Stu Downes

Well unsurprisingly the Lotus oriented blogs are alive with comment following Microsoft’s press release about their updated tools to assist with migration from Lotus Notes and Domino to Microsoft based platforms.  What has surprised, wrong word… what has interested me about these posts is their complete negativity towards what Microsoft is doing.  This kind of competition is good for the industry, the more competitive the market the better the end product will be for the users.  The timing will no doubt trigger fierce debate during next week’s Lotusphere event – which I’m not going to (

So why am I as a “Notes” person not too worried by this?  Well in my view it should spark one of 2 reactions with one of 2 net results, either:

1. IBM take this seriously, start speeding up their delivery cycle for new innovation and deliver better products to the market – and telling people about them!!  Result = better software for all of us.
2. IBM don’t take this seriously, dismiss the tools and the work that Microsoft is doing.  Result = Microsoft will undoubtedly increase their market share.

I hope the IBM response will be number 1, and next week at Lotusphere they say “hey we see what Microsoft are doing, we’re all in a competitive business, good luck to them but here are the great products and features we have”….time will tell!

The worst that can happen is that the “Notes” people like myself have to look for new technology challenges which will pay the bills.  That’s probably why I’m not too worried as I see my career path (hopefully) involving more diversification into the wider Collaborative space.

 

 Well I was amazed at the weekend to see a sign in the Clough Head visitors centre car park saying “want to check your email from your car, ask at the cafe about wireless access”.  This has got to be the most remote WiFi hot-spot I have come across.  What a great place to sit and catch up on the internet!  For those who don’t know the area this visitors centre is on the “Grane Road” between Blackburn and Haslingden and although it is within 4 miles of the nearest town the car park and visitor centre has no close neighbours (and all of those are hill farms or country pubs!).

 

Now here is a gadget I like the look of (thanks to The Register).  It is a pen with an infra red link to a clever USB storage device.  You place the USB device at the top of your page, write your meeting notes, sketches etc.  They are transferred to the USB device so that when you are next at your computer you can upload the text and images and also decode your handwriting into ascii characters….for me, a user without a tablet who likes to take notes in meetings but would love a way of electronically storing those notes it would appear to be a great gadget.  Indications from the register suggest it will be available in Q3 for a competitive £50 GBP.  I’d be interested to see how it copes with taking notes on more than one page and whether the ergonomics of the pen would suit me.  For more information.

 

This webcast on the 17th January has caught my eye.  I’ll be attending.  I do like the MS webcast series and would love to see IBM and others doing similar.

 

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Originally uploaded by sdownes1972.

I’ve now decided to keep the turbulant world of IT collaboration here but move the more peacful home life blog here with its own feed.

With the use of WordPress the RSS experience is much richer with feeds available for all comments, comments in individual posts as well as the normal content.

 

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Originally uploaded by sdownes1972.

Is it just me that finds that projects and tasks are moving along quicker. Maybe it is experience coming to life, maybe it is methodologies like GTD making me more productive.

Maybe it is the collaboration tools that I have to use? I’d love to say so and in terms of voice, email, instant messaging and emeetings I would agree. The combination of voice and screen sharing has proved very powerful for some of the engineering teams I am working with on large implementation projects.

However perhaps the least useful and most burdensome technology has been the workspace, in my organisation that takes the form of either a Notes Teamroom database or a browser accessed Quickplace. Am I the only person that finds these areas cumbersome and painful to use, and eventually I find that all they are used for is a document repository. Even where the project is staffed by collaborative engineers we still seem to revert to the more basics of communication (IM, email and telephone – and probably in that order).

Wouldn’t it be better in my view to ditch all these collaborative workspaces, provide document respositories, open up our emails to searching (apart from our in-box and documents in folders marked by us to be excluded from search). To avoid the problem of mail files for many users containing the same data there could be tools to exclude duplicates and save storage.

The annoyance is I know all this is possible, yet at the same time we seem to be ploughing head long into massive investments in team workspaces without actually seeing whether they are used correctly in our organisations. Something Graham has commented on in the past.