Ports Thoughts

My frolleague Darren Adams has created a web site pointing out the great features and general awesomeness of Lotus Notes. Notes is Cool . Well done sir.

As you may know IBM has for many years been providing the technology for the Wimbledon Tennis Championships (as well as many other sporting events). This includes the Wimbledon web site which is awesome and there are now apps for both iPhone and Android to keep track of results. In an effort to help IBMers keep track of what is going on in the Championships while they are using their favorite collaboration application, IBM has deployed a Lotus Notes Widget called Wimbledon Sideline that allows everyone that is using Lotus Notes 8 and above to see what is going on in real time displayed in their sidebar. Very nice. (clicky for bigger). Update: Here is a link to the Widget

A very interesting article from PC Pro comparing and contrasting the progress of Google Mail with Lotus Notes. Comparing a robust reliable product matured over many years to the new players on the block reminds me of an old anecdote my Dad used to tell; "When I was a kid my father knew nothing. It's amazing what he has learned since then." " Comparing the Notes architecture back then (all of which is still in the product, even now) with what Google is laboriously developing, as if there were no prior art, is pretty illuminating: Notes does smart replication between servers and clients, works offline or in low-bandwidth connections admirably well, secures the inter-machine traffic with robust levels of encryption, doesn’t have to sit on top of protocols used for other things, stamps messages with irrefutable digital identities so you can verify who the sender really is. These are all things which SMTP (on the one hand) and webmail over http (on the other) are struggli...

I have pretty much lost count of the number of times MS Outlook users who have been upgraded to Lotus Notes have asked me how to save an email either to their file system or to their desktop. The most commonly stated reason for this is so that all the emails, files and documents related to a project can all be saved in one folder on a shared drive. Most organisations now recognise that collaborating through shared drives creates a whole raft of problems including security, duplication, compliance and the inability to find the "one version of the truth". This capability is pretty much redundant to Lotus users since they have many ways of collaborating including Teamrooms , Quickr Places , Wikis , Blogs and Connections Communities . These tools include access control, search, versioning and all the various features that promote good information management. However, we must remember that users do tend to become a bit set in their ways, so if they do want to copy mail messages t...

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.

I love the TV show The Wire. My Wife and I are halfway through watching the fifth and final season on DVD. It's brilliant TV. All the better for seeing what software Bunk uses for his colloborative needs .... Maybe that is why crime is going down in West Baltimore. (Season 5, Episode 5, 47.14). You feel me?

John Lance wrote a couple of days ago about how cool it is that in the next release of Lotus Notes (8.5.1) You will be able to access calendaring functionality from the preview pane of your mail. This is indeed a very welcome improvement and being able to accept or decline a meeting without having to open the invitation or your calendar is great and will save time. But personally I am more pleased to see this innovation . If you have a message that has been archived (as can be seen by the little "torn paper" icon next to it) there is now a button in the preview pane to say "Open in Archive". Obviously this was always possible using the "Open Archived Document" in the Actions menu but putting it as a preview button (also there when the message is opened) is far more intuitive. It is only a little thing but these things really matter. *As always these things are subject to change

I was half watching the BBC News tonight in the middle of the Red Nose Day charity bash (do give generously). However, my attention was caught when I saw this interview with Geordie Greig the new editor of the London Evening Standard . What would he choose to have displayed on his monitor during this high profile appearance? The Standard web site perhaps? Publishing staples like Quark or Photoshop? No, he's gone with Lotus Notes mail. I'll be honest, I don't think I'm gonna get a job as a photographer any time soon. But this is clearly a valid Lotus Notes on the TV sighting. (Looks like Notes 7 - the latest version is Notes 8.5 )

The Profiles component of Lotus Connections is a great way of finding expertise and information about people within your organisation. This has been greatly enhanced through the tight integration into Lotus Notes 8.5. So whenever I see a name in a Notes document " Live Text " recognises that it is a name and allows me to search Profiles for that user. This is great for finding out about people internally but there is also a need to be able to find information about people who are external to your organisation. So Lotus announced at Lotusphere that they are working with LinkedIn to produce similar integration and I have just installed it to see how well it works. And the answer is brilliantly. When I select a message in my inbox; It automatically enters that name into the LinkedIn sidebar application and returns a search matching the name (I had to manually edit the "J" our of my name since it does not appear in my LinkedIn profile). Clicking on my name in t...

When I first tried installing Windows Vista I used a Thinkpad T41 . The results were very poor. Whist the operating system did install it was pretty much incapable of doing anything useful. I quickly reverted to using Windows XP again. With the launch of the Windows 7 Beta1 I thought I would try the same test again. And I am very encouraged by the results. It is clearly a step up from Vista both in terms of stability and performance. From downloading the code (over 2GB) to burning it onto a DVD to installing it onto my venerable Thinkpad only took a few short hours. Within a couple of reboots it was recognising my Wireless Lan, Graphics Card and the other computers on my network. Impressive although nothing you wouldn't expect from a Mac or Ubuntu. But the big question is does Lotus Software work on it? The answer is a resounding yes. The first thing I installed was Lotus Mobile Connect to get VPN access to IBM's internal systems. Then of course it was Lotus Notes. It installed...

Receiving attachments via email is a bit of a two edged sword. On the one hand it is quite an easy way to get stuff, but on the other hand you don't necessarily know if the attachment contains wondrous information which will transform your life or viruses and other malware which will destroy your computer. In order to help users, when they double clicked on an attachment Lotus Notes would bring up a dialog box warning the user of the possible perils and offering some alternatives including "viewing" the attachment to check that it was safe before launching it. But these days most computers and particularly those ones that are used for business have Anti Virus software installed to watch your back. In which case if you add AttachmentActionDefault=1 to your notes.ini file then double clicking an attachment will launch it in the native application with no dialog box. More details are here: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21292126

There are some debates about IT products which are far more like religious arguments rather than technical discussions because there really are no right or wrong answers, just opinions. Obvious examples are the two button "PC Mouse" vs. the single button "Mac Mouse" , coding using "Multi Threading" vs "Multi Process" techniques, using images in GIF , JPG or PNG format or perhaps the ultimate in cosmetic comparisons, the Black Thinkpad vs the White Macbook One such debate has revolved around what key should be used to refresh a view or page or in the case of a mail client, check for new mail. As with most things in the PC Software world, there has never been a standard for such things. Each developer does what they think best. However, over time " De facto " standards sometimes emerge. In the case of the refresh key, it became the key F9 since this was what was used by Lotus 123 , the dominant application at the beginning of the...