Check out this new whitepaper abotu migrating from Exchange to Notes/Domino 8

Mary Beth Raven  November 13 2008 09:00:00 AM

This is hot of the press! Enjoy.
Migrating from Exchange to Notes/Domino 8

• Comments [4]

How Many vCard Versions Do You Need?

John Lance  November 12 2008 10:52:58 AM

Hi all, John Lance here. You may remember me from such past blog posts as "Calendar Color Coding (Or All Aboard the Alliteration Express)" and "Wooly Bully" (excerpt: If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times, Sheep Wrestling - it's just plain wrong.)

Moving right along...

So we've heard plenty of requests for multiple signatures in mail, for example, one signature to reply to business contacts with, another for when responding to friends. The question we're kicking around right now is how many versions of a personal vCard do Samantha and Ted and Phil (errr, Phileppe)  need?

Or, to put it another way, does Samantha expect to have a business vCard vs. a personal vCard (perhaps one being saved with each corresponding signatures) or does she create just one and uses it across the board?

Thanks in advance and, as always, if you have end users who are particularly heavy vCard users (or would like to be) please forward this post so they can comment as well.

- John

• Comments [8]

What do you want to learn at Lotusphere in a "hands on sessoin" about the sidebar?

Mary Beth Raven  November 11 2008 12:55:12 PM

Hello Lotus fans,
Yesterday, Jamie Liu (Sidebar developer) and I were notified that our hands-on session has been accepted.  (I also was notified that 2 other sessions were rejected).
Now, I know that most of you who follow this blog probably already know a lot about the sidebar because you're exceptional. Nonetheless, I'm going to ask you what you want to learn-- and what you think more average Notes developers and admins would like to be able to do by the end of the session.

Here's the abstract:
Sidebar Safari: Controlling and Extending the Lotus Notes Sidebar with Policies, Widgets, Plug-ins and a new API
During the Sidebar Safari, you'll learn how to corral wild widgets into sidebar panels! In this session, we will also demonstrate how to control the appearance of the sidebar using Desktop policy settings, how to add Notes views and documents as sidebar panels, how to install plug-ins, and how to take advantage of new API introduced in 8.5 to programmatically open or close the sidebar and show or hide specific panels.  We will demonstrate the latest sidebar design that allows end users to more easily manage all the panels they may have in their sidebar.  We will include UI design guidelines for building your own sidebar plug-ins.

My Questions (remember, this is a new "hands on" session where you are supposed to bring your laptop and do the exercises yourself during a 2-hour session!)

1. Can we reasonably expect that you'll have the 8.5 shipping version of the Notes client? (we assume it will ship before Lotusphere)
2. Can we expect you to have Eclipse installed?
3. Can we expect you to have a Domino server on the same machine  so that during the session you can tweak the Widget desktop policy and push it out to yourself?

Here are some of the things we were thinking of having "labs" for (no guarantee!)
1. One-click to put a Notes view in the sidebar
2. One click and EDIT the url to put just the "listview" in the sidebar
3. Add an "info only" Google Gadget  sidebar e.g. the world clock
4. Add a Google Gadget that  takes some kind of input, like countdown
5. Do some live text thing (like the delta flight example,but something a little different) where the answer opens in the sidebar
6. A sample Eclipse plug-in , with examples of:
- how to contribute to sidebar declaratively - explain extension point (if some people in the audience have no knowledge of this)
- how to contribute dynamically
- new API/how to access ShelfPage object (and what it is)
        - how to toggle sidebar state (Open, Thin, Collapsed)
        - how to show/hide panels using new API available in 8.5
- demonstrate how a panel can be modified by listeners
7. How to use policy to
-Deploy the sidebar as open or closed
- Use the widget catalog to deploy categories of widgets
- Set who is allowed to create  and share widgets

We don't think we'll have time to cover it all, so we're asking your opinion. Should we do a smattering that covers power user, app dev and admin? or just focus on app dev?
I look forward to being one of the "Hands-on session" guinea pig presenters.
   

• Comments [3]

Customers are always on our minds, even on vacation in foreign countries

Mary Beth Raven  November 3 2008 08:15:03 AM

One of the Sametime Designers, Michelle McDevitt (who focuses on Sametime administration user experience) was on vacation in Morocco last week.

Even though she was on vacation, she noticed that the Colgate brand was very popular there, and snapped the following picture in Marrakech,  to remind us all that, no matter where we go, we've probably got customers there.


P.S.On a slightly different topic, we are always in search of interesting pictures of USERS (primarily for our internal use) -- it helps us remember the many different ways that our products are used.  Thus far, one of our favorite pictures  is of coal miners user Lotus Notes --they still have their head lamps on, even. I haven't posted it to the blog because I don't have permission from them to do so. We really do like to receive pictures of people using Notes/Sametime/any of the products, to help keep us continually grounded.

• Comments [0]

What usability improvements do you want to see in the Notes Widgets wizards?

Mary Beth Raven  October 30 2008 01:15:17 PM

Hello power users, app devs and admins who use the "My Widgets" feature that shipped with Notes 8.0.1.

We have a small window of opportunity to make usability improvements to the wizard for creating the widgets, and the My Widgets sidebar panel, so I'm asking what you'd like. The bother here is that I am not allowed to add any new FUNCTIONALITY, just make usability tweaks :(

WIZARD: Here are some thoughts I've had. First, please go try to build a widget  and then come back and answer these questions.
1. We have a toolbar with 3 buttons.  We had the first button to really give you a very generic overview. As a wizard, tho, it is very lacking because it gets to a point and says things like "So now go open the web page you want and then click the toolbox icon". So is it worth keeping, to help people get up to speed?
.

2. Terminology. To us, the Widget is the finished thing, a combination of a Component that has a wired action to a recognized content type.I consciously decided to use the term component because composite applications, and the Comp app editor, use components, and these very same components that you create with the my widgets wizard can be used in the Comp app editor. BUT I am worried that  we are splitting hairs with our vocabulary. Any comments?

3. The whole "ok now enter a REGEX" part is horrifying to me, but since it's so generic I can't really  seem to come up with something that is better while still being generic.

SIDEBAR PANEL
To be honest,  I do not think a sidebar panel as a container of widgets (including other sidebar panels) is the appropriate thing to have.  I think of the whole My widgets" thing as a main-window app where Raj or Michaela would go to manage things (Philippe-- our new persona--see yesterday's post-- and the others do not BUILD widgets, they use  ones that other folks build for them).

In the future when I'm allowed to add functionality, I want to make the "Widget management" a part of the newly-designed workspace.  Philippe wants to go to ONE place to manage all his stuff- his databases, plug-ins, widgets, bookmarks etc. Thoughts?

IF I am stuck with a sidebar panel for at least the next few point releases, I want to give you a tree control view and a flat list view in addition to the Thumbnails.

And for general sidebar stuff, if you drag something on a sidebar panel that is collapsed, and hover, that panel needs to open up so you can drop it inside.  These ideas are "new functionality" so I dunno how far I'll get.

I look forward to your comments.

• Comments [9]

Meet our new Persona!

Mary Beth Raven  October 29 2008 10:51:25 AM

Customers,
I am pleased to introduce"Philippe" to you.  He is our new end-user persona, and  we are going to use him to help us design all the Lotus end-user facing products (Notes, iNotes, Sametime, Symphony, Connections, Quickr).  

To create him, we  interviewed real project managers (some of whom use Notes and some who did not),  We refined him by getting feedback from you during the Lotus Leadership Alliance conference in September.  We chose a project manager at the request of the GCPC (Global Partnership Customer Council), who thought that this would be a valuable additional persona. We also made sure we interviewed  non-Americans, and made this persona a "non-American." (Daisuke is our other non-American end user; our app devs and admins are German, Canadian, Indian, American.)

 Many thanks to Michelle  Cooper in our user studies group for  conducting the interviews and writing up the persona!

The other personas will continue to be used when we have very specific purposes for doing so, For example, if we have specific cases where we need to consider "Ted the VP" who delegated his Calendar to Betty.
So, without further ado, I give you Philippe.

Philippe Babineaux  ·  Project Manager “The best way to fail is to not communicate adequately.” Philippe's main responsibility Create the schedule and identify resources to guide the project while managing issues and risks throughout the project's completion. Project Manager's main responsibility Understand client needs and set up the project plan to successfully fulfill those needs within the budget and given timeline. Renovations :: 3, Avenue Europe, 78140 Vélizy Villacoublay, France :: Tél. : +33 (0)1 58 03 26 26

Persona summary
Philippe is a 43 year old Project Manager for Renovations in France.  He considers himself as an easy going person who is very efficient at his job. Philippe is highly organized and detail-oriented.  

As a project manager, Philippe's main responsibility is to manage and track issues and risks through a project's completion.  This includes facilitating communication, managing cost, and scheduling resources and deliverables.  He is currently managing 4 projects simultaneously, one is a new sales floor inventory device, one involves an internal initiative for streamlining request processes, and the other two are internal software initiatives for vendor tracking. Philippe's days are spent acquiring or collecting status information from various team members in back-to-back status report meetings, turning that information into reports for management and stakeholders, and working to resolve any issues or risks that come out of those meetings. He has the ability to make timely decisions and does well at managing the project's resources.

Philippe knows that communication and collaboration are the most important factors in getting his job done and are tied into all activities of a project.  

Philippe is dedicated to his work and to the people on his projects, so he is willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done and make the projects run as smoothly as possible. He takes responsibility and accountability in order to deliver on all his project commitments.

Philippe's biggest challenge is working with all the different tools in order to stay organized,  be effective in managing the projects and getting his deliverables out to the various stakeholders.  

Day-in-the-life Scenario

Philippe starts his day around 6:00am.  After getting himself ready for work, he wakes up the kids, eats breakfast and may do a quick check of email using a VPN connection before leaving for the office.

He lives about 30 minutes from his office in Velizy, Yvelines (a small suburb outside of Paris) and is usually at work by 7:30am. After grabbing a Café noir and booting up his computer, Philippe reads and responds to email and gets in any quick blog reads from his RSS feeder before other people start filtering in at 8:30am.

Philippe typically has one to five meetings in a day which are usually followed up with action items.  He has two this morning which are both project team meetings that cover status reports for tasks, project schedules, and any other updates (for two different projects).  After each meeting, Philippe writes the meeting minutes, sends them out, and updates the project plan.  These reports help him create a more formal status report for the client and upper management that's due on Friday which also includes budget and time perspectives.

Occasionally Philippe will meet a client or co-worker for lunch, but usually he just has a quick half hour lunch in the canteen at noon.  He'll also try catching up on email or getting in some RSS reads before the rest of his afternoon starts.  

After lunch he focuses on any outstanding to-do's from action items assigned in the status meetings. He also does his planning and writing documentation for the projects.  From two o'clock on, Philippe is in more meetings.  Today he has another status meeting and then a funding approval meeting to review the projects that are going into the initiate and solution scoping phases.  These two meetings will be held in a conference room to accommodate the team members who are co-located as well as those who are remote workers and dial into the conference call.

Before leaving the office for the day at five o'clock, Philippe will spend the last hour of his day checking and responding to email and dealing with any other business issues that have come up.  

At home, Philippe spends time with his family before eating dinner and then it's off to the gym for a couple of hours.  After watching TV for a bit, Philippe will check his email one more time before going to bed by eleven o'clock.  Normally, Philippe doesn't work at night, but there are cases where there might be a problem that he has to attend to at a client site in a different time zone or if a special project is going on that he needs to manage.




Detailed information

Demographics
Age

• Philippe is 43 years old.

Language spoken

• His native language is French, but he speaks English, German, and some Italian.

Certifications

• Philippe does not have his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and doesn't see a strong need for it at this time; however; he does occasionally check in with the PMI website for any relevant or interesting articles and has taken classes from them in the past.

Previous positions

• Philippe's past positions have included other project management roles and analyst roles as well as consultant.

Time in current position

• Philippe has been in his current role at Renovations for six years.

Time doing project management

• He's been doing project management for 11 years.

Interests

• Philippe enjoys reading but has a hard time fitting in recreational reads these days.  Almost all of his reading is done on-line either though specific websites or RSS feeds he's subscribed to, but he will occasionally get in a book or even an audio book.
• Philippe likes to stay active.  He tries to stick with a regular exercise routine and often is part of sports league.  A lot of his activity is done outside.  Some of these activities include: biking, running, swimming, taking walks, playing soccer, and the occasional round of golf.
• Philippe's most important interest is his children.  He loves spending time with them and participating in any activity they are a part of.

Work Characteristics
Works with

• Internal clients
• External clients
• Stakeholders
• Human Resources
• Information Technology
• Application development
• Architecture
• Support
• Corporate Systems

Work environment

• He is part of large multi-person project teams who often contain remote members.
• His clients and team members are located in France, Germany, Italy, and the United States.
• Reserves conference rooms, uses his office, and occasionally works from home.
• Uses his laptop to be able to communicate with team members, keep up with email, assist with meetings, and travel to client sites.
• His greatest pressure is making sure things stay on track and when they don't he is required to make sure they get back on track.
• Philippe has managed as many as 15 projects at one time.

Preferred communication methods
Philippe knows that communication is the most important factor for success and he understands that everyone communicates differently and has different preferences. By understanding this, Philippe makes every effort to communicate in the way that works best for the person. It also depends on the situation since he works with many remote people.

Philippe feels that face-to-face meetings are best and prefers them whenever possible.  His experience has proven that in-person meetings and even less formal chats help build relationships.  Whenever possible, Philippe will make the effort to go to a team member's cube to chat even if it means he has to walk to another building.

He also uses email, chat, web conferences, video conferences, and the telephone to communicate with his teams.  In addition to personal preferences, time and money constraints play a factor in his communication choice.  For example Philippe has weekly meetings with a team in another region, so he opts for a video conference instead of traveling there.  He also often switches to using the phone if an instant messaging session becomes to detailed and decides it would be better to talk on the phone.

Technical environment
Philippe needs to stay connected and he mainly uses his laptop to accomplish this. For status meetings, he uses his laptop to take notes and/or present the meeting agenda and topic along with Sametime Meetings in addition to a conference call number to connect to remote team members.

Lotus Notes is the software that's most important for him in getting his job done. Philippe doesn't have one program that allows him to accomplish all that he needs as a Project Manager, so he feels that he would choose one that best accommodates his need for communication. Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project would be second since he needs something to help him manage his work.  From either of these programs he is able to build the project schedules and use that to work from and guide meetings and manipulate the dates if necessary.

The program he spends the most time using is Lotus Notes for email. Microsoft Excel would be next followed by Word and Powerpoint.  His web browser and Microsoft Project are also at the top of his list.

Tools

Software VPN connections Lotus Notes: mail, calendar, contacts, to dos, databases CA Clarity (formerly Niku) Microsoft Project Open Workbench Microsoft Office 2007: word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, templates Sametime Instant Messaging Sametime Meetings Audio Conferencing Video Conferencing   Web Browser Visio Quickplace Concur (for expense reporting) Mindjet

Hardware Desktop computer Laptop computer Wireless connections Telephone: land line and mobile Pager Blackberry (email, calendar and Sametime IM) Multi-function device (for scanning in expense reports) Company credit card

Responsibilities
Main responsibility

• Create the schedule and identify resources to guide the project while managing issues and risks through the project's completion.

Responsibilities
Initialization of Projects:  The planning stage

• Set up the kick-off meeting
• Identify and document requirements, goals and objectives
• Allocate resources and put together the teams
• Schedule meetings
• Start brainstorming
• Plan assumptions, constraints, what things to be aware of, conflicts
• Define deadlines and milestone dates and set project schedule
• Know the clients and their restrictions and environment.
• Provide cost estimates and develop budget
• Cost benefit analysis
• Complete risk assessment

Managing the Project: Being on top of everything on the project

• Track and hold weekly meetings to collect status information from various team members assigned for the tasks in the project plan
• Write and publish progress reports every week for upper management and/or client management.
• Reports include objective status information
• Client and internal management reports are separate
• Update the project plan on a weekly basis to drive metrics
• Create purchase orders
• Work around schedules and vacations/holidays
• Work though time zone issues
• Manage budget
• Manage the tasks between teams and clients
• Track the project to the schedule, to the plan, and to the spec

Managing Issues and Risks

• Being aware of and identify delays, obstacles, scope changes, client changing their minds, team issues and challenges, dependencies other higher level things like availability of systems, third party, etc.
• Deal with escalated issues
• Determine how to fix problems/issues and reschedule the work if necessary
• Work with subject matter experts for solutions
• Present issues and risks to client
• Make the owner aware of cost related to a decision

Completing a Project

• Getting formal approvals from client

Goals
End goals

• To minimize risks to my go live/end date
• Be on time
• Stay within budget

Experience goals

• Be successful

Pain points

• Being able to find stuff when you need it is my biggest challenge
• Not one program to accommodate all his needs
• Working across cross-cultural teams and time zones

Skills

• Highly organized
• Detail-oriented
• Communicates well within the many mediums used
• Accountable and responsible

• Comments [3]

Color Coding Survey - Last Chance!

John Lance  October 28 2008 08:08:45 AM

Hi all, John Lance here. You may remember me from such past blog posts as "Calendar Color Coding (Or All Aboard the Alliteration Exress)" and "Night of 1000 Tweets" (which, ironically, has nothing to do with Twitter and everything to do with Goatsuckers (been trying to work the phrase "goatsucker" into the blog for months now...))

Moving right along...

Just wanted to give you all a heads up that the Calendar Color Coding survey will be up and running until Friday 10/31/2008. We've gotten about 100 responses so far, and we want to make sure that we cast as wide a net as possible here because we are making decisions based on this feedback.

So if you have a pet color coding technique, or a technique you would like added into Notes, THIS is the survey for YOU!!!!!!

So the pitch again, while we are obviously interested in your opinion, we'd also like to collect as much feedback from direct end users as possible. So please feel free to forward this link to the Samanthas, Teds, Bettys, and any other folk at your company.

Here's the link:  https://www.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dd/s/ag1f8

Thanks in advance,

John Lance

• Comments [0]

Why do you want to drag emails to the desktop and what do you want to do with them?

Mary Beth Raven  October 24 2008 08:54:37 AM

Loyal constituency,

Here is your chance to influence a feature in the next version of the Notes client.  We are considering adding the ability to drag a message (or any Notes document) to the desktop, because several companies have asked for this.  First, I give you some background, and then I ask the questions.

THE BACKGROUND:
You can, indeed, drag any document from any Notes view to the desktop TODAY. However, it simply makes a shortcut and does not make any kind of a file that you can manipulate separately. For example, we know that we have customers who want to drag an email to their desktop, and then perhaps days later,  send that email to others as an attachment. (Personally,  I fail to understand why this is preferable to just forwarding the mail message, but hey, they are the customers and they tell us that they will not change the way they work. )


THE QUESTIONS:
(Please give us an idea of the importance of each of the possible features, where 1 is critical and 4 is not important.)

• Why do you (or your users) want to save emails to the desktop?  Is it so that they can refer back to them?  For compliance reasons?  Record retention? Evade Quotas?
  • Is it really just that they want to be able to find certain documents in a way they are used to? Maybe they really just want a Notes Database application to be "explorable" like File Explorer?
  • Is it because they don't know they can "bookmark" any Notes document as an alternative way to easily get back to a document?
• Is it only emails that they want to drag to the desktop, or would they want every Notes document to have this capability?
• Should any person by able to open the file, or should it require a Notes ID and the proper access rights?
• When an email is opened from the desktop, should it be editable?  
• Should the user be able to Reply, Resend and forward the message?
• Should the message retain all of its properties (e.g., time sent, time received, routing path, etc.)?
• What format would be best for you and your users?
  • A Notes proprietary one would be most likely to make it in the product. You'd need Notes to open and/or edit that document.
  • .msg (this is the format that MS Outlook appears to use)
  • a .pdf (this would be read-only)
  • an .odt (you could then open it in  any "open-document format-compliant editor, such as Lotus Symphony)

Thanks very much  for your feedback.

• Comments [31]