Fud Buster Friday #9 - Religion

This post is for anyone in one of the following religions:
Democrat vs. Republican
Job vs. Outsourced
Imported vs. Domestic (Beers! What did you think I meant?)
Coke vs. Pepsi
Oracle vs. Anyone
Google vs. Microsoft
Blackberry vs. iPhone
Microsoft vs. Everyone
Lotus Notes vs. Exchange

Say what you will but there is a lot of religion going on in your life and mine these days.
Just finished Yom Kippur, a solemn day of thinking about past sins and trying hard to change one self for the better.

So I can relate to the problem of religion in the IT world.

Religions for centuries would impress on others to join their own, sometimes at the threat(and it wasn't just a threat) of various tortures and death, sometimes with bribes and others with a shrug.

Luckilky, in modern times we don't still do this...within IT, other countries is another issue entirely.

The put downs, FUD and other ideas put forth often times come back to bite the speaker.
You as the speaker look bad, I don't care if you are Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs or Steve Cohen. Someday, and that day may never come, the payback is going to hurt.

It is one thing to not confess everything, it's another to lie or just make up stories which aren't valid pr blame someone/something for no good reason.

Admittedly I may post thoughts to Twitter which at times can unsettle my Microsoft followers, but they are truthful in their wording, albeit at times harsh criticisms.

I do try to stay on the open and honest path and please correct me when I haven't! As happenned once with a post I made that was deleted because I didn't check all the facts.

So the moral of the story is if you must go and have converstions along any of the topics in the front of this post, just remember to play above board and try to be respectful of the other side.

Defining Lotus Notes & Domino for the Next Gen

In a truly perfect world, The Beatles would never have broken up, Jimi Hendrix would still be alive and MACs would rule the Earth. And Tech shows would get attendees when they are int he right place at the right time.

I went to a tech show today, ITEC, hoping to meet and listen to Chris Brogan. Sadly, as he informed me on twitter, he had to skip us in Ft. Lauderdale.

I ended up meeting a possible new SPAM solution provider for my clients and learned a great deal about using Facebook for Business from Chris's replacement, a really nice guy from Boston, Brett Wohl(He's on Facebook, go say hi!). Thanks Brett!

What I was not prepared for was defining Lotus to him. Sure, I do it all the time, but this was the first time I had really sat and explained it to someone more in tune with Facebook than Redbooks.
I appealed to digital rights and the ability to secure them in the app or db and allowing for selective exposure, plus replication capabilities for working on applications when traveling. We discussed it's messaging side, it's open source side, variable Operating System platforms, and even more important to their customers, scalable clustering within a heterogeneous environment. Even hit on document management and serializing data via RSS and other means.

In a way I feel like I failed to get across what I wanted, but he got what made sense to him and I leveraged what I knew would make sense to him so we were both happy in the end.

We discussed Sharepoint being used as a file sharing program, not in true collaborative style. And that Domino did sharing and does still, long before Sharepoint existed, but then I start to sound like I am 50 or 60!

Another really interesting conversation was with a Microsoft BP, who works in the SMB area. When I asked about his dealings with Lotus customers he said he doesn't see many naturally. He informed me that many customers are still running Windows and Exchange 2000. His hope was for the new Small Business Server, which has Exchange inside, would help migrate these people.

Naturally, Lotus Foundations came to mind and why IBM is pushing that as a solution. I wished him well and continued on.