the average temperature is already about 100F/40C during the day. From there, I am headed straight to the middle east, for my first ever customer meetings in in Dubai and Doha, where the average temperature is already about 110F/45C! Looking forward to this opportunity to meet our clients in a new region. After Doha, I'm swinging back through Europe for the 2012 DominoPoint Days event, this year in Milan. The DominoPoint event features numerous international speakers this year, so the question won't always be "parli inglese?" Colleagues Jan Kenney, John Campitelli, and Niklas Heidloff will speak, along with several IBM Champions and industry experts.

Other than this big swing, I've been trying to limit my North American travel to day trips lately. Lots to do to keep Notes/Domino Social Edition moving, Connections Mail progressing, and IBM Docs updating. Watch for an IBM Docs update on IBM Greenhouse in about a week.

Earlier this week, IBM Press released its third book on XPages, XPages Extension Library: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Next Generation of XPages Components.



Meet the authors:


Really happy to see the names of Declan Sciolla-Lynch, Jeremy Hodge, Paul Withers, and Tim Tripcony on there (a special hat tip to Tim there). It's great to see the community involved in education and writing. Congratulations to all of the authors!

XPages Extension Library is the first and only complete guide to Domino development with this library; it’s the best manifestation yet of the underlying XPages Extensibility Framework. Complementing the popular Mastering XPages, it gives XPages developers complete information for taking full advantage of the new components from IBM.

edbrill.com readers can get a 35% discount on the book using coupon code IBM1819, which also includes free shipping in the US.

Link: IBM Press: XPages Extension Library: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Next Generation of XPages Components >

At today's IBM SmartCloud Forum event here in Chicago, we announced that we'll soon begin offering IBM SmartCloud Archive Essentials.  This new, pure SaaS service is tightly integrated with IBM SmartCloud Notes, and will provide customers with a secure, searchable copy of any or all user mailboxes.

Customers are increasingly interested in automating compliance and information lifecycle governance (ILG) tasks.  Email is still the #1 source of discoverable content for legal and regulatory actions, so an email archive with retention and discovery features has become a logistical requirement for organizations of every size and type.

SmartCloud Archive Essentials provides exactly that.  It captures a copy of email to or from all subscribed users, and saves them in native NSF format (important for fidelity of evidence).  The service creates an optimized index of emails and attachments, and features a rich, browser-based search capability that assures customers they can quickly and easily find specific content.  This is important in many contexts, including legal/regulatory actions, but also to do things like locate references to projects or customers, or -- prosaic but useful – restore a deleted mail for a user.

The service is architected for cloud efficiency, and in fact will run on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, IBM's cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS).  Taking advantage of cloud characteristics of elasticity and virtualization, SmartCloud Archive Essentials features dramatic performance and scalability; even massive complex searches complete in a matter of seconds.

SmartCloud Archive Essentials also takes advantage of cloud economics.  Archive implementation hurdles have historically been high because you had to provision for projected capacity, and always carry the costs for idle resources.  In the cloud, there's 100% utilization of resources, so the service can be sold as a low per-user subscription.  The service even comes with unlimited storage.  Most customers will choose to implement retention periods for good ILG practices, but if a customer wants to keep everything forever, it's the same low monthly subscription.

The security of archive data is critically important, so SmartCloud Archive Essentials applies encryption of all data, in motion and at rest.  Customer archives are never comingled.  All access and operations are recorded for audit, and data in the archive cannot be deleted or modified except as part of a logged action (emails can be restored to user inboxes, but only as new copies).

We expect to ship SmartCloud Archive Essentials this quarter.  For now it is paired with SmartCloud Notes, but we're looking for feedback on other use cases, such as support for on-premises Domino deployments.  There's no reason that the unique fidelity and performance characteristics of SmartCloud Archive Essentials couldn't benefit both use cases equally.

Earlier today, IBM delivered on a promise.

Last July, in throwing our support to the new Apache OpenOffice podling project, we committed to contribute the source code of Lotus Symphony -- a fork of OpenOffice -- back into the mainline project. This morning, that contribution is complete.

With today's action, we are re-uniting behind one OpenOffice, and will work with the Apache OpenOffice community to take the best of Symphony forward along with the best of OpenOffice. We will do this in The Apache Way -- community, merit, and openness.

Clearly, in the week since Apache OpenOffice 3.4 was announced, the market has welcomed OpenOffice back with "open" arms. In the first week, AOO 3.4 has been downloaded over one million times. Relevant? I certainly think so.

As I commented last week, IBM is continuing our support for Lotus Symphony, until we are able to offer an IBM-supported version of Apache OpenOffice that best meets the current and future needs of our current and prospective customers. Of course part of that is to align the social business objectives of these organizations with the incorporation of a modern, innovative Apache OpenOffice.

Meanwhile, to integrate AOO 3.4 with some of the IBM collaboration solutions, we have posted a series of AOO extensions -- one for IBM Connections, one for IBM SmartCloud Social. These are demonstrable evidence of our commitment to the broader AOO effort, not just what we will deliver with an IBM label on it.

More details on our Symphony contribution to Apache OpenOffice can be found in the project wiki.

Link: Apache OpenOffice-Lotus Symphony contributed features >

Earlier today, I posted the latest version of the IBM Social Business presentation on mobile strategy. The presentation covers solutions available from IBM software for mobile social business, business intelligence, and commerce, as well as a deep dive on Lotus Notes Traveler, IBM Connections Mobile, IBM Sametime Mobile, IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices (nee BigFix), Lotus Mobile Connect, and custom application development through XPages or IBM Worklight.

I suspect when you review this that you'll find as I did that only IBM offers this range and depth of solutions for the mobile web and social business.

The presentation PDF can be downloaded from SlideShare in addition to being viewed below.

Some cool Domino-based solutions being deployed for smarter healthcare in Russia...

IBM is also working with KMIS and the Emergency Hospital of Petrozavodsk in the Republic of Karelia in North Western Russia to implement electronic medical records and an automated hospital information management system for its eight therapy and three diagnostic departments.

The new system which is based on IBM Notes and Domino software provides unified access to many types of medical data, allowing doctors and medical staff to share and record information and access tests and lab results instantly to improve decision making.

The new system also helps automate many administrative processes throughout the hospital such as appointment booking, work scheduling for doctors, nurses and staff as well as helping to better manage the hospital’s financial processes and reporting requirements

“Our doctors now have real-time access a complete archive of a patient’s medical data. As a result we have improved our ability to diagnose medical conditions and make optimum decisions for patients,” said Andrey Myachin, Head of the Control System Department at the Emergency Hospital of Petrozavodsk.

IBM is engaged on similar projects at other public hospitals throughout Russia including those in the regions of Volgograd, Leningrad, Kirov, Pskov, Perm and Vladimir as well as the Republics of Khakassia and Udmurtia.

Link: ibm.com: Hospitals in Russia’s Regions Turn to IBM to Transform Healthcare >

Recently, as part of the rebranding from LotusLive, the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business added a pretty important capability -- "buy online".



In the past for LotusLive, this was a somewhat-complicated process through PassportAdvantage Express. The new e-commerce engine allows online purchase of key services including SmartCloud Engage, SmartCloud Meetings, and SmartCloud Notes.

For small customers especially, which continues to be one of the key market segments for software-as-a-service, this is a rapid path to getting up and running in SmartCloud Social. Simply click here....

Link: IBM SmartCloud - Plans and Pricing >

I was out of the office most of the day so didn't have a chance to link this earlier...

The Apache OpenOffice Project today announced the availability of Apache OpenOffice™ 3.4, the first release of OpenOffice under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation.

Apache OpenOffice is the original open source office productivity suite, designed for professional and consumer use.

"With the donation of OpenOffice.org to the ASF, the Foundation, and especially the podling project, was given a daunting task: re-energize a community and transform OpenOffice from a codebase of unknown Intellectual Property heritage, to a vetted and Apache Licensed software suite," said Jim Jagielski, ASF President and an Apache OpenOffice project mentor. "The release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 shows just how successful the project has been: pulling in developers from over 21 corporate affiliations, while avoiding undue influence which is the death-knell of true open source communities; building a solid and stable codebase, with significant improvement and enhancements over other variants; and, of course, creating a healthy, vibrant and diverse user and developer community."

Apache OpenOffice is the leading open source office productivity suite, with more than 100 million users worldwide in home, corporate, government, research, and academic environments, across 15 languages.

As indiciated, this is the first release of OpenOffice since the Apache project began. Much of the work between then and now has been to bring the community that was already established around OpenOffice.org forward, including our participation at IBM. We hired "the Hamburg five", five developers who created the original Star Division project that was acquired by Sun and later Oracle before becoming an Apache podling project.

As discussed in previous blogs about the work IBM is contributing to OpenOffice, we have much to do on the road ahead. We have yet to merge our contributions from IBM Lotus Symphony into the project (stay tuned on that) and the community is discussing the next Apache release vehicle for the project. Meanwhile, Symphony continues to ship and be supported as part of Notes 8.5 and on its own at Symphony.Lotus.com. Once there is an Apache version that includes our contributed code and other enhancements, IBM will begin supporting an IBM edition of Apache OpenOffice.

This release is a great opportunity to see the future of desktop productivity alternatives to Microsoft. It also marks a basis for other communities to draw from the master OpenOffice source, hopefully uniting those desktop productivity alternatives. As Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady said in today's announcement,

"[T]he first release of OpenOffice 3.4 as an Apache project marks an important new chapter in the life of a landmark project. Following months of effort, the open source productivity suite is now licensed and built with the intent of courting a large population of users, developers and ISVs worldwide."

Footnote: eWeek incorrectly states that IBM have discontinued Symphony. This isn't the case as you can see at the Symphony website. eWeek seems to have also taken the angle that this is some kind of competition with LibreOffice, with a "let the games begin" conclusion. My take is actually that this is where the games should end, but I realize that takes much more than a sentence on my blog to make happen. Thankfully, IBM is 100% committed to bringing together those that want to provide a viable desktop productivity open source approach, and you see many IBMer names on the volunteer list responsible for today's OpenOffice 3.4 release.

Link: The Apache OpenOffice Project Announces Apache OpenOffice^TM 3.4 >

Thanks so much for over 100 comments worth of valuable input on where we should be taking Notes/Domino in the future. We took this chart into the meeting as one of many inputs, coming from edbrill.com readers:


 

Other inputs included the design partners, feedback from events like Lotusphere, competitive analysis, SPRs/APARs/PMRs, strategy coming down from IBM software group at large, sales input, and many many many other input vectors. Triaging for a mass-market product is always one of the most fun, but most challenging, parts of product managing.

Obviously, I can't telegraph my future roadmap to the public market at this phase. So, talking about the outcomes of this meeting on the blog, or even at this phase with design partners, is pretty much impossible. We also roped off application development and mobility to mostly be separate topics for subsequent workshops, and thus focused on client, server, and SmartCloud Notes.

We had many very good discussions about what a rich client needs to be in the future, with the future being deployments in 2014-2017. We talked about the role of HTML5 vs. an installed client, we talked about iNotes and Connections/"social mail", we talked about mobility, we talked about Eclipse, we even talked about Outlook. On the server side, we talked through the capabilities that have been built for SmartCloud Notes and their applicability to the premises product, we talked about TCO (total cost of ownership), we talked about architectural limitations. We had a great business discussion about ways to improve our offerings in market, including branding, packaging, licensing, bundles, and all those other usual vectors. We had a good discussion about market segmentation and growth opportunities, and our sales and marketing teams provided input on what's working and what isn't.

Our drive to Notes/Domino "9", "10", etc. continues from here. The leadership team will come back together in August, and then present our anticipated plans initially at our Leadership Alliance meeting in October. I expect you'll see some of the decisions play out even sooner than that.

OK, so this six-minute YouTube video violates one of the frequent requests made of IBM marketing: we aren't showing the product. Instead I try in a little more than five minutes to explain what we mean by a "social mail" experience, and what we are building for the next release of IBM Connections (and in the future, other mail experiences we deliver):



The IBMSocialBiz channel on YouTube has many other videos we have produced in the last few months, including one filmed at Lotusphere where I talk about the value of your IBM S&S contract for product updates, support, etc.:
http://youtu.be/LjZENiBYzmM

Check out the whole channel.

Link: IBM Social Business on YouTube >

Next week, my team and I will be in our labs in Littleton, Massachusetts US, working with our engineering team leadership on plans for the Lotus Notes and Domino roadmap for 2013 and beyond. The Mass Labs, as they are known, house many of the top architects, engineers, and developers who work on Notes, iNotes, Domino, and Designer, along with other IBM labs throughout the world. The whole leadership team -- many of whom you have met at Lotusphere, including VP Sandesh Bhat, Directors John Woods, Norm Lord, and Chief Architect Russ Holden -- are all at the Mass Labs, so it makes sense to bring my somewhat-more-distributed product management team together there, along with representatives from the Traveler team (labs in Austin, Raleigh, and elsewhere) and other parts of the Notes/Domino portfolio.

Our priority for the workshop is to lay out specifics of what we want to achieve in the next release of Notes and Domino after "Social Edition", likely to be called "9", and where we go after that. Many of the themes for "9 or whatever we call it" were shared at Lotusphere 2012, but this workshop will be a deeper look and plan for that release and beyond. The product managers, sales, marketing, development, and executive team will be working for two days on these plans, and of course we will also be looking at tactical ways to continue the momentum that we're seeing once again in the Notes/Domino and XPages/XWork space.

Some of the themes that I am expecting to focus on include the continued evolution towards web and mobile interfaces, integration with third party software (this one I hear over and over as a continued priority from customers), future direction for the Notes rich client and improving management and deployability, and taking further elements from the "Project Vulcan" blueprint into the product overall. On the server side, we're going to be looking at work that has been done for SmartCloud Notes and how much of it can be brought into the shipping software product, more standards work, more integration work. Of course we've used sources like IdeaJam.net as input, along with PMRs/SPRs and the usual inputs to the product management process.

We're working in parallel on a set of activities around the application developer/development roadmap, so that's not a focus for next week's workshop (and we won't have Brent Peters, Phil Riand, or others who would be needed for that). But from an infrastructure perspective....what general areas would you like my team and I to be thinking about? I'm not asking for your favorite feature request, but a higher level hot button thought of what you are looking for from us next. I won't be able to respond to your ideas, and no commitments that this ideation will lead to implemented features. Still, it has worked many times before to throw these discussions open on the blog -- so let's go for it.

Last week, a couple of IBM business partners posted interesting new Sametime-related videos on YouTube.

The first, from BelsoftAG, shows how to use the new Sametime Meetings for iPad client, just released last week! It highlights the interactive nature of the app, the ability to participate in meetings on multiple servers, and and even being able to share links and other content in the meeting.



The second, from foresee, showcases a demo that was conducted at the German CeBIT last month. foresee's InteracTable Collaboration Room provides an innovative form factor for emeeting participation -- the furniture itself.



The whole video is a Sametime meeting, as evidenced by the selection of the meeting room at the start of the video and other functionality, e.g. choosing documents out of the library of the meeting. Details of foresee's participation at CeBIT can be found here.

Thanks for Volker Juergensen for sharing the foresee video and to Marlon Machado for the pointer to the BelsoftAG video.

My colleagues in development and support are hosting an open mic call next week to discuss the latest developments with Lotus Notes Traveler....

IBM will host an Open Mic webcast with Lotus Development and Support Engineers on 24 April 2012. The topic will be "What's the Latest with Notes Traveler?."

Details in this technote....

Link: ibm.com: Open Mic Webcast: What's the Latest with Notes Traveler? - 24 April 2012 >