"Lotus is not dead yet"
Ok - this was something that was said in a number of different places throughout Lotusphere. Now, I know the underlying message is one of strength and commitment to the brand and future, however, adding the "yet" to the end of the sentence just confirms the fears at the heart of the message - that one day, Lotus will be dead. Surely the message needs to be more aligned with Mark Twain-like "reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated" - get away from the negative campaign - respond to it and move on - don't make it the centrepiece of your campaign.

In truth, the real issue with the message isn't that it repeats the "Notes is dead" mantra of the opposition, but the use of "yet" at the end of it - adding a "yet" also adds an implication that it's something that is likely to happen at some point in the future - near or distant - and in the world of competing software products that just means that it's always relevant no matter how far in the future IBM commits to the product. Drop the "yet", respond with a simple "Notes is not dead" and let's all get interested in the good stuff.

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well... obviously a lot of you know already, but we're off to Lotusphere 2006. A few of you might have guessed because some of the referrers I've been getting from frappr.

Laurette and I are making the trek across to the USA in January (spare a thought for us on the epic journey from Sydney-LA-St Louis-Orlando without a bed or a shower!) and will be braving the US winter as we travel around for a couple of weeks afterwards. I don't know if many of you have done the trip from this part of the world, but it's kind of weird booking a flight which leaves at 3pm and arrives at 10.30pm on the same day, but takes 30+ hours to get there.

After Orlando we're off to Washington, NYC, San Francisco, Las Vegas and then home again so if anyone knows of any user group meetings in those places in the couple of weeks after Lotusphere let me know as we'd love to drop in and see what's happening in your part of the world.

I won't be packing any Fosters or VB (not that I would anyway as being a born and bred Queenslander requires me to remain forever faithful to that nectar of the hop Gods - "XXXX"), but I'm sure we'll be more than willing to savour the taste of the local product whilst we're there. If you see us, stop and say "G'day", we're looking forward to finally putting a face to some of the personalities we've been following online for the last year or so.

We were discussing how Notes shows categorised dates in view columns the other day and I made a reference to the way it was done in the "old days". After explaining what I meant, a couple of people replied that it was the same as the way they're doing it now, so I thought I'd outline a couple of different processes that I've seen/used in case it's useful to anyone.

Let's assume you want a view categorised by the creation date. Firstly, you create 2 columns (one for the year, and one for the month), the goal being to get something like this:

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I thought I would share something about the way I write my code in LotusScript that seems to help with readability (at least that's the comments that I've received - what people say when I've left the room is nothing I can control ....yet).

My expectation is that everyone does something similar, but just in case it's not the normal practice, and if there are people looking for something different, I offer this as a suggestion.

Now, bear with me as it's kind of hard to explain.

Essentially, I'm a bit of a fan of the "if/then/else/end if" combination and this will come out in the example.

Basically, if I have a piece of code that requires a few tests before I can get into the nitty gritty, I test these conditions, reporting any errors that I find, and then set a variable which identifies if I can progress onto the next stage - I know that might sound exactly like everyone else does, so let me elaborate with an example.

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"I believe the problem is that the people who know (technically) are very rarely anywhere near high enough in the organisations to prevent these decisions being made. Existing customers need just as much (if not more) attention than new or potential customers. Surely it would help if IBM Lotus would start sticking their heads back in the corporate doors and asking "How are things going here?" - they just might be surprised at the response."
Laurette Rynne

Apart from all the other reasons why I have to support Laurette (you know - husband, wife.. it's a tangled web), this is my experience too - it just seems like there are far too many cases where big companies (maybe not BIG on the global scale, but certainly big in the Australian market) are moving from Lotus Notes with little or no resistance from IBM.

Some of the reasons I've heard to justify the move are quite ridiculous, where a little research and certainly a little pre-sales would have possibly changed the decision.

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