Cage Fighter – Bruce
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IBM Lotus Vice President of Unified Communications and Collaboration, Bruce Morse called out Microsoft at the Enterprise 2.0 (E2) conference in San Francisco earlier this week. The Demo Gods weren’t with IBM that day.  After suffering through a very glitchy demo presumably caused by an overloaded conference network (hey, we’ve all been there), he declared:

“Trust me, this stuff works. We use it every day in business and we have a lot of customers who’ve deployed it,” he said. “But obviously we’re having a bit of difficulty I presume with the network today.”

“I’m here today to tell you I’m not afraid to get in the cage with Microsoft – in their closed cage,” said Morse. “And so, I’d like to issue a challenge today for Microsoft at VoiceCon in the spring, to put up or shut up. I’ll be willing to match up our capabilities against Microsoft and let the audience judge.”

In order to differentiate itself from Microsoft, IBM Lotus is enabling its customers to leverage their existing communication infrastructure by integrating with Lotus Notes and Sametime. It is great to see IBM taking the offensive and I can’t wait for VoiceCon 2010 to witness the public solution shootout – cage or no cage.

Microsoft, are you biting…?

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“Exchange 2010 is Code Complete and on its way to General Availability”.

The next version of MS-Exchange is expected to be released at the Tech-Ed Europe event on November 9.

David Sengupta sums it up on the Ferris Blog:

Exchange 2010 takes on several existing markets. Email archiving vendors will feel the impact of native archiving capabilities. SAN vendors will feel the hit from native support for low-cost storage. And geoclustering vendors will be impacted by mailbox replication technologies now in the box.

The most significant change is that Exchange 2010 facilitates cloud services. Web-based self service capabilities, high availability, and deeper web services support all enable Exchange in the cloud.

The big question is whether Exchange 2010 will see a spike in adoption. Exchange 2007 deployments have been less than stellar.

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The key areas for improvements of this release seem to focus on productivity and cost savings, by providing:

• Capabilities to mix on-premise and hosted services, while maintain the same capabilities
• Storage performance improvements and resulting cost reduction
• New compliance capabilities through built-in archiving and expanded user roles management
• Improving user productivity and inbox management/experience

I found particularly interesting the introduction of so called MailTips that help prevent end-user faux-pas, such as reply-to-all or accidentally sending mail to unintended recipients outside the company.  I’m curious to see the actual implementation, since misguided user tips can quickly get annoying – remember clippy.

Voicemail preview is also very cool – I’ve been using Phonetag as an external voice mail transcription service for over a year now and would not want to miss it.

WindowsITPro published this more detailed article highlighting other notable improvements.

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SharePoint has been a $1 Billion success for Microsoft although the platform is still struggling with enterprise-wide adoption due to integration and scalability issues. IBM Lotus is hoping to stop/slow SharePoint’s growth with Quickr’s enterprise grade scale (J2EE, WebSphere, DB2) and attractive web 2.0 features that tightly integrate not only with Lotus Notes 8 but also with Microsoft Office.

Enterprise customers will certainly benefit as this competition heats up.

Technorati Tags: quickr, sharepoint, content integration

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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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“Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations. And worse yet, they will all tell you they are paying top dollar for the privilege because the expertise needed to successfully run a Microsoft Exchange server is some of the most expensive in the IT labor pool.”

While I don’t think that many of the issues that companies encounter within their messaging infrastructure are limited to Exchange, its tight integration and dependency on Windows and Active Directory as well as the limited choice of hardware platforms, sure seem to compound the problems. Now just imagine the arrival of unified communication.

As Michael points out:

“E-mail is considered the most mission-critical, a simple fact that is only going to become more evident once more organizations begin using Exchange as the underpinning of a unified communications architecture that is going to tie voice and video to the Exchange server. And if you think people get upset when they can’t access their e-mail, imagine what will happen when they can’t make a call because the Exchange server is down.”

For solution providers this offers great opportunity to provide supporting technology that lessens that pain. For companies considering Exchange this article gives some interesting insight worth sharing with an “Outlook-happy” executive who wants to replace an existing system that is functioning properly, with Exchange.

Technorati Tags: Exchange management, unified communication, Microsoft Exchange

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IBM is expanding Lotus Sametime from a single product into a whole product family consisting of:

• IBM Lotus Sametime Entry 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime Standard 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime “Unified Telephony”

In addition, IBM is joining the already crowded web-conferencing market through the acquisition of WebDialogs. This acquisition is most likely aimed at extending Sametime’s robust behind-the-firewall capabilities onto the public Internet, putting IBM in direct competition with CISCO/WebEx, Citrix/GotoMeeting and Microsoft/LiveMeeting.

Microsoft announced an equally interesting coopetition agreement with Cisco. Both companies CEO’s acknowledged in a joint public discussion that their customers are demanding more flexibility and interoperability when choosing unified communication solutions.

They’re saying, ‘Give me the choice. Don’t give me the all or nothing choice,”‘ Ballmer said, adding that he was seeking “respectful competition” with Cisco.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Lotus, Unified Communication, Lotus Sametime

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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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This feature was first mentioned last summer with the pre-announcement of Sametime 7.5 amongst a slew of many other important enhancements to the product, including the gateway to public IM networks.

Perhaps one of the reasons that I may have missed this before is the fact that the integration option is not part of the default installer. You must actually read the release notes to find the specific installation instructions. Why IBM chose to exclude this feature from the standard installer is a mystery to me.

Once installed, Sametime offers integration with Word, Excel and the likes through Smart Tags. User can easily initiate chats within a document or spreadsheet if a name matches a corresponding Sametime user. What’s even more interesting though is the inclusion of a Sametime toolbar within Outlook. The toolbar integrates presence and instant chat capabilities right into email, contacts and calendaring.

Why do I think that this is a big deal? For one, MS-Office is ubiquitous in the enterprise and integrating Sametime is simply a requirement to effectively compete against Microsoft’s own LCS. Secondly, many companies are running Notes/Domino and Exchange/Outlook side by side. The integration with Outlook enables them to stay with one IM solution as users share the presence and awareness capabilities across both email clients. Lastly, Sametime is currently the most robust and complete enterprise IM and collaboration platform on the market. The wealth of new features that IBM managed to add into the 7.5.x releases helps in maintaining this leadership position.

Technorati Tags: Sametime, Lotus Notes, Outlook, Ms-Office

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