How Lotus Notes Changed the Collaboration Landscape

http://readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/09/sheldon-laube.php

I was part of the early days of Lotus Notes (1989-1996) while at Price Waterhouse.  I worked with Sheldon and his team and then later worked for him at a start-up.  There is a great podcast interview with Sheldon Laube linked to from this article, it is very relevant to the conversation today around enterprise collaboration and social interaction.

Enterprise Collaboration/social interaction is almost a back to the future moment.  We had it with Lotus Notes and now people are starting to recognize again the power of collaboration.

LotusLive

IBM has annoucned LotusLive, its answer to collaboration in the cloud.  This is what IBM has been calling Bluehouse.

On paper LotusLive looks interesting.  Can they pull all these disparate technologies together into something that provides seemless powerful user experience?  I think we will have to wait and see.

Is Lotus Notes Still Relevant?

I've been catching up with my reading and came across this item on Lotus Notes at TechCrunch.  It really was a fair treatment of Lotus Notes.

As an early adopter, implementer, evangelist, consultant, author and builder of Notes applications I've always been a bit partial to it.  I believe that even today it is a fundamentally better platform than Microsoft Exchange (it takes more than Exchange/Outlook to equal Notes built-in capabilities). 

What Lotus/IBM failed to do was understand that an intuitive User Interface is key to keeping the users happy.  We can't forget that command and control IT management also had a hand in diminishing the users perception of Notes.

In the early days of Notes users were actually allowed to build their own applications; that was before IT management decided that users were mucking up their stuff.  Well, here we are in the Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media era and the users don't know how powerful Notes is and how it can do most everything they want in 2.0/Social Media. 

IBM has updated the UI in version 8.0, but will users be handed back the keys and allowed to use the tool to its fullest potential?