Content Feed
Subscribe via EmailFolks, whilst I admire your efforts to prove that Lotus software is still being purchased by customers, please can you consider refraining from phrasing your posts as "selling" Lotus?
This falls into a trap that Lotus sales folks often slide into - focusing on the license sale, not the value delivered by your solutions.
What is interesting is that customers are choosing to "purchase" solutions based on Lotus technology. Talk about the value that they're gaining from your work, the innovative technical and business solutions you're building, and the way in which Lotus technologies are benefiting their business.
In the long run, this is a much more strategic approach and one that will benefit the whole community long-term rather than a very short-term burst of posts that people soon ignore.
[Just my 2 British pence, as ever...]
By: Stuart McIntyre | 16 Comments | On: 30 June 2010 10:30:49 | Tags: community
... then I believe it simply has to be independent - either owned and run by IBM itself (the ideal) or by a body that is outside the partner and ISV channel.
The reason why I say this? NotesAppStore.com.
Whilst I admire any effort made by a member of this community to improve the visibility and availability of products and solutions based on Lotus products, especially one that has clearly taken as much effort as NotesAppStore.com has, I can't help but have some serious misgivings about the site:
1) NotesAppStore.com is wholly owned, managed and populated by Mayflower Software (specifically Frank Paolino), developers of a number of ISV solutions including SpamSentinel. I've met Frank at Lotusphere before, and have no reason to believe that he is in anyway unethical in his approach to business. Not unreasonably, Mayflower's own software products are listed on the NotesAppStore.com site. However, it is very noticeable that MayFlower's own products have the most reviews so far posted, and that they are overwhelmingly positive (e.g. SpamSentinel has 15 reviews, all of which give 5 stars).
I've never used SpamSentinel so can't vouch for how perfect it might be as a product, but I have concerns about the possible conflict of interest between the management of review/rating submissions to the site and the listing of MayFlower's own products.
2) The site has recently added some new functionality to allow potential customers to request a quote, e.g.:
Once again, I am not alleging any wrongdoing on Mayflower's part, but this feature gives me real concerns about conflict of interest, either because of the intelligence it gives the owners of the site about interest/pricing/configuration of other vendor's solutions, the opportunity to misrepresent NotesAppStore as the provider of the product, or to be (possibly accidentally) the cause of communication issues between the customer and the ISV. Even if the quote requests go direct to the vendor with no Mayflower involvement, the site does not make this clear right now.
3) There has been, as far as I am aware, no effort to get community support around this effort. If it had been dealt with in a similar way to OpenNTF.org with some buy-in from IBM, other partners and even some customers, then I'm sure I would feel differently about its independence and integrity, but whilst the site is wholly owned and managed by one ISV then I can't see how it can be the AppStore that so many in the community are asking for.
So, this has been a pretty negative post so far, and I'd like to sign off with some constructive feedback... In my opinion, if Mayflower wants NotesAppStore.com to be widely accepted, then there needs to be a couple of major moves - firstly to reach out to the community to create a cross-organisational board that can run the site as a Not For Profit that is independent and auditable. Secondly, it must have some level of buy-in from IBM in terms of commitment to further develop the Notes/Domino products to better support purchase and provisioning of third party solutions from an online App Store.
Personally, if we want to get to an Apple/RIM-style App Store for the Lotus platforms, I'm not 100% convinced that NotesAppStore.com is the place to start. But I would love to be proved wrong - over to Mayflower to prove that they can take this forward to the place we need it to get to.
Would you agree?
By: Stuart McIntyre | 26 Comments | On: 17 June 2010 05:59:38 | Tags: appstore notes domino lotus community
Just announced today at the opening of IBM's new Littleton Design lab:
IBM Collaboration Software to Support the Android PlatformWhilst the iPhone and Blackberry are still way in front in the organisations we work with, there is no doubting the surge in interest that the Android mobile OS is seeing right now. It's fantastic that both Traveler and Connections will support the devices in the near future.
IBM today announced it is delivering a beta version of business-grade collaboration software for use with devices that run the Google Android operating system.
More than ever, businesses are embracing the model of a mobile enterprise. According to analyst firm IDC, there will be more than one billion mobile workers worldwide by year end 2010.
“IBM is committed to supporting the vast array of mobile devices out there including the Android platform,” said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, messaging and collaboration, IBM.
Lotus Notes Traveler for Android beta version is no-charge software that can be downloaded by Lotus Notes customers and provides two-way, over-the-air synchronization of information between Lotus Domino and mobile devices.
The software allows Lotus Notes users who synchronize their Domino mail, calendar, and contacts via Lotus Notes Traveler to view that data on the devices that run the Android 2.0 or higher operating system. This includes the Droid, Nexus One and many other devices.
Additionally, the next version of IBM Lotus Connections social software plans to support the Android platform.
According to a recent news report, approximately 100,000 Android based phones are being activated each day, with more than 60 models on the market.
“Employees at Memorial Health System use Lotus Notes Traveler on other devices, and I am now getting many requests for Lotus Notes Traveler on Android devices as well. We look forward to trying out the functionality on the Android platform as participants in the beta program,” said John Cherry, Programmer and DBA Manager, Memorial Health System.
IBM also has Lotus Notes Traveler software that supports Nokia Symbian, Windows Mobile Devices and the Apple iPhone and iPad. “I have seen an increase in the use of enterprises using IBM Lotus software with mobile Apple devices as new support and devices have become available, for example, most recently the iPad.” Employees of General Motors, Hyatt, Roto-Rooter Services and many companies have employees using IBM collaboration software on a variety of mobile devices including Apple's.
More than half of the largest 100 corporations use IBM's flagship collaboration offerings, Lotus Notes and Domino. These companies include the top aerospace and defense organizations; the top nine automotive firms; the top eight banks; the top four makers of consumer products; the top seven electronics firms; the top eight insurance companies; the top seven pharmaceutical organizations; and the top nine telecommunications carriers.
Can't wait to get my hands on that Traveler beta code ;-)
By: Stuart McIntyre | 9 Comments | On: 16 June 2010 15:04:49 | Tags: traveler lotus android
Whilst many will know Collaboration Matters as being Lotus Connections specialists, we have a number of relationships with other vendors in the Social Collaboration space, including SocialText, Jive and Atlassian.
This week in the Enterprise2.0 conference in Boston, and many of the vendors are planning big announcements over the next few days. e.g. IBM has its 'Evening in the Cloud' even tonight, where Sean Poulley will be leading the LotusLive push.
However, the most impressive set of announcements so far has been from Jive Software, who are launching their "New Way to Business" campaign:
The "New Way" is an agenda for social business, redefining how work gets done, and how companies engage with their customers. Two facets of the "New Way" being unveiled today are Jive What Matters and the Jive Apps Market:
Jive What MattersBy integrating the Twitter "Firehose" that has been licensed, Jive can take the knowledge shared in the 65million tweets each day and combine this with the organisational information within the Jive environment. I think this makes a great deal of sense as a way to bring the private and public social webs together.
Jive What Matters is designed to be the first place for everything users need to see, know, and do. It aggregates relevant information on a single page, enabling faster action taking and decision-making.
Jive What Matters combines information from social business applications, existing enterprise tools and the external social web into a simple, breakthrough user experience. It includes the following functionality:
- 'Now' -- an aggregated view of everything a user needs to know, including activity and critical information from the web, legacy systems and other social sources;
- 'My Communications' -- a single place to go for everything a user needs to see, including relevant comments, direct messages, or anything else that impacts the user; and
- 'My Actions' -- a streamlined summary of everything a user needs to do by prioritizing action items, alerts, and critical project notifications.
"Jive is helping us drive innovation and collaboration across the company," said Greg Lowe, Social Media Strategist, Alcatel-Lucent. "In less than 60 days, over 10,000 employees have joined Engage, our Jive-powered community. Managing the information explosion so we can focus on the crucial data is an ongoing challenge and Jive What Matters will help us do just that."
Jive What Matters is powered by Jive Chatter Filter and Jive Genius. Jive Chatter Filter delivers a pure stream of relevant information. It gives each user a personalized view of the information they want and the actions they need to take by intelligently cutting through the noise from a myriad of sources. The Jive Genius proactively recommends useful content based on learned preferences and behaviors of each Jive user.
From within their Jive What Matters page, users can invoke Jive apps. Jive apps are lightweight, powerful applications that deliver critical functionality without the overhead of outdated user interfaces.
Jive Apps Market
Jive Apps Market will function as a gallery of applications, tailored for various industries, business functions and processes. Businesses will be able to select and adopt the most innovative and easy to use applications. They will have a direct line of sight into usage, performance and budget control.
Jive applications can be built by cloud application providers, third party developers and system integrators.
Jive is launching an application developer community in September at JiveWorld 2010 with full API documentation, example applications and tutorials on how to leverage the Jive platform. Developers will be able to combine their knowledge of the Open Social framework with the Jive apps services to build and test apps that reside inside Jive. They will have access to the rich Jive enterprise social graph to develop compelling applications with engaging user experiences that, to date, have not been possible.
As a first step towards Jive Apps Market, Jive is announcing the Jive Widget Studio. The Jive Widget Studio will allow employees to personalize their Jive experience by making and adding popular Open Social widgets such as YouTube videos, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and Flickr streams. The Jive Widget Studio will be available next month to Jive customers with Jive 4.5 and later.
Jive is building the application framework using Open Standards such as OpenSocial and oAuth. This is consistent with Jive's strategy and commitment to pursue and adopt an open strategy.
In addition, the Apps Market builds on the success of the OpenSocial development effort to allow organisations to expand their Jive infrastructures, integrate their applications and embrace the Social Web.
Also announced today are strategic partnerships with Dachis Group (including our partners at Headshift) and CSC, and the addition of Jive to the Google Apps Marketplace. I find the "New Way" a really exciting effort so far, and can't wait to hear more as the event goes on.
By: Stuart McIntyre | 1 Comments | On: 14 June 2010 11:01:40 | Tags: social collaboration jive newway connections
In all the excitement about IBM's announcement of formal support for Lotus Traveler (and thus Lotus Domino/Notes mail, calendaring and personal contacts) on the Apple iPad on Tuesday at the DNUG conference, I somehow missed this rather important statement:
"Several IBM collaboration products now offer browser based support of the iPad including Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr for social networking and team collaboration and Lotus Sametime for instant messaging," IBM said.[probably because it wasn't in IBM's press release but is covered by eWeek, Network World (where this quote appears) and others.]
Now I haven't seen any updates to formal product announcements, and Monday's Lotus Quickr 8.5 for Portal announcement didn't mention the iPad either, so I can only assume that this information came via interviews with IBM execs and/or press relations people.
So I wonder, do we now have formal support for Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Sametime on the iPad, or is this just suggesting that the apps work on this platform (as they do in most cases)?
By: Stuart McIntyre | 0 Comments | On: 10 June 2010 16:53:20 | Tags: ipad lotus connections quickr traveler
Sometimes IBM does things that surprise me - occasionally that's a very bad thing, I'll admit.
More often, it's because they make changes that show they are really thinking about how to make their products better and showcase the benefits that are available to organisations and their users.
A case in point is the latest beta release of Lotus Symphony 3. This Beta 3 includes a lot of changes, not least a significant improvement in speed and responsiveness over the previous betas and Symphony 1.3. However, a number of apparently small enhancements made me both smile and begin to see the future being marked out much more clearly:
1) A streamlined approach to installing widgets and plug-ins
The procedure for adding plug-ins to Notes has always been tricky - policies/configuration settings need to be changed, the menus are terribly intuitive, and the process takes a while. Symphony 3 makes this much, much easier:
Use the menu Tools/Widgets/Get Plug-ins Online:
This opens a web-browser within Symphony, accessing the Symphony Plug-ins catalog:
Simply choose the plug-in you need, e.g. the new LotusLive Files connector (see below):
Drag this plug-in to your My Widgets sidebar (it would be great if this pane could be opened automatically when accessing this menu) - this begins the provisioning process:
Accept the license agreement:
Approve the signer:
And restart Symphony:
Whilst I think that the dialogs can still be made more friendly (does the user need to know the names of the plug-in files, sizes etc?), this is a massive improvement on what has gone before, and should lead to a lot more users trying plug-ins and widgets in their Symphony environment.
2) Increased integration between on-premise/local applications and the Cloud
IBM has long discussed the integration possibilities between on-premise and Cloud-based applications - they even have a nifty slogan for the idea, "Click to Cloud":
However, it is clear that this integration effort is increasing in importance with every new release. Alongside Symphony 3 Beta 3 IBM has introduced the brand new plug-in for LotusLive files which makes it much much easier to access, edit and upload files from the cloud, and is a great effort from everyone in the Symphony/LotusLive teams - a big step forward.
This is, of course, just the first step in a long journey towards seamless integration. Project Vulcan offers a vision of a mesh of social and collaborative applications accessing local, networked and cloud-based resources, in such as way that the user has almost no need to differentiate where and how the information is being stored. At the same time, competitors such as Google are pushing the boundaries of online collaboration and editing forward, so IBM needs to keep making improvements in this area with every release.
3) Cross-sell the Lotus vision
I often wonder how many IT professionals even know that Lotus still exists. Indeed, I often also consider whether most Notes users know that Lotus do anything beyond the products that they use day-in, day-out. That's why Lotus Symphony is so critical to the ongoing success of the brand. It isn't right for every organisation or user - many will stick with MS Office through thick and thin, or else focus purely on a cloud-based productivity tool future - but the fact that Lotus really has a contender in this space (and that it is free) keeps the brand mindshare alive.
Likewise, Symphony can act as a means to inform users of the possibilities of using other Lotus offerings. That's why I was excited to see the new release advertising LotusLive collaboration services:
So, just three small incremental steps, but all together I think they add up to some exciting 'joined-up thinking' from the Lotus brand. Keep it going!
By: Stuart McIntyre | 2 Comments | On: 10 June 2010 07:33:46 | Tags: lotus cloud clicktocloud symphony lotuslive
As someone who is reluctant to shell out the $3,000 required to access the Radicati report in full, I find the executive summary just keeps me asking more questions:
- Why would Notes and Domino suddenly jump from c.130 million seats sold (which is what the general consensus suggests IBM's published number means) to 192 million by the end of this year and to 266 million by the end of 2014?
- The report states that it refers to "on-premise and hosted mailboxes" - one assumes this means Notes/Domino CALs purchased via Passport Advantage and ELAs, plus subscribers to LotusLive Notes (the hosted Notes/Domino solution). Are they including LotusLive iNotes in this calculation (as this is the cloud-based solution expected to see most growth in the near future - which isn't Notes/Domino based of course)?
- These numbers appear to be pretty optimistic by most accounts. Sarah Radicati is (ahem) not known as being the biggest fan of Lotus Notes on the planet, why would she change her stance so significantly now?
- Did IBM 'sponsor' the report?
Don't get me wrong... I would be absolutely 100% over-the-moon if Notes/Domino was being used by 266 million users in the next four years - it would be wonderful for this community and for my company.
However, something seems not quite right here. Anyone agree?
By: Stuart McIntyre | 6 Comments | On: 7 June 2010 13:22:37 | Tags: analysts radicati domino notes
A new study from Radicati Group:
In 2010, IBM Lotus Domino will have an installed base of 192 million mailboxes, and is expected to grow to 266 million by 2014. This represents an average annual growth rate of 8%.More >
o On-Premises Lotus Domino mailboxes account for the vast majority of the Lotus Domino mailboxes worldwide. In 2010, On-Premises Lotus Domino mailboxes will account for 89% of the Lotus Domino mailboxes worldwide.
o Traditionally, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has found most of its traction amongst Large and Very Large businesses, as larger organizations often require the powerful, advanced collaboration features offered by IBM.
By: Stuart McIntyre | 2 Comments | On: 7 June 2010 11:40:04 | Tags: analysts radicati domino notes