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Lotus Notes seeks Apple cool

January 6, 2009 10:19pm
by Chris Nuttall

Lotus Notes 8.5 for MacLotus Notes, IBM’s strait-laced enterprise email and collaboration software, donned a black turtleneck today with the launch of its first version for the Mac.

The announcement at Macworld was aimed at adding a little of Apple’s nano-chromatic colour to what has been considered a grey product and at emphasising some unexpectedly  up-to-date features.

“Our reason for doing this at Macworld is to show that we can be part of a play in the enterprise that can be hip and cool,” Ed Brill, Lotus’s director or messaging and collaboration, told me.

From Apple’s point of view, the launch is a major endorsement that its products are a realistic option in the PC-dominated enterprise.

“We are definitely seeing a surge in interest in Apple in the enterprise,” said Mr Brill.

“I think when you combine the stability and user-friendliness that they have now got on the entire Apple line with the collaboration and productivity we can bring with Lotus Notes in the Mac environment, then we have a great story to tell.”

Lotus Notes 8.5, which is being released on other platforms at the same time, has “social computing” features such as integration with personal web calendars, including those of Google and Yahoo.

Notes is now in its 20th year and has more than 140m licences worldwide. But the new version may not be adopted that quickly by cautious and often cash-strapped IT departments.

The Financial Times for instance is still using a five-year-old 6.5 version and my problems and frustrations with it recently led to me switching to Google’s Gmail.

And while the social features sound fun, there is evidence that workers may value more the ones that help them cope with information overload.

“I personally rely on the blue dots next to emails in Lotus Notes that tell me an email is just for me so I know those are the most important ones,” says Jonathan Spira, chief analyst at Basex, the office productivity research firm.

“I also like the way I can colour emails so that I can see yellow ones from our president and red from the head of our sales for instance.”

Basex estimated in a report last month that information overload was costing the US economy $900bn a year.

Mr Spira has some New Year’s resolutions on email that workers could adopt to ease the inbox burden on themselves and colleagues. They are reprinted with his permission below:

 

1)  I will not e-mail someone and then two seconds later follow up with an IM or phone call.

2)  I will refrain from combining multiple themes and requests in a single e-mail.

3)  I will make sure that the subject of my e-mail clearly reflects both the topic and urgency of the missive.

 4)  I will read my own e-mails before sending them to make sure they are comprehensible to others.

 5)  I will not overburden colleagues with unnecessary e-mail, especially one word replies such as “Thanks!” or “Great!” and will use “reply to all” only when absolutely necessary.

  

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January 6, 2009 10:19pm in Software | Comment

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