My blogging activity has been thin over the last couple of weeks mainly due to travel. This week I am attending the DNUG conference in Bonn. It is always a good sign when independent user groups form around a brand or solution. The Deutsche (German) Notes User Group has been around for over 10 years, and IBM is smart to actively support the group’s meetings and activities. DNUG provides them access to honest opinions and feedback from an almost religious following of longtime Notes users representing many of the largest corporations in the world.

IBM is attending this event with quite a number of staffers including such heavyweights as Brent Peters, VP of Engineering at Lotus. Brent gave the keynote presentation this morning. He reiterated much of the new direction Lotus is following and gave a preview on some things to come. What caught my attention was a demo around Notes-based mashups using the power of Eclipse. It showed how easy it can be to incorporate external web services content right into the Notes client.

Example: Rather than having to check the flight status on a carrier’s website, why not integrate a lookup right into email and calendar entries that contain a flight number. A simple REGEX based recognizer logic easily wires matching string patterns such as LH423 to show the flight status in an iframe style window. Although a trivial example, it triggers the imagination of other uses such as the contextual linking of HR, CRM or ERP records or other internal systems. Brent also demo’ed the use of Google gadgets within Notes. Perhaps not as relevant to enterprise users, it still highlights the concept nicely.

I think IBM gets it right. We all spend many hours in our inbox. Why not make that experience more productive by exposing more useful content right in the email context?

Technorati Tags: dnug, lotus notes, nd8

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. An RSS Subscription will deliver new Blog posts automatically to your computer.
Thanks for visiting!