Jeff Eisen

Notes 8 has been a great ride and congratulations to the entire "Hannover" team for the outstanding accomplishment.

To our customers, partners, etc. -- It was built with your input and guidance and the product is better for it.  

There are parts of the product that I think turned out great (such as the embedded Sametime) and parts that still need some work (navigation models).   Of course, more releases to come so you will continue to see improvements in existing functionality as well as cool and valuable new functionality over time.  A lot of pretty interesting stuff already being discussed for Lotusphere 2008.  You won't want to miss it.

There are also parts I really don't like.   Perhaps my least favorite "improvement" in Notes 8 is to switch to the Windows selection model.  Yes, it is a standard, but no, I find it annoying and I don't find it as productive for my model of working through the inbox as the original "Notes" selection model.    So, we are heading to bring back the Notes model as a preference.   Work in the old way; work in the standard way; take your pick.  Over time, I'd like a hybrid approach with the best of both worlds, but we're not there yet.

Overall, IMHO, Notes 8 turned out amazingly well.   It will make it more enyoyable and productive for you to use and will give you much better ammunition within your organization to win the Lotus Notes battles.

I also agree with Ed Brill's statement in his blog today where he says about the decision to move Notes onto Eclipse:  "This single decision about the Notes 8 architecture is more important for that long-term than anything else being delivered in Notes 8."    

Eclipse really opens up a new world of easy to build and powerful applications welcoming a new development community while giving new power to the existing development community  The demos I've seen lately (some of which you'll see at Lotusphere) are really quite impressive and make me quite confident that Eclipse was a wise choice.

While it is an exciting time at Lotus, it is no time to rest on our laurels.  On a customer call this morning, I got the "Congratulations on 8.0 -- when's 8.0.1?" question...

The team is working hard to get to 8.0.1 and beyond.

I, for one, though, am taking a quick break.   Notes 8 is finally in the customers' hands and I'm taking a short vacation, my first this year.  I'm heading to Disney World -- really.

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 02:04:38 PM | Add/View Comments (6) | Permanent Link

Did a podcast recently on what's coming in Notes for developerWorks hosted by Scott Laningham.   It just went live yesterday.

Mary Beth Raven, Jan Kenney, and I were the interviewees.

Enjoy.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int052207.html

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 12:26:44 PM | Add/View Comments (0) | Permanent Link

We've had a feature in Notes for awhile (since Notes 6 if memory serves and if I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me), where you can put various documents, links, etc. in the "Startup" folder and they automatically start up as window tabs on Notes launch.

In Notes 8, we've automatically added Mail, Calendar, and Contacts applications to your startup folder.



You are welcome to add more or remove some or all of these by clicking right on the entries in the "Startup" folder and doing a "Remove".

You can also control whether Notes remembers to re-open window tabs that were there when you shutdown.   Some people love it enabled (they like to get right back to where they were) and some people hate it (they like starting with a clean slate).   That control is in the preferences menu under File/Preferences.   As long as I'm on this screenshot, notice the settings around window management to control how window tabs open in Notes 8.  Try the choices and see what you like.

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 08:10:39 AM | Add/View Comments (7) | Permanent Link

On behalf of the entire Notes/Domino team -- Welcome to IBM Lotus Notes 8 Beta 2.

Lotus Notes 8.0 is an innovative new release aimed to make you more productive, both individually and collectively.  It brings you a dramatically improved user interface, new functionality such as a search center, feed reader, and open standards based productivity editors (word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation editor), as well as powerful new application models.   Of course, there's much more, but why don't you check it out for yourself?

You can get started with the first public beta of Lotus Notes 8 here.

You can read and provide feedback at the Notes/Domino 8 Public Beta Forum.

I'll also be using this bully pulpit to discuss, provide an avenue for some feedback, and provide tips of the day for the beta.

Some simple ground rules though:

• Accolades -- appreciated
  
• Criticism --  welcome
  
• Pot shots -- discouraged and potentially removed
  

Might as well get started with the first meta-tip of the day.

One of the new features in Lotus Notes 8 is an RSS/Atom feed reader that allows you, among other things, to easily keep up with blogs.  The feed reader in the beta provides one click access to several of the Notes/Domino blogs.

So, open the feed reader in the "side bar," click on the "Tune in" button that I have circled in the picture below



and easily add some blogs



After that, you can keep up on these tips of the day by just going to the "Notes 8: The Road to Hannover" entry in your feed reader.  Also, notice when you go to the Notes/Domino 8 Public Beta Forum that there are RSS links to add the forum content to your feed reader too.

Enjoy!

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 09:35:00 PM | Add/View Comments (14) | Permanent Link

I was on a call a few weeks ago with a Hannover design partner and we were discussing the feed reader in Hannover (now known as Notes 8).

He shall remain nameless (unless he wants to identify himself), but his comments in as direct a quote as I can remember were: "It's not that I don't like the feed reader in Hannover, it's that I hate it".    His beef was although it works nicely to read the web pages for the feeds when you are on-line, there was no decent off-line story.    That is, you could not read the summaries of each feed entry when off-line.   Not too cool in the Notes universe.

Well, the power of negative suggestion sometimes accomplishes things.   A statement like "It's not that I don't like X, it's that I hate it" reverberates somewhat.

So, here's a screenshot, fresh from this morning's Notes 8 daily build.   Now you can find something else to pick on....

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 07:56:19 PM | Add/View Comments (15) | Permanent Link

I was having dinner last night with Dave Millen, the "Director of Real-Time Collaboration Development" at IBM.    That means he is the upper-level manager over the Sametime 7.5 project.  

We were saying that in general at Lotusphere this year, people seem to get the picture of base technology (Eclipse) with platform based on it (Lotus Expeditor) and multiple products built on this platform (Lotus Notes, Sametime, and standalone Expeditor).    Standalone Expeditor gets you the platform to develop and build apps on, but without the Sametime and Notes collaboration pieces.

The one confusion, he said, was people are unsure of and are getting inconsistent information as to the simple question:  "Does a plug-in written for Sametime work in Notes 8?"

So, to clarify, here goes.   Simple question, simple answer:  "Of course, yes".

Now, for some subtlety.   In Eclipse (and therefore Lotus Expeditor and therefore Notes and Sametime), to declare functionality such as that "you are a plug-in that goes in the sidebar", you use a named extension point to register this behavior.   An extension point is just a little bit of XML that typically is written using a easy form based user interface in the tooling.

Well, the confusion comes from the fact that in Sametime 7.5 (already released), the extension point used to declare that something is a "miniApp", namely a Sametime extension, is different than the extension point used in Notes 8 to declare something is in the sidebar.   The sidebar is a Lotus Expeditor (and hence Notes) feature for adding functionality to the right hand side of the top level window.

This difference is a very temporary situation and will be resolved by the time Lotus Notes and Sametime 7.5.1 ships.

So...

1) If you write or have already written a miniApp for Sametime 7.5, then you have to add a small amount of XML to the code to make it work in the sidebar in Notes 8, something like

extension point="com.ibm.rcp.platform.shelfViews"
       shelfView id="shelfid" view="idofviewpart"
extension

(I'm excluding at the moment the HTML less than and greater than signs of the markup, because not quite sure how to keep my blog template from eating it).

2) If you write a miniApp for Sametime 7.5.1 which will be out by when Notes 8 is available and is the version of Sametime included with Notes 8, you simply declare the above extension point when you are building your app and it will automatically work in both places.

Simple as that.

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 05:58:50 AM | Add/View Comments (8) | Permanent Link

Good first day at LS.

Changed my room this morning.  Between the beep beep sound in the middle of the night of trucks backing up at the loading dock and the swish sound about once a minute from the leaking toilet, I decided I could do better. Now, no complaints.

Never quite made it over to Business Development Day stuff, but I checked out a few hands on and jump start sessions.  As Ed Brill says in his blog on the subject, sessions are crowded and there were long lines a half hour early for the hands on sessions.

My hands on for "Customizing IBM Lotus Notes 8" went fairly well, but it became clear, no surprise, that while the Notes developers may have heard of Eclipse and heard of Java, in general, their experience with either of them is pretty limited.   But, we did a fairly straightforward Lotus Expeditor/Eclipse plug-in with no Java required that extends search functionality.   Once you get the basic concepts and UI gestures for the tooling around Eclipse and Lotus Expeditor, you can add pretty powerful functionality without breaking a sweat.   It also became clear that there is confusion about what exactly Lotus Expeditor is.   I'll try to clear that up in this space in the next couple of days.

The party tonight was fun with the IBM Westford crew for the most part ending up sitting in the sand watching the Patriots/Colts game.    Good game -- bad ending.  Such is life.

Looking forward to the opening general session tomorrow.  I demoed in it last year, but this year I haven't been much involved.  From what I've seen, though, they are showing some pretty cool stuff.  

.

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 09:36:07 PM | Add/View Comments (4) | Permanent Link

OK, yeah I know, I haven't updated this in awhile.   I figured I had to tonight before I see everyone tomorrow at Lotusphere and catch incredible grief.

I'm doing 2 (well kind of 2 1/2) sessions this year and each one has a repeat.

Presenting "ID101 -- What's New in IBM Lotus Notes 8 -- and Beyond".  The first is right after the opening general session (OGS) on Monday morning and the second is Wednesday afternoon.  I'll be presenting with Dwight Morse, the Notes product manager (who replaced Heidi Votaw in the role -- she's still with us, just different role).   I'm also presenting with Jim Marsden, the manager of the messaging apps in Lotus Notes 8, formerly known as "Hannover".  Unfortunately, you can only get two names on the presentation, so Jim is uncredited, but I'm giving him credit here.  His team has done an amazing job really delivering exciting improvements in Notes.  For anyone who gets to see Notes at the OGS, I hope you agree.  If you do, let me know.  If you don't, also let me know --  I can take it.

I'm also presenting "HND101 -- Customizing Lotus Notes 8", a two hour hands on around some cool customizations of Notes using Lotus Expeditor/Eclipse.  I'll be presenting with Brian Leonard, an amazing developer on the client team.    It's going to be on Sunday and Monday afternoons.  Will be a little weird showing how to customize Notes 8 on Sunday when they don't really see the full deal at the OGS until Monday, but so be it.

I'm actually doing another session of sorts, a BOOMERANG which is kind of like a birds of a feather (BOF), but slightly different (don't ask me how because I'm not really sure).    It is on Wednesday afternoon, "BOOM102 Decoding the Lotus Client Product Family".  Jim Colson is actually running the show, but I'll be there to to help make heads or tails out of Lotus Expeditor, Notes, Sametime, and other client products and how they all fit together.  

It's a little before 2AM and time to crash.  I'm staying at the Dolphin hotel and have a lovely view of the loading dock/garbage area in the back.    Membership has its privileges.   Wish I had a digital camera with me.  

Looking forward to showing people Lotus Notes this week, seeing a lot of old and new friends, and getting feedback.

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 12:25:40 AM | Add/View Comments (3) | Permanent Link

Not exactly Hannover news, but rather more about Notes on a USB stick which is part of 7.0.2 released a couple of weeks ago.  Pretty exciting stuff.   I carry Notes and a VPN client on a tiny stick wherever I go these days.

Here's a clip from NECN (New England Cable News) where none other than yours truly gets interviewed on the topic.   I hear I did well for a TV novice -- I'll just have to take the word of others on that.  Just too painful to watch myself :-)


New solution to go mobile with your workspace

(10/16/06 4:51 p.m.) Taking your work on the road is nothing new- IBM Lotus, is offering Lotus Notes, which stores documents, pictures and many other helpful items. Jeff Eisen of IBM Lotus has more on going mobile with your workspace

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 04:35:35 PM | Add/View Comments (6) | Permanent Link

Today and tomorrow is "Innovation Workshop 2006" at Lotus in Cambridge.

That's the yearly event where the IBM research folks and many development folks get together and do a show and tell of various research projects (related to Lotus software) and discuss where the research focus should be for the coming year.

I thought I'd use this opportunity to discuss an innovation coming in Hannover that started with our friends in research.

Activity-centric computing began as a project in IBM research a few years ago.  It made its first product appearance in the Workplace Managed Client as "Activity Explorer", but has since morphed from a single product in a single UI to a much more open platform around collaboration using RSS/Atom feeds and Rest style APIs.  The open approach of activities allows the integration of Activity-centric computing in Hannover, Sametime, MS Office, older version of Notes, browsers, and elsewhere -- pretty much anywhere you have e-mail or an HTTP stack.

The tag line around Activity-centric computing is:

Organize work around the activities people do, rather than the tools they use

 Here's a presentation that was given on it at Lotusphere this year by Jason Dumont

I've been struggling answering the question in an easily graspable manner of how activities (ok, I'm tired of typing "activity-centric computing") is really different from other related paradigms such as discussion databases, teamrooms, Quickplaces, and the like.  The answer struck me recently with a simple real world example.  

I wanted to collaborate with some colleagues on how we should integrate a certain technology into our portfolio.   The set of colleagues was those interested in this particular topic, but it was definitely not a "To:" list I have ever used before.   Would I set up a whole database or teamroom or Quickplace for just this set of people for something I expected to last just a few days.  No way -- too heavyweight for the task.   Without activities, I probably would have started an e-mail thread and I bet you would have too.  But, after the activity started, I ended up added a few more people to the fray.  Not too easy in an e-mail thread if you need to bring everyone up to speed and make sure they all get included on all the replies, etc.  An activity worked great for the task and I was able to easily add chats, web pages, attachments, and other contents to the activity.   Just too easy.

A lot of work on "activities" has clearly been done by the development teams, but a lot of ongoing work has also been done by research, continuing to drive different ideas around making Activity-centric computing more useful, intuitive, visually appealing, etc.  What's coming in Hannover is pretty powerful -- what's coming later even more so.  

It's always a great challenge to bring a research idea into a product.   Sometimes the ideas aren't mature enough, sometimes the market isn't ready, sometime it is just too much work to make it enterprise ready, sometimes there's just too many priorities to juggle, but sometimes things just come together.

Years ago, I worked as a coop student in a research lab -- at the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) at Texas Instruments in Dallas.  We contributed some of the work we did to products (for example, I was involved with the introduction of the TI Explorer Lisp Machine), but a lot of the work we did was just interesting stuff that never really ended up in products.   Such is the nature of the beast.   But, of course, there are sometimes home runs.  Probably CSL's most widely known home run at the time was Speak & Spell -- a clever mix of technology and cool-ness.    

Looking today at the stuff coming out of IBM Research, you can bet (just playing the odds) that a lot of it is not going to be a home run and you'll likely never see it in a product.  

But, with Activity-centric computing, Dogear, and a host of other projects, I can just see the high fastball and the bat making solid contact...

Posted by Jeff Eisen at 10:10:00 PM | Add/View Comments (7) | Permanent Link