On App Stores, Notes Home Edition, and Open Source Notes

I was helping my sister-in-law setup her new PC the other day, and checked the basic installation of Office she had ordered.  I was surprised to find that Outlook was included even in this entry level version of Office.  Yes, MS is great at getting Outlook in the hands of as many end-users as possible.

It got me thinking about how Lotus could get Notes in more end-user hands.  I mentioned in my last blog entry that part of the challenge Lotus has in the market is that where people know about Lotus (is that 1-2-3?), a significant problem is that consumers have outdated perceptions of Lotus software.  Getting Notes in the hands of more end-users could go a significant way towards eliminating this perception.

There have been a number of blog posts this past year in the Yellowverse that have touched on different ways Notes could be consumerized.  There have been suggestions that Lotus make Notes available via open source, suggestions that they put out a "Personal Edition" of Notes, and passionate lobbying for Lotus to open an app store.

Now, I'm not a fan of Lotus putting Notes into open source.  Face it, Lotus does not sell an operating system that bank-rolls all of its other software development.  Lotus needs the revenue from Notes to stay in business. But I do think that Lotus should make available a free Personal Notes client.  Huh?  Didn't I just say Lotus needs to keep it's Notes revenue?  Yes, it can do that, and still make a free Personal Edition.  Right now, Lotus does not get revenue from home users, so they lose nothing by offering a free version of Notes to that market.

But how could Lotus get Notes into the hands of home users?  Here's my thought, Lotus should steal a page from MS and put a Personal Edition of Notes within Lotus Symphony.  Lotus says that Office tools are a commodity and should be available for free.  Well, the market leading Office software considers its email client part of its Office suite--so much so that it is a part of its entry level offering.  Doesn't it follow that Lotus should view an email client as a commodity and include it with Symphony?

Of course, this would require some modifications of Notes--I'm sure many recall the incident last year of a blogger bashing Notes when he tried to install it at home without a Domino server.  Frankly, even Ed Brill admitted this is a problem, but I don't think it is as big of an issue as some make it out to be.  You can get Notes to pump mail into the 8.5 mail template with offline IMAP, and when you do, it's a great Notes 8.x experience.  BUT, it's not straightforward to do right now, and that would need to be addressed.

There could be many advantages of to bundling a Personal Edition of Notes with Symphony.

1. Get Notes in the hands of more end-users, and combat the image of Notes as legacy software.  When you see and use Notes 8.x, you can't really hold that view.  It is cool software.  What other email client lets  you easily deploy cool widgets to improve your productivity?  Or even more impressive, connect those automatically to text recognized by Live Text?  You all know the ways that Notes shines, I won't go through them all here.
2. Collapse Notes & Symphony development.  No need to maintain two separate code-streams under development--one for stand-alone Symphony and one for Notes with embedded Symphony.
3. Provide an attractive market for a Lotus App Store.  I'm a strong supporter of a Lotus App Store.  Getting Designer out there for free was a huge step in the right direction to make Notes a more attractive platform for developers.  But what developer will care if the development tool is free if there is no market for their applications?  A Lotus app store that has  all of the corporate installs of Notes/Domino out there, plus several million users of Symphony would provide an attractive market for developers. And we all know that customers are less likely to migrate away from Lotus Notes when they are leveraging the platform for applications.  We can say that Notes is more than email--a vibrant App Store environment would demonstrate that in spades.  Customers would not have to have in-house development skills to take advantage of the application capabilities of Notes.
4. Make hybrid LotusLive for even the smallest clients. Lotus has had web-based applications for some time.  But anyone who used to use Quickplace knows what a huge time-saver and improved value came with the introduction of the connectors in Quickr.  The Connections team had the same realization.  As we rush to push customers to the cloud, let's not forget the lessons learned from these other products.  Don't make end-users go to a web-browser to use the services from the web-application.  A Personal Edition of Notes would make an attractive up-sell to LotusLive services.  Users could could pull their mail down, use the embedded Sametime client, connect to activities, and maybe at some point, pull down their calendar data as an overlay like you can with your Google calendar in Notes today.  Lotus could even put a tickler in Notes for users to sign-up for a trial of LotusLive from the Sametime and Activities areas.

OK, but how does Lotus do all of the above and NOT kill their Notes revenue stream?  Why wouldn't customers just use the free version?  Well, the current Notes CAL licensing is for attaching to Domino servers.  Keep that in place.  Any user that wishes to connect their Notes client to a Domino server will require a Notes CAL.

Hmmm, was this the motivation for switching to the CAL licensing model in the first place? Has Lotus been planning to offer a Home Edition of Notes all along?  I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Lotus Knows the Secret Ingredients to Great Pancakes

It was another great Lotusphere, and though many have already given excellent overviews of what was presented, I wanted to throw my 2 cents into the pot as well.

I had my five minutes of fame on Business Development Day during a short video that had a series of clips about things people don't know about us.  Alistair Rennie shared his proficiency with a chain saw (Alistair, when your done using that on MS, I have several trees in my orchard that need attention).  I shared my secret ingredients for Banana Chocolate-chip Pancakes, and was stopped several times on Sunday with comments like, "Hey, you're the Pancake Guy!"   Took me back to my younger days flipping pancakes at my Dad's diner.

Here are several things that stood out to me during the conference, some of which I'll dive into further in later posts.

• Bob and Alistair.  First, a big thank you to Bob, and congratulations to Alistair.  I appreciate the edge Bob brought to Lotus, his willingness to directly take on MS, and his ability to bust through old ways of doing things that had become impediments to moving Lotus forward. AKA, "We can't do direct Lotus advertising, IBM doesn't do that."  Alistair has a long history of doing great things in Lotus--under his leadership, we've seen some major Cool brought back to the portfolio. I'm looking forward to his wit and sarcasm directed at the competition.
• LotusLive.  It had a lot of attention at the conference.  That team has come an amazing distance in a very short time, and they have some great enhancements around the corner.  I'm convinced Lotus' "hybrid" approach to cloud computing will win in the market.  Not all users should be in the cloud, and even for those that are, not all functions should be accessed solely through a web browser.
• Lotus Knows.  I have been so excited with the long overdue introduction of Lotus-centric adds that actually mention Lotus products by name!  That said, I've been somewhat disappointed that the content of the ads has not included visuals and video of the products in use.  A negative brand image is still rampant, and that largely has come from the outdated user interface of 5.x - 7x Notes.  Combating this image problem will require eliminating those old mental images.  But good news is, data from early test markets was overwhelming positive.  Now, will IBM act with the urgency needed to flood the market with this campaign?
• Foundations.  Wow, amazing partner solutions being built on this platform for small businesses.  As if Foundations wasn't amazing enough with its instant collaborative infrastructure in a box, now you can get a complete VOIP platform with add-ons from ShoreTel, and impressive electronic document capabilities from Xerox.  Of all Lotus' efforts, this has the potential to move the market and impact perceptions.  I hope this is the year that Lotus gets aggressive with this solution.
• Vulcan.  My first reaction was, wow, this is a rich client for Lotus Connections.  It did give me thoughts of Google Wave, but unlike Wave, the concept is far more practical.  I have to confess, I'm not much of a Facebook user, but my wife is, and I can see the value of connecting to others in this medium.  I can see the focal point of the "inbox" shifting to social networking as more and more users are connected this way at home.  But more than that, the interweaving of social networking, traditional mail, analytics, real-time communications and seamless premise and cloud elements really is exciting.  
• Collaboration Agenda.  I see a lot of value in this approach for many customers.  It delivers targeted business value leveraging the full breadth of capabilities in the Lotus portfolio.  Now my concern.  This is a slow process, and by its very nature, can only touch a limited customer set.  It limits the reach of an already constrained sales force (compared to the competition), and worse, it puts the sexiness of the technology in the background when the biggest problem with the brand is its limited exposure and outdated images of old Lotus software.  I continue to be amazed at the number of customers I see wasting money on migrating away from Lotus during the worst econonmy in any of our lifetimes.  It shows that market acceptance of collaborative technologies is not driven by business economics.  Irrational as that sounds, its born out time and time again.

Well, there is my 2 cents.  I'll rub 'em together with a few more reflections on the conference, and maybe have a nickel when all is said and done.  Now, for the pancake recipe!

Ingredients
1 banana
chocolate chips
2 cups Aunt Jemima Instant Pancake mix
1 1/2 cup water

Mash banana in mixing bowl until liquified.  Add instant pancake mix and water, and stir.  Warm your non-stick skillet over low heat.  Put five tablespoons of mixture on skillet, and gently spread out in a circle.  Drop chocolate chips in circular pattern around pancake and dot in center.  Gently press chips into batter, and spread batter over top of the chips.  Wait until batter bubbles, and flip pancake.  Makes 8 - 10 pancakes.

Enjoy!

CDW Customer Reception at Lotusphere

CDW will again be hosting a customer reception at Lotusphere this year.  The reception will be held on Tuesday evening, January 19th.  If you are a CDW customer and will be at Lotusphere, feel free to email me if you'd like to attend (phil.salm@CDW.com).  Seating is limited.  If you can't make the reception, but would just like to touch base at the conference, please feel free to email me as well.  Looking forward to next week!  See you there.

Thank goodness for the kindness of neighbors

And to think that on Tuesday morning we had no snow on the ground.  The pictures below are from our house at the end of storm after we had cleared the driveway.

When we first moved back to Wisconsin from Florida in '98, I bought a shovel to handle snow removal.  The snow falls were actually pretty mild, nothing like I remembered as a kid, and the shovel was fine.  A few years ago we moved further north in Wisconsin, and with a larger driveway, I decided to purchase a small snow blower. 

Ha!  The past three years have shown me the folly of my ways with record snow falls in 2007 - 8.  This year I thought we might be back to light snows.  Essentially, we had no snow stay on the ground this year... until this week.  Tuesday the snow and ice began.  I cleared my driveway Tuesday night in the middle of the storm thinking this way my tiny snow blower could handle it.  Wednesday, school was canceled for my kids.  My girls came out with me to "help" clear the snow (which is code for play in the snow while dad clears the driveway).  I opened the garage door, and my 4 year old just giggled.  She raised here hand level with her nose to indicate the height of the snow, and could only manage to mutter 'Daddy' between her giggles.

Well, the snow was so high, it was well above the height of my small snow blower.  Several minutes in I had managed to clear the smallest of sections.  Fortunately for me, my neighbor took pity on me, and came over with his large Ariens snow blower.  He cleared out well over half of my driveway, and my wife and I managed to clear out the rest.  We were finally done... 2.5 hours after I had started! 

I was visiting a customer today describing my tiny snow blower, and he joked, "you deserved to be out there a long time!"  I guess large snow falls are back!  Now I know what to put on my wish list for Santa. ;-)

 

Microsoft on Plug-ins from Cisco

Interesting comments from Microsoft on the plug-in developed by Cisco for OCS. 

Charles Woodson -- NFL Defensive Player of the Year

If you haven't guessed, the 'Cheese' in my blog title alludes to me proudly being a Cheesehead--the (affectionate?) term for us Wisconsonites who are fans of the Green Bay Packers.  I grew up in a time when a Packer victory was few and far between, and you cheered for the Pack regardless.  In fact, my mother always warned my siblings not to bring their kids over during a game because she wouldn't be responsible for the language they learned while we all shouted at the TV!

If you've watched any Packer football games this year, you just have to be amazed at the play of Charles Woodson.  It's amazing to see someone with such great speed and ball-hawking ability--and at 33!

In yesterday's game, albeit against the hapless Detroit Lions, his incredible skills had my jaw on the floor again, particularly with his two interceptions.  On the first, he lunged forward and made a diving interception right in front of Bryant Johnson and with a finger-tip grab just above the turf.  I cannot blame the Detroit quarterback, Stafford, for this interception.  How on earth Woodson is able to get that spring is beyond me.  The interception was reminiscent of a similar one he had at the goal line against Dallas two weeks ago.

His second interception he made to seal the Packers victory with just a few minutes remaining in the fourth quarter.  What stunned me on this one was his speed.  He was behind the receiver who turned towards the quarterback to provide a clear passing lane for Stafford, and Woodson literally looped around the receiver to make the pic.  It seemed like Woodson was able to stop time and get in front of the receiver as if he had enlisted the help of Hiro from the TV series Heroes.

I want to include a photo here, but am not sure of copyright laws and whether I could just provide credit for the photo.  So instead, I'll point you to an article from the Green Bay Press-Gazette where you can get more specifics and see a photo.

Charles, thanks for the entertainment!

Desk Phone Control for Cisco Phones from Lotus Notes or Sametime

Happy Thanksgiving!  In my last entry, I gave an overview of the Unified Messaging plug-in from Cisco.  Another free telephony plug-in available from Cisco is their Phone Control and Presence (PCAP) plug-in.  There is a lot of functionality packed into this plug-in, including:

• Desk phone control
• Click-to-call
• Click-to-conference
• and Phone presence.

Each of these features has different back-end Cisco requirements, and can be implemented independently if you do not meet the requirements for all capabilities.  Given this, I'm going to cover the capabilities of the PCAP plug-in over separate blog postings.  In this post, I'll cover the desk phone control capabilities.

Once you've installed the PCAP plug-in, you'll have a new option in the Sametime preferences for 'Cisco' > 'Phone'.  Here you can indicate whether you want the plug-in to control your desk phone or IP Communicator (Cisco's soft phone). 

With your credentials entered, you can click the 'Search for Phones' icon to have it locate your desk phone on the network.  The device will be listed in the 'Select Phone to Control' box.  You select your phone and apply the changes.  Now the plug-in is set to control your desk phone. (Note: if you set the plug-in to control IP Communicator, then the functions below do not apply since call control is handled by the IP Communicator interface.)

Now when you get an in-coming call to your desk phone, you will get a pop-up on your PC screen indicating who is calling you.

If the number is a recognized number and you have Sametime setup to use photos in business cards, the name and the photo of the caller will be displayed.  If not, just the phone number and the silhouette will be displayed.  From the pop-up, you can send the call to voicemail if you're currently busy. Or you can click the 'Answer' button which will pick-up the call on your desk phone and either place the call on speakerphone or put it live in your headset if you are using a head set with your phone.

When I first read about this capability, I honestly didn't see the value of it.  Why would I use the dialog box rather than picking up the call from my phone when I'm at my desk?  Well, once I had the plug-in installed, I understood.  When you're at your desk, your focus is on your PC where you are working.  When you get an in-coming call, the pop up occurs where your focus is already.  It's simply more convenient to respond to the pop-up screen in the context of your current work.

When you answer a call, the window changes to display details of the call status and to provide new controls to manage the call.

 

From here you can:

• Put the call on hold
• Surface a dial pad to input numbers (for example, to respond to phone prompts)
• Hang up the call
• Or conference the call with another call (I'll say more about this in a minute).

If you receive another call while you're still on the line with the first, you'll see another pop-up window indicating the in-coming call.

 

If you choose to answer the second in-coming call, the first call will automatically be put on hold while you speak to the new caller. 

 

Now here's where things get really get slick.  If you want to conference the two callers together into one single conference call, all you have to do is to click the 'Merge Call' button.  This replaces the two call windows with a single conference call window and merges the calls into a conference call. 

 

On my desk phone, I still don't know how to accomplish this.  But the plug-in makes it easier for end-users to take advantage of the investment you've already made in your Cisco phones and the capabilities they have.

In order to use the capabilities above, you'll need Cisco Call Manager 4.1.3 or higher, and Sametime Standard 7.5 or higher.  If you meet these requirements and have not deployed the PCAP plug-in, I'd be interested in feedback as to why you haven't.