Ed Brill

Apparently a graduate of the "If you say it enough times, it must be true" school of thought....Sample quotes:Today, we think we are the only Java-based J2EE-compliant suite of content portal and collaboration. ... We think we can be the only vendor that has both the whole back-end ECM structu...

Public congratulations are in order for my mom, who is retiring today after 30 years of service to the US government. Her career spans four decades, in agencies such as the Corps of Engineers, the US Army base (now closed) at Ft. Sheridan, and the General Services Administration. She is all se...

Thankfully, technology now offers an arsenal of weapons to battle this burgeoning evil. GHY created its own solution, using various pieces of open- source software on IBM servers in conjunction with a Linux operating system. Vendors such as Microsoft and IBM are currently offering a variety of t...

I know it might be a bit of a shock to read that I was at O'Hare Airport today without actually being on an airplane. Just picking up a friend flying in to Chicago for a few days. Her flight, originating in Minneapolis, was scheduled to leave there at 11 AM and arrive here at 12:18 PM -- 78 min...

Volker has linked to an interesting article in the Inquirer... an opinion piece which, while it occasionally offers assertions without supporting evidence, covers the multitude of issues and challenges that Microsoft's core business faces at the moment. Hopefully it will get some attention, de...

It's not spring, but I decided that since I'm "on vacation" for the next ten days, it might just be a good time to clean up my home office. This is a non-trivial endeavor -- it might just be the first time I've done so since moving in three+ years ago. I'm about 1/3rd of the way through, mayb...

See http://www.bruceelgort.com/blogs/be.nsf/plinks/BELT-5ULQF6 (revised link) Obituary in Saturday's Oregonian: Danielle Perri Elgort...

Office of IBM Chairman Louis V. Gerstner, executive complaint tracking #ZB4580, February, 2002:I think in order for IBM to save its credibility with the Notes development community, another quick blinding U-Turn might be in order. Along with the head of the marketing person who took this extrem...

Awww...."The company has suffered recurring losses from operations and has a net capital deficiency that raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern," the auditor said in the filing. Link (CNET): Critical Path in critical condition...

I am now a week into my first full month at home in a very long time, so it's been a fine opportunity to peruse some of the hours of TiVo that have been sitting around waiting for me. I'm slowly making my way through a number of episodes of Globe Trekker, one of my favorite TV shows. There ha...

I know many of you have been following the "Damage Limitation" thread on Mike Golding's Notestips site, which I linked to the other day in "Bah, Humbug". The discussion has gotten fairly intense, both here and on Mike's site. Over at notestips, my friend and colleague Mr. Lepofsky has been d...

It's because every day counts that, late last year, Nektar Therapeutics began to consider deploying an enterprise portal that would speed up the process of application deployment. The company went live with IBM WebSphere Portal in January 2003, leading to an impressive reduction in cycle times....

Microsoft is now showing symptoms of Big Company Disease. In the case of Microsoft, the disease manifests itself differently from IBM because Microsoft, unlike IBM, is still headed up by the company founders. Men like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have the power to force the company to do the rig...

Wow, you would think that Scrooge himself just started blogging in the Lotus community.... First, over at Notestips, Mike Golding is exploring the heavily skewed results of his last poll. The closed-ended question asked about whether the lack of clarity around Lotus's future strategy has been...

As hard as I've been on AA at times this year, it's only fair that I acknowledge when they've come through for me in the crunch. This morning, I needed to get back home in a reasonable hurry, in order to make a 2 PM CST conference call. I was booked on a much later flight, and there was nothin...

In open defiance of an established cliche, IBM Research is thinking inside the box -- the e-mail in-box, that is. And the results may one day be a breath of fresh air for every over-stuffed and unorganized e-mail client in corporate America. IBM's Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team is tw...

I often forget to think about jet lag in the context of moving two time zones within the US. As such, I've been waking pretty early the last three mornings.... which is OK because my colleagues out east are looking for me by then anyway. This morning, I woke about 5:30 PST, which allowed me to...

The On Demand Innovation Center had previously existed as a WebSphere demonstration center, but has now expanded to include IBM's other software technology such as Lotus Workplace as part of the company's "On Demand" strategy, said Robert Sutor, director of WebSphere infrastructure software.Shor...

Well, the best thing to happen to the SFO rennovation that has taken the last several years is the extension of the BART line. I've never actually taken the subway in San Francisco before, never had a reason to do so. But since it now goes directly from the IBM office to the airport, it was t...

Directions on Microsoft has published a very good analysis of the issues facing Microsoft in 2004. Some quotes: It has become harder and harder for Microsoft to introduce updates that offer compelling new value and customers perceive many older products such as Office 97 as simply "good enou...

Still, Manzi's decision to go with and stick with Notes is his claim to fame. Notes was a collaborative application well before anyone other than the Notes team, led by Ray Ozzie, really knew what that was. It was a huge risk at the time. But Microsoft didn't get it, and it gave Lotus somewhere ...

Worse still, if you take a close look at Microsoft's current generation of software, you'll quickly see that it's all designed to lock you into Microsoft products, from your desktop to your server. Take, for example, Office 2003. Unless you use its groupware and presence functionality, it's re...

Being in Chicago is great for the travelling professional, at least it is most of the year. Two airports with three airline hubs, plus every other domestic airline flies here as well. The only exception becomes winter weather, and trying to anticipate problems. My schedule this week has me...

The mails yesterday delivered a very nice gift from UK-based blogger Neil Gower. Neil was at the October Admin/Developer UK conference, but somehow we never connected up there. Neil has generously sent me a recent BBC Audio production of Doctor Who, entitled The Spectre of Lanyon Moor. Tha...

My brother-in-law Chris is gearing up for a pretty important day on Monday. He is part of the US Navy satellite operations center, and on Monday, the satellite he's been working on is set to launch. The satellite is called Ultra-High Frequency Follow-On (UFO) F11, and will be launched via an A...

In the next major release of the Rational tools suite, due next year, IBM will link the Rational tools with its WebSphere application server, which is used to run Java applications, and with its Tivoli systems management product, said Mike Devlin, general manager of IBM's Rational division. T...

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I've been duped! Back in August, Microsoft announced that they were extending mainstream support for Exchange 5.5 for another year. At least that's how the press and others conveyed the MS announcement. Turns out that mainstream Exchange 5.5 support ends on 31 December 2003, as scheduled. A...

VARBusiness' first annual Tech Innovators Awards garnered 370 applications from more than 100 vendors. Products were judged on factors including newness, potential suitability for VARs and overall coolness. In the end, 24 companies were honored across eight technology categories. And the winners...

I'm sitting here reviewing the draft schedule for Lotusphere 2004, and I realized that I had neglected to mention that the full Lotusphere session abstracts are now posted to the Lotusphere website. You'll see that I am again reprising my Boss Loves Microsoft: Where does that leave Lotus? se...

A pretty decent-sized group of Chicago area IBM/Lotus customers assembled today to see the John and Ed show, AKA a Lotus update including Notes/Domino 6.5. Mr. Head somehow even convinced me to put a jacket and tie on for the second day in a row -- I can't remember the last time I did that here...

Customer meeting ended before 4 PM EST. Arrived home about 10 PM CST (11 PM EST). Between a not-so-great flight schedule on AA, late equipment, ground holds, etc.... not so fun. But good to see Scott and Roberta today; we have all been through a lot together. Hope to see you at Lotusphere '0...

If you have anything that those of us using Sametime should really know about please, please let us know; otherwise stop making such a noise over nothing. The hacker that cried wolf!!! If you see a vulnerability please tell all of us, but don't yell, kick and scream over nothing. Link to SecureP...

The folks at H&T Verlags, who publish the German Groupware Magazin, have announced Admin & Developer 2004, a Lotus-focused conference on 1 and 2 March in Munich. Some of the speakers are announced already, including myself, Bill Hume, and several other veterans of the recent London-bas...

My RSS reader just caught a posting on notestips.com that I've been waiting for. The most recent reader poll on that site asked about the Lotus strategy going forward, and whether it is the right one. While almost 26% said yes, 54% said they were unclear on the strategy. And these are readers...

Months ago, I blogged about my visit to Vietnam in July, 2000. I mentioned that I had been prescribed Lariam as an anti-malaria drug, and how I had some bouts of restlessness and paranoia while taking it. Well, I'm clearly not the only one. In February, 2002, Consumer Reports ran a story...

What is wrong with this picture -- FAO (parent of FAO Schwarz, Zany Brainy, and the Right Start) files bankruptcy and Toys R Us closes Kids R Us and Imaginarium locations. Both at the outset of the holiday shopping season. Huh??? Shouldn't this be their busiest and most successful time of...

The problem with take-out (take-away for the Brits) sushi is that I always order more than necessary for a meal. There's a good reason for this -- once it is inside the four walls of the house, it is like a siren song, begging and pleading to be eaten. What looks like it will be three meals' w...

John Head and Justin Knol have both blogged about the upcoming Eclipse 3 plans. One item that may be of particular interest is the "rich client platform", which is related to some of the work that IBM Lotus is doing around Lotus Workplace. As the Eclipse site states, "Certain changes, like fa...

A strange article on the Microsoft website, which Airplay has just blogged about. If I am reading this right, the MS Small Business Server's (which I typically refer to as MS BS) installer has a date-based validation routine for installing MSDE. And if the computer's date is later than Novem...

Insert your favorite rendition of "If Microsoft made cars" here....First Microsoft set out to put a computer in every home. Now the software giant hopes to put one in every vehicle, too. "We'd like to have one of our operating systems in every car on Earth," said Dick Brass, vice-president of...

I know a lot of you reading here or in the Lotus Partner Forum must think Carl Tyler and I are perpetual antagonists, but it's really not the case. Carl is just typically British. What does that mean? Well, it does mean that he is a pain in the arse sometimes, but it also means that he is go...

Let's say, just for sake of argument, that tonight was my 50th time flying into Boston with a destination in Cambridge (Lotus bldg, a hotel, etc). This was probably the 30th time I had to explicitly tell the driver "don't take the Ted Williams tunnel, take the Sumner tunnel" (ok, that also incl...

A wide-ranging interview with Hewlett-Packard's Tony Redmond. Redmond is Vice President and CTO for HP's services unit, and he's apparently still quite hands-on with the MS collaboration tools. Over the years, he has been the source of much of my good competitive information about Microsoft E...

When it comes to building enterprise Web services, the entrenched Java language is maintaining a healthy lead over top contender C#, Microsoft's best-suited language for the job from its .Net toolbox, according to a new survey. The Evans Data survey of 398 programmers shows Java winning handil...

Anyone else noticed that Yahoo has modified their photos service? My photos site looks pretty different today. The Good: The banner ads are gone!!! I like the single thumbnail "cover" for each album. I wonder how Yahoo chose the defaults (not that you can see them, I just went in and...

Eight years after its introduction, VOIP is having its moment. Indeed, 2004 is sure to be the year in which the technology hits prime time.... because no technology story is complete without IBM or Microsoft, rest assured that both companies are muscling in on the competition to provide a platfo...

Only about 35 percent of large businesses plan to move up to the latest version of Microsoft's Office software next year, according to a new survey of chief information officers. A more interesting question to me would be, what do these CIOs think they are describing when they talk about Office...

Bill Gates may have unwittingly rankled a few ISVs this fall while showing off Outlook 2003 at the glitzy launch of Office System. Busy highlighting new features in Outlook, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect briefly turned to the audience and offered this aside: "You know, a lot...

I'm on a Lotusphere 2004 planning call at the moment, and Sandra Marcus (Queen of Lotusphere) is giving an update on registration etc. I can't share publicly what I'm hearing -- sorry -- but it's putting me in a pretty good mood. Anyway, it's clear that tomorrow's deadline for the early-bird U...

Good coverage on the Lotus Workplace direction...Dubbed Workplace 2.0, the desktop client offering will tap Eclipse open source Java for a rich client experience. Eclipse offers a standards-based development toolset that can incorporate traditional desktop messaging behavior such as dragging and...

This is a pretty interesting statistic...Osterman Research has just concluded a large, multi-client messaging survey in which we asked organizations about the potential for replacing their back-end messaging infrastructure with one that provides significantly better performance, less server load...

From a Groove press release:Groove Networks Inc., a leading provider of desktop collaboration software, today announced a customer service offering for small businesses and groups within larger organizations. Available to Groove Networks customers with between five and 50 Groove Workspace softw...