Twelve hours into the Lotus Knows IdeaJam we have the following stats:



There are some truly amazing ideas and discussions going on in the jam and it's really cool to see so many IBM'ers participating. Two more days to go!

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From Safari on your iPhone or iPod touch navigate to http://lki.ideajam.net to access ideas, comments and votes in the Lotus Knows IdeaJam. A full text search is also provided.



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Matt pointed out to me this morning that the Lotus Knows IdeaJam is on the home page of www.lotus.com



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John Roling writes about the launch of the Lotus Knows campaign on Intranet Journal:

In the next few months, you'll be seeing a lot more from the IBM Lotus Marketing department. Yes, I did say Lotus and marketing in the same sentence.

One of the complaints that the Lotus community has had for a long time has been the lack of any real marketing voice, or campaign touting Lotus products and capabilities. For years, people using Lotus for their collaboration infrastructure have had to endure management and end users asking about Microsoft products due to their relentless marketing efforts. Well, Lotus is finally about to fight back with its Lotus Knows campaign.

Yesterday both Ed Brill and Bilal Jaffrey blogged about the upcoming "Lotus Knows IdeaJam" starting August 19th. I suspect that many of you will be participating in this IdeaJam which is very cool.

What you should really be doing is sending the Lotus Knows IdeaJam registration info to your customers, co-workers, employees and others who may have some feedback. So please help IBM Lotus by spreading the word about the IdeaJam starting next week.

Please have them read Ed and Bilal's posts or they can register for the IdeaJam here. The IdeaJam will open up on Wednesday, August 19th at 8:00AM ET.

Oh and since you asked people already registered on IdeaJam.net do not to re-register for the Lotus Knows IdeaJam..

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After months of a podcasting hiatus The 1352 Report is back with Episode 12 whereJess, Sean, Carl and I talk about iPhones, Lotus Knows, Foundations Reach, Tivoli Foundations and a talk with our special guest David Leedy of the "Notes in Nine" screencast. Oh, and please mind the crickets.

More >

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To view the ideas on the Lotus Knows IdeaJam that have the most comments, go to the All Ideas Theme and click on the Most Comments link to the right of the Popular ideas view. To see the ideas in a particular Theme with the most comments first select the Theme and then click on "Most Comments".

There are some ideas with over 30+ comments. You all be jammin!

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Yes it's true that IBM Lotus is partnering with Elguji Software, LLC to bring Lotus customers, Business Partners and customers a 72 hour "Lotus Knows Jam" using Elguji's flagship IdeaJam product. Participants in the jam will be able to use their IdeaJam.net usernames and passwords. Elguji has been working closely over the last couple of weeks with IBM'ers setting up the Jam logistics and we are all looking forward to hearing the many great ideas that you all have.

Elguji's Domino ISP of choice Prominic will be hosting the Jam on their servers. Stay tuned for more information.

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David Allen the world recognized productivity expert and creator of the Getting Things Done methodolgy and has joined the discussions going on at the Lotus Knows IdeaJam. Of particular interest is this comment he left on this idea:

Lotus needs to be very careful not to make the mistake Outlook and others have made, once a company "gets" that email is something to be managed - over-structuring and feature-creeping. What passes for "organization" for most people is rearranging incomplete piles of still-unclear things. Being organized simply means that where something is matches what it means; so deciding what it "means" is the critical prior step. GTD emerged from my research about what specifically needs to be decided about something before you'll know what to do with it (e.g. is there an action tied to this, or not?) Few software applications support that kind of executive decision-making; and without it, none of the additional gizmos will work.

We are currently preparing some very cool adverts and literature for some upcoming events and needed to know what the exact Lotus "yellow" color was for our Photoshop and Illustrator work. Well here is the lowdown:

PMS - 116 coated, 115 uncoated
CMYK - C0 M18 Y100 K0
RGB - R255 G204 B0
WEB - FFCC00

Well there you have it. Many thanks to David Hsu of IBM for this information. I am not quite sure if this is the "goldenrod" color that is used in the new Lotus Knows ads or not but, I simply wanted to pass on the color info.

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Over the past two months Gayle and I have traveled to Boston, Edinburgh, London and we are off to New York City in less than a week. Let me walk you through our journey.

In Boston we attended the Lotus Leadership Alliance as a member of the Business Partner Advisory Council. At LoLA we met Elguji customers, demonstrated IdeaJam, IQJam and LinkJam to Lotus executives and customers, participated in chalkboard sessions, attended several product briefings and attended breakout sessions. Of particular fun was filming video footage covering Elguji, the Taking Notes podcast and OpenNTF for the Lotus Knows campaign. It's been a few years since I did any video shots and I forgot that striped shirts don't work well when being filmed. The video team was prepared and had a perfect fitting dress shirt ready and waiting for me. We also spent some quality time with many Lotus BP's including Mike Smith from the Turtle Partnership, Lance Spellman from Workflow Studios, Darren and Lisa Duke from STS, Paul Mooney and Harry Dunn from Bluewave, Julian Robichaux from SNAPPS and many others.

One of my personal highlights from the trip was finally getting to meet David Hsu, Jeane Staten and Colleen Hayes from the IBM PR team. Elguji worked with David, Jean and Colleen on the Lotus Knows IdeaJam. Here's a picture of Daivd and I which I display proudly in my office.



We also had a chance to have dinner and share laughs with our good friend Erica Topolksi of Lotus PR fame.

Oh and how can I forget..... I got to sit in the drivers seat of the Lotus Knows bus:



October started off with the UKLUG in Edinburgh, Scotland and I have to say that this is one of the best Lotus conferences around on all fronts. Speakers, vendors, organizers, attendees - all, totally top-shelf. Elguji was a spnsor of the event and had a blast demoing IQJam, IdeaJam and LinkJam. Some sessions of note included "Mr. XPages" himself - Matt White's session on XPage design patterns. Matt knocked it ouf the park and delivered and A+ session. Unfortunately, I had to sit next to Steve Castledine and have this facing staring at me for an hour:



Other sessions of note were the Flex and JQuery session by Ben Poole and Mark Myers, The Hairy Bikers session given by Bill Buchan and Steve McDonagh as well as Julian Robichaux's "Free Your Data!" session. Again, all of the speakers were all fantastic. UKLUG was also allowed me to meet many faces that I have only known through the interwebs - most notably Jeff Gilfelt, Paul Westlake and Phil Warner".

Gayle was able to perfect her Scottish dancing on Thursday night as you can see in the photo below:



We spent the rest of the trip sightseeing Edinburgh before heading down to London with Matt White and Bill Malchisky via rail. Gayle and I both wish that we could have spent more time in Edinburgh as it's truly a beautiful city.

We had the pleasure of spending 3-1/2 days in London. Matt was an excellent host and ensured that we saw as much of London as one could see in the short time we had. As I mentioned earlier we had a chance to spend a few hours with an Elguji business partner who uses IdeaJam as part of their innovation consultancy. Matt also arranged a "Lotus Beers" event on Monday evening where we got to have a couple of pints with Roy Holder, Ben Poole, Bill Malchisky, Paul Westlake and others. And of course getting to see a good friend and my Dutch "brother" Vince Schurrman was also a highlight.

Next weekend we are off to New York City where I will be speaking at the Tri-State Lotus User Group and giving a presentation that Steve Castledine and Vince Schuurman delivered at UKLUG and NLLUG. The presentation is entitled "OpenNTF - The Lotus Notes and Domino Open Source Organization". Earlier today I ran through the presentation with Vince over Skype and it should be an excellent session. Lots of good things to talk about.

On the Elguji Software front there is nothing but good and productive things happening. IdeaJam and LinkJam continue to sell very well, feedback from customers is extremely positive. We continue to make inroads into non Lotus shops through our Software-as-a-Service offerings. IQJam which will be commercially available on Tuesday, November 10th has pre-sold very well. If you have not yet seen IQJam in action go have a look here. The team is currently planning for Lotusphere 2010 where Elguji will be participating in the product showcase at booth 622. We may also have a few surprise announcements for you. Gayle also has put together some excellent customer case studies which she will be making available on the Elguji website shortly.

Julian and I were finally able to record episode 100 of the Taking Notes podcast where we got to interview some of the XPages experts including Declan Lynch, Matt White and Peter Presnell. Many thanks to our friends who sent in the audio clips you hear at the beginning of the show. Planning for future episodes is also under way and include topics such as the new Lotus Symphony API with John Di Gorgio from Integra4Notes, a fireside chat with Julian and myself and a show with some of the IBM developers working on the XPages technology inside of Domino. Many thanks to all of you for tuning in and listening. The download stats say it all.

The XPages Blog has really taken off in a very short amount of time. This would not have been possible without dedicated people like Jeremy Hodge, David Leedy, Julian Buss, Paul Hannan, Declan Lynch, Paul Calhoun, Matt White, John Mackey and Peter Presnell. These guys are truly the XPages experts and have shared some really great content.

That's it for now as it's time to go hand out some candy to the neighborhood kids.

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If you have not yet read Chris Toohey's "Yes, we *do* need a Lotus App Store" blog post please go read it now. Please also be sure to and read the other blog post Chris links to in his blog "Say it with me: App Stores define the product!". Oh yeah Bill Buchan has also written about this idea "Lets create a Lotus Domino AppStore". Chris Miller and company have also announced their AppCentrist website/appstore. Now that you have read some of the others thoughts here are mine.

First the app stores that I have worked with include Salesforce.com's AppExchange and the Apple App Store. I have never purchased an app from the Salesforce.com App Exchange however I have downloaded and installed "test drive" apps in my developer instance. After test driving the apps I never purchased them,  primarly because I was unable to get them to work correctly. Removing the apps was quite simple as I can simply go to the installed apps section of Salesforce.com and nuke them. Pufff.....gone. The apps were also highly constrained as to not let developers get their hands on the underlying code. While my hopes were high for the entire AppExchange experience, I always come away dissapointed.

While end-users can explore the AppExchange they are unable to install anything into the Salesforce instance they are using as that is managed by an administrator. Yes I am one of the administrators for a large manufacturing company with hundreds of users and not once has a user come to me suggesting we purchase an app from the Salesforce App Exchange. Again, the AppExchange is clearly in their face all of the time due to the highly skilled Salesforce.com master marketing department.

The Apple App Store for the iPhone/iPod touch is something as an individual that I use a lot. Most apps that I do download are free and others are $2-$5. The paid for apps include a Google Analytics app, Super Monkey Ball, Tweetie and the Mac OS Ken podcast app. Most of the free apps are from companies like Facebook, Starbucks, ZipCar, Yelp and of course the obligatory flashlight app. Also, I don't mind risking a few dollars on app that may or not be good. I consider my phone a "personal" piece of technology that I have 100% control over.

Now let's talk about Notes and Domino and more specifically Notes first. Notes clients are typically centrally managed and controlled by an IT departments. Now let's say there was a Lotus app store that could be optionally placed in the menu or sidebar. OK it's there and the XYZ Company with their 55,000 Notes seats allows their staff to download and install 3rd party Notes apps. First who is going to pay for these apps on the corporaate Notes clients? If I pay $5 bucks and install one of these apps on my system who is going to support it? Do I call the IT department or do I call the vendor. Do I even get support with the vendor for a $5 app? What if the app screws up my corporate Notes client? Now of course the opposite would hold true for companies that don't manage their Notes clients and allow the end-user to do whatever they want. I haven't even touched on the port 1352 firewall issues that may exist.

Domino apps like IdeaJam, IQJam and LinkJam I can't see ever being able to purchase/deploy via an appstore. Possibly remote Domino apps with Lotus Foundations like Bob Baehr has blogged about in the past but I would have to see this in action first. For a hosted solution with Elguji sure: been there, done that.

So what does Bruce think can work and should be done by IBM? Just what they are doing - developing a new Product Catalog which they are currently doing and continue to invest in the Lotus Knows air-cover campaign.

In a few days please go back to the posts linked above and see what others are saying in response to the blog posts. I wish I had more time to tell you some more of my thoughts on this but not enough time in the day.

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