I will not try to compete with all the Live Blogger & Twitters this morning. So here is simply my Twitter stream. I will blog about all my impressions this afternoon.
For now just follow #LS09 or @Lotusphere to see all the updates this morning. Got to go now to find my “bloggers´s den” sign for special seating in the front rows 
.
Since I do not use a Domino server for my mail anymore I was very curious to see how the iPhone optimized iNotes Ultralite looks like. Lotusphere Online Mail comes now in in three flavours: tall (Ultralite), grande (Lite) and venti (Full). And I like the Ultralite client: very fast, iPhone look & feel, easy to use. But: Why do I have the choice? Wouldn´t it be much easier if the application detects my device and fits the UI automatically?
Unfortunatly I will not use iNotes Ultralite. Most of the time I am offline over here only using WLAN where it is available because of the roaming charges. Downloaded my schedule now as iCal file. Sorry, iNotes Ulralite. If you have an offline sync, I will give you another try.
Last years trip to Orlando was worse. I had to spent the night in New York due to late arrival. This year I was on time – but I almost lost my sense of hearing. Eight hours of continuos chatting, crying and ranting on my right side.
I thought I had a reservation for a window seat, but when I arrived it was middle seat. Two russians on my right side, and the girl I had noticed before in the check in area in Frankfurt. Well, I love children, but I can not deny having thought about radical methods to stop that child from making me crazy. Her mother did not care. And her father was sitting very far away, different row, window seat of course. Probably my window seat.
So after 21 hours of travelling I arrived finally 2:00 a.m. Today I am not allowed to visit Business Development Day. I am press this year. So I will go shopping with Volker now and meet everybody tonight at the Welcome reception.
This year everything is different. Last 15 years I was part of the IBM Lotus business partner community. Now I am not. Last 15 years I worked with Lotus Notes. Now I don´t. But one thing remains the same: I travel to Florida end of January and visit Lotusphere 2009.
This year I am part of the Lotusphere 2009 Blogger Program.
“The Lotusphere 2009 Blogger Program combines access to press conferences, key IBM executives, and one-time-only events designed to show bloggers a side of Lotus/Lotusphere they have never seen before. Bloggers in the program will have special access to senior Lotus executives, an exclusive advance-look at some news items, early access to the exhibit hall, and of course lots of time to visit conference sessions and speak with customers and partners. There will be surprises along the way and lots of opportunities to network with IBMers and other attendees.”
So thank you IBM for inviting me. It will be a great pleasure for me to attend this conference and look at it from a different perspective – personally and from a business point of view.
Looking back preparation for Lotusphere was easy in the good old times. There was an official Lotusphere site and – much more important – Gonzos Unofficial Lotusphere site. That was it back then.
Today when I finished my work, changed my mood to “Lotusphere” and started crawling through all the different Lotusphere sources I was really confused: Lotusphere Blogs all over the place, offical and unoffical Twitter streams, LinkedIn Groups, …
First thing now: Manage my schedule. The last years the Lotusphere session database worked pretty well for me as a Lotus Notes user. This year I want to have it on my MacBook and on my iPhone. No Lotus Notes installed. This will be the first challenge for today.
One of the first emails in my Inbox this year: Lotusphere Online is open. Looks very good, most parts I visited are Domino based. A lot of session presentations are available as PDF. Schedule database is somehow slow, but building the schedule was much easier than last year when I had to fight a lot of errors.
Update: Well, ok then. My attempt to connect to Volker was denied by WebSphere Lotus Connections.
Since I left my old job in October and set up my new company I worked on so many Non-Lotus related things I nearly forgot about Lotusphere.
I have been to Lotusphere Orlando all the last years, I have visited Lotusphere Europe back in the old days – and I will be there 2009. Thanks to IBM I took the chance to see what´s next in the collaboration business. This time I will be there as a consultant, not as a reseller and software developer. My role has changed, probably my point of view, too.
I am happy to meet lots of people I know for years now. See you there in January.
…even Lotus Notes 8.5 beta runs on my iMac – fast and without any problems. Alexander is a happy camper now.
These are my first 24 hour remarks for my iPhone 3G.
What I like:
What I don´t like:
And finally syncing. I am still a Windows user. I have still most of my PIM data in Lotus Notes. I don´t want to complain about the bad iPhone support in Notes again. But as a user of Google Apps I expected my iPhone to support the PIM data I am holding there.
Will further look into this the next days.
Today I had the time to read all the comments to last weeks posts about Lotus Notes’ core strengths and weaknesses. Finally Volker asked: What would you do, if you were in charge of Lotus?. And Alan Lepofsky, now Director of Marketing at Socialtext, hits the mark:
[...] DRAMATICALLY simplify the product portfolio down to only 3 offerings: Notes/Domino, Sametime, and Connections.
Gone as standalone products would be Quickr, Doc, Workflow, Portal, Forms, Portal, Mash-ups, Traveler, Symphony, and anything else I’ve left off. Not gone as features, just gone as stand alone purchasable units which require marketing, confuse customers and press, etc. Take their code, and weave it appropriately into the 3 products above.
For example, Quickr does two things, file/attachment sharing and team sharing sites. The main confusion over Quickr is Domino or J2EE? Fine, remove any talk about that, by taking the Domino Quickr code and moving it into… Domino. Take the J2EE Quickr code, and make it part of Connections. Don’t talk about parity across the platforms, talk about how Domino now has file sharing and team spaces, and how Connections now has file sharing and team spaces. That is not overlapping product functionality, as both products need those features. [...]
I know IBM is listening. I hope they will understand.
I received a few emails regarding my post on Google Apps and my sceptical view on Microsoft Exchange AND Lotus Notes. One of my friends from Denmark just asked:
“hey alex, what happend? you are a Notes-guy, man! Are you leaving? will you work for Google? Are you about to leave our community? give me a call…”
Dear Christian,
1. Just wrote what I think and what I want to share with others.
2. Yes, and still I am.
3. Yes.
4. No.
5. No.
6. I will.
What an interesting read about the Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, about using and consuming all that social software tools like Facebook or Twitter out there in the digital world:
Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.
I have currently 642 contacts on XING, I follow 81 people on Twitter. I have accounts on Facebook, Plazes, LinkedIn, Plaxo and many other services I don’t use anymore or not on a regular base. In most cases I am linked to one physical person in more than one social networks. Every morning I see who is now connected to whom in XING. I realize while I am starting the day who posted a new blog entry or uploaded new pictures to Flickr. I see exactly those friends boarding planes on Plazes or feeling sick on Twitter. And I share my daily life with the people who follow me.
How can I explain all that to my parents? They will never understand why people like me share daily experiences and thoughts on blogs – or in every detail on Twitter.
For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism…
I had my doubts about Twitter too. Remember, I am “over 30″. But when I dived into the Twitter world it was addictive like it was years ago entering the world of blogs or the social networks like XING:
Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.
So Twitter and all the other “news feeds” have become the ambient noise in the background of my business and private life. I learn a lot about my contacts. And I let my contacts look into my life – as far as I am willing to write about my life. I definetly do not have more friends now – I mean real friends. This social software thing is not about making new friends. It is about getting to know the people I am working with or talking to – and the people I want to work with in the future. Some of them might become friends when we realize we share the same interests and the same values – or the same contacts.
A great article. It made something clear for me. I couldn´t explain many of the experiences even if I am living in that world for years. So who is interested and “over 30″, read this article over here on New York Times Magazine.
I am using Foldershare, a peer-to-peer service for synchronizing files, since years. It does a good job for some usecases at the borderline between my private and my professional life. In my professional life I have Lotus Notes and Quickr, we never used Foldershare.
In the last weeks I had some occasional looks to other services providing help in organizing files online. I tested wua.la and ran into several problems. It has a Java client and caused some conflicts on my machine. When it was up and running, wua.la was down for days. OK, its beta, but they should call it alpha at this time. Finally, it did not work from within our corporate network, because it needs specific ports.
Last week I received another invitation for Dropbox. I have been told several times that Dropbox is actualy the best service out there for filesharing – and indeed: it is well designed, works without any problem, everywhere, on Mac, Win and Linux. From my first tests I can say: I like it.
If anyone needs an invitation code for Dropbox, just leave a comment.
So this used to happen a few years ago from time to time: a customer meeting with me and some other vendors. Somehow the discussion starts about Lotus Notes vs. Microsoft Exchange. The good and the evil. Platform dependency vs. freedom of choice. Mail-only client vs. platform for applications. Performance, backup, pricing, yada yada yada. But these kind of discussion seemed to stop a few years ago.
Today I had a kind of déjà vu experience. Me and my beloved competitor discussing about the question “why not migrating all that Notes stuff to Exchange?”. The customer is a small 50 user services company and uses Notes mainly for mail and calendaring. They want to have some Quickr style web based teamrooms, so it was obvious they raised that question. But this time it ended up at an interesting point: Why not use Google Apps instead of Notes or Exchange?
I know a few companies actually evaluating Google Apps. Most comments I get are like “looks very promising”. And I can understand it. As expected we covered the usual questions, and we received some unusual answers from the boss:
Some random vendor: Do you really trust Google when they hold all you e-mail data?
Boss: I trust you too. Why not trust Google?V: But you know they can read everything?
B: My admin probably can read everything, too.V: But your admin is your employee since years, you know him personally and you trust him!
B: Do I?V: So what about reliability and availability? Look at the news about Googles outage a few weeks ago!
B: So you want to tell me that my server is more available in average?V: No, I know, we had that disk crash last week, yes, but if you would have ordered our clustering offer, that crash would not have been any problem for you.
B: So what was exactly the price for “clustering” our servers, I mean: hardware, software and your service?
V: Grmpf…
Our talk was not exactly like this, I took this to extremes. And yes, I know how a professional sales guy should act in that situation – this was fortunately a discussion between business men and friends.
But I have that feeling we are much closer at the point where messaging and collaboration components become a commodity than large software vendors are able and willing to admit. I read the discussion about Google Apps and SaaS at Ed Brills blog and we put some irony on it when the Domino servers were down in Westford.
My point is: I really don’t know anymore if I should advise my customers – especially in the SOHO and SMB market – to build and maintain their own operating and data center. Why should a small company with 50 employees run four to six servers in a room, which he could use for another employee for example? It costs money for space, for energy, for services. Yes, we as a service company sell the hardware, we do the services, we install and customize the software. But what they basically need is mail, calendaring, maybe teamrooms, document management, adress management, activities, CRM. Yes, they could do this with Lotus Notes/Quickr/Sametime/Connections or Microsoft Exchange/Sharepoint/etc. All theses services run on different servers, which are based on different technologies, and nobody from their own staff members ever wants to install a Websphere server to have Lotus Connections up and running. Good for us, you would say. No. They would never pay for that. And – to stay with my todays discussion – no SOHO company can afford a Domino licence which allows clustering – and two servers just for a reliable mail solution.
So why not just setup Google Apps? I know so many companies using salesforce.com, and they are happy. If you can get CRM as SaaS, why not messaging and collaboration? Google is nearly enterprise ready from my perspective, and I am not only talking with SOHO and SMB companies – I hear it from large accounts 5000+ too. I don’t see any other vendor in that space, even not IBM with its hesitant Bluehouse attempt. So this all makes me think. It is provocative, I know.
Correct me if I am wrong.
Just installed Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta 2 on my Ubuntu machine while holding a telephone conference. The Debian installer worked like a charm – I even did not have to uninstall the Beta 1. Rebooted. Done.
First impression: Start up much faster. All bugs I have noticed in Beta 1 are gone now. Lotus Sametime plugin is now running properly while in Beta 1 the chat window did not open at all.
One strange thing: there is no location awareness in this release, even in the preferences for Sametime there is no tab for “Geographic Location” settings. Can not see any reason why they removed it. Maybe the 8.5 client checks if my backend Sametime server has the right version and is location aware?
Anyway. Notes 8.5 seems to be very robust. I even had no crashes in the first Beta release. Lets start working with it.
Upgraded my X300 Windows Vista machine to Lotus Notes 8.0.2. Upgrade was smooth, startup is much faster than before. Office 2007 Fileviewer works now. Thats it. Lets see how it behaves the next hours on my desktop.
Still wait for the next Lotus Notes 8.5 beta for my Ubuntu machine.
One question comes into my mind: If something improves so much like the startup time in 8.0.2: What did they do wrong in the former 8.x releases?
Chris Miller writes about his experience with the new Domino Attachment Object Store (DAOS).
It works, right out of the box folks. [...] The benefits of usage and savings were staggering in the on disk sizes. Savings were in the 40-50% range right now. Here is the good news many people are missing. It is not shared mail in any way. it uses new NLO (Notes Large Object) file types and the darn thing works across ANY freaking database that shares the attachment and is enabled for DAOS.
I just stumbled upon Chris posting because I had exactly this discussion with a customer today. Back in the old days he enabled “Shared Mail”. It was one the darkest days in his history as he was not able to rebuild the references after a server crash and hundreds of users tried to kill him. Even IBM found no way to fix it and the IBM rep told him afterwards: “Nobody really uses that feature in real life, we built that because Exchange has it”.
So hopefully this time it will work in any freaking environment with any freaking database. I fear there are lots of customers who remember and will not trust.
KLUGE.DE ist die private Website von Alexander Kluge. Ich bin Berater an der Schnittstelle zwischen Informationstechnologie und Organisationsentwicklung. Ich lebe und arbeite in Berlin.
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