Lotus Notes has been around for a long time. Since its release in 1989 it has always been viewed as a "different" piece of technology, loved by some people and reviled by others. It takes a different approach to information management and collaboration tasks, it looks different from the standard Microsoft offering which many people view as being "authoritatively correct", and it offers capability for being used so broadly across an organization that it can be put to use on many tasks, including tasks that it is not well-suited for.
So what do we do with Lotus Notes, and by implication, the other products from Lotus Software? Is there still life left in Lotus? Is it time to move to "greener pastures"? Are the new offerings from other vendors better suited to the information management and collaboration tasks that organizations are using Lotus Notes for? These are the questions addressed in this report.

I'm doing some work around user adoption strategies for collaboration tools ... extending the work in SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration, learning more for Collaboration Roadmap, and various other things ;-)
So ... I'm looking for people to interview about their work with User Adoption Strategies. Are you doing cool stuff with how to encourage people to adopt new collaboration tools -- SharePoint, Lotus Connections and Quickr, Socialtext, Jive SBS, Yammer, and other such tools? If yes ... please contact me so we can set up a time to talk.

Recent Blog Posts

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Smart Collaboration at Lotusphere Comes to You, Madrid Tue, Mar 9th 2010 12:30p Ed Brill OK, mark another one off the bucket list. Today at Lotusphere Comes to You here in Madrid, I delivered an entire 45 minute presentation en español. The presentation, "Smart Collaboration", was essentially a slightly higher-level version of the keynote Kevin Cavanaugh and I delivered at Lotusphere. In fact, it was the comfort of knowing that this was my presentation, my words, that gave me the confidence to deliver those words in a different language. The times when I stumbled were mainly [read] Keywords: collaboration connections ibm lotus lotusphere notes application consulting facebook linkedin mac social software twitter

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Alistair Rennie podcast on LotusUserGroup.org Mon, Mar 8th 2010 4:30p Ed Brill Alistair Rennie has been the general manager of Lotus software for about sixty days. In this podcast, recorded last week, Alistair debriefs on Lotusphere, talks about Project Vulcan, and looks ahead in the collaboration and productivity market. Well worth a 20 minute listen.LotusUserGroup.org caught up with Alistair Rennie, General Manager of Lotus Software at IBM, and we recorded the whole conversation for you to hear. Listen in to hear what he finds matters most in his new position and what [read] Keywords: collaboration ibm lotus lotusphere enterprise lotususergroup.org mobile podcast

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Off to Spain Sun, Mar 7th 2010 3:00p Ed Brill Near as I can tell, it has been more than seven years since I was last in Spain. Madrid, more like ten years. I barely had discovered blogging at the time of my last visit. As such, I can't wait to get there tomorrow morning and start the day with some churros y chocolate. The Lotusphere Comes to You events are on Tuesday in Madrid and Thursday in Barcelona. I agreed, as blogged earlier, to deliver my presentation en español. While I studied Spanish in high school and college, it has b [read] Keywords: ibm lotus lotusphere blogging community twitter

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About that issue that Erik Brooks found Fri, Mar 5th 2010 12:57p Ed Brill A few days ago, Erik Brooks wrote a blog entry entitled, "8.5.1 FAIL. Your code may just break." Unsurprisingly, that blog post got a fair bit of attention, from many of you as customers/partners as well as within IBM. I received a number of emails and pings from people who were worried about the issue, even though some said they couldn't reproduce it. At any rate, a few of you opened PMRs and SPRs, and I quickly escalated them from my side as well. I didn't "turf mark" the conversation o [read] Keywords: ibm lotus lotusnotes lotusscript notes notesdomino bleedyellow bleedyellow.com development java javascript server

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Just scheduled my first meeting using the Tungle beta plug-in for Notes 8 Thu, Mar 4th 2010 9:08p Ed Brill This is so cool. At Lotusphere, Tungle announced that their connector for Lotus Notes was in beta. The Mac version wasn't ready until a few days ago, though, so I hadn't yet really started to tell people to "tungle me". Last week, I installed the beta plug-in and didn't really think anything further about it. Earlier today, though, a colleague used Tungle to schedule a meeting between a few of us IBMers and an outside party. If you haven't tried this, what happens is that each party i [read] Keywords: lotus lotusnotes lotusphere notes notes client notesdomino email mac

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Feeling slightly overexposed Wed, Mar 3rd 2010 1:21p Ed Brill Note: Wrote this on Saturday's flight home....sounds a bit ASW-ish but I am definitely interested in discussing perceptions. I had a great week in Germany, once again. My 26th visit (I think) was just as good as the previous 25, and I start to feel more and more "at home" in Germany every visit. I still would love to learn the language some day, though oral comprehension seems like it would take a very, very long time. At least for now I consider my "restaurant German" to be very solid, a [read] Keywords: collaboration domino lotus lotusphere notes blogger blogging email enterprise

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Something’s wrong, Niklas decided to show the product Mon, Mar 1st 2010 2:48p Ed Brill This is a great video showing several of the hottest OpenNTF.org projects for Lotus Notes and what their end-user benefits will be: File navigator, status updater, and XTalk discussion forums are shown. Niklas Heidloff demonstrates the actual end-user experience for each, in this short video that shows exactly what Notes is capable of. Nathan should be happy :-) A few weeks ago I was asked, what can *you* do to help get the word out about Notes. We had some videos like this submitte [read] Keywords: lotus notes application openntf

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147% vs. 29% Mon, Mar 1st 2010 2:39p Ed Brill A few people have pinged me today about Microsoft's new competitive website, which can be reached via the classy-looking "Why Microsoft" blog written by andrewk (doesn't that anonymity make you feel better about doing business with Microsoft already?). On the new site, Microsoft has done a clever job of their usual innuendos and half-truths (labeling everything Lotus as either legacy or acquired -- great throwaway line but how does that connect to reality?). In one place, though, they've backe [read] Keywords: collaboration ibm lotus consulting email microsoft

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Windows IT Pro: More on Going Backup-less with Exchange 2010 Sat, Feb 27th 2010 5:18p Ed Brill Another prime example of how in the Microsoft world that Microsoft giveth with one hand and taketh with the other...Everything else about the Exchange 2010 storage story pushes the costs of high availability down--it's possible to use commodity hardware (SATA in some cases), no SAN, no RAID, etc. But we went from having the ability in Exchange 2007 to do replication on Windows Standard Edition with SCR and LCR (in combination with one another if desired) to having no HA or replication solution n [read] Keywords: admin domino lotus notes notes client enterprise exchange exchange microsoft server

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Lotus weiß: Lotus Knows in Germany Wed, Feb 24th 2010 10:17a Ed Brill Earlier this week, we kicked off the second major market presence for the "Lotus Knows" campaign -- "Lotus weiß", here in Germany. The website is up at ibm.com/lotusknows/de. In Germany specifically, this effort incorporates advertising -- online, print, and "out of home" (e.g. Frankfurt Airport), but there is much more. The IBM presence at CeBIT, a major trade fair in March, will have a strong "Lotus Knows" message. After that, there are additional events and activities -- including a [read] Keywords: ibm lotus lotusphere notes blogger facebook linkedin rim twitter