At Lotusphere 2010 yesterday, IBM announced the upcoming beta of Lotus Symphony 3.0, coming in February. Symphony 3.0 is based on the OpenOffice.org version 3 codebase, with a refined user interface, more features, support for Visual Basic macros, and the latest Open Document Formats. Symphony 3.0 marks the first major release of Symphony since 2008, and demonstrates IBM's ongoing commitment to the Symphony project. Be ready to check out this beta in a week or so, or if you are at Lotusphere, stop by the Symphony labs to check out the latest. Very good effort to bring this product forward.
We also demonstrated Project Concord, a set of collaborative web editors that will be part of the new LotusLive Labs in Q2 2010. Project Concord is something I've talked to customers about in concept over the last year or so -- that when we started working on productivity as a set of web tools, we weren't just going to deliver yet another reinvented word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool. Instead, this project demonstrates some very cool collaborative document editing, contextual commenting, smart tables, and task and attention management. It is designed to work with installed editors (e.g. Symphony), browser users, and even mobile users.
Symphony 3.0 and Project Concord are part of our general theme at Lotusphere 2010 of showing more technology, even if it is in early "lab" form. LotusLive Labs is intended to be an incubator for new cloud-based capabilities, and Project Concord is just one of those. For those at Lotusphere interested in more, check your conference guide for the Tuesday morning session on LotusLive Labs.
New Notes/Domino customer success stories page on ibm.com
Wed, Jul 28th 2010 11:10a Ed Brill This is a useful improvement: a single page that is part of the Notes/Domino section of ibm.com (www.ibm.com/software/lotus/notes or www.lotus.com/notes for old-school) that highlights key recent customer stories around the use of Lotus Notes and Domino. Sorted by industry, each features a pull quote from one of the stories highlighted within. Access the Lotus Notes and Domino customer success stories directly here, or find the link in the left-hand navigator throughout the product pages. [read] Keywords: domino
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Questions from the Domino statistics team
Tue, Jul 27th 2010 5:10p Ed Brill My colleagues in engineering who focus on Domino statistics have asked for the opportunity to ask the admins out there some questions about how you use statistics on Domino. Feel free to comment here, or send me mail at work with your thoughts. The goal of the exercise is to improve documentation, rework tools like statrep, and make other improvements in the world of Domino statistics. Looking forward to your insights. a. As a Domino Administrator, do you proactively monitor server health [read] Keywords: domino
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TCA/TCO Study on Lotus Domino x86 consolidation to IBM Power Systems
Mon, Jul 26th 2010 11:30a Ed Brill This popped up on a Google alert for me over the weekend... I am honestly not sure why it is buried in a channel announcement deep in the IBM website, and why the PDF seems to crash my browser. Will see if I can find the right person to discuss both. Assuming you get to it and open it in Acrobat, it's a very cool paper...In the following study, we'll explore details for example of savings of almost a $1M Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by running Domino mail on one Power 750 with 12 cores runnin [read] Keywords: domino
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IDoNotes podcast 79: IAmLUG
Thu, Jul 22nd 2010 7:30p Ed Brill Don't miss this podcast that Chris Miller and I did earlier today talking about the IamLUG, the user group event in St Louis coming up in ten days! was lucky to catch Ed Brill as he packed his bags and begin his walk to St Louis for IamLUG taking place Aug 2-3 2010. IBM is a Platinum sponsor of the event and will once again bring a ton of information. Last year we were lucky enough to hear about the Lotus Knows launch. I wonder what will come out of it this time around? The keynote from Do [read] Keywords: ibm
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Best Practices for Converting from Lotus Notes-Domino to Google Apps
Wed, Jul 21st 2010 4:00p Ed Brill Looks like it's another week, another Google competitive document strewn with inaccuracies.... This one starts with the premise that Google is the next generation, and gives readers ten steps to evaluate Google Apps. Too bad so many of them are based on false dichotomies. For example, someone at Google dug deep to come up with this comparison:Software Acquisition Costs: Lotus Domino plus Lotus SmartSuite costs $450 per user based on published pricing. Google Apps costs $50 per user, per ye [read] Keywords: agent
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Notes 8 client running with a Notes 7 mail template
Mon, Jul 19th 2010 10:30p Ed Brill I'm on a flight right now, and the passenger across the aisle has caught my eye. No, it's not her sparkly jewelry, but rather the software running on her Dell laptop. She's using the attractive Lotus Notes 8.5 -- but with the less-attractive Notes 7 mail template. This is far from the first time I have seen this combination. When we were first working on building Notes 8, eager beta testers tried out the "Hanover" release at any cost. As companies adopted Notes 8, some chose to deploy new [read] Keywords: admin
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Best.Lotusphere session ratings.Evar.
Thu, Jul 15th 2010 11:30a Ed Brill Yes, it has been six months, but we tend to leave Lotusphere and move on to the next thing. However, as we start to ramp up on Lotusphere 2011, the results were tabulated from the Lotusphere 2010 session evaluations. At Lotusphere 2010, over 90% of the sessions received an average rating of "Excellent". This is the highest overall session rating ever. The good news continues -- 91% of Birds-of-a-Feather sessions received an average rating of "Excellent" -- a more than 10% improvement yea [read] Keywords: lotusphere
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Google envisions life after Notes in a reference guide
Wed, Jul 14th 2010 4:50p Ed Brill Surprised to see this document on Google's website. While Google is getting a lot of attention with their Google Apps offering, I'm still not seeing a lot of current impact in customers actually migrating. Sure there are some customers moving, but where they are, they tend to be small organizations with email-only kind of requirements. That seems to me to be a retro view of the market, not an innovative one as so many seem to want to ascribe to Google. With that in mind, perhaps it is no s [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Upcoming travel/event plans
Wed, Jul 14th 2010 4:50p Ed Brill The summer is when things are supposed to slow down, right? Well, not when we are just weeks away from launching Notes/Domino 8.5.2, LotusLive Notes, and all sorts of fun planning next releases. I've also been trying to stay home, for a bit, or at least keep my passport in the lockbox for a while. Still, there is travel ahead. From a major activity perspective, in August I will be at IamLUG in St Louis on August 2 and 3. The keynote speaker this year is Doug Cox, IBM Vice President of Dev [read] Keywords: domino
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Another great case study: Haiti relief application built on Notes in TWO HOURS
Wed, Jul 7th 2010 12:21p Ed Brill This one speaks for itself...On January 12, the Haiti earthquake struck, with its epicenter just west of the populous capital of Port-au-Prince, and estimates quickly rose to 230,000 dead, 1.5 million homeless and 3 million in need of emergency aid for the most basic necessities. The epic, urgent need on the ground required immediate response. That same day, Colin Cameron, Director of Software Engineering at MAXIMUS, received an inquiry from the CEO asking if the company could set up a Web site [read] Keywords: domino
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