The TechCurrents Podcast

So, Ed Brill is an exec over at IBM who really has responsibility for Notes/Domino sales.  His blog is actually really good because in addition to talking about what’s going on at IBM, he uses it as a personal travel log and Ed does more than his fair share of traveling.  I like reading Ed’s entries because in addition to the interesting places that Ed gets to see and people he gets to meet, I get to read about his perspective on Notes/Domino and lets be honest, each of us is skewed in some way around our own bias’s.  In this case Technological bias’s around collaboration tools.  As it turns out, we both agree to post our pics up on Flickr so realistically its possible to agree on something even when you can be diametrically opposed on others.

So, with that said, he had a post this evening that I thought was interesting and I’m linking to it here Ed Brill .  The post is about an organization in Australia that chose to remain on the IBM collaboration platform rather than move to a Microsoft platform.  What’s interesting (and I don’t know the specifics about this particular situation) is that Ed takes the opportunity to parlay this by saying "In many of these "defend" situations, customers end up considering a broader scope of IBM Lotus software, and this has given us many opportunities to beat Microsoft both in the Notes/Domino space as well as with Quickr, Connections, and Sametime.  One thing I’m proud of as a sales manager is that our team is very, very good at turning defense into offense." 

Now, again, I suppose that in some cases this might be true, but I think that to use the word MANY in that sentence is probably an overstatement (in all fairness though as sales people, that’s what we do).  In my ‘limited’ experience, I would say that generally what has happened is that the customers who have chosen to remain on the existing platform have done so, not because of the "broader scope of IBM Lotus software", but rather because what Notes/Domino has been exceptionally good at is creating an environment where application creation is ‘viral’ and customers wind up with such an embedded investment that it becomes cost prohibitive to try and migrate.  This assuming that a customer actually has the funding to pay for an assessment of the sheer volume of Notes applications that may exist to understand what the impact of a migration could be.  Make no mistake, when considering a move from Notes to ANYTHING, it is NOT about email. That is the biggest mistake that anyone can make in considering changes in technology of this kind.  Folks SAY that its Exchange vs Notes, but lets not kid ourselves.  If it were just about email, this wouldn’t be such a hard conversation.  Its not about email, or instant messaging, or collaboration (that’s another favorite word to throw around in those discussions).  It becomes about how tough it would be to replatform the entire user community and how many applications are simply tied to Notes.

Long and the short of it, customers lock themselves in and make it cost prohibitive to leave the technology.  This despite the evidence that some of the technological solutions that Ed refers to (such as Sametime) are inferior to what is being developed by other technology competitors.  The solutions are good, but I wouldn’t say that they are necessarily winning based on the overall technological merit of the solutions.  Realistically, they are winning sometimes in the same manner that Microsoft does,  "If we are going to stay on Notes, then we should probably use Sametime because it integrates better with Notes".  Its not a bad argument, however, it is one that IBM has worked hard at competing against when working with a Microsoft based incumbent environment.  I would put the IBM folks on notice now that the "Sametime integrates better" argument is on borrowed time.  Check out the innovation going on by downloading the add-in for Notes here and see how it is explained by and OCS MVP here.

So welcome to Q4 on the sales team….. I have been in my position now for just a little over a year, but its my first full year on the team and my first REAL Q4 on this side of the business.  After spending 11 years as a technical resource who wasn’t paid based on what I sold (for the most part), Q4 was pretty much a non-event.  Now, I don’t know where I will get 5 minutes to myself.  Its a non-stop flurry of emails and phone calls and IMs that escalate to phone calls (thank god I sell this nifty Unified Communications technology).  All because I’m hoping to sneak just a couple of deals in before the end of the year. 

On top of all of this, I can’t believe that it is already May.  It has been just under a year since I tore up my knee.  It was Memorial Day weekend last year.  Where the hell has the time gone.  I suppose spending all of last summer in a chair didn’t really help me much since by the time I was walking, the summer was over.  Nevertheless, it goes fast.  This summer will most certainly be different.  We have an unbelievable amount of stuff planned and we have to plan a trip to LA so my wife and I can visit the set of MONK and meet the cast.  A little something that we bid on at the auction for my daughter’s school.  Crazy!!!

PICTURES

I realized looking at my site, that I haven’t posted pics in a long time.  I’ll have to update that as well. 

POLITICS

Once I can catch my breath long enough to string together something coherent, I’ll put some postings up regarding the state of politics in my mind.  Last time I posted anything on the topic it was about how our good govenernor (Jon Corzine) was looking to go ahead and take yet MORE money from the good residents of NJ.  Its amazing that in the state with the highest property taxes in the country that we continue to see our taxes go up and the state government do NOTHING to cut REAL spending.  Sure, they will close the state parks etc, but do NOTHING about the abuses that the BLOATED workforce they have in Trenton are perpetrating on the citizens of the state.  Actually, it is a little unfair to blame the state workers for this.  The reality is that it simple is the apathy of the NJ Voter that has put us in this position.  If the voters would take back their state and send a message to Trenton that we will not continue to take this, then perhaps we would get the change we need.

I digress, I have work to get back to.  With that said, check out the new Zune 2.5 software.  The Zune team continues to do good work and listens to the users to provide real quality updates.

TTFN

Only too often you will only hear about a company when someone has something to complain about.  I am as guilty as anyone of that.  I only seem to write about NJ when I have a complaint.  Nevertheless, In this posting, I thought I would tip my firefighting helmet to the folks at TechTrade for the Pro-tech 8 structural firefighting gloves and their customer service in particular. 

The Pro-tech 8 gloves are remarkable because of the level of dexterity they provide right out of the bag brand new.  For those who aren’t familiar, structural firefighters have to wear a tremendous amount of turnout gear.  this includes a coat, pants, boots, hood, helmet and gloves.  All of this gear together is required to attempt to provide a safe protective barrier around the firefighter to prevent burns.  Any deviation from the standard around the manufacturing of the gear or the donning of the gear by the firefighter can result in injury or something more serious because of the nature of the job.  With that said, the gear is HEAVY and is very difficult to move around in. Since becoming a volunteer in 2002, I always found that gloves were always the biggest problem for me. Either:

1. The gloves are so thick that it is nearly impossible to move my fingers in them and/or
2. They have poor stitching in the areas that get the most use (such as between the thumb and forefinger) and usually result in a tear in the seam right at that point. 

I myself have gone through at least 3 pairs of gloves in the almost 6 years I’ve been doing this.  This past winter, my 3rd pair now ruined, I needed to invest in a pair of gloves for myself because the department was in an evaluation stage with a number of gloves and wouldn’t have a decision in time for me.  One of my colleagues turned me on to the Pro-Tech 8.

They are REMARKABLE.  What makes them so remarkable is that despite conforming to the necessary standards for structural firefighting, I can conceivably operate my Xbox controller with these gloves.  They are that flexible.  With many types of hide based gloves for firefighting, they are very stiff.  Not these and they have the appropriate barriers to protect my hands (which are EXTREMELY important to my livelihood) from heat, puncturing, and liquid.

Unfortunately, less than a month after I obtained the gloves, I was involved in a forcible entry with a door that had some plate glass in it.   I wound up damaging my gloves. However, I myself was not injured at all.  The gloves protected me as designed, but what to do.  I needed yet another set of gloves.  It was then I reached out to the Tech-Trade folks about what happened with my gloves. 

Andy Shapiro and the team not only responded in quick fashion to my requests, but sent me a pair of the NEW TITAN model gloves, as opposed to simply replacing my gloves with the same model that I had purchased back in January.  This is remarkable customer service and they were sensitive to the obstacles that I have to deal with both as a firefighter and a volunteer.

That kind of customer support is not something you come across every day, so I feel that I need to say something, whether I get the kind of traffic that I would like to or not.

Thank you Tech-Trade, for your customer service as well as the effort that you put forth to come up with a glove that is as functional as the Pro-tech8.

Best of luck in 2008.

Sam

This past spring I moved out of my consulting role and into a role in our sales organization.  One of the lessons that I’ve learned (and I believe the company I work for has been learning) is that the sooner you can communicate potential issues to your customers/constituents, the better.

If you know that there is a potential critical bug in an application, it is better to notify your customer so they can plan because if they find out about it the hard way, satisfaction will ultimately be sacrificed.

With that said, you can imagine the shock of the travelers going through Terminal C of Newark Liberty International Airport on Monday, when we arrived to discover lines at the security checkpoint that resembled the lines from Six Flags Great Adventure on the 4th of July (or Disney on New Years Eve if you like).  It was crazy and tempers/blood pressures were rising and the root cause of that came from the lack of communications around the fact that an entire security checkpoint in Terminal C was closed.  As a result, the traffic that would have gone through that checkpoint are now distributed across the other 2 checkpoints causing (specifically on the first real work monday after the New Year’s holiday) a critical mass of people that the lines were not designed to handle.

Now, let me take the opportunity to commend the PEOPLE who work at Newark that were tasked with trying to manage this crazy situation.  they did a commendable job of keeping the lines moving, however, either Airport Management or the TSA or both should be flamed for not communicating this coming construction anywhere that is easy to find (I’m assuming there is a communication somewhere, but I have been searching the Port Authority of NY/NJ website as well as the TSA website and haven’t found it yet) so that travelers can plan.  Additionally, it would be prudent for them to communicate how long the construction will be going on.  I had to ASK someone about the lines to find out that the situation around checkpoint closures would be going on through April.  Since I will be traveling with my family several more times between now and April, that is incredibly important information that should be in a place that is easy to find.

Shame on them.  As you can imagine, as I waited in the line on Monday 1/7, you can imagine I was asking how this could be and there not be ANY communication.  I hope someone out there will be fixing that because the TSA security checkpoint site did not reflect the reality when I checked in on 1/7 (while I was waiting on the lightning loops line at EWR.

So, not too terribly long ago, I attempted to use an early beta of the Windows Live Writer.  At the time it was still a pretty early build so it didn’t really work all that well with the Spaces service, but in all fairness, this was before the Spaces services was migrated to Live.  I’ve been using Word 2007 Beta for some offline blogging against Spaces and I was happy with it, but recently, I have been encouraged to take another look at the Live Writer Beta.  Holy Crap!  Now I can’t speak for its integration with other Blogging sites and technologies, but in all serousness:

IF YOU USE SPACES AND DO NOT GIVE LIVE WRITER A TRY, YOU ARE AN IDIOT!

Seriously, this has to be the best tool I’ve seen Microsoft release in Beta in a long time.  What do I mean, well, aside from the fact that I can offline blog and the tool has already downloaded the information about my blog’s format, theme and style for posting.  In otherwords, the graphics for the theme of the tropical paradise that I have selected show up inside the tool as part of it.  The different types of text that are used in the blog have been detected and thus are automatically used when I’m blogging.  The format doesn’t need to be changed at all. Finally, built into the tool is the easy ability to add photos or Windows Live Maps.  So if I wanted to show you where I spent the 2 weeks I was on vacation, I could show you one map of Southern Shores, NC (we were in a house on the ocean side)

and I could show you an overhead of the Galleon in Key West, FL (I included another pushpin where you can find the Blond Giraffe Key Lime Pie store on Front Street in Key West).

This is simply the most useful and functional beta that I’ve seen in a long time. 

So you should be thinking to yourself, ‘so where do I get this great tool?’.  That’s easy enough, the Windows Live Writer team has their own ‘space’ on Spaces here The Windows Live Writer team.  Give the tool a try, you have nothing to lose.  Really.  I pick this over the new functionality in Word 2007 anytime.  One reason in particular is the extensibility of this tool.  There are currently, 3 add-ins already that include a plug-in that allows you to browse a Flickr repository to attach an image from Flickr to a blog post.  Too cool.  I’m hoping something this functional might actually encourage me to include more posts to this site.  That would be terrific since that was the point of doing this ot begin with.  Anyway, sounds like the baby is stirring so I should get going.  I’m on call to do all the feedings tonight.

So, I’m testing the email publishing capabilities of my spaces site.  Its pretty exciting and I dig it, but I’m having some problems with adding photo albums to the site.  For some reason, it appears that the photo upload control doesn’t seem to interact too well with Vista and IE 7.  I tried to send a problem ticket to support, but for some reason the browser form didn’t appear to work right with IE7 either.  *sigh*.

Nevertheless, I’ve been away on vacation the last couple of weeks.  Last week was my first week back and I had to get back to work.  I’m still working, but I have started to go through my pictures to share some of them here, not to mention no our shutterfly site.  Anyway, I had an opportunity to catch an offshore storm while we were out in Key West.  Florida is great for these kinds of storms and if you have the patience and some luck, you might get a decent shot.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a tripod and the best luck.  Included is a shot that I managed to capture of the lightning up in the clouds, but this was the best shot I was able to manage.  Better luck next time, right 🙂

So as I continue to re-discover my passion for technology and the company I work for, I’ve recently started playing with some of the new functionality in the upcoming release of Office 2007. There is a public beta for this product available. I’m running my version on top of a pre-release of our upcoming Vista operating system. There have been numerous reports in the press about a lot of different things regarding Vista. What I can tell you anecdotally is that my experience with Vista has been awesome. While the new UI will require some getting used to, it doesn’t take long. The Aero glass will truly be slick for folks who have the graphics horsepower and it will be much simpler to use. File system hierarchies currently in place make more sense. You don’t have to find ‘my pictures’ under ‘my documents’ anymore. Nice. Don’t get me wrong, there are still issues with the code. Its still pre-release code which means that performance is less than stellar. That and my machine (a 2+ year old M200 TabletPC) is slightly underpowered to really recognize the true benefits of Vista at this point. Its good enough for me to show off to my customers though and the fact that it is hosting a much more stable build of Office 2007 makes it impressive overall.

For those who have been living in a cave, Microsoft Office is in for a major facelift as well. The traditional menu structure that we have come to expect is no longer there. Instead, a much more functional "ribbon" is there. You get instantaneous feedback for the changes that you wish to apply to your documents and it centers much more around tasks as opposed to menu related items. Customers have voiced concerns over the costs that will be associated with training their users to the new interface, but I currently vote to let them just figure it out. Realistically, I’m not an Office power user by any stretch of the imagination, but realistically, I’ve found that I have an easier time getting what I need to done with the new interface. It just took once or twice to figure out where the button I was looking for was now placed.

Outlook 2007 didn’t get the interface overhaul that some of the other applications received, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t get some enhancements. The capabilities of Outlook 2007 are really terrific including new search, an integrated taskpane including calendar info, and terrific RSS integration.

Overall, this is a lot to get excited about. When you add things like the improvements that we are making for home and entertainment devices, mobile devices, Zune and more, we are going to be in really good shape. As I said, I cannot remember the last time I was this excited.