I’m sure there was a collective sigh amongst Domino admins, getting their iPhone touting execs back onto corporate email. But the catch-up game continues, as the cool new Droid arrives on the scene. Traveler doesn’t yet officially support Android devices, although both Traveler and Android have ActiveSync support. Ed Brill mentioned on his blog that Android support is coming, but what to do in the meantime? There are a number of 3rd party apps that can bridge the gap – Touchdown by NitroDesk is one of them.

The droidStory blog has a post on how to get it working and the trade-offs and compromises of the solution.

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Last night was the September meeting of the NE Lotus User Group in Waltham, MA.  A good turnout overall with a nice mixture of Domino customers, partners and IBM’ers.  The technical presentation was about DAOS as it appears in Domino 8.5 and the big improvements now in Domino 8.5.1.   Not only was the subject matter well-received by the audience generally — who doesn’t like to save more than 40% on their storage and backup costs? — but being able to discuss technical aspects was especially nice for us.  We had a lot to contribute, based on our own experience with large enterprise customers.

Pat Mancuso and Collin Murray ably handled the technical side of the discussion.  We asked some tough questions of our hosts — so much so that I did not have the heart to rise to the ‘Stump the Experts’ challenge  offered at the end of every meeting.  Overall, I was reassured that the implementation seems very solid, based on simplicity and information hiding.  What was especially neat was that in Domino 8.5.1 the email pathway from the client through the servers will be able to inquire whether an attachment needs to be copied across the wire during mail transfer and if DAOS already has it just a ticket stub is copied.  A big performance win for the network.  This is a bit of change from the traditional store-and-forward mail contract which generally is ‘pushed’ without asking questions about the data along the way.  One sticking point for us is that there are now two sizes floating around — the logical size of the message and the size of the actual network transfer — and it appears that the LOG.NSF transfer records are now going to include the actual number of bytes transferred, making correlation with actual mail documents harder since those are only expressed in logical size.  Grrrr.

Pat touted the ‘transparency’ of DAOS — the expansion of attachment tickets happens at such a low level that no API calls need to change.  We applaud this backward compatibility from IBM — at least one other large vendor I can think of might have asked us to rip-and-replace our code.  However, it is not the ‘transparency’ but rather the ‘opaqueness’ that mars this excellent feature in our eyes.  Permessa has been asking for more than one year to have additional APIs to provide access to both the physical as well as logical sizes.  Both pieces of information are vital for our customers’ planning and measurement needs.  Imagine performing a server consolidation where you are dealing with ‘logical’ disk space taken by mailboxes and not the ‘physical’ disk space once DAOS is taken into account!  Yuval Shimoni, our CTO, summed it up nicely.  To paraphrase:  the current DAOS is geared more to the tactical than the strategic needs of the IT staff.  To better help IT measure, model and plan their future environment we need access to the true size information.  The Domino Admin client uses undocumented calls to gather this information — we are just asking for this same info to be available via public APIs and would be happy to contribute effort to their design.  While I am asking, how about exposing the logical checksum value of each attachment — I can see possible optimizations from the A/V vendors to avoid redundant checks and free up CPU, giving DAOS an even higher effective performance boost.

Overall it was a great presentation.  I very much appreciated IBM answering our of myriad questions and taking notes on the issues we raised.  I actually look forward to attending these gatherings every month, as the positive energy and momentum from IBM is inspiring.

For folks who want to be on the mailing list for the NE Lotus User Group, you can sign-up here.

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I think, this signals two things:

1. IBM acknowledges the growing popularity of the Mac, and its increasing usage worldwide. Macworld in particular is a great venue to connect with real end-users, many of which may not even know that Notes still exists. The success of MS-Exchange has been largely driven by the ubiquitous nature of Outlook, and IBM must rebuild end-user awareness and street-cred to regain market share.
2. Lotus is hoping to leverage years of heavy investment in Eclipse, which gives Notes instant cross-platform capabilities and feature parity on non-Wintel systems, including the Mac and of course Linux.

While there has been much focus on the long-overdue client-side improvements, since the release of version 8, Notes/Domino 8.5 is now bringing significant enhancements to the server.  Domino Attached Object Storage (DAOS) is a welcome feature that helps enterprises cope with rapidly growing storage demands and the rising costs for email storage. DAOS stores only one attachment per server, regardless of how many recipients received a copy of the message.

The chart below shows the projected storage savings with DAOS deployed. The report was produced on actual email traffic data and is representative of the savings that one can expect to see in large environments.

Technorati Tags: macworld, lotusphere, Notes 8.5, ND8.5, DAOS

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While there are many theories about the missing emails, reaching from government conspiracy to sheer incompetence, I would side with the latter.

I have witnessed the decision by some companies to switch their enterprise messaging vendors over recent years. Often these decisions were driven from the top down based on personal preference, false promises of massive cost savings by the new vendor and utter ignorance of existing infrastructure dependencies. I’m not sure what the driving force was behind the decision to move from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange at the White House, but the mistakes made follow the same pattern as seen in numerous other corporate cases. If your company considers the move from Notes to Exchange, review these key points in your planning and assessment to avoid making the same mistakes:

• Make sure that any existing 3rd party applications (anti-spam, anti-virus, archiving, records management, system monitoring, etc.) will still work with the new platform. Don’t forget to include any 3rd party upgrade costs in the overall migration budget.
• Include audit and retrieval costs in your evaluation. Moving to a client-based storage model (e.g. pst files) may seem like a great idea for reducing server load and storage cost, but will inherently make auditing and retrieval at a later time almost impossible. Retrieving data from remote and portable media is extremely difficult and costly, but apparently that will not be a valid legal excuse.
• Assess the skill set of your existing IT staff. Large messaging systems are complicated and require highly skilled IT workers to manage and administer. Switching platforms may require a significant retraining of existing staff, or worse, cause the defection of key resources.
• Evaluate other dependencies. Lotus Notes is much more than email, a fact that is frequently overlooked by people unfamiliar with the platform. Companies that have been running Lotus Notes for years have often custom-built rich enterprise Notes applications running mission-critical corporate functions. These dependencies are often downplayed or simply overlooked. Migrating these applications can be expensive or simply impossible, which has forced some companies to continue running both Outlook and Notes on the desktops after the migration.

Technorati Tags: lotus notes migration, missing white house emails, John Facciola

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There has been much criticism since its launch about the iPhone’s missing integration with corporate mail platforms. Although corporate email has been accessible through existing web clients, an actual iPhone Notes app will bridge that gap.

“If IBM, which counts 135 million Lotus users worldwide, can get companies to let their employees check Lotus e-mail on iPhones, the partnership could make Apple’s gadget more competitive with Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry and other business-targeted smart phones.”

IBM has also plans to release Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony for Apple’s line of Macintosh computers.

I wonder if Sametime is coming to the iPhone next?

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony, Apple

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“So now in Notes 8 when you are Bcc’d on an email, you can no longer embarrassingly reply to everyone, considering they (everyone but the original sender) did not know you received the email in the first place!”

Careful though, you can still use reply-to-all for that message directly from your inbox.

Technorati Tags: nd8, notes 8, reply to all

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One such peculiarity is the default “reply-with-attachment”. I never understood why anybody would want to return the original attachment to the sender. Because Notes displays the attachments in the message body, many users don’t realize that the original file is included in the reply. I have seen message threads that contained the same 2MB PowerPoint in a lengthy back-and-forth discussion between numerous people, resulting in more than 100MB of storage and network consumption.

At a time of rampant email growth and ever-increasing archiving requirements, this little oversight can significantly add to operational costs. While this default behavior could easily be changed through a modification to the mail template, I am not sure that many companies have actually done that.

It seems that the Notes engineering team is listening to their customers and are considering changing the default behavior in the next release. If you care about this, you may want to add your voice to the current discussion thread on Mary Beth Raven’s blog.

Technorati Tags: nd8, lotus notes

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Notes gets Nip/Tuck’ed

Big Blue is getting some respect

Notes/Domino 8 is hitting the homestretch

With this release, Lotus is hoping to restore some balance in the competitive battle over the enterprise email and collaboration market against Microsoft. While Domino has always been superior in the server room by offering a highly scalable and flexible collaboration platform capable of running on a multitude of hardware and OS versions ranging from Wintel to Mainframe, the dated Notes UI had been the source of much user frustration and ridicule. Notes 8 and the accompanying productivity applications are a complete rebuild on top of the Eclipse framework bringing a much-needed fresh new look to Notes.

The stakes are high for IBM and it will be interesting to see how this release will fare in the market.

Planned availability dates (from IBM’s website)

Electronic software delivery:

• August 17, 2007: English
• September 10, 2007: Japanese
• September 19, 2007: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese-Brazilian, Korean, Chinese – Traditional and Simplified, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Finnish
• January 23, 2008: Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Czech, Polish
• April 2, 2008: Catalan, Slovenian, Slovakian, Thai

Physical media and documentation:

• September 21, 2007: English
• October 26, 2007: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese-Brazilian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese – Traditional and Simplified, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Finnish
• February 29, 2008: Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Czech, Polish
• May 2, 2008: Catalan, Slovenian, Slovakian, Thai

Technorati Tags: Notes Domino 8, ND8, IBM, Lotus, ND8 availibility

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For many companies currently supporting corporate mobile email through services such as RIM’s Blackberry BES, Microsoft Mobile ActiveSync or Good Technology from Motorola a far different question arises: How will they support the iPhone on their existing infrastructure and what possible security risks does the device pose in the corporate context?

The Wall Street Journal published an article last week titled: “Companies Hang Up on Apple’s iPhone”, which discussed the issue.

“Mr. Caraher, technology director of von Briesen & Roper, a Milwaukee law firm, says he is being besieged by inquiries from employees wondering whether the office’s email system can be used with the device.

His answer, at least initially, has been no. The main problem is that the iPhone can’t send and receive email through the company’s corporate BlackBerry email servers. He says he is unwilling to look into workarounds, because they might compromise the company’s security.”

Like it or not, company executives and hipster summer interns alike will show-up next Monday touting their shiny new iPhone’s and they will find a way to get them connected to the company networks and email. Email forwarding to personal accounts on AOL, Gmail, Yahoo! and the likes will probably be a common workaround for receiving corporate mail at least initially.

While many companies are taking the wait-and-see approach, some are smarter about it and pro-actively address the issue.

“Bear Stearns Cos. last week sent its global staff of 15,000 an email saying that the iPhone won’t work with the company’s email service.”

I think companies are well advised to go one step further and clearly articulate a policy around iPhone usage. This could range from outright prohibiting its use to providing acceptable usage guidelines and workarounds in lieu of a fully integrated solution.

However, there is some good news. Smaller software vendors are seizing the opportunity. Visto, a Redwood City, CA provider of mobile business solutions just announced Secure Corporate Email for Apple iPhone, supporting both MS-Exchange and Lotus Notes. I’m sure the larger platform vendors will follow suit very quickly.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Apple, RIM, Blackberry, Good Technology, Microsoft Mobile, Exchange, Lotus Notes

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“I believe the answer is no. In many ways, email is more database than communications tool, a repository of unstructured content that you can add to at will simply be sending me an email. If content is unwanted and unusable, such as spam, obviously it should be discarded. However, we all receive content in email that might not need a response right away, or that might be more useful when aggregated with other content.”

I agree with Michael. Until a few years ago, I used to organize all incoming messages into folders by subject matter and delete the Spam and superfluous mails with the goal of having an empty inbox at the end of the day. In essence, I was using my inbox as a to-do list. This system became too difficult to manage after a while. I fell behind, messages got mis-categorized and I could not find older emails quick enough.

I then discovered the “Google approach” to email – keeping a flat inbox - using search, sort, flagging and tagging. While I personally don’t view Gmail as a viable option for my daily email needs yet, traditional email clients such as Lotus Notes and MS-Outlook already have all the built-in capabilities to make this approach very effective.

Here is how it works:

Searching – Keeping all messages in one place saves you from searching multiple folders. Both Notes and Outlook provide the capabilities to setup virtual search folders, which are in essence stored search queries.

Sorting – When reviewing a message, a simple sort by sender gives instant access to all emails previously received from that sender. Sorting by subject shows the entire message thread.

Flagging – Setting different priority flags on specific messages allows you to turn the emails into a prioritized to-do list. It also helps in highlighting the importance of certain messages so they don’t get overlooked or forgotten.

Tagging – Probably the most powerful and underutilized feature in email. Rather than organizing messages in folders, try using category or subject tags. While an email can only be stored in a single physical folder, it can be tagged with many keywords. Tagging combined with virtual search folders is a very productive way to organize messages.

There are still some exceptions when it might make sense to use folders to organize emails. Examples are personal emails or mailing lists subscriptions.

Overall, this approach works very well for me, removing any anxiety over having a full inbox. Now off to battling that unread message count…

Technorati Tags: full inbox, email best practices, MS-Outlook, Lotus Notes, email tagging, search folders, Osterman Research

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