The Lotus Pinball Machine

You pull the mouse plunger and watch the tcp/ip ball of data roll around your network surface searching for ways to collaborate and thus score more points(money/revenue) for you and your team.
Make sure you hit the data with the appropriate reply settings(flippers) and try to knock down all the targets on the left side (Exchange, Sharepoint, Office, Outlook, SQL and especially BOB) and the right side (123, Improv, Organizer, cc:Mail and of course e-suite).

If you can get up the middle ramp your email can flow and connect to the internet mode in which a Lotus Mail Protector device which uses a magnet drags your data to the top left corner of the table where you can bounce off the SMTP bumpers and Anti-Virus pop-ups to see if indeed you can crash your server with one too many hops.

After it leaves this zone it may get sucked into the Agent/Mail Rules hole. Now the fun begins, you need to watch fast as you never know if it will pop out of the Trash hole, the Filed Folder hole or the OOO hole. Once found you can continue on your mission which is to reduce your total cost of ownership by hitting the right drop lane where the Symphony kicker is waiting to put the data back in play, while reducing your overhead and thus making you more money.

If you have made it this far, I ran out of time but please comment with some updates for this.
I hope you have a great new year and have enjoyed my postings.
See you in Lotusphere!

MS relying on office Sales to Beat Lotus?

Fellow bloggers, Greg Eldred and Glenn Irvine both found this article ahead of me.

What neither pointed out is the ruse Microsoft makes, well Kevin turner makes, that:
"This past year we sold in 4.86 million seats of our collaboration solution – SharePoint, Exchange and Office – into IBM Lotus Notes accounts"

Office is now considered a collaboration product. Right.
So Microsoft can use this product any way they want, what companies do not use Office, any version?

Would like Mr. Turner to provide a better break down when you take Office out of the picture.

For that matter take Exchange out of the picture as well since the likelihood of a Lotus company using Exchange as well is nominal which leaves Sharepoint.

Sharepoint, and the Microsoft people love telling everyone, sells like water at a baseball game in Miami in the summertime. What they don't tell you is every Enterprise Agreement includes CALs for Sharepoint, by default, in addition to other licensing areas which require a CAL, even if you don't use it.

Or as some say, Microsoft gives it away for free and gets you on year 2 licensing maintenance.

Just more FUD from Redmond, and I expected better from Kevin Turner.

Maybe the Lotus Symphony team has some similar numbers we can play with against Microsoft. And it's free, really it is, go get it now and try it, http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa.

Symphony to the Rescue, thanks again to Microsoft

Sad to admit it, but I do not usually use Symphony for all my work. I have slowly been moving newer work to it, but older docs/clients limited me in this.

Today while editing a spreadsheet, it crashed while saving. Never a funny thing.
Luckily Office 2007 has a built in autosave function, which I use extensively for years since it was introduced, wonder why?

Great it had my spreadsheet with my changes, went to save it again, as a 97-03 doc so 95% of the world could read it and BAM! Same problem.

Can't even screenshot it because it automatically sends Excel to a tailspin of closing.

Now to be fair, something wanted to get installed last night when I shut down my laptop. Probably from Microsoft but who knows, it took hours. Perhaps it was Vista SP1 or some other item.

In any event, nothing works as it should today, except Symphony is humming along fine as is my Notes client and Twirhl, the Twitter client I use.

And my spreadsheet, opened in Symphony, edited and saved as xls and all is well.

Here's hoping you have an easier time with Office 2007 and Vista in your travels, if not, look into Symphony, your hair and wall will appreciate it.

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa or find it in your R8 client.

The CEO/CIO thinks free is a great idea and it is too!

The previous post was created to show a theory.
Namely that some people would say it's a bait and switch.
Or Microsoft people would claim they do this too, some would say they offer to give everything for free, but I won't go there.
Or Business people would say how can you do it for free.

Never said I would pay for your licenses, after all I am not IBM, nor would I cover your hardware.
Just that I would migrate your users off Exchange to Domino.
And I could do it in one day/night too.
Rolling out Notes to your employees is up to you, I will give them all webmail access immediately, plus their own blogs and a wiki for them to discuss the pros and cons of your decision.

Still not enough? How about automatic push email, Lotus Notes Traveler, with no other server required. Again ALL from one Lotus Domino box.

Want more? I have over 100 applications I can include and you can use at no cost to you for your internal employees to use, depending on YOUR needs.

EDITED after original Posting to include:

Plus a free Operating System, Lotus Foundations!

And finally, a 100% free Office Suite courtesy of Lotus Symphony for every user. So you can stop paying extra licenses to Microsoft for that as well.

END OF EDITS

I could go on, but, right I forgot, you love Exchange, Office, Windows and it is so useful you wouldn't dream of changing it for anything.


Thank you for the graphic from here.

If companies don't believe something for free is worth anything, why do they consistently take Microsoft up on their offers of Free Exchange or Sharepoint or ahem, Vista.

The next time your CXO or a new one, comes in and saying you must get to Exchange, ask him this question:

How much of your bonus is tied to the company making money? Because you are about to disrupt the company in ways you can not imagine.

The graphic above takes what sits on one server in Domino and shows just how many pieces you need from Microsoft to recreate it.

You don't need more servers, you need less.
You don't require more silos, you want fewer.
Everyone wants to collaborate, the shortest distance between 2 points is a straight line, or in this case....
1 Lotus Domino Server.

Happy Holidays, Lotus Style

2007 started out so well,
Lotusphere in Orlando was swell.
R8 was brought out and it was good,
Mobile, internet based and free,
and a new spreadsheet for you and me.

So whether or not you used SSL, VPN, POP3, LDAP, IMAP, IPv6 or a (i)phone,
Make sure to finish the year right and use Sametime8 mobile client when away from home.

So onwards Notes, Domino, Sametime, Quickr, Connections, Forms, Symphony and Doc,
We have many more clients to bring good cheer and luck.

See you in 2008, Lotusphere's gonna be great!