So I woke up this morning with a slew of blog comments, emails, and instant messages to read. The content varies but it seems what I wrote caused people to react - some negative, some positive. I know Ed blogged in response to what I wrote - and I will get to that in a moment. First, thanks for the feedback. 99% of it has been constructive, even if you did not agree with what I wrote. I LOVE when people disagree with me, even passionately. But you have to, in the worlds of Rob McDonagh, "be constructive and polite". I am not always right and like to learn from my actions. So thanks again. Second, I want to publically separate my comments from yesterday when it comes to the technical aspect vs the marketing, sales, and competitive side of Lotus Notes & Domino teams. Brent Peters commented yesterday about the technical state of the Notes & Domino product line - and I agree 1000000% with Brent. I think the state of the core Notes & Domino products are in the best shape in ma

After almost a year of waiting, Microsoft released the 2007 Office System Service Pack 2 today, which includes Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1 support in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Here is the details: Save as ODF 1.1 for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Save as PDF and XPS File format converter API Charting Object Model for Word and PowerPoint Cryptographic Agility Outlook Performance Office Service Pack Uninstall Tool Other enhancements of possible significance: SmartArt® Graphics & Charting Better rendering performance Better printing fidelity Fixes issues in the object model to achieve better parity with Office 2003 Improves the Edit Points feature. This enables more accurate shape editing and increased interoperability with Office 2003 Microsoft Office Access Lets you export reports to Microsoft Office Excel Fixes issues that occur in the import data wizards, Fixes issues in report printing and previewing Fixes issues in macros, in Excel integration, and in date fi

I have learned a life lesson over the years - change is not only good, but sometimes required. For example, I have a friend who lives near the Mississippi River. Every couple of years, the coming of Spring brings flooding to his city. The spring rain storms and the melting of the snow north of them in Canada and the US sends more water into the river than it can normally contain. Every couple of years, his city would call out for help to make sandbags and battle the rising waters of the river. Some years they won the battle, some years the flooding would damage the town. Everyone had insurance, but the costs went up. Some folks got a bit creative with barriers and other methods of keeping the water from getting into their homes. Others bought boats and rafts so they could navigate the waters when they covered the streets. This went on for years until someone got an idea. Why can't we move the river? Well - this is the Mississippi - you don't just move a river like that. So they mov

Most people know that here at PSC, we do far more than just IBM Software consulting. We have a Microsoft practice and we also have an Open Source Practice. The PSC Open site aggregates the Open Source team's blogs, twitter, and Del.icio.us information. In 2009, I firmly believe that Success Stories that demonstrate true value and Return on Investment (ROI) are the key to generating new business - far more than any time prior. The site also highlights a few of our success stories around Open Source solutions in the enterprise. The PSC Open Source Practice has expertise in many areas. Here is a slide covering many of them: One of the things this team is doing that really excites me is iPhone development of custom applications. We will be launching our first iPhone app for a trusted partner of ours very shortly. Helping organizations build iPhone apps is something we see as a huge potential market in 2009. If you are interesting in discussing how the PSC Open Source Pract

Ed brings us news about the Lotus ExpertBriefing on Lotus Symphony from IBM Software Services. There is a podcast and a transcript pdf you can download that covers topics such as: What is Lotus Symphony and how does it fit into a set of tools? Open source movement - Is it safe to be moving in this direction for an organization? How does Lotus Symphony compare to Microsoft products? Who should use Lotus Symphony? What additional functionality or benefits does Lotus Symphony have beyond Microsoft's suite? What is our roadmap, long-term viability of Lotus Symphony? What do I do about technical support, what’s the best method for coexistence, what do I do about security and stability? If you are looking for a more in depth briefing for your company about Lotus Symphony, PSC has a Lotus Symphony JumpStart offering. Over two days, we do a briefing around executive, user, administration, development, and migration topics. At the end of the two days, your company will have an idea of the le

Mikkel Heisterberg brings us news of an IBM White Paper that provides (from the IBM position) a comparison of Lotus Symphony, Microsoft Office, and OpenOffice.org. You can get it here (once signing in to the IBM website). Thanks for the heads up Mikkel!

Sorry for the past couple of weeks where Symphony Thursday went dark. My travel schedule got the best of me. So I am taking full opportunity of some down time this week to get a bunch of articles written for the next month. Some other pieces of news that go along with Symphony Thursday: 1. I have created the twitter account SymphonyThurs. That should have all of the Symphony blog topics I post on there later today. I am looking for ways to make that the defacto Symphony twitter account going forward. More to come there. 2. I will have a dedicated RSS feed for Symphony Thursday soon! I am getting ready to talk all about Lotus Symphony 1.3 and the long awaiting Symphony LSX that brings LotusScript and Java support to Domino Designer for automating Lotus Symphony. I should have complete overviews and detailed examples using the LSX when 1.3 ships! Technical tips will return next week!

Most readers here know that I am very big on the document independence nad interoperability movement going thru the industry right now. The age of application automation and file format lock-in is giving way to document generation and open standard, document formats. The Lotus Symphony Team Blog has an new entry written by Wei Guo SHI, Development Manager for the product: In current Office market, there are a number of document formats, includes not only traditional binary formats, e.g. Microsoft Office binary format, Lotus SmartSuite format, but also XML based open standard document formats, e.g. ODF(ISO26300), UOF(China national Office standard format), and OOXML(ISO29500), as well as other popular formats, e.g. HTML, PDF etc. For each document format, there are multiple implementations, a large number of end users, and a huge amount of existing documents. With the requirements of exchanging document and sharing information across different formats, interoperability for documents

The following are the new and updated plug-ins available for Lotus Symphony: Plug-In Name Updated Date Plug-in Category Description Document2Html plug-in for IBM Lotus Symphony Apr 15, 2009 File Conversion This plug-in is designed to convert Symphony supported document files into html format by batch. The supported format includes Open Document Text, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Rich Text Format, Text, Lotus Word Pro. Chart Sync plug-in for IBM Lotus Symphony Apr 15, 2009 Utilities The Lotus Symphony Chart Sync plug-in adds the capability of synchronizing charts which reside in spreadsheet document, presentation document and text document. When you create a chart in a spreadsheet document, you might want to make a copy of the chart in a presentation or a text document. This plug-in helps you to automatically synchronize the three charts when the original chart data changes in the spreadsheet document. Symphony Calculator plug-in for IBM Lotus Symphony Apr 15, 2009 Misc

This post is from the Notes Design Blog, by Mary Beth Raven: You can browse and download brand new Symphony clip art from the Gallery section of the Lotus Symphony website. From the Gallery, there are two ways you can download clip art, as shown in the figure below.: 1. "All In One" download: This is the most efficient way. You select your favorite category and then download the whole set of images. For example, if you want to download all of the "Bullet" icons, just click the "Bullets All In One", then from the details page, click "Download now" to get a .zip file (you need to unzip the file later). 2. "One By One" download: You can also browse individual clip art images and select your favorite ones to download one at a time. After you download them, just follow these steps to add them into the clip art gallery. 1. Open the clip art gallery dialog (main menu entry: Tools Gallery). 2. Click the "New Themes..." button, and you will see a pop up dialog. 3. Click

Here is what's coming out today ... Movies 8 Simple Rules: Season #2 Air: The Complete Series America's Test Kitchen: Season #6 Burrowers, The Caprica (#25 in the DVDPS Top 40) Dallas: Season #11 FBI Files Season #2 Freakazoid!: Season #2 Frost / Nixon Hawaii Five-O: Season #6 Hellraiser Box Set Into The Blue 2: The Reef Life And Legend Of Wyatt Earp, The: Season #1 Life Of Ryan: The Complete Series Moonlight Mile: The Complete Series My Own Worst Enemy: The Complete Series Notorious: Collector's Edition Rhoda: Season #1 Science Is Fiction: 23 Films By Jean Painleve: Criterion Collection Sin City: Unrated, Recut & Extended (Blu-Ray) (#3 in the DVDPS Top 40) Top Gear 10: Season #10 Wolverine And The X-Men: Heroes Return Trilogy Wrestler, The X-Men Trilogy Pack (Blu-Ray) (#16 in the DVDPS Top 40) Computer Games Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 ( Xbox 360) Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2 ( PLAYSTATION 3) Wii Riiser Aerobic Step for the Wii Fit Balance Board ( Nintendo Wii) ExciteBot

Granite PSC Sametime Best Practices SymView more presentations from John Head. Sametime 8.X Best Practices presentation given by Luis Guirigay of PSC at the 4.20.2009 GRANITE (Chicago Lotus Notes User Group) meeting.

Domino X Pages 8.5View more presentations from John Head. Here is the presentation that I did with Philippe Riand of IBM this morning at the GRANITE (Chicago Lotus Notes User Group) on XPages. This is a near duplicate of the presentation that Phil did at Admin / Lotus Developer 2009 last week. Instead of having Phil travel to Chicago for this, it made more sense that I presented the slides and Phil ran the demos. It worked out very well and everyone in the room seemed to enjoy the presentation - based on the great comments! It covers the following: 1. What is XPages? 2. XPages Basics 3. XPages Advanced Topics 4. XPages Futures It also has links to quite a few of the XPages demos that are available around the community. One item of note: Just as the IBM legalize states in the slides, the futures stuff is not committed too. Don't plan around that functionality until you see it in the product :-)

Here is what's coming out today ... Movies American High School Bedtime Stories: Deluxe Edition Ben 10: Alien Force: Season #1: Volume 3 Beverly Hills 90210: Season #7 Cleopatra: 75th Anniversary Edition Day The Earth Stood Still, The (2008) (Blu-Ray) (#11 in the DVDPS Top 40) Day The Earth Stood Still, The: SE (2008) Deadliest Catch: Season #4 Dynasty: Season #4: Volume 1 Goldwyn Follies, The Instant Star: Seasons #1-#2: Director's Cut Max Fleischer's Superman: 1941-1942 Mysterious Cities Of Gold, The: The Complete Series Not Easily Broken Nutshack, The: Season #1 Paper Chase, The: Season #1 Peanuts: Snoopy's Reunion: Deluxe Edition Pre-Code Hollywood Collection (#31 in the DVDPS Top 40) TCM Spotlight: Doris Day Collection Tale Of Despereaux, The Vandread: The Complete Series Yes Man: SE Computer Games The Godfather II ( Xbox 360) The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena ( Xbox 360) Ninja Blade ( Xbox 360) Walt Disney Pictures Presents Hannah Montana The Movie (