Ed Brill

250 employees, growing their number of clients by 40% through using Domino, iEnterprises' CRM solution, and Blackberry...

This allows project managers to improve decision making, shorten sales cycles and significantly increased new business by making client interactions and client contact information accessible to all project managers through their smartphones.
Besides an increase in new clients by 40 percent, up from the year prior, VCC has also seen an average savings of 400 employee hours per month thanks to the ability to more quickly retrieve and utilize client information.

That's good stuff.

Link: ibm.com: IBM Helps Construction Firm Boost Number of Clients by 40% Through Mobile Real-Time Trends Analysis >

It's been a long time since I thought about my blogroll or, for that matter, really paid attention to anyone else's.  I find blogs today through PlanetLotus (and there are a number of new ones found there), Google alerts, Twitter and Facebook links, and our internal implementation of Lotus Connections.  So, rather than inadvertently offend someone not included, or consider whether the links there are still relevant, I've blown it away.  I put it on a hidden page for now, and suppose I can resurface it if I get a lot of negatives on this, but the Twitter feedback was neutral to positive so, it's gone.

We added a small rotating widget to the ibm.com/lotus/notes and ibm.com/lotus/domino product pages to highlight our key Notes plug-in partners: Gist, Tungle, FewClix, TripIt, and OpenSpan.  See here in red:



The goal is to increase awareness of these value-add tools that are available to showcase the power of the Notes 8.x client.

Link: ibm.com/lotus/notes >

It's been about a year since the last time we did this, and this time, we want to know about both client- and server-side virtualization technologies.  This area is moving fast and not a week goes by without a request for us to support some new virtualization technology.  VMWare and Citrix remain the most frequently-asked, but there are now half dozen others mentioned regularly.  The survey will only take about ten minutes to fill out; you need an IBM.com ID in order to do so.

Sample questions include:

• What are your primary reasons for CLIENT Virtualization?
• What are the important factors when deploying or upgrading new software in a virtualized environment?
• Is anything preventing your organization from upgrading your CLIENTS to the latest MR/Fixpack more frequently?

Link: ibm.com: IBM Lotus Virtualization Survey >  (Please respond by September 10, 2010).

Yesterday, we posted Lotus Symphony 3 beta 4, what should be the last beta of the Symphony 3 cycle.  You can download it from here.

Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 adds some exciting new enhancements. We've focused on performance. In addition we've enabled the support for adding additional spell check dictionaries into the product and added support for VML images.
We've done some additional work around installation to support a silent installation option for Windows. We've added some enhancements to the user experience like remembering file paths when you insert objects and some enhancements to the import data functions.

I haven't had a chance to download yet but I see a weekend opportunity ahead....

Now that Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is out, a few questions have trickled in about the status of the Notes Traveler client for Android.

To refresh, we announced at Lotusphere that we would build our own Notes Traveler client for the Android 2.x OS -- supporting mail, calendar, contacts.  We knew that the Android OS would evolve to have some of these capabilities in the base OS, but enterprise calendaring and other features just aren't there; plus, different devices using Android use different sets of capabilities, so we can't always assume that the OS will provide what we need.  For example, we will have the best experience with the 2.2 operating system -- versions prior to that have no ability for us to implement a remote wipe security feature or password enforcement.

We entered beta about 75 days ago, and progress is good.  The plan is to ship somewhere in mid-Q4, as part of an 8.5.2 fixpack.  The Traveler server will need to be 8.5.2 in order to support the Android client as well.

If you are interested in participating in the beta, and have access to a Traveler 8.5.2 server (does not require all Domino servers to be upgraded, just the Traveler server), follow this link to self-nominate.

Earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to be invited to a roundtable luncheon at the Chicago Tribune.  The topic was small business in Chicago, and while IBM itself is anything but small, we do routinely work with small businesses.  I know, the market perception is otherwise, but across IBM, the Express Advantage offerings -- hardware, software, services -- are all designed for companies with less than 1000 employees, and our own tools like Lotus Foundations or LotusLive scale down to single and double digit numbers.  

In some ways, I was at the lunch to hear what was on the minds of small business owners and advocates throughout Chicago.  Though I was invited in part because of my contributing columnist role in the Chicago Tribune's TribLocal Highland Park, I chose to lead with my IBM executive identity only as I was introduced to the Tribune reporters and other guests.  Eventually, I was outed by an editor who thought my name looked familiar, and, interestingly, from that point forward, I was like a new best friend to many of the journalists...more than some generic corporate suit from IBM (note, as you'll see in the picture, I chose to go with a modern interpretation of "IBM executive" -- khakis, iPad, etc. -- to try to reset some stereotypes.  The other corporate exec who was there -- well, let's just say he also brought his media relations manager...).

It was interesting to represent "IBM" as a whole in this setting.  It was the first time I was, well, a bit anxious about the whole back of my business card, with references to planetlotus.org and OpenNTF.  I hesitated over words like "cloud computing", though almost everyone in the room had a familiarity with social media.  One interesting wrinkle was that few had contemplated it in a business-to-business context, mostly thinking about social media in the business-to-consumer space.  Perhaps some opportunity comes from that.

There was much swapping of business cards, connecting up on LinkedIn and Twitter, and invitations for coffee.  30 people I had never met before, never even heard of before in all but one case, now wanting to connect.  When the invite came, I didn't really think of it as a networking event -- I thought I was going to talk to the reporters.  Instead I found myself immersed in a rich tapestry of multi-vector thought, around issues of the day -- for the community, the industry, and the future.

When you have lunch with a group of people who set out on their own to run their own small businesses -- or who work with those people all the time -- you are going to hear some passionate conversation. ... Well. The enthusiasm was palpable.

But, of course, small business affects more in American society than small businesses themselves. Jason Rosado's business is coaching other small businesses. Ed Brill, IBM director of product management for Lotus software (NOT a small business), helps craft tools for businesses of all size. Jerry Furby, executive vice presdient of business banking at PNC Bank, helps entrepreneurs to launch. So there was a lot to listen to and consider -- and I know the journalists in the room came away with a lot on their minds.

So, thank you to James Janega for the invitation.  It was well worth the trip downtown, and hopefully it is the start of the conversation, not the end of it.

Link: Chicago Tribune: Trib Nation small business community conversation >

Yesterday, Tungle debuted a site called "The Calendar of the Future | A Manifesto".   The site features interviews with Tungle's team and industry experts, including Robert Scoble, Google's Don Dodge, LinkedIn's Ellen Levy, Facebook's Michael Brown, me, and others.  I am honored to be in the company of smart, visionary people on these videos.  They are well worth 15 minutes of your time.

Part of the reason I was so excited to participate in the Manifesto was my long ties to enterprise calendaring and scheduling.  Back in 1993, I was one of Lotus's first corporate customers to deploy Lotus Organizer 1.1 as a group scheduling tool along-side my company's cc:Mail environment.  It was that pioneering work with Lotus that actually lead to my joining the company in 1994, and the rest is, as they say, history.  

Except that the Tungle videos challenge us to think about the future, too.  Where is calendaring going?  Why hasn't it gone the way of "contextual collaboration"?  Heck, why hasn't the metaphor of a calendar changed at all?  (Part of my answer -- "the sun goes up, the sun goes down").  What will be different about it in the future?  How does calendaring affect the blur between my business and personal life?  What does the trend towards transparency and sharing online have to do with calendaring?

These are all good questions, which I and the others in the videos attempt to answer from our own viewpoints.  I applaud Marc, Jonathan, and the team at Tungle for putting this stake in the ground and establishing thought leadership.  It's also cool to see that the site is generating hundreds of click-throughs just from mentions on Twitter and a few blogs.


As many of you have heard me say for the last several months, using Tungle is a logical next step in calendaring for me and many others.  Simply by pointing you to my Tungle page http://tungle.me/edbrill, I can make you aware of times when I'm available to meet -- no admins, no need to connect to my server, no interop at all, except a plug-in in my Notes 8 client and industry standards we already support.

Link: Tungle.me: The Calendar of the Future | A Manifesto >

My other manifesto videos:
History of the calendar >
Future of the calendar >
Ecosystem >
Data and semantic relationships >

As announced on August 10, the new Notes and Domino 8.5.2 release arrived earlier today, along with service availability of LotusLive Notes.  Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is a release primarily about reliability -- lots of fixes -- but with incremental improvements in the Notes client and significant forward progress for developers in Domino Designer.

The blogs are buzzing about the release, and some of the Design Partners and beta participants have blogged over the last few months about key new features.  I'm sure there will be a lot more now that the release is available and being deployed.

On the Notes client side, 8.5.2 adds some incremental improvements such as multithreaded replication, the ability to save individual emails to files, sharing of personal groups, and a preload module to improve startup time.  DWA/iNotes has several improvements such as iPhone 4 and Android support in ultra-light mode, iPad support, etc.  And Designer has a multitude of great new improvements for developers, including a new editor for XPages.

The downloads are still being staged -- seem to be working fine in PartnerWorld, not yet for all customers on Passport Advantage -- but should be shortly.  Stuart McIntyre has kindly listed out all the part numbers here.

Congratulations to the team on this important release.  It is no coincidence that today is also the day of service availability for LotusLive Notes, which I discussed extensively back on August 10.  Notes 8.5.2 contains important optimizations for LotusLive Notes users, and is the version that is included in a new LotusLive Notes agreement.  We're the only vendor providing a rich client as part of our SaaS/cloud messaging pricing, and it happens to be a great release of that client.

I would also like to clarify something I said at the IamLUG in St. Louis earlier this month, which seems to have since taken on a life of its own.  I said that 8.5.2 would be the last feature release of 8.5.x; some have mistakenly interpreted that to mean it would be the last maintenance release of 8.5.x.  We are working on an 8.5.3 release with a target of early 2011, and yes, there will be a few incremental improvements -- but mainly for developers in Designer/XPages.  For now, we are shifting future feature focus to the next major release of Notes/Domino, which is using IBM Project Vulcan as a blueprint.  Tons of activity going on in that space right now, and we'll start talking about what that release looks like with key audiences in Q4 and headed towards Lotusphere 2011.  We're also working on service updates for LotusLive Notes over the next few months in parallel; things will be busy from now to Lotusphere and beyond....

Back before my vacation, a few bloggers were talking about the abrasive, mixed message that IBM was sending to the market by having a web page from ibm.com Global Technology Services describing their Notes to Exchange migration offering.  My stance at the time was that IBM, as a portfolio business that is dedicated to every client's success, should be the best possible systems integrator for Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, or whomever else in our GTS business, even while we are competing with those companies in our software business.

Some of you didn't like that answer, and I certainly understand why.  It's one thing for us to be great at every business that makes sense within the various segments, it's another to play them against each other in negative ways.

At any rate, the topic bounced around the blogosphere enough that there was plenty of internal chatter about this within IBM.  As of yesterday, the web page in question had been removed from ibm.com.  You all were heard, and you collectively made the right call.  I was too willing to fly the IBM flag overall, but on further reflection, one of my peers convinced me that it was the wrong approach.

I still believe the "Lotus community" could do more to understand collectively why Lotus as a brand within IBM matters.  The acquisition was 15 years ago, we can stop talking about it now; other than being IBM's first large software acquisition, it really doesn't matter today.  IBM's strength is the ability to draw on diverse resources across our entire organization to provide client solutions; it's the unique value of IBM to be able to do that.  How we build product, what we build, who builds it, who supports it, who deploys it -- those are all things that are completely identical to how the other hundreds of IBM software products operate today.  Sometimes it puts us in conflict across IBM, no different than other companies with multiple product lines.  Heck it's not even just a big company issue -- I remember the discussions back when I was at US Robotics 18 years ago about the Courier vs. Sportster modem market overlap, back when we were all of about 500 employees.

IBM as a company will never sing in perfect unison, but we dig harmony.  Except that sometimes, there's a sour note.  This time, you all helped correct it.

I don't see chick flicks and I don't read chick lit...as much as I try to be a renaissance man, this genre simply doesn't appeal to me (nor is it designed to, obviously).  So normally, a book/movie like Eat, Pray, Love would never hit my radar.  Except that I love to eat in Italy.  I found my visit to India ten years ago, and places like the Taj Mahal, spiritual.  And I've met Wayan.

The book Eat, Pray, Love was released in February, 2006.  During 2007, as my bride-to-be and I planned our wedding and honeymoon, she read the book and was instantly drawn to Bali, Indonesia.  For me, a confirmed "Asianophile", the anecdotes that Deborah shared whilst reading the book only increased my interest in visiting the island paradise.  For a time, we even discussed eloping and getting married in Bali, until a) we realized this was somewhat complicated to achieve and b) our families pretty much insisted on being part of the nuptials.

Instead, we went to Bali for our honeymoon, except that we went on the trip before our wedding.  While non-traditional, I quite liked this approach -- we were both much more relaxed leading up to the big day.  Part of the reason mirrors part of Elizabeth Gilbert's experiences in Eat, Pray, Love -- Bali is a place like no other, and our time there helped solidify our love and our positive mental health.  The journey to Bali from Chicago was lengthy, flying first to Tokyo, overnighting there, then another seven hours to Denpasar.  This was all made somewhat easier by an accumulation of frequent flyer points that put us in business class, and some amazing service on Japan Airlines.

At the time, I had some personal reasons for not sharing the honeymoon with edbrill.com readers.  With the passage of time, and the release of the Eat, Pray, Love movie, it seems fitting to talk about the Balinese experience.  The first few days of our trip were basically beach vacation in the town of Sanur.  We stayed at Tandjung Sari, in a villa overlooking the beach.  In the mornings, we ate mee goreng, croissants, and local fresh fruit sea-side, and we passed the rest of these days more in the mode of a beach/spa relaxing vacation.  We visited Uluwatu Temple, meeting monkeys and watching the kecak dance, and ate prawns after dark on the beach in Seminyak.  We took our shoes off when we entered shops, and put sashes around our waists when we visited temples.  We could already tell Bali was someplace special, but we knew we had to dig in more.

A few days later, we moved inland to the town of Ubud, and the beautiful Kajane Mua villas.  There, we did some of the more touristy stuff like the monkey forest and eating roasted pig at Ibu Oka.  We also bought the buddha and visited other artists using many different media.  My wife also decided that if we were there, she needed to find Wayan.  Now, "Wayan" as a name is extremely common, as by Balinese custom it is often given to first-born children.  In this case, the Wayan my wife was seeking was the healer who played a central role in Elizabeth Gilbert's Balinese experience.  Through Eat, Pray, Love fan websites, we had a general idea of where Wayan's cafe and healing center was located.  It took a few inquiries, but eventually, Deborah found the place and settled in for an afternoon of relaxation.  This was more than a massage; Wayan's treatment included a whole bagful of lotions and potions for Deborah to take home for various aliments.  I was a little skeptical, but one result was clear -- Deborah was absolutely as relaxed as ever, for the remainder of our trip and well beyond.

The Internets are full of reports of similar pilgrimages, and that's likely only to intensify in the coming months now that the movie is out.  For us, it's certain to only increase our desire to return to Bali.  We hardly made it inland, never saw the mountains, didn't surf or scuba dive, and the buddha seems lonely.  We only briefly glimpsed the white heron birds returning to their nests in Petulu, only saw two temple festivals, and haven't been able to locate anyplace in the US that does mee goreng quite like the Balinese.  Plus it was cheap -- recognizing that you have to spend a lot of time and money to get there, beachfront luxurious hotels on the island cost the same or less than a night's stay in Manhattan.

Most importantly, we need to return to recapture the spiritual relaxation of Bali.  I'm on vacation this week, so the blog will be quiet.  Not headed to Bali, but hoping that reflecting on that experience will bring a little bit of it with us.  See you in a week.

With the launch of Notes/Domino 8.5.2 and LotusLive Notes this week, it was a good opportunity to make the podcast rounds.  Be sure to check out both the Taking Notes podcast and This Week In Lotus for in-depth Q&A on these product launches and other current topics in the Notes/Domino universe.

Taking Notes Podcast with Bruce Elgort and Julian Robichaux:

This week we spoke with IBM's Ed Brill who is the Director, Product Management, IBM Lotus Software about this weeks LotusLive Notes and Notes/Domino 8.5.2 announcements (LotusLive Notes, Notes/Domino 8.5.2). We covered:         •        The LotusLive Notes product and the various ways customers can configure it and integrate it with their existing Notes/Domino environment         •         LotusLive Notes pricing options         •        LotusLive Notes and LotusLive Engage and how they work together         •        What the industry analysts are saying about LotusLive Notes         •        Notes/Domino 8.5.2 and what users can expect         •        Mobile access to LotusLive Notes

This Week in Lotus with Stuart McIntyre and Darren Duke, with special guest Tom Duff:

This Week in Lotus 012 - LotusLive Notes and 8.5.2, we ask Ed the tough questions!

Topics included Notes/Domino 8.5.2, LotusLive Notes, "That Gartner report!", Tom's book on Sametime, and Google Wave killed.

Thanks all for having me along!

I invited a few "Yellow bloggers" to a call yesterday to talk with the LotusLive team about the new LotusLive Notes offering.  We had a great discussion about the new service, and for something that had been relatively in stealth mode before launch, the questions and ideas were very, very useful.

Several bloggers have written their own thoughts following the call, and you can go check out Peter Presnell, Darren Duke, Tom Duff, John Roling, and the others via PlanetLotus.  I do want to call out Nathan Freeman's specifically, because he latched on to one of the most important architectural concepts of LotusLive Notes -- hybrid operation.  Hybrid means a customer who is running some Domino on-premises (whether it is mail or other applications) and some LotusLive Notes in the cloud.  And Nathan distills what sounds like it could be complicated (and is VERY complicated in the Exchange world, and non-existent in the Google world) down to:

Here's what you need to integrate your on-premises Domino implementation with LLN: an OU certifier and a single Domino server in the DMZ.

There's more to his post, of course, but the essence is captured.

So, great stuff, great questions, great first day feedback.  I know some people objected to my rather bold assertion that LotusLive Notes + LotusLive Engage puts us ahead of the pack in cloud collaboration.  I know we have to prove this out by delivering and winning customers.  We've done some of that already, and we'll be naming names.  But when I look at what our competition offers, I know that we are in fact leading out front from a technology and flexibility perspective.  As you check out the service, you'll see this as well.

This morning, we channel announced LotusLive Notes, with service availability on August 24.  We also announced Notes/Domino 8.5.2, with eGA on August 24.  Like I have been saying, it's a busy August.

LotusLive Notes has been gliding down a very smooth track towards taking the mantle of best SaaS messaging and collaboration offering.  We announced the new multi-tenant Domino solution in January, went to beta in April, deployed a key customer in limited availability in June, and are now activating the service in August.  Like most SaaS offerings, we plan updates on a regular basis, with some additional features already queued up for a couple of months out.

Today's announcement marks the clear establishment of LotusLive as the leader in cloud collaboration.  LotusLive Notes, enterprise-class mail, calendar, tasks, and instant messaging, lists at US$5/user/month, including a license for the Lotus Notes 8.5.2 client.  While it matches the competition on key checkboxes like 25 GB mailbox quotas, rich messaging features, and ease of access, we beat up on Microsoft Exchange Online by running the latest version of our server software, including the Lotus Notes client in the base price, and including instant messaging in the base price.  The Domino team has done an incredible engineering job to establish a true mutli-tenant Domino architecture, running in clustered pairs in multiple IBM data centers and integrated with the rest of LotusLive.  We're bringing all our experience with 20 years in the messaging market and 50 years of data center operations.  LotusLive Notes is a winner.

Add LotusLive Engage to LotusLive Notes, and the result is the SaaS front-runner.  For a list price of US$10/user/month, users get all of the LotusLive Notes capabilities, plus all of the capabilities of LotusLive Engage.  This includes our unique and easy approach to file sharing, online emeetings, profiles, activities, forms, and charts.  LotusLive Notes and LotusLive Engage are seamlessly integrated, providing a single "dashboard" view with one-click access to all cloud services.  If you use LotusLive Notes web (the DWA or Lotus iNotes experience), that just appears as another web service.  If you use the Notes client, you're seamlessly authenticated to all the other LotusLive web services, and will have the ability to use plug-ins to connect to LotusLive Meetings and LotusLive Connections.

If you are an existing Lotus Notes/Domino customer, IBM is committing to offering you the best cloud solution at a price that recognizes your investment in Notes/Domino today.  We've also done the hard work to support hybrid deployments of cloud- and premises-based Domino environments, connected together, both from a technology and also from a licensing perspective.  If you are running a competitor's messaging and collaboration product, now is the time to check out IBM.  During beta, we did literally hundreds of preview proposals of LotusLive Notes + Engage for Microsoft Exchange customers, and beta was also successful at diverting attention in some organizations who were needlessly flirting with Google.

We have been hard at work on this offering for a long time.  In the SaaS world, we don't get to announce, ship, and then breathe.  We've already defined the next update to LotusLive Notes, which should come in October, and then more after that.  In addition to my excitement at going public today, I want to extend my congratulations and thanks to everyone in the organization who did the real work.  My own team -- Chris Baker, Jan Kenney, Collin Murray, Scott Souder and many others along the way -- have lost sleep and been the creative force to get this project done. Russ Holden, chief architect for Domino, has not only lead this project, but touched every aspect of it along the way.  I have been humbled by Russ's ability to sweat the details -- actually, to invent the details, sweat them out, and solve them all at once.  I will save the rest of the list for my internal kudos, but all of the rest have worked equally hard to get to today.

Cloud/SaaS collaboration is clearly a game that we need to not just play, but play to win.  With today's announcements, I'm confident we are ready to take on and beat the competition.  If you haven't checked out LotusLive yet, you owe it to yourself to do so.  We'll be adding the LotusLive Notes trial to the site just a few weeks after service availability; you can try out all the other services today.  Meanwhile, Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is coming simultaneously, with great improvements for premises-based deployments as well.  I'll be blogging about those in the coming days.

Link: lotuslive.com/notes >

Eric Mack is conducting an interesting survey...I had not thought about the extent to which mobile devices were being "controlled" or not controlled.  In the era of consumerization, I know many IT shops are grappling with how much or how little to secure data, encrypt connections, manage what's deployed, etc.  

With all that in mind, Eric asks:

With the recent discussions about Apps and how consumers want the freedom to find, evaluate, and purchase Apps for their Smartphones, I wonder how many users are able download and use a productivity application and how many have policies that prevent them from doing so.

If you found a productivity application for your mobile device that was proven to increase your performance, would you: a) be allowed to install it? b) encounter resistance (or refusal) from IT to allow you to install it? c) make a business case to management for why this App should be allowed?

Please vote in his poll.  Click through...

Link: Eric Mack: Does your employer allow you to use productivity Apps on your Blackberry, iPhone or Android? >