LotusUserGroup.org Group Blog

The case for sticking with Notes

Bruce Lynch — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:54:41 -0400

I just read that Coca Cola Amatil has dumped Lotus Notes for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS). Their technology manager said that they made the switch to reduce costs and “smooth out” the fragmentation associated with Lotus Notes.

They claim that upgrading Lotus Notes was a continual exercise and that, from a business point of view, created significant capital spikes for them so every two or three years when they did upgrades to get the new features set.

They started the BPOS migration process with a ‘pilot’ phase for the 180-members of the IT department, using it to learn, and “experience the pain” before offering it to the whole company.

Then they extended the product to about 90 non-IT volunteers who helped “champion” the change, who were taught about the product and then helped to “spread the word” to the rest of the employees.

It would seem to me that an organization that would deploy this type of evangelical effort to migrate to BPOS could have easily done the same thing to facilitate their Notes upgrades with minimal cost and pain.

So now they have email in the cloud. Congratulations! I would be interested to see what their cost structure will be in the long run versus what it may have been had they decided to put the effort into leveraging their Notes investment.

Does anyone have an idea how to frame this debate for other organizations looking to do the same migration?

New What's New in Sametime and SUT 8.5.1 with Rob Ingram and Kathleen Cooke

Scott Treggiari — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:53:21 -0400

Sametime is now on release 8.5.1 and SUT had a new release along with it. Rob Ingram, Senior Product Manager for IBM Lotus Sametime and Kathleen Cooke, Senior Offering Manager for IBM Lotus Unified Communications & Collaborations have graciously agreed to give a quick 30 minute down and dirty overview of what's new in the release. The webcast is free and will be held on September 14 at 12:00 pm Eastern Daylight time. But we can only handle so many participants, so pre-registration is required. You can register now here.

Rennie: Give people tools and let them decide how to collaborate

Bruce Lynch — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Speaking On August 12 at the TechLines forum discussing the future of email, IBM general manager Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal Alistair Rennie said that just fiddling with current email platforms wasn't going to meet market needs.
Although the inbox was important to people's lives and it wasn't going away, it needed to change, and that change shouldn't just be a facelift, according to Rennie.

"Our view is that the world is not going to prosper by moderate tweaks in email," he said.

New concepts were needed to make the platform more accessible for business processes and introduce social-networking and analytical elements, he said.
Filters have lagged behind people's needs, according to Rennie, which can end in emails being lost.

Earlier he had talked about the need for filtering mechanisms, which put email into context, helping people prioritise what's in their inbox.

In the morning, there might be 200 emails in an inbox, he said, but what's important might be the sixtieth email.

He believed that systems need to be intelligent enough to be able to put that email at the front for the user.

"What's important to me first thing Monday morning is going to be different to Friday night," he said, adding that people needed to be able to set account profiles and time profiles, making their inbox tuneable and trustable.

However, he admitted that there might be many different ways for people to want to use their email. "Us telling people the best way to collaborate is crazy." He said that people should be given tools to experiment.

Our Kool-Aid is better than your Kool-Aid

Bruce Lynch — Mon, 9 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I am sure most of you saw Ed' Brill's reaction to the Gartner report about migrating off Lotus Notes, but you may not have seen Gartner's Tom Austin guy firing back::

The money shot in the Austin's blog is "I’ve been where Ed is today. I used to work for a vendor in this very space, among others, Digital Equipment. I know what someone in Ed’s position is supposed to do." What he's saying is he used to be a product evangelist for a vendor that's seen by some to have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel (DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998).

In my opinion, where the Austin loses his credibility is when he says " the contents were written by hundreds of Gartner clients, filtered through several key Gartner analysts and vetted by a large number of analysts and managers at Gartner" as if it has somehow not been tainted by the greasy hands of a vendor! "Filtered through several key Gartner analysts?!?!? Why not just say "the Kool-Aid makers at Gartner took out all the content that would make you less likely to hire Gartner to do your Notes migration...or not"

If Gartner wants to take shots at Ed Brill for toeing a party line, that's fine - but to imply that Gartner has no agenda is simply not credible.

Admin2010 Europe and XPages Bootcamp for Domino Developers: 2 great training opportunities for Lotus professionals

Celia Hamilton — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:22:43 -0400

THE VIEW has announced it's fall training calendar. Don't miss out on these opportunities to get the training in the essential Lotus technologies that matter most to you!

XPages Bootcamp for Domino Developers
November 3-5, New York
November 15 -17, Las Vegas
December 8-10, Copenhangen
This hands-on event is the most comprehensive training opportunity available for learning to develop XPages. Revolutionize your Notes and Domino applications and fast-track your development efforts with the training provided by our experts. You’ll discover best practices for extending existing applications as well as creating new applications that use the technologies that XPages provide. For more information, please visit http://www.xpagesbootcamp.com/ .

AdminEurope 2010
December 8-10, Cophenhagen
This one-of-a-kind event offers you expert-led training, peer networking, and collaborative problem solving. Choose your sessions based on the tracks you are interested in, or mix and match to take advantage of training from various aspects of Administration. Tap into years of experience for the techniques to get more from the tools you already have and tips on how to automate tasks to save you time and money. For more information, please visit http://www.admineurope2010.com/ .

2 companies that "keep on Truckin'" with Louts Software

Scott Treggiari — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0500

We posted 2 new case studies yesterday.

Sogeti
Sogeti, a Capgemini subsidiary that specializes in technology services, needed to find a way for its more than 20,000 employees spread across 200 offices in 14 countries to share information to speed the formation of consulting teams for customer engagements, while also driving efficiency improvements.

For more detail and links to the complete case study, go here: http://tinyurl.com/5gse3o

Iowa 80 Group
A trucking support services company in the United States increases collaboration while reducing costs when it implements a suite of IBM Lotus software solutions throughout its enterprise

For more detail and links to the complete case study, go here: http://tinyurl.com/5gse3o

IamLUG 2010 is about to begin - Join IBM there Aug 2-3 2010

Chris Miller — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Please join IBM at IamLUG, the free North American Lotus User Group event. IamLUG is once again taking place in St Louis, MO, offering two days of free technical training, networking and events in a social atmosphere on August 2-3 2010.

Please share this with your team members and your customers.   All are invited to come. Administrators, developers, support specialists as well as any decision makers involved with the IBM Lotus family of products will benefit.

Expand your IBM Lotus Notes, Domino, Sametime, Quickr, Connections, Portal and other Lotus software knowledge. Sessions will cover everything from tips and tricks to deep dive technical knowledge in specific areas. Find out how to get the most out of your IBM Lotus Domino investment while networking and having fun!

IamLUG is FREE courtesy of our awesome sponsors. IBM is a premium sponsor.

To register, see a list of sessions, speakers and frequently asked questions about travel arrangements simply visit the website at http://IamLUG.org

Last year filled quickly. Register now so you don't miss out!

Tell your users about this...

Scott Treggiari — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0500

LotusUserGroup.org posted an article today about a tool that is not only a great idea for our members and others in the Lotus IT community, but also somehting you can pass on to your users.

The article is about a widget called Awesync that lets Notes users sync their Notes with Google calendars and contacts. It even extendable to mobile devices like Android and iPhone.

It's a cool little widget that was well thought out. Check out the whole story here:

IDC names Lotus "All that and a candy bar" of Social Software

Scott Treggiari — Thu, 1 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Today IBM announced that IDC ranks Lotus Connections and LotusLive Connections as the worldwide marketshare leader in the Social Platform market, based on total software revenue for 2009.

Lotus claims some big numbers and some heavy weight Connection clients. check it out... http://tinyurl.com/2uysc6t

READING, MODIFYING, AND SAVING IMAGES PROGRAMMATICALLY By Julian Robichaux

Scott Treggiari — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Read about how to manipulate image files (like JPG or PNG files) with your code. While there are a number of third-party DLLs and applications you might tap into for this purpose, you'll probably find that you can do most, if not all, of the things you want to do using Java right out of the box.

http://www.lotususergroup.org/submissions.nsf/ContentSpotlight/E0CC293698989BBC86257746007D631E/?OpenDocument

let us know if you find the article useful