I am as ever late in the game. It took me a while to digest the whole Mail Next/Verse thing. Actually, because the whole two hours thing was kinda boring. Half an hour of demo, the rest futile attempts to explain the new way to work. Maya was cute, though.
I am not sure what I should think about Verse. On one hand, it does have a few features, I always wanted. Some of them I even did for customers and me years ago. I always thought that folders are a waste of time and I created people centric views, that showed new mails on persons. Unfortunately, I was limited by Notes and my own capabilities. I always dreamed of taking apart the whole mail client thing and attach it to a bigger picture. Things like blog responses and tweets, SMS and Chat, LinkedIn and Facebook are all just information’s that flow in. I don’t want to change applications, just to do read a LinkedIn post. Therefore I am a lousy social platform user. It never fit me. Does Verse change that? Well, I hope so. Does it have the WOW-factor I have been missing from IBM for so long? Not quite; almost. It looks good though. Interestingly it looks a lot like the first screenshots from january. Not at all like the examples I saw in april/may. What goes around, comes around.
IBM claims it is just the start of a whole new approach to collaboration. We have heard that before. We will see in january, what else IBM has to show.
IBM claims that it is compliant with EU and Swiss(!) laws. That does not mean a lot. By US-law, IBM has no way to protect our stuff here in a way that „they-who-read-all-the-mails“ can not read it as long as it is in IBM’s cloud. And as if „they“ ever would have cared about anybody elses laws. Therefore, will there ever be an on premises version? I doubt it. Even though the panel that was invited yesterday, was all in favor of Notes and wants to go on with it, it looks to me, that they did not realise, this isn’t Notes. There could be a Domino server somewhere in the back, but everything else will not run on Domino alone.
Maybe they know something more, or they just did not realise, that IBM wants them … in its cloud. BTW where was Scott Souder?
Even if there is an on premises version, I suspect it would be a crippled one. Anyway, without Connections, it would probably be useless. I can’t imagine IBM letting me connect to WordPress with MailN… sorry … Verse. Would be nice, though. CalDav? WebDav? No word about that either. Would have been nice to hear more about the technical side of that thing yesterday.
On the upside is the fact, that IBM seems to go for a new approach. Rather than asking customers what they want, IBM shows, what it can do. That’s more like Apple and way more innovative.
Is that the thing, IBM is betting on to get out of the swamp?