The discussion about the IBM rebranding of different products, including removing "Lotus" from a number of products, have me got thinking. What is really in a name? Well, a product name is really not that different from a person name. We have a firstname/surname which is our identity, and a lastname/family which indicate what family or group we belong to. In some cultures the family name is listed first, but the idea is the same. Sometimes we also have a nickname that we are know as, or that our friends call us.
When a woman get married, she often takes the family name of her husband, or combine her family name with his. Jane Doe becomes Jane Smith or even Jane Doe-Smith. A product is often named the same way. Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, Lotus Sametime. When IBM took over ("married") Lotus, eventually the name became "IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Domino, etc. We continued using the "nicknames" Notes, Domino and Sametime, as they are shorter and easier to say/write.
I am sure we all remember when Sametime was renamed "IBM Lotus Instant Messaging" and Quickr was renamed "IBM Lotus Team Workplace". The names were quickly changed back... Not that the names were bad, they actually explained much better the nature of the product. But they were much harder to remember and did not have the familiarity people needed. Compare that with if I would change my son's name from Erik to say Allen (which happens to be his middle name). That would cause a lot of confusion. And if you dropped the "family name" part ("IBM Lotus"), like we all do in normal conversations, the result did not provide any good branding. "Do you use Instant Messaging?"
Some products have already lost the Lotus part. We now have "IBM Sametime", and at Lotusphere, it was announced that "IBM Docs" is the new name for LotusLive Symphony. I think that is a great name, it explains the product and also have the family name in there. "IBM SmartCloud for Social Business" is a long name for LotusLive, and perhaps not the best name. But I never thought LotusLive was a good name. I know that a few years everything cloud was "Live" (Windows Live, etc), but it felt like just another buzzword.
I understand the need of IBM to group products into different families. That makes sense. But everything does not have to include "Smart". What about simply giving any cloud offering/product a "Cloud" designation? IBM Cloud Docs, IBM Cloud Mail (LotusLive Mail), etc. To me that is a no-brainer.
For the traditional client side products in the Lotus family it is a bit more complicated. We all love the Lotus brand, but it has a somewhat tainted or dated sound these days. It is simply old, and people still think "Lotus 1-2-3" when they hear it. I would have no problem with IBM Notes and IBM Domino. We already have "IBM Xwork Server". What about "IBM Smart Client" (for Notes) and "IBM Smart Server" (for Domino). There, IBM got their Smart-designation, and we got a good descriptive name on the products.
Lotus 1-2-3, SmartSuite and Organizer officially retired
Fri, May 17th 2013 6:50a Karl-Henry Martinsson Earlier this week, IBM announced the withdrawal of marketing [sic!] of Lotus 1-2-3, together with Lotus SmartSuite and Lotus Organizer, effective 06/11/2013. Support ends on 09/30/2014.
Lotus 1-2-3 version 3.0 for MS/DOS
I personally never worked with 1-2-3 myself. When I started with computers in school, we used CP/M-86 as the operating system, and had a spreadsheet program developed specifically for use in the Swedish schools. My first job after high school was with Microsoft in 1988, so my fi [read] Keywords: formula language
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Ender’s Game – First Movie Footage
Fri, May 3rd 2013 1:45p Karl-Henry Martinsson Preview for the teaser trailer, to be released on May 7.
You get to see about 10 seconds of movie footage here, and I have to say it looks pretty good to me. [read] Keywords:
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My recipes – All in one place
Mon, Apr 29th 2013 11:06a Karl-Henry Martinsson For many years, I have enjoyed cooking and baking. One reason could be because I like good food. But it is also logical, similar to programming. You have instructions you follow, but you can still modify them, as long as you know how different ingredients react with each other and with heat, liquids, etc. Cooking is a combination of programming, chemistry and physics. Perfect for a geek!
I often get questions about how I made a particular dish. Many of the recipes have been published on my blog, [read] Keywords:
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Useful utility to rename files in bulk
Tue, Apr 23rd 2013 3:20p Karl-Henry Martinsson Earlier today I had to rename about 400 image files, and I was looking for a convenient tool that would help me out. I had to remove part of the filename, in the middle of the filename, which was a bit tricky.
I found a very useful tool, called Bulk Rename Utility. It does not have the most user-friendly interface, but it is very powerful. And the best thing is that it is free. You can download it here.
This is the somewhat messy but very powerful user interface… [read] Keywords: interface
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The Enemy’s Gate is Down
Tue, Apr 16th 2013 5:04p Karl-Henry Martinsson Teaser poster for the upcoming movie adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s book Ender’s Game. I really enjoyed the book (as well as the parallel story in Ender’s Shadow), and hope the movie will stay at least somewhat close to the story in the books. According to the author, the movie will use elements from both books.
If you haven’t read the books, I can highly recommend them. [read] Keywords: wiki
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How to set doctype on Notes forms
Thu, Apr 11th 2013 1:29p Karl-Henry Martinsson Who redesigning my website to use Bootstrap, I ran into a problem. The navbar (meny) did not render correctly in Internet Explorer 9, despite looking perfect in Firefox and Internet Explorer 10. There are several discussions about this problem on StackOverflow and other forums, and the solution is simply to add on the first line of the HTML code.
However, IBM Domino automatically adds a different doctype string, and there is no database or form property to change/set the correct value. But ther [read] Keywords: domino
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New LEGO Lord of The Rings sets this summer
Fri, Apr 5th 2013 1:51p Karl-Henry Martinsson As the regular reader of this blog may have noticed, I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and I also enjoy building LEGO. There are four new LEGO sets in the Lord of The Rings series to be released this summer (in June, according to TheBrickBlogger.com). They are:
79005 – The Wizard Battle, 113 pieces, $12.99
79006 – The Council of Elrond, 243 pieces, $29.99
79007 – Battle at the Black Gate , 656 pieces, $59.99
79008 – Pirate Ship Ambush, 756 pieces, $99.99
Pictures below from The [read] Keywords:
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Export Notes view to Excel – with multi-value fields
Fri, Apr 5th 2013 9:26a Karl-Henry Martinsson A few days ago, a question was asked on StackOverflow about how to export the content of a Notes view to Excel. The caveat was that some columns contained multiple values, but not on all documents.
To solve this, I wrote a Lotusscript class that will export view data as either CSV or as an HTML table, both can then be saved to a file and opened in Excel. I am posting the code below. Enjoy!
%REM
Agent View Export
Created Mar 27, 2013 by Karl-Henry Martinsson
Description: Code to export a [read] Keywords: agent
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Should everyone be a programmer?
Tue, Apr 2nd 2013 2:47p Karl-Henry Martinsson For years, there has been a debate if anyone can (or should) learn programming or not. While reading the Notes and Javascript groups on LinkedIn, as well as the Notes forums on IBM developerWorks, I have read more than one post where someone wants to learn Javascript or Notes programming, but don’t have any programming experience/knowledge.
Can anyone learn to program? No. I would say half the population could learn at least the basics and mechanics of programming. So should everyon [read] Keywords: atlas
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And I am up and running!
Thu, Mar 21st 2013 12:45p Karl-Henry Martinsson Downloaded the Notes client with Domino Designer and Administrator, installed it on top of the public beta from December in a viritual machine (with 1GB memory). Install went without any problems, and the client starts up fine. All settings and bookmarks were preserved from the beta.
My workspace in IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition
It just works. [read] Keywords: domino
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