Ed Brill

From Infoworld's top stories...PJ Connolly has tackled the Notes/Domino 6.5 release in the InfoWorld labs. A "very good" score of 8.2: Although some of the features new to Notes 6.5 are merely catching up to the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook, in other areas such as presence awareness, Notes is on...

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Hope all my fellow Americans had a good Thanksgiving...urp.... sorry about all the problems with yesterday's link. I suspect that Yahoo does something in terms of expiring the image links, precisely so that people don't do what I tried to do. You can still see the pictures by clicking the bro...

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Using Domino and Lotus Workplace for Applications December 10, 1-2 pm Eastern (New York) In this Webcast, IBM's Ed Brill will cover why you want to run applications on Domino and Lotus Workplace rather than Microsoft platforms. Then you'll hear from Ron Klowak, Director of IT at Federated...

Thank you for your patience.... A long-overdue feature of the lotus.com/weblog is now online...an RSS feed! I know how many of you have said that you don't remember to check in with my more professional voice as often as I might like... so, no more excuses folks. Stick this in your reader: htt...

This article has been out for a few weeks, but it just crossed my desk today. Some fascinating work going on in IBM labs, and it's so rare we hear about it all.That's right, folks, IBM has finally come up with a product that can spot the difference between rutabaga and arugula. IBM's chief frui...

It is great to finally have this news in the open....for months, it has seemed that some MS customers believed that Netmeeting was going to be the continued right solution for them, despite scalability issues, lack of updates, etc. I guess the patent infringement lawsuit was the last straw, eh?...

Was cleaning out my RSS feeds this morning. It's funny that once you add 'em, you have to consciously think about whether they should stay. For example, and not to pick on any one person in particular, I noticed that "e-Random on Demand" hadn't updated in a while... in fact, I think the entir...

I am publishing this on my lotus.com/weblog momentarily, but since that RSS feed isn't available yet ;)... here's a reprint... - I'll be in Cambridge MA for a short time next week on Wednesday. - December 8, a quick day trip to Detroit. - December 9, a Chicago-area event, co-hosted by IBM and...

How will business instant messaging prosper within the context of IT operations? Is it the tail wagging the dog, as this author suggests, or is it just a matter of companies finding the right vendor/technology combination to work with?The rapidity with which Yahoo dumped its business IM was bre...

Well, first night back, I fell asleep just fine at a normal Chicago bedtime and awoke with no worries at 7 AM Sunday. Took two (!) naps on Sunday, totalling about three hours. So I knew I'd need melatonin to continue to try to get back to a normal sleep pattern, and it did just fine at the out...

Something really funny about picking up my bag last night and seeing this big pink tag that says, "TSA Security inspection LAX". Yes, my tax dollars at work. Recovery day in processs, catch you all on Monday!...

Sounds like it was a heck of a game, but in the end, the Brits were too much for the Wallabies. Ah well...no defending champ has ever won back to back, I think that's what Marty told me yesterday. I sure learned a lot about rugby this week. It started right away when I landed in Sydney, and...

A list of some of the session content for Lotusphere 2004 is now available at http://www.lotus.com/events/govfor.nsf/wdocs/lstrackslist. From what I reckon, it's about 75-80% of all the sessions we've selected so far in these tracks. We published this list earlier than ever before, in hopes t...

Ken Bisconti was in Oz the week before me... and spoke with Computerworld Australia.Claiming there has been a shift away from Microsoft's offerings, Bisconti said IBM provides incentives such as discount pricing and has an entire program to encourage companies willing to rip and replace their e-...

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As I previously mentioned, Michael Sampson was also in attendance at yesterday's event in Wellington. Michael has recently started a weblog, and he has posted some comments about yesterday, as well as some ideas on IBM Lotus's competitive differentiators against Microsoft. I'm finally done...

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I appear to have guilted Colin Williams into writing a review of today's session in Wellington. Glad to see that someone is getting entertainment value out of my crazy travel schedule this week. Colin, I did have a really nice lunch, so I'll have a good memory of Wellington. And Lisa, Justin...

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This delay's my own fault -- my flight back to Sydney has been delayed 90 minutes due to a faulty fuel pump -- for wanting to fly Air New Zealand, and not instead hustling out here 30 minutes earlier to catch the last Oz-bound Qantas flight. Oh well. Actually works out OK -- I've found a seat...

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Just catching up on my complimentary newspapers from the last two days...this headline caught my eye for sure...TELSTRA is preparing a tender for a new email platform as part of its $100 million response to four months of serious system problems. Chief executive Ziggy Switkowski said a number o...

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Since I know some of you who read this blog run in mixed environments, thought I'd pass this along.Ferris Research is conducting a survey, co-sponsored by NEC, to determine the reliability of Exchange servers. If you are involved in support of a Microsoft Exchange email system, we invite you to...

Well a pretty impressive day all the way around in Melbourne. The Sheraton Towers Southbank is a winner, sad to say I was only there seven hours. Definitely one of the nicer hotels of the year. Started the morning off today with a business partner seminar; looked like a nice breakfast, too...

Administrators of e-mail systems based on Microsoft's Exchange might have spammers using their servers to send unsolicited bulk e-mail under their noses, a consultant warned this week. Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard University junior and president of consulting company Think Computer, published ...

I don't really know what it is about this city and me.... The last time I was here, I ended up "in hospital" for five days. The time before that, I never ended up flying to Melbourne, thanks to some strong persuasion by the Lotus team in Sydney about staying there for a few extra days. This...

A blurb on new features in WebSphere Portal 5.0.2, including new file import/export capabilities, an application integrator tool, and some Lotus Workplace Web Content Management. Also some "momentum" numbers around additional portlets and ISVs building for WebSphere Portal. Link: eWeek: IBM...

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well, I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or collapse, but I'm here in sunny Perth. Warmer than I expected -- almost 30 today. Just took a quick walk around the town center to get my bearings. There is a small pedestrian-only zone for a few blocks around the train station, and it is hopping w...

From May 23 to 31, 2004, how would you like to join a boat full of geeks in learning about Web Services, on a journey between New York and the Eastern Caribbean? The mental image of a bunch of y'all on the sun deck, well.......someone must be interested, right? Produced by IBM/Developerworks,...

A good overview of why IBM introduced Lotus Workplace Messaging, as well as other interesting observations about how companies are addressing unserved/underserved e-mail users (as well as their traditional knowledge workers). The Notes client takes an unfair knock, but the rest of the article i...

How I let this sit in my inbox ignored for a week, I'm not sure....The notion that Microsoft might abandon .NET is especially troubling for vendors who have wrapped their product strategies around the .NET brand. ISVs are confused when they perceive that Microsoft is apparently dropping a brand...

E-mail as workflow, ever think about it?It was a conversation with Akiba Saeedi, senior marketing manager at Lotus, that helped me put things in perspective. "Workflow, both structured and ad-hoc, is one of the most key and most underestimated elements of what we do every day," she said. "One ...

Yes, both business class and first class are oversold on the Qantas LAX - Sydney connecting flight, which is never supposed to happen. Should make for an interesting next few hours....

A couple of years ago, IBM announced that the next generation of Lotus collaboration software would be built as componentized services on a J2EE infrastructure. That vision has evolved to be Lotus Workplace, at least the J2EE side of Workplace. Understandably, (and I know I'm stating the obvio...

Dated November 6, 2003. I don't know much about this, but it sounds interesting...US information technology giant IBM and Chinese software firm Kingsoft yesterday formed an alliance to develop office software for different operating systems, which will become a huge help for the latter to chall...

I have been so busy this week that I have barely had time to think about my next trip -- uh oh, too late! Where are my power adapters?* Tickets? Oh yeah -- I still haven't unpacked or done laundry from the last trip -- guess it's going to be a busy 36 hours. My Australian colleagues confirm...

I received a pretty cool "targeted promotion" from American Airlines last week, one which I'll have a tough time earning but is worth trying. The promotion is simple: book four round-trip flights on aa.com between now and March 31, 2004, and receive a free Bose Quiet Comfort noise-cancelling h...

I am so behind with news content, but this is a good one:So whom do you blame for all this fear about WebSphere? Is it Microsoft? Goyal: It is to Microsoft's advantage to say Notes/Domino is dead. We would need to have an intelligence test if we were going to take a 110 million-user base and s...

OK, so given how this is a public weblog, I can't really say much about the customer I met with on Tuesday here. But I will say a couple of things -- 1) The meeting started with the most senior person present saying "We have committed to [move to] Microsoft Exchange". And the Lotus sales per...

Ah, it's finally in print...I.B.M. is trying it itself. About 15,000 workers use Linux desktops, mostly software developers and researchers. By the end of the first quarter of next year, I.B.M. plans to increase the number of Linux desktops to 30,000 as sales, marketing and administrative worker...

LOL -- "Where's the beef?" There has been a ton of press coverage of last week's Lotus Workplace launch. Much of it has been merely highlighting the day's news, which of course is good and helpful. This particular article, though, is much deeper, as a result of the reporter having attended th...

A discussion in the Lotus Partner Forum degenerated into a chuckle about the old shampoo commerical, you know the one, where "and she tells two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on". I don't remember what brand that was for, do you? But it seems to be stuck in the American...

Network Computing is running a sneak preview review of SharePoint Portal 2003. This hands-on review exposes some of the disconnects between the product marketing and implementation.... If you are a Microsoft shop looking for a portal and you can live with the severely limited document managem...

Interesting how I am really starting to get a feel for the Canon Elph after about six months of usage. It's not the perfect camera -- I also had my analog Minolta with me on this trip -- but it's pretty darn good. The Minolta was used exclusively for black and white film (matte finish, mind yo...

The 19th DNUG conference--the fourth I've attended--was, in my opinion, a very successful event. I've said it before: I really enjoy connecting with a wide spectrum of customers from across the German market, because a) there is no hesitation to express their needs and wants and b) they are qui...

Some weekend reading material for everyone... IBM is committed to supporting and advancing the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino messaging server and application-development and deployment platform for years to come. So you can feel confident that your Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino investments are...

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Well that was a long trip. And one where I hardly ever had a high speed Internet connection....meaning that I went from being completely caught up on my e-mail when I left to being over 100 messages behind at the moment. I guess I hadn't really realized how many of the messages I receive are l...

Earlier this year, eWeek reviewed a number of enterprise portal software tools, but skipped WebSphere Portal and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Now that both products have shipped their new versions, eWeek has completed the Portal product roundup. Compared with some other enterprise porta...

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In the "it's harder than it looks" category.... Yahoo is shuttering its enterprise software division and has laid off an undisclosed number of employees as a result. ... Analysts said Yahoo's de-emphasis also underscores the difficulty that media-oriented companies have when selling directly...

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This week Microsoft executives opened the door to a possible shift in that strategy at least with respect to Kodiak, the next-generation Exchange Server. While the plan remains to put Kodiak on the WinFS relational store, business pressures could abrogate that decision, the executives conceded...

A few days ago, Jonvon posted a comment where he asked about the process used for choosing sessions at Lotusphere. Now, I don't want to blog about anything that could get me fired :), so I'll leave out some of the gory details. Lotusphere 2004 is my third go at being part of the content team....

More pre-announcement coverage of the November 5 Lotus Workplace 1.1 launch. But although IBM Lotus will offer Team Collaboration as a Web-based service -- as it did with Workplace Messaging -- its strategy actually hinges more on offering the components to businesses, which can then plug them...

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A relatively painless departure from Vienna this morning. Due to it being All-Saints day, traffic was light and many shops were closed. I had planed to "nosh" this morning at the Naschmarkt, and while the traditional Saturday flea market was in operation, the food market was not. Instead I wa...