Fredrik Malmborg just posted an article (in Swedish) on his blog about how the Swedish government have been moving several departments (taxes, defence, etc) from an IBM/Lotus platform to the Microsoft stack. He noticed that a certain executive with sales responsibility for public sector at a big software company became Secretary of State (not the same as "Secretary of State" in the US) right before the government asked a certain software company (guess which one!) to write the specification for the new system. Coincidentally that same company (Microsoft)  was then choosen to deliver the solution. IBM was never offered to even compete.

A year ago Computer Sweden wrote (in Swedish) about several departments moving from IBM/Lotus to Microsoft, without IBM being allowed to compete, or in some cases select Microsoft despite IBM being less expensive. Google translation here.

Here are some arguments used in the studies presented to the government why the switch should be done:

* Outlook is used privately by many users and thus have a higher acceptance.
* The similar interface improves the user experience.

I know that IBM does not believe in those arguments, but the customers and the ones in charge (may it be politicians, civil servants or a CEO) buy that argument. Line, hook and sinker... Especially if the persons in change are among the ones that use Outlook at home (since it come bundled with many versions of Office). I personally know several people who use Outlook (not Outlook Express!) at home for their private mail, as they can easily aggregate several mail accounts into one client. I been building/rebuilding a number of computers for friends lately, and the request to use Outlook came up several times.

I believe that IBM should create a "IBM Mail" client, with support for POP/IMAP/SMTP as well as direct support for Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail. Why not add Domino and Exchange support, to allow users to connect to work, without installing the full Notes client?
The client must be able to aggregate mail from multiple sources, and send mail using any of those services. When you compose a new mail, there should be a dropdown where you select Gmail, your ISP service or Yahoo mail (depending on what you have setup), the same way as it works on most smart phones today. If you reply to a mail, the service is was received on should be default, e.g. if the mail was received through one of my Gmail accountrs, the reply should be sent using the same account.

This client should look like Notes mail, contain a calendar, to-do, journal, perhaps an RSS feed and support for widgets. Why not throw in a couple of simple but useful applications? Show that "IBM Mail is not just mail". Strip away as much as possible when it comes to complicated menus, settings, etc. The properties/settings in the Notes client causes any normal user to get a headache instantly... Make it easy and quick to setup, and make it available as a free download, without any annoying registration. Most of all, make the client fast.

The market perception will not change overnight, but in the long run, showing that "IBM Mail" looks modern and has the functionality people need will benefit Notes.

Recent Blog Posts

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IBM Notes/Domino growing in Asia? Fri, May 24th 2013 11:26a Karl-Henry Martinsson Judging from an unscientific survey of postings in the IBM developerWorks forums, and also in the Lotus/Domino related forums on LinkedIn, the adoption of IBM Notes and Domino seems to have increased dramatically in Asia during the last few years. The growth seems to be mainly in India, with China coming in at number two, while Notes jobs in the US seems to be dropping or being stagnant. The indications that they are new or recent adopters are very strong. Many of the questions are very basic i [read] Keywords: domino ibm lotus lotusnotes notes notesdomino linkedin

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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 ibm lotus notes microsoft office properties

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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

244

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 ibm lotusnotes notes database development firefox javascript twitter

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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 lotus lotusscript notes database server

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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 domino formula language ibm lotus lotusscript notes ajax community css facebook java javascript linkedin wiki xml