Friday, August 21, 2009

e:Mail is a part of collaboration

Lotus Knows that collaboration means people working together to achieve better more productive results. Sometimes this means participating in finding expertise, sharing files, discussions, instant chats, collaborative applications, workflow, knowledge management and sometimes it means sending an email or scheduling a meeting. Lotus Notes and Domino allows all of these types of collaboration (and more) on a single platform via any client (Rich, Web or Mobile) on any O/S (Windows, Linux, Mac).

Competing solutions require multiple platforms to achieve these capabilities. Why would you want to use one solution to send an email or schedule a meeting but then require a different solution to book a holiday or participate in a collaborative team space? They are all collaboration. Email is the TCP/IP of collaboration and should not be thought of as a different product. (Remember when calendaring was separate from email (cc:Mail and Organiser vs. MS Mail and Schedule+) - would you ever want them separate again? of course not. So why do it with collaboration?


If you agree, vote for this thought on the LotusKnows Ideajam

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Lotus Knows: How to integrate Notes and Connections Business cards


In honour of it being Yellow Day and for those of you who missed MBR's Notes 8.5.1 update at IamLUG, here is one of my favorite forthcoming features. Lotus Connections in the Notes 8.5.1 Business Card. Nice.



And here in the integrated Sametime. It's never been easier to know who you are talking to.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Many a word spoken in jest

I was chatting with my frolleague Rick Robinson a couple of days ago about Enterprise Social Networking. Specifically we were talking about how people may feel inclined to put more accurate information in internal Social networking systems such as Lotus Connections than they might do for external sites such as Facebook. I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I gave the example of my own Linkedin account. In a vain attempt to divert attention from my meagre academic achievements (an O'Level in Woodwork) I invented what I thought was an amusing spoof degree, "Applied Quantum Philosophy" which I assumed anyone would see for the joke that is was meant to be.

Imagine my surprise then when Dr Rick said, "Oh yes, I studied that at University. Fascinating". Later on he followed this up with an email "PS you pulled "quantum philosophy" out of the air as an example subject when we spoke about collaboration ... I'd very much recommend the following book on the subject ;-) In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbins". That is certainly the philosophy of quantum mechanics. I think I might have to leave the "applied" part alone for the time being though. My cats are stating to look worried.