The Three Kings: Eisen, Bhat and Holden
Category Lotusphere2009
Last night, I was fortunate to have an open discussion, all to myself, with the key managers for iNotes (Sandesh Bhat), the Notes client (Jeff Eisen), and Domino (Russ Holden). I asked Sandesh if the inclusion of ActiveSync into Lotus Traveler would diminish his efforts to expand on UltraLite. He assured me that more UltraLite development is on-going (e.g., better calendaring) and that it should be able to work well with Google's Android. After all, the iPhone and Android are both using Apple's WebKit for HTML rendering. Even though the initial interest in Android integration to Domino messaging has been low, I'm shy of a repeat backlash as happened with being unprepared for the swelling consumer IT drive to the iPhone.
Everyone agreed that the deployment on Macintosh and Ubuntu for 8.5 had created buzz over the products in communities not usually associated with IBM and Lotus. In fact, on the showfloor, several of the non-Linux vendors were nonchalantly using Ubuntu with Notes. Per Aarnes of dk Digital explained that it's "what we use for development." And, I just saw Stephan Wissel's excellent DXL presentation, which he ran on Ubuntu. Linux and Lotusphere deserves it's own article, so I'm going to post on it in a few days.
So many features and improvements were included with 8.5 that we touched on a few important ones with SPENGO, DAOS, and XPages. Some developers have expressed their caution to fully embrace XPages until they are convinced that IBM/Lotus is fully committed to it's continued support and maturation. Russ promised that more is coming for Xpages. I had also heard that Quickr 8.5 would not fully support DAOS, but Russ assured me that because it's Quickr 8.5 for Domino, which means because it is still Domino 8.5, it will be fully capable of leveraging DAOS.
Finally, we talked about the Notes client, and it's ability to "federate" different sources for calendaring, into a single view. This is a great feature, and many users have been asking for this capability. The terminology, though, needs to be reworked--calling calendaring overlays "federation" is too complicated for end-users. Soon, users will be able to merge their contact directories, so the concept of a single e-mail identity begins to dissolve. We didn't resolve the right terminology for the concept, except that within IBM, they are all about federation.
One of the directions for the Notes client, is to enhance task management. It sounds like David Allen's GTD methodology will have an influence on the some of the ways tasks are processed. Later, when I had a discussion with some of the product managers in User Experience, the thought of including GTD was tempered with the awareness that not everyone is so disciplined.
Right now, Lotus is at a peak moment with its primary brand, the Notes client and Domino server. Everyone seems to agree that the UI for Notes 8.5 is on par or better than any other e-mail client, and only Lotus has an extensible, native client for three operating systems. Maybe, instead of kings, I should have said "wise men."
Last night, I was fortunate to have an open discussion, all to myself, with the key managers for iNotes (Sandesh Bhat), the Notes client (Jeff Eisen), and Domino (Russ Holden). I asked Sandesh if the inclusion of ActiveSync into Lotus Traveler would diminish his efforts to expand on UltraLite. He assured me that more UltraLite development is on-going (e.g., better calendaring) and that it should be able to work well with Google's Android. After all, the iPhone and Android are both using Apple's WebKit for HTML rendering. Even though the initial interest in Android integration to Domino messaging has been low, I'm shy of a repeat backlash as happened with being unprepared for the swelling consumer IT drive to the iPhone.
Everyone agreed that the deployment on Macintosh and Ubuntu for 8.5 had created buzz over the products in communities not usually associated with IBM and Lotus. In fact, on the showfloor, several of the non-Linux vendors were nonchalantly using Ubuntu with Notes. Per Aarnes of dk Digital explained that it's "what we use for development." And, I just saw Stephan Wissel's excellent DXL presentation, which he ran on Ubuntu. Linux and Lotusphere deserves it's own article, so I'm going to post on it in a few days.
So many features and improvements were included with 8.5 that we touched on a few important ones with SPENGO, DAOS, and XPages. Some developers have expressed their caution to fully embrace XPages until they are convinced that IBM/Lotus is fully committed to it's continued support and maturation. Russ promised that more is coming for Xpages. I had also heard that Quickr 8.5 would not fully support DAOS, but Russ assured me that because it's Quickr 8.5 for Domino, which means because it is still Domino 8.5, it will be fully capable of leveraging DAOS.
Finally, we talked about the Notes client, and it's ability to "federate" different sources for calendaring, into a single view. This is a great feature, and many users have been asking for this capability. The terminology, though, needs to be reworked--calling calendaring overlays "federation" is too complicated for end-users. Soon, users will be able to merge their contact directories, so the concept of a single e-mail identity begins to dissolve. We didn't resolve the right terminology for the concept, except that within IBM, they are all about federation.
One of the directions for the Notes client, is to enhance task management. It sounds like David Allen's GTD methodology will have an influence on the some of the ways tasks are processed. Later, when I had a discussion with some of the product managers in User Experience, the thought of including GTD was tempered with the awareness that not everyone is so disciplined.
Right now, Lotus is at a peak moment with its primary brand, the Notes client and Domino server. Everyone seems to agree that the UI for Notes 8.5 is on par or better than any other e-mail client, and only Lotus has an extensible, native client for three operating systems. Maybe, instead of kings, I should have said "wise men."
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