Simon Scullion

Then promote the idea and sign the petition.

Dear Mr. Jobs,

We love the iPhone. But we are frustrated that you have focused your attention for Enterprise customers on Microsoft shops, while effectively snubbing IBM Lotus technologies, who remains a strong player with over 40% of the global messaging market.

Maybe of us already support thousands of Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices in an enterprise context and, particularly in light of your new pricing announcements, would love to transition our users to the iPhone. We understand that it could be a powerful business tool especially for our corporate leaders.

IBM leadership has stated that they are in communication with you about improving integration, but that they must work at a closer level than the SDK provides for today. Please help IBM enable the millions and millions of current Lotus customers to take advantage of your wonderful device.

Thank you.

I simply don’t understand why Apple would want to alienate such a huge chunk of the market, basically gifting it to Blackberry.

This should be a must read for all Lotus developers, even those of us who consider ourselves experienced.

There are so many badly designed and developed Notes applications out there, giving the technology - and by implication also us as developers - a bad name, that sometimes I think it wise that we revise even the most basic concepts from a best practice perspective.

This white paper addresses the most important and most serious factors affecting IBM® Lotus® Notes® and Domino® application performance. It is intended for developers of Notes client applications, to help them maximize performance by identifying problem areas and by offering solutions.

In this article:

• Introduction
• General principles
• Database-level performance considerations
• Formula performance
• Form design
• Views
• Code
• Testing
• Use Profile documents
• Conclusion

Direct link to the PDF

Via Per Henrik Lausten

Warning, this is a bit of a gripe post!

Why is it that the dates for Lotus events in Spain always seem to be the last to appear!? Spain isn’t even on the list for the Lotusphere Comes to You events, which I hope that is just temporary!

It could go quite some way to explain why the Lotus community here in Spain has struggled for so long. I just hope that all the effort of late from those behind Spanish Lotus User Group - SLUG.es, are matched by IBM Lotus.

I’m looking forward to hearing from Josep Alemany how the first Spanish Lotus User Group meeting went yesterday, held in the IBM Fourm in Madrid.

The agenda looked interesting, I hope the turnout was good, Josep put a lot of effort into getting this off the ground.

In the end I was extremely disappointed I was unable to attend, hopefully I’ll be able to make it to Barcelona in a couple of weeks!

Sorry Josep!

Tags: Spanish, Lotus, Users, Group, SLUG2007, Spanish Lotus Users Group

Kevin Hansen in an open letter to Mike Rhodin:

You have the world’s attention at the moment. For the sake of all of us who live and breath Lotus Notes/Domino, please make full use of this brief and rare opportunity.

Out of a strong belief that Notes 8 is the most important release of Notes in the last decade this blog has frequently been a location where I can beg and plead anyone at IBM/Lotus to do more advertising and marketing to get that message out to new audiences. Yes, there have been a number of activities on that circulated around Notes 8 … but its not enough. And, what is out there doesn’t get to the right people. And when it does, it leaves them confused asking “what does an animal hybrid have to do with my company — or Lotus Notes?”

My point is that it is frustrating to believe so strongly in a product and have to frequently respond to questions like “is Lotus Notes still around?”

It is. And it has a great story to tell.

More >

Well worth a read.

Tags: ibm, lotus, notes, symphony

Eric Mack makes some fantastic points in questioning some of IBM Lotus’ marketing efforts based on real experience out there in the Knowledge Management space in his post “Lotus Notes/Domino is a dead product”.

I had stopped by to ask if their search technology could crawl a Notes/Domino database. At which point I was told that the company saw no value in creating an add-on for a dead product. “IBM isn’t even here at KMWorld, look around - do you see them anywhere?” I didn’t.

He goes on to say:

I stayed at the vendors booth, convinced them that Lotus Notes is indeed alive and well, and growing, and that they could seize a large opportunity if they integrated support for Notes/Domino into their KM product. I convinced them (I think) to attend Lotusphere in January to see the market for themselves, meet developers who can help them add Notes/Domino support to their product and test the market.

Worth a read, as its a balanced article rather than a cheap shot at Lotus Marketing.

Tags: lotus, km marketing

I haven’t specifically blogged about the idea jam yet, I wasn’t lucky enough to be involved in the beta testing, but have since signed up and been having a look around

Today created my first idea!

idea jam - Linux support for Quickr Domino version

Bruce and the guys have done a great job getting this up and running, now we need to support it by throwing in our ideas!

So if you haven’t already, sign up!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: ideajam, lotuscommunity, lotus, quickr, linux

I found this gem over at dominobaloney

There are people who love mail folders and people who hate them.

Nowadays using folders is the “old” way to organize e-mail messages: put this memo here, that one there, and so on. Right, as in real life…

I’m trying to love Notes mail folders, and I must say that one handy tool is helping me a lot: its name is SwiftFile!

So what does SwiftFile do? Well, as Cristian goes on to explain:

SwiftFile is very handy because it “learns” how to manage you Inbox messages and then, for any open memo, it suggests which folders are likely to be chosen by the user, just showing folders name on top of the memo. Then the user make just one click on a folder name to move the memo inside that folder! Easy and fast!

In more formal speak, according to the readme:

SwiftFile is an intelligent assistant for Lotus Notes that helps users organize their e-mail into folders. SwiftFile uses a text classifier to learn each user’s mail-filing habits. SwiftFile uses the model it learns to predict the three folders into which the user is most likely to place each incoming message. The predictions are presented to the user as three shortcut buttons that allow the user to quickly file each message into one of the predicted folders. When one of SwiftFile’s predictions is correct, the effort required to file a message is reduced to a single button click.

SwiftFile 4.0 for IBM Lotus Notes 8.0, part number C1436EN can be downloaded from Passport Advantage. I have it installed and running fine in Notes 7.

A nice find, gracias Cristian!

Tell me its true!

Glen on his blog lets on:

So it was a big (and welcome) surprise to find not one but two groups within the company putting together distributions of the IBM desktop products for Ubuntu.

This was also picked up by Julian over at nsftools:

Ooo, that sounds tasty. A package of IBM products specifically for Ubuntu. I know it’s internal to IBM and not-for-the-public and unofficial and all that, but very interesting to hear. Maybe that’ll get us one step closer to official Debian support.

Lets hope so. I know it would make a lot of people happy, and would get IBM products in front of a lot of linux users. Imagine Dell flogging laptops preloaded with Ubuntu + Notes + Sametime + Symphony! That’d be nice!

This also gives us a glimpse of the power of social software tools behind the firewall. Without them, Glen would have found it extremely hard, if not impossible, to locate this kind of virtual community within such a large organisation. The truth is though that all organisations have these kind of dispersed groups with common interests, and tools like Sametime and Lotus Connections can allow them to unite and achieve results.

It would not surprise me to see this made available in some form at some point in the future. Please IBM!

Peter O’Kelly sums up the key strengths of the Lotus story and how that faces off to Microsoft’s offering:

I think there’s more to the story, however: if you consider the Eclipse.org-based foundation in Notes 8, along with the OpenOffice.org-derived Lotus Symphony “productivity editors”, the fact that Notes 8 runs on multiple platforms (eventually multiple versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS), and the fact that Notes is also a template-driven application development platform (with a tightly-coupled and purpose-built, multi-platform server counterpart), the competitive overlap goes far beyond Outlook. You could argue that aspects of Notes actually compete with Windows, Office (not just Outlook), and even the .NET Framework.

Emphasis mine.

He was commenting on Michael J. Millers article on the latest version of Notes and Domino.