Notes on Productivity

Video: How to use ActiveWords

Eric Mack — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:56:31 -0700

One of the essential components of my productivity toolkit is an application called ActiveWords. I use ActiveWords to control most of my Windows Applications.

I've just posted the video and related links over on the inside.eProductivity blog.

Since this blog is focused primarily on Lotus Notes, I know that the next question I will get is: "Will ActiveWords work with Lotus Notes?"

Yes and no.

ActiveWords works as if you had typed keystrokes at your keyboard and is great for launching applications and substituting text. These features work great in Notes.

Because Lotus Notes is itself a windowed application ActiveWords has not context from which to control specific features of Notes once launched. This is because it has no context.

For people that use eProductivity for Lotus Notes we have modified Notes in such a way that ActiveWords can effectively control most aspects of Notes. So, for example, I can type "IN" anywhere (Notes does not even have to be running) and ActiveWords will launch Notes (if not already open) and take me to my inbox.

Even without the connection to Lotus Notes, I think ActiveWords is a remarkable application and certainly one I am never without!

ActiveWords Web site
[Originally posted on the Notes on Productivity web site. (http://www.NotesOnProductivity.com)]

Originally posted on eProductivity

When tools (e.g. Lotus Notes) become personal

Eric Mack — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0700

Two interesting discussions today. (Well one at least, my post has no comments yet.)

Ed Brill: What kind of apps do you run on the Notes client stand-alone?
Eric Mack: Just what is Lotus Notes good for, anyway?

There's discussion about what people use Notes for and whether it can be personal or not. I just posted this comment to Ed Brill's blog, but I think it is valuable to re-post here. It deals with the issue that when tools become personal, people become passionate about them - and they tell their friends, and their friends, and their friends...

@12, one of my clients, David Allen, loves to show end-users and senior company execs the Notes Journal - something most have no idea exists. If you have ever attended his Getting Things Done (GTD) seminars, you know that he often mentions and shows how he uses Lotus Notes and then he talks about the power of the journal and the ability to customize. 10 years ago (it maybe more) David stumbled on the Notes Designer client and created his own quote application - an app then he still uses and shows off today.
The key here is that Notes became personal to him. Once a tool becomes personal, people can't help but tell and show their friends. Think of the iPhone.

The key point I want to make is:

When tools become personal, people become passionate about them - and they tell their friends, and their friends, and their friends...

In this illustration, and end-user "discovered" something that created great value for him (the Notes Journal) and then he "discovered" that he could customize the way he works with his information using the Notes designer client. the tool became personal. Now, you couldn't pry it from his hands. I know many people that feel the same way.

As I teach in my seminars: "for tools to become productive, they have to become personal."

What do YOU think?

Originally posted on eProductivity

Just what is Lotus Notes good for, anyway?

Eric Mack — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:11:29 -0700

In the beginning, we did not think of Notes as e-mail. (I'm talking about the client) We thought of Lotus Notes as the ultimate repository for information and knowledge in tacit form across distributed databases (often called "knowledge-bases" or "applications"). Oh, and Notes happened to do email and calendaring (with some issues).

Over the next 15 years Microsoft did an exemplary job (I think) of convincing the world that Notes was just email and that it wasn't very good as such and that Outlook was better application because it was a really good Personal Information Management Tool (PIM). They did a good job of shifting the focus from the many things Notes did really well to the fact that its email and calendaring had some issues. Over time, Notes users listened to the message from Microsoft and, in the absence of new information to the contrary, began to think of Notes just an email client.

Lotus, then, IBM responded with improvements to email & calendar but missed the opportunity (in my opinion) to educate the world that the Notes client - even back then - was so much more than email.

Unfortunately, I think many people today still see Notes as an e-mail client and never consider the powerful communication and information management capability it contains - regardless of whether it is used with a Domino server or not.

It is my opinion that Notes is an undervalued tool and that it has great potential as an extraordinary communication and information management tool. Still, many people think of Notes as email and they may not think of it well at that. In the absence of marketing that would educate them otherwise, this is a challenge.

Personally, I would continue to use Notes for myself even if I did not have a Domino server.

In the 1990's when I was actively reselling Notes, I helped many people experience the power of Notes simply by selling them a stand-alone client and showing them what Notes could do for them. I did not sell collaboration. I simply met them where they were at. Within days, the question would inevitably come up: "This is great, how do I share my information with Mary?" Then, clients would beg for a solution and a Domino server sale was made. As I work with many Lotus business partners and Foundations resellers I'm learning that many of them are following a similar approach to win new customers.

I think the Notes design team is doing an extraordinary job with the Notes product. It looks great out of the box looks and each version gets better and better.

I am fortunately to have as clients and friends, some of the most productive people in the world. For the past 15 years they have been getting things done with Notes. And, telling others about it. I also have considerable first-hand experience showing people that may have a less-than-favorable opinion of Lotus Notes that the product does in fact do all of the things they think it can't - and more.

I believe that Lotus Notes is truly an extraordinary application, both by itself and with its ability to add third-party applications. I have built a business, not selling, but showing people how to use Lotus Notes effectively as a tool for information, communication, and action management. I also believe in the Notes product and the potential that it represents for IBM Lotus Business partners that I have invested in creating software applications that build on what Notes can do.

So where am I going with this post? If you have read this far, you have heard the thouhts of a passionate Notes user. Now, I want to ask you this question: Just what is Lotus Notes good for, anyway?

The inspiration for my question is Ed Brill's blog today: What kind of applications do you run on the Notes client stand-alone?

I want to know what you think.

Specifically, is there value in IBM making Lotus Notes available to end-users as a stand-alone communications and information management application? By "available" I mean with active web marketing and aircover targeted at first-time end-users to tell them that Lotus Notes is a great productivity application for their needs. I also mean making it easy for a first-time user to visit the IBM web site and find Notes and get it up and running. Or, is should Notes be left as-is, to be considered a program that some unfortunate workers are forced to use at work because of the shortsighted vision of their employers? (An actual comment I hear all too often.)

Do you think the market would benefit by learning that Lotus Notes is so much more than email? More important, do you think that people - individual consumers - would find value in Notes?

What features would you show people that would help them see the power of Notes in a way that brings value to them personally?

You can post a comment here or go and post something on Ed's blog.

P.S. I want to keep the attention focused on the topic of the Notes client and the value it has for individuals. Therefore, I have intentionally not mentioned any specific products as examples or included any links other than to Ed's blog.

Originally posted on eProductivity

GTD Productivity Software Winners Announced!

Eric Mack — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:23:30 -0700

Over the past few weeks, two free drawings were held for GTD Productivity tools. Sponsored by ICA, ActiveWord Systems, and Gyronix, the drawings awarded prizes with a total value of over $2000.

People were invited to to download and explore eProductivity for Lotus Notes. Everyone that did, got their name entered in the drawing. Those that took the time to send in feedback, got their name entered a second time. No purchase was required.

Six people's names were drawn on June 2 and again on June 15 for a total of 12 lucky winners.

Visit the Inside.eProductivity blog to find out who won.

Originally posted on eProductivity

iFidelity for more productive e-mail

Eric Mack — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:03:00 -0700

One of the (many) features that I love about Lotus Notes is the ability to paste doclinks from anywhere to anywhere. Long before we had URLS we had doclinks. I feel so strongly about the value of Notes doclinks that I worked hard to get my two favorite knowledge visualization tools, MindManager and The Brain, add support for Notes Doclinks to to their product.

If you can live inside of Notes, doclinks are great but when you move to the web they sometimes break. I've been following Ben Langhinrichs blog posts about his product, iFidelity, that among other things appears to ensure that doclinks will work inside and outside of Notes - incliding within IBM's own iNotes mail template.

I have not actually used iFidelity, but from today's blog post it looks like a valuable tool to improve the experience and increase user productivity.

Blog: Why is iNotes a second class citizen?

You can lean more about iFidelity here.
[Originally posted on the Notes on Productivity web site. (http://www.NotesOnProductivity.com)]

Originally posted on eProductivity

Is your e-mail getting fat? Time to archive!

Eric Mack — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:59:49 -0700

While I encourage users to archive their old mail, I don't use the standard mail archiving features of Notes. Instead, I prefer to use the external filing feature of eProductivity which allows me to archive on-the-fly simply by dragging emails to an external database. This way, I am effectively archiving in real-time and with little effort. Also, the line between action and reference remains clear for me..

Today, Julia Brown blogged about Lotus Notes Mail Archiving today on the Lotus Notes 8 Tips Blog:

Archiving is a really great way to reduce the size of your mail file, and to keep things from getting cluttered in your mail. But we know a lot of people never set up archiving because they can't figure it out, and the current help is not sufficient. So this week's FAQ-style tips should help you out with setting up and using archiving

I think Julia's made good start at explaining how anyone can set up archiving for Notes mail and stay under their company email quota.

As I posted in my comment on her blog, one of the problems that often see is when users (or this Admins) incorrectly set up archiving to archive all documents in a user's mail file - including tasks and calendar entries. This, of course, undermines the value of Lotus Notes as a trusted system. Properly setup, however, Notes archives can be a helpful way to keep file sizes down and email access speedy. Hopefully Julia will address some of the many ways to configure archiving options in a future post.

Lotus Notes 8 Tips:
How do I reduce the size of my mail file (to avoid going over my mail quota)?
[Originally posted on the Notes on Productivity web site. (http://www.NotesOnProductivity.com)]

Originally posted on eProductivity

New iPhone features for Lotus Notes? For real?

Eric Mack — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:28:00 -0700

GTD Coach Kelly is on a journey to get Lotus Notes tasks to sync with her iPhone and she's got a lot of followers waiting to see if she will be successful. You can read her adventures here.

Chris Blatnick posted a comment that said that Notes/Domino 8.51 will include native Lotus Traveler support for the iPhone but it is unclear if this will provide the features that Kelly needs.

As far as I know, one problem that business users face with the iPhone, at least from a GTD perspective, is that the iPhone does not support tasks. So, unless Lotus Traveler 8.51 adds a Task app to the iPhone, Kelly will still not achieve the level of productivity she seeks.

To give Kelly her ultimate GTD system, she needs::
1. Lotus Notes - Got that
2. eProductivity - Got that
3. iPhone - Got that
4. An on-device task application - It must sync with Notes. (See #5)
5. A way to sync tasks (#4) with Lotus Notes - Traveler? mNotes?

Now that you have seen the list of requirements, do you have any recommendations?

Read: Kelly Forrister: New iPhone feature for Lotus Notes?

Note to iPhone software vendors: If you have a product that meets requirements #4 and #5 I invite you to post a comment and link here. Everyone else: please don't flood the blog comments with advertisements for your iPhone products unless they meet requirements #4 and #5. Thank you!

Originally posted on eProductivity

Free GTD & productivity software drawing: 10-days only

Eric Mack — Fri, 5 Jun 2009 02:39:18 -0700

Inspired by this week's GTD with Lotus Notes podcast with GTD Coach, Kelly Forrister, I've decided to take a short break from showing people how to get more done with Lotus Notes and eProductivity to equip them with a way to get more done: I've decided to give away licenses and subscriptions to my favorite GTD productivity software.

Last month, I took the business cards from everyone that visited the eProductivity booth at Lotusphere 2009 or the GTD Summit and entered the names into a drawing for free GTD software. Additionally, if I received written feedback from those people who had already evaluated eProductivity, I entered that name in the drawing a second time.

My daughter, Kelly, selected the first 6 winners.

Before I share the winner's names, you should know what the prizes are:

Congratulations to the first group of winners! I've created a winner's page on the eProductivity web site where you can find out who won.

This was an experiment to see if the concept of a drawing would encourage people to visit the web site and evaluate the software. It worked - well enough that I've decided to do it one more time with a larger audience.

If you didn't win the first time, I'm going to give you another chance to win some of my favorite GTD productivity applications.

In just over a week, I will have one more drawing for free GTD & productivity software. The drawing will be Monday, June 15, 2009. That's only one week away; follow this link for details.

Do you blog or Tweet? If you think the offer of free GTD & productivity software would be of interest to your friends, please share it with them. Thanks.

I wish you the best of luck in the drawing.

Eric

Originally posted on eProductivity

GTD Times: Getting Things Done with IBM Lotus Notes

Eric Mack — Thu, 4 Jun 2009 15:50:00 -0700

Originally posted on eProductivity

How to experience Lotus Notes for free

Eric Mack — Thu, 4 Jun 2009 14:02:28 -0700

I receive many requests from people who have learned about Lotus Notes for the first time, either as a result of David Allen's mention of Notes at the Office 2.0 Conference, a public GTD seminar, or podcast or as a result of learning about eProductivity. They usually contact me to ask if individuals can purchase Lotus Notes (yes) and if it is possible to evaluate Lotus Notes for free (yes).

Unfortunately, as many people have learned, the IBM web site can be an overwhelming experience for an individual user that simply wants to download and try or buy Lotus Notes. Here's some information which you may find helpful:

How to experience Lotus Notes for free:
You can evaluate Lotus Notes for free, with the Lotus Notes 90-day Test Drive.

Lotus Notes Product Manager, Dwight Morse, recently posted a detailed tutorial that explains how to use Lotus Notes to retrieve your personal email (e.g. from a hosted account.) Dwight provides detailed screen shots for each step. If you are a first-time user of Lotus Notes and you want to use Notes as your personal information management system, I think you will find this tutorial helpful.

When you are ready to purchase Lotus Notes:
1. Go to the Lotus Notes Product Page & click the green "View US prices & buy" button
2. Select "IBM Lotus Notes with Collaboration Authorized User License"

I hope this information is helpful.

Eric

Originally posted on eProductivity

Worldwide GTD Weekly Review Thursday - Don’t miss it

Eric Mack — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:20:56 -0700

In the fast pace of today's business world, we are pressed to do more with less, to track more things and, well, get things done. Unfortunately, it's easy to get overwhelmed, miss something, and have things fall through the cracks. When that happens, you lose control and perspective and this can have a draining impact on your personal productivity, causing unpleasant ripples in your personal and professional life.

The solution is to hold the world back once a week so that you can do a thorough review of everything that you have (or should have) attention on. David Allen calls this, the Weekly Review. By completing a thorough review, you will feel a greater sense of control and perspective throughout the week and when you do it consistently it will transform the way you get things done.

The Weekly Review Process. It is the critical success factor for people that want to get things done.

This Thursday, May 28th, GTD Coach and fellow eProductivity user Kelly Forrister is leading the first Worldwide GTD Weekly Review. Kelly will be using Twitter to coach a global audience through the Weekly Review process.

Here's how the Worldwide GTD Weekly Review will work:

On Thursday, May 28th from 10AM-11AM Pacific Time (check your local time), clear your schedule to do a GTD Weekly Review. Follow me @GTDCoachKelly, or follow the tag #Tweekly. I’ll walk everyone through the GTD Weekly Review checklist. We’ll have 5 minutes per step before moving on to the next one. Yes, 5 minutes. Idea is to get you through a taste of all of 11 steps. If you’re not done with a step, just bookmark your next actions list with what’s left and move on to the next one. I’ll Tweet the step and an explanation of what you can do. Or, if you are so inspired and getting good stuff out of the step you’re on, stay there. There’s no “should” here except to get whatever value you want to get out of it!

I encourage everyone to participate in the Worldwide GTD Weekly Review.

Notes users: I invite you to have a look at how David Allan and I manage our Weekly Review in Lotus Notes, While, you do not have to use Lotus Notes or eProductivity to do a successful Weekly Review, it just might be easier.

Bloggers/Twitterers: It would be great to have some people blog or tweet their experience doing a Weekly Review in Lotus Notes. It looks like Paul Gardner and Peter Simoons have already started. (If you would like your own license of eProductivity see here. I have three left.)

Originally posted on eProductivity

Using Lotus Notes to Read Personal Mail

Eric Mack — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:35:50 -0700

Lotus Notes Product Manager, Dwight Morse, has just posted a detailed tutorial that explains how to use Lotus Notes to retrieve your personal email (e.g. from a hosted account.) Dwight provides detailed screen shots for each step. If you are a first-time user of Lotus Notes and you want to use Notes as your personal information management system, I think you will find this tutorial helpful.

I'm pleased to see this tutorial. Many first-time users are installing Notes for themselves, either to get eProductivity or because they have learned that GTD Author, David Allen, uses Notes. Either way, these people need simple steps to find, download, install, and configure Notes. This is an area in which IBM has historically been light on information for the end-user.

Dwight's tutorial is a step in the right direction to making it easy for people to install and use what David Allen and I believe is an outstanding information management and self-organization tool.

I look forward to Dwight's future tips and I will blog about them as I see them.

Here's what's on my wish list for the future:

An equivalent tutorial for a first-time installation of Notes 8.x for Mac and PC. (Including how to locate, navigate to and download the software.)
Videos for each tutorial posted on YouTube to make it easy for people to find and get started

What first-time Notes user topics would YOU like to see IBM blog about?

Link: How to use Lotus Notes to retrieve your personal email
[Originally posted on the Notes on Productivity web site. (http://www.NotesOnProductivity.com)]

Originally posted on eProductivity

Lotus Notes, Personal Brain, and MindManager playing together

Eric Mack — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:03:19 -0700

I am about to begin a major research project - one that will require that I bring all of my PKM tools to bear for the next three months as I process hundreds of articles and thousands of other digital artifacts.

I will continue to make extensive use of three of my favorite tools for information and knowledge management:

Lotus Notes
Personal Brain
MindManager

The issue that I am thinking about is where I will use these tools and how. Each has its strengths. For this post, however, I want to focus on a more fundamental issue: organization and portability and I am reaching out to my readers to join the discussion.

For this project, I will need to integrate these tools more than I have in the past. Thankfully, I have the integration down quite well. Both teams at MindJet and The Brain have accommodated my request to integrate support for Lotus Notes Doclinks, which means that I can simply paste a Notes doclink into a MindManager map or a Personal Brain and have that become an active link or thought that will link back to the source in Notes. (A big shout out and thanks to both companies for listening to my passionate pleas and for looking at the source code I sent them to do the job. Both product work great with Notes.)

Now, I want to add two more factors into this equation:

External files stored in folders on the file system
The ability to sync my MindManager maps, brain, and external files between computers.

Doing either of the above is actually not difficult - I've been doing either one (at a time) for years. What gets tricky is that I now want to do both - Oh, and it has to work seamlessly and reliably.

So, let me restate my objective:

Objective: Seamless nonconcurrent use of Lotus Notes, Personal Brain & MindManager (with all related files in My Docs) between multiple computers.

We can leave Lotus Notes out of the equation because, well, it simply works. I want your help exploring the issue of file management under both Personal Brain and MindManager.

I would like your feedback on my current thinking:
1. I plan to create an "ICA" folder on the root of my computer. I will move all of my files into to a simple structure (probably 1-2 levels max) under C:\ICA
2. I will not store files in The Brain or MindManager. Instead, I will store all files in a simple folder structure (see #1) and keep relative links to these files in these applications.
3. I will use GoodSync to sync the C:\ICA directory between my Primary Laptop, my Tablet PC, and my backup server. This way, my Brain, my MindManager Maps and all external files that are linked to will be available on each machine.
(I will only use one at a time and I will be sure to exit The Brain before & sync and Move to the next PC. I know that there are other sync tools, e.g. SugarSync and I am not opposed to them; GoodSync has simply worked well for me for 5 years so I am in no rush to switch.)
The idea is that I will be able to pick up whichever computer I want and have full access to my Brain and my MindManager Maps as well as all of my files. I have done this seamlessly in Lotus Notes for 15+ years. Now, I want to do this with Personal Brain and MindManager as well.

My questions to you:

Q. Are there any tips or best practices (other than to be sure to fully exit the program before I sync files) that you can offer?

any best practices about file organization at the OS level? I prefix my files with a date YYYYMMDD and I go between organizing files by type, project, or purpose. With the Brain, I can transcend that. I hope.
any best practices about Personal Brain organization in this context?
any best practices about MindManager organization in this context?

Q. I may add a Mac to this mix at some point in the future. (Yes, Michael, I know; hard to believe, It could happen.) Lotus Notes is cross-platform;it simply works, doclinks and all. As far as Personal Brain or MindManager, Is there anything I should consider in terms of file organization in order to preserve links from within the Brain or MindManager to external files in folders? Ideally, I would want to preserve the same file linking ability cross-platform, or at least know what my limitations will be. has anyone actually done this? Will this even work? (Moving and storing my files into the Brain or MindManager is not an option for me.)

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Eric

Originally posted on eProductivity

Lotus Notes Sucks? Not so much (A happy ending)

Eric Mack — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:37:45 -0700

As a knowledge worker, part of working productively is having confidence in the tools that you use. For myself and David Allen, Lotus Notes is our productivity platform of choice and we can't help but share how we enjoy using it. Unfortunately, not everyone enjoys the same passion and vision for Lotus Notes as a powerful tool for knowledge work as we do. Sometimes, people even complain, blog, Tweet, or otherwise make it known that they are unhappy with Lotus Notes.

Fortunately, we have a strong Yellow community that helps one another. (more on that in a moment)

Today, Scott Hooks blogged about his insights helping people see Notes differently in his post: Lotus Notes Sucks? Not so much. His timing couldn't be better and I find it refreshing to see people reaching out to make a difference.

As a Chief Lotus Advocate, Scott makes it a point to find unhappy Notes users and offer to help them. Scott makes two observations that I want to point out:

Each time I spotted one [a complaint about Notes], I would reply to it and offer assistance if they would provide more detail. Most people didn't respond. My hypothesis is that most people don't want to have their minds changed about something they "like to dislike."

Like Scott, I've found that with a few minutes of discussion, I can often help people change their thinking about Notes.

Scott continues with his observation:

...However, most that did, quickly revealed that their complaints were not actually legitimate "suckage" of Lotus Notes, but rather poor implementation, poor management, or lack of training. Many were running 6.0, which is 6 or 7 years old now. Now wonder they're displeased.

This has been my experience as well. I have less of a problem with older versions of Notes as I do with the way I see many companies deploy the product - with little (or no) training or instruction in how to use it as a tool for personal productivity and collaboration. It's as if they somehow expect that collaboration will simply happen because they got the tool installed. No wonder they are disappointed. Fortunately, a discussion will usually do wonders there, too.

Thank you, Scott, for your post. (I would have left a comment, but they seem to be off.)

Now a Yellow Moment: Yesterday, Tamara, who self-installed Notes on her Mac and her PC, after learning about Lotus Notes at the GTD Summit, blogged about her frustration with Lotus Notes. I tweeted about it this morning. Within an hour I has emails from Jim Casale and Bill Malchisky offering to help. Then, I saw on Twitter that Chris Blatnick and others were responding, too. Apparently, Tamara's now overwhelmed with offers of assistance. How cool is that!

It's nice to see the Lotus Community pitch in and help a novice Notes user solve her issues.

Well done Yellowverse!

Originally posted on eProductivity

Work Smarter with Bob Picciano of IBM Lotus

Eric Mack — Tue, 12 May 2009 06:25:00 -0700

I was invited to participate in last week's blogger conference call with IBM Lotus General Manager Bob Picciano. The topic for the call was IBM's Smarter Work initiative. I was unable to attend the call due to a prior commitment (more on that later) but Nathan Freeman has done an extraordinary job of summarizing the call for our benefit.

I'm interested in seeing where the Smarter Work Initiative goes. I know that David Allen has offered to meet with Bob to discuss Smarter Work. I think it would be great to have IBM learn from someone that understands Smarter Work and who happens to be a Lotus fan.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you read Nathan's summary and listening to Bob's comment to Nathan.

Bruce asked Bob about Twitter. Apparently Bob does not follow Twitter but he does read lots of blogs. (Bob, sorry I missed the blogger conference call. No idea if I'm on the list of blogs you read, but I'd love to talk with you.)

If you have not already seen it, Bob had a great Op Ed piece at CIO com that is also worth reading.
[Originally posted on the Notes on Productivity web site. (http://www.NotesOnProductivity.com)]

Originally posted on eProductivity

Jens shares how he Gets Things Done with Lotus Notes

Eric Mack — Tue, 12 May 2009 06:15:00 -0700

Several bloggers have recently shared how they are using Lotus Notes as their system for Getting Things Done using David Allen's GTD Methodology. This weekend, Jens Bruntts wrote up an extensive blog post with screen shots detailing how he's using Lotus Notes and eProductivity as his GTD Solution. Not much I can add to this except that it was really neat to see eProductivity running under Linux (thanks to Lotus Notes cross-platform support). I'm aware that many people are using eProductivity on Mac and Linux but I have only seen a few screen shots.*

Read Jens post: eProductivity review part two: What is it?

* Yes, I'm a Mack and yes, I'm Mac challenged. But I did make sure that eProductivity would run cross-platform so that I can switch at any time. The hard part will be finding equivalents for GyroQ and ActiveWords.
[Originally posted on the Notes on Productivity web site. (http://www.NotesOnProductivity.com)]

Originally posted on eProductivity

David Allen greets attendees at Lotusphere Comes to You

Eric Mack — Mon, 4 May 2009 23:55:00 -0700

A few weeks ago, David Allen shared with me that he had been invited to introduce the Windsor Lotusphere Comes to You event, hosted by CastleBreck Inc., a Canadian Lotus Business partner. I encouraged him to accept the invitation. Last week, David greeted the Lotusphere Comes To You 2009 Windsor audience:

David makes the case for why tools like Lotus Notes are key to his personal and organizational productivity:

"You know, in order to get things done, we all need to collaborate, with ourselves as well as with others, so it's important to have great tools that help us manage our commitments and focus as well as supporting each other with communications, information, and our ability to stay consistent and current in our organizational focus. Lotus Notes really fills that bill."

David then goes on to share his experience using Notes and why he thinks its cool:

"I've been a Lotus Notes user and advocate for more than 15 years; my small company works in a highly lean and streamlined way and we just couldn't do that without the dozens of active shared Notes databases that help us run the business. Lotus Notes is also the key application I use for my own personal productivity. That's one of the coolest things, I've experienced as a business owner and Lotus Notes user, the huge power under the hood to customize and integrate it with critical best-practices."

It's refreshing for me to see business partners making the connection between Lotus Notes and Productivity and I love it when happy and productive Notes users share their experience about what works for them. (David isn't a paid spokesperson for IBM; just a happy Notes user.).

Listen to a recording of David's LCTY greeting

Aside from having one of my favorite business titles: "The Knights of Collaboration," it looks like CastleBreck is doing things right and from what I hear, this week's LCTY was a success.

To the Knights of Collaboration, I say, "Well Done!"

Originally posted on eProductivity

How to best serve Notes users switching from Outlook?

Eric Mack — Fri, 1 May 2009 00:09:00 -0700

I'm trying to figure out how to best serve our customers that are switching to Lotus Notes from Microsoft Outlook. When we launched eProductivity, we designed it to be the ultimate productivity application for Lotus Notes users. Our marketing plan didn't include getting people to switch to Lotus Notes from something else. Frankly, I didn't expect anyone would.

I was wrong.

We are learning that people are switching to Lotus Notes in order to use eProductivity, but many of these people have never used Lotus Notes before. The numbers are very small right now, but they are growing.

I should point out that these are individual users, not enterprise deployments. At least not yet. Typically, these are people that learn about David Allen's Getting Things Done� (GTD�) Methodology from a book, web site, seminar, or conference, get hooked on the idea of increasing personal productivity, learn that David Allen uses and recommends Lotus Notes and eProductivity. They then Google for these tools and install them.

Traditionally, Lotus Notes has not been been sold directly to end-users and an end-user wanting to get started or seeking answers can find it challenging, even though IBM has a huge collection of support material. Those that are successful in finding, buying, downloading, and installing Lotus Notes have no problem installing eProductivity, but I frequently hear of people having small questions or problems setting up POP3 or IMAP and Lotus Notes. While I'm thrilled that non-Notes users are finding value in the solution we have to offer, if someone switches to Lotus Notes from Outlook because of my product I want to do what I can to help ensure that their experience with Lotus Notes is a positive one.

I've always thought that Lotus Notes is the ultimate Information Manager, long before GTD and eProductivity came along. At present, Notes is positioned as a solution for IT and enterprises. What I'm seeing is interest from individuals. You can see the obvious gap. This gap represents an opportunity, if IBM can find ways to make this experience easier for new users.

Here's a Tweet thread from this afternoon, between @RapunzelMAP and @unconntam that illustrates this point:

@uconntam Excellent post Tam. I'm having almost same problem. I'm SO excited about eProductivity, everything I ever dreamed of however..
@uconntam I wasn't a Lotus Notes user before, but migrated especially to get 'eProductivity' but can't get Hotmail (POP3) into Lotus Notes..
@uconntam & until I do that, I can't really download the eproductivity template. :oS searched everywhere on the web but realised that..
@uconntam ..this is a bigger issue than I potentially thought. I KNOW that Outlook users etc would migrate [to Lotus Notes] to gain something like eproductivity!

And here's comment (#34) from Ed Brill's recent post: Doing Things Different:

I'm one of those tiny, unimportant, single license Notes users (both on Mac and PC) and I only got excited about Notes because of Eric Mack's eProductivity software. The combination of the two has completely obliterated any thoughts I might have about ever going back to Outlook, Apple Mail & OmniFocus.
My conversation with Eric Mack at the GTD Summit was the best [Lotus Notes] ad I could have ever heard. In 5 minutes, he dispelled every myth I'd had and corrected every wrong impression [about IBM Lotus Notes]...
However, I feel very much alone in the Lotusphere because I have had trouble getting the help I need when I get stuck. All the answers I find seem to come back to: talk to your system admin.(I am the SysAdmin! I don't have an IT department at home. Plus, none of it is Mac-specific.) That's not going to make me change back to my old system, but it has begun to affect my enthusiasm for a product I was completely enamored with about a month ago...

Ed quickly respond to the above post:

@34 Tam, Eric is right, we are not oriented enough to supporting individual end-users. I would like to be able to do something more like the Symphony part of our website (symphony.lotus.com) but we will take some time to get to that. My team is trying to make some short-term website adjustments to help you and others like you.

This is encouraging. I should also add that last week I had an encouraging discussion with Michael Masterson of IBM Lotus about this and I'm hopeful that his tweet will come true and that he will make it easier for individuals to purchase, download, and install Lotus Notes. But that's only part of the challenge. Since Notes has historically been an enterprise application there are virtually no end-user focused communities for end-users of Lotus Notes that I am aware of (other than our Notes on Productivity forums which are not very active at this time).

I'm delighted to read Ed's response and I believe IBM will adapt, but I don't know how long that will take. I'm not sure what I'm asking here, but I thought I would share the above and then put these two questions to the community to discuss:

1. What does this mean for IBM? Is it a good thing that individuals want to purchase and install Lotus Notes for personal use instead of Outlook, Entourage, or another app? Or, should IBM stay the course and focus on selling to the enterprise and SMB market?

2. What can we in the yellow community do help these people get started? What resources (blogs, web sites, etc.) can we point them to?

Update: Independent from my writing this post, I received a few emails today from people offering ideas. I have written to them to ask them to post their thoughts here or to give me permission to do so.

Originally posted on eProductivity

16 years later, Lotus Notes keeps on ticking...

Eric Mack — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:36:00 -0700

Today, I needed to access some information stored a long time ago. A quick search of my system found it -- in a Notes database that I created in 1993. I was able to open the database and access the information easily, even though the database and data were created almost 16 years ago. How many products and data files can your current systems read from that long ago?

I started thinking about how many personal computers I have owned in that time and it has to be close to 20, covering the following operating systems:

OS/2
Windows 3.1
Windows For Workgroups 3.11
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows NT
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista

I have used this same Notes database, with few changes on each of these systems. Oh, and there was no data conversion or migration. (Unless you call replicating a Notes database to a new machine a migration.) For people in the yellow bubble this is nothing new. For people working with other products and platforms this may be a novel concept.

What brought all of this up is the fact that I'm writing a paper on enterprise content management and I have been reading about the nightmares of managing and migrating content. For the most part, this has simply not been an issue. That's productive!
[Originally posted on the Notes on Productivity web site. (http://www.NotesOnProductivity.com)]

Originally posted on eProductivity

8 Ways To Make Your Twitter Time More Productive

Eric Mack — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:31:54 -0700

If Twitter is becoming a part of your daily social networking activities, then there is much that you can do to tweet productively.

Shimon Sander offers these 8 tips:

Centralized Dashboard
Automate
Interaction
Retweet
Seek & Follow
Share Original Thoughts
Quotes from other people
Answer Questions:

The full article is on Shimon Sandler's blog
[Originally posted on the Notes on Productivity web site. (http://www.NotesOnProductivity.com)]

Originally posted on eProductivity