Ed Brill from IBM Presents!

Time	October 3^rd 4:00 - 6:00 PM
Cost	Free, as always!
Location	Regis Corporation
Address	7201 Metro Blvd Minneapolis, MN 55439
Map Link	Click here (Google Maps)
Directions	Take Hwy 100 to the 70th Street exit (it's the first exit south of 62 & 100, or the 2nd exit north of 494 & 100) Go west onto 70th Street. As 70th St curves south, go straight at the stop light, onto Metro Blvd. It's the 9 story building on your left.

Ed Brill will be speaking to the user group, discussing current technology and future direction. This is an event you do not want to miss.

Invite your Managers, Directors, CIO's and anyone else that would be interested in how IBM continues to innovate and how your company may be able to take advantage of the new technologies that IBM/Lotus are delivering NOW!

Ed is a dynamic speaker that is in high demand all over the world. We are privileged to have him speak at our group and it also illustrates the importance that IBM places on Twin Cities companies.

for more about Ed Brill, check out his über-popular blog at www.edbrill.com

We expect a high turnout for this event. Please RSVP to . If you don't RSVP you are still welcome to attend.

Meeting Notes

There were over 60 people in attendance. The largest turn-out in recent history. There were several things in the meeting that I wanted to capture but didn't because I was too busy listening, and one or two bits of inside knowledge that Ed specifically said was not official yet and shouldn't be communicated in these notes.

Ed started by talking about the history of Lotus Notes, including...

Even before they shipped version 1, they had started working on version 2. This is important because this has carried through to today, where they are working on both Notes/Domino “Next” and Notes/Domino “Beyond”. (IBM can't use version numbers until they are officially and legally formal, but most people assume that Notes/Domino “Next” means Notes/Domino 8.5.)
V3, in May 1993 - At time of release, ½ million users
R4, in 1995 - New UI, LotusScript and new API's introduced.
R 4.5 & 4.6, in 1996 – Added calendaring and scheduling, web Server, web mail
R5 in 1999 - CORBA, IIOP, separate domino admin tool, linux server, iNotes (now Domino Web Access).
ND6, in October 2002 - User improvements, improved system admin, starting to integrate with the rest of IBM, focus on mobility: Domino EveryPlace, EasySync, etc.
ND 6.5, in Sept 2003 - Integration of Sametime.
ND 7, in August 2005 - Major update of Domino server (scalability, reliability, autonomic system management, web services)

And now we're at release 8. Ed likes to cover the history because we as Notes people talk a lot about what's new, but rarely talk about what we have now, like investment protection. (Version 8 still supports Version 2 applications.)

The “Why should you care about Notes/Domino 8?” slide talks about what's new in ND8. Ed calls this slide his own personal cheat sheet on why you should upgrade.

In ND8, they focused on usability. They started with Photoshop, not code. We put 6 full time usability engineers headed by Mary Beth Raven. (http://www.marybethraven.com)

ND8 had 2000 usability tests before the first beta.
Mary Beth Raven's design blog was a big deal at IBM. It talked about the design of a product that hasn't been shipped yet, so it was difficult to get approval (legal and management). However, it is incredibly popular. It's been 10 to 1 ahead of any other blog at IBM, and just last week there was a topic that had over 100 replies to it, as opposed to many of the other blogs where nearly all posts don't even get 10 replies.

Ed Brill also talked about how composite applications are going to open up lots of potential, and highlighted an example of how an open source eclipse plug-in for reporting was used to provide a pie-chart to Lotus Notes data.

Then he talked about the productivity editors within Notes 8, which are derived from OpenOffice.org software, and then on Sept 10^th IBM joined the OpenOffice.org community. Then they offered the productivity editors as a stand-alone free product: Lotus Symphony. 100,000 downloads in the first week.

Native 64-bit Domino is planned for beta in Q3 2007.

Entitlements with an ND8 license:

Lotus Sametime
IBM DB2 (for Lotus Notes data only)
WebSphere Portal - 20 seats per Lotus Domino Enterprise Server
IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator. This is a milestone towards the general (read: not officially announced) direction of Domino servers being able to use other directories, such as LDAP or ActiveDirectory.

R 8.0.1 (targeted for January 08):

new DWA client
mail file quota gauge
Task (To Do) user interface
better Quickr integration
better compression (+35%)
native support for 64-bit
FIPS 140-2 support for secure email
Citrix support
IBM Lotus Notes Traveler
DWA “Next” light version

Domino “Next” (unofficially, probably, “8.5”):

Simplify Lotus Notes ID management, etc., including allowing names to be managed via MS Active Directory / LDAP
Addressing storage costs, reduce database size via new compression, address I/O bandwidth
QuickTune (improvements beyond what's available for autonomic administration)
Expected second half of 2008
Notes on a stick
Notes client support for Macs (right now you’d need to use Notes 7.x)

There's also a plan for another release for 2009/2010.

Other factoids I was able to write down before he changed the slides:

More than half of FORTUNE Global 100 corporations use Notes/Domino.
Over half the largest 100 American corporations use Notes/Domino.
IBM is second in integrated collaborative environments.

After the presentation, Ed was barraged with a lot of questions...

What about Quickr 8 entitlement? Quickr 8.1 will have a personal data store that will be entitled and integrated into ND8.

Wiki? There's an OpenSource product at OpenNTF.org called DominoWiki but because it's open source IBM is having a difficult time endorsing/assisting/shipping it (for legal reasons). In 8.0.1, the Domino Blog Template will have wiki-based attributes such as shared editing. The developer of the blog template calls it a “bliki”. We'll see if the term catches on.

Domino running on VMWare is supported if the problem can be re-created on stand-alone servers. Domino licensing on VM servers has improved, but you must convert you licenses to “sub-capacity” licenses.

Why do Mac implementations of Notes lag? Apple rarely goes back to update old operating systems... they assume their users will upgrade to the current OS, and they're generally right. However, an OS-dependent fix can't get released until the OS is released. Therefore, Apple impelementations of Notes lag behind.

WebSphere Portal vs Notes/Domino? WebSphere Portal does much more, server side, than Notes could ever do client side. That said, there's a lot of overlap. There isn't yet a way to run things on both WebSphere Portal applications and on Lotus Expeditor (upon which Notes 8 sits), but they're working on it and expecting it out soon, probably involving components of WebSphere Portlet Factory software.

OpenNTF.org: IBM (or at least Ed) wants to more with OpenNTF, but OpenNTF.org is more "personalities" than a real organization... or at least that's close enough as far as lawyers are concerned. OpenNTF is hopefully going to incorporate and start a steering committee, so Ed's hopeful that IBM will give them more support in the future.

What would cause Outlook users to say “How did you do that?” In other words, what are some differentiators of ND8 vs. Outlook. Free time search off line, sorting by conversation, thumbnail view of tabs, productivity tools, a bunch of small stuff that add up to a lot but there is no one cool new feature that is likely to win over Outlook users. The biggest thing is the UI, when Ed shows Notes 8 to people who have preferred Outlook, the least positive things he hears are responses like “Ok, I can work with that.” as opposed to complaining.

iPhone support? IBM is working on it, but right now Notes Traveler only works with Windows-based smart phones.

All in all, it was a great meeting. Thanks for Ed and everyone for coming!