Lotus Software product branding – a tittle too far?

This diatribe of mine was inspired by Kevin Hansen's post earlier today: Lotus is a “tarnished” brand? Ouch!

For me, it's hard to know as far as branding is concerned. I don't think anybody can be sure what the end result of branding changes is going to be. Let me relate two brief stories.

Example (1) is the once-iconic Aussie airline that spent a small fortune changing their corporate name from "Ansett" to "Ansett." Did you notice it? That added period, or full stop if you prefer?

Apparently it was supposed to signify an increased sureness or definiteness to the brand, but I doubt if many people ever noticed the change, even when spelled out in large letters on the sides of their aircraft. Anyway, the airline went bankrupt during the hard economic times of the late 1980s, so adding that  period  surely was money down the drain.

Example (2) is the long-established and very famous Arthur Andersen (AA) accounting/consulting firm, who must have spent an even bigger fortune changing their corporate look during the mid-to-late 1990s. They did so by implementing with what was (to me) a rather subtle color change towards the orange/ochre part of the color spectrum. Did their clients really care about this, did it make or break any deals?

And where AA now? Indeed, some of you might not even recognize the firm's name, so quickly have they been forgotten by the masses. Bad practices by a few in the USA brought down the entire worldwide partnership. Luckily for some of the partners, who several years earlier had split off into the Andersen Consulting firm, the rebranding to Accenture turned out to be much more successful.

Moving on to the IBM side of the block... As an Australian employee, I was associated for quite a few years with the products from the IBM Rochester, Minnesota, line of products, which were designed specifically for use by small to medium-sized organizations.

From 1969 onwards there was the IBM System/3, the System32, the System/34, the extremely successful System/36 (S/36), and (introduced in 1978) the System/38. The S/38 had a fantastic system architecture, conceived in the early 1970s and living on strongly decades later in the current IBM i product range.

The IBM Application System/400 (or AS/400), announced in 1988, was  built by wedding the marvellously-advanced architecture of the S/38 to  the fabulous user-friendliness of the S/36, then adding in a whole raft of new capabilities. This has been continuously improved upon over the ensuing two decades.

Ten years or do after the AS/400 was announced, IBM decided to rebrand all of its hardware platforms with the "Series" moniker. The IBM PC became the x Series, the let-me-call-them AIX (or maybe Linux) range became the p Series,  the mainframe range became the z Series, and the AS/400 range became the i Series.

I suppose that the "series" concept  is somewhat logical from an overall IBM perspective, but I was taken aback when the "application system" connotation was removed from the Rochester product line and replaced with the "i" designation (which is not at all self-evident in terms of design intent, compared with the original AS/400 notion of being "application-oriented").

Then a few years later on the "Series" moniker was replaced with "System", for what reason I have no idea. So what once was the AS/400 became the "System i" and this still doesn't make much sense to me. But then, I'm essentially a techie type (running a nano-enterprise, so having to do sales/marketing and every other corporate activity only out of evil necessity), so who am I to raise such an objection against the determinations of the "MAD men" of IBM! ... Are   they as glamorous, I wonder, as the ones in the award-winning TV series?)

Now IBM has moved on a stage further, with the Rochester products rebranded  to just "IBM i" which certainly is short and catchy. What really worries me is that, in another wild flush of rebranding frenzy, the same "MAD" men or their replacements will decide to remove the vertical part of the letter "i" leaving behind only the dot , or what is called (by those in the know) a "tittle" -- which would certainly save some ink but may not be too good for brand recognition!

Let's give a thought now to branding for the Lotus Software part of IBM.

As for myself, I reckon that there's an strong and vigorous lease of life still left in the "Lotus" brand. AN I think that good comes from the slightly longer conjunction "IBM Lotus" -- as long as it doesn't gent any longer than that.

With or with the IBM prefix, I'm most happy to be associated with short product names like "Lotus Notes" (as well as “Lotus Domino” for the server side of things, yet another branding exercise), plus the others like "Lotus Sametime" and "Lotus Quickr" (but not with some of those ridiculously long, hard to remember product name mouthfuls that IBM has come up with from time to time).

Now that, with Notes 8.5.1, IBM has at last started delivering significant enhancement to the application-building side of Notes, I feel that all IBM needs to do now to really rejuvenate Notes is get a few more of its top executives to do the IBM version of the famous "developers, developers, developers, developers" dance by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Is there somebody Brill-iant enough at IBM who would be prepared to start off such a dance craze?

The executives need to keep stressing, stressing, and keep on stressing that Notes is a powerful and flexible delivery vehicle for all sorts of collaborative applications (and not just a mere mail platform like Microsoft Exchange essentially seems to be). And to keep stressing that there has been a major reinvigoration, a renaissance, with Lotus Notes versions 8.0, 8.5 and 8.5.1 -- with more to come --  a rapid application development (RAD) platform par excellence,

Because IBM has such a vast range of software, hardware and services offerings, I suppose that IBM executives have a hard time coping with the massiveness of it all. So any Ballmer focussed and enthusiastic “developer dance” behavior is is a bit too much to expect from Sam Palmisano and his executive team! … Sigh :-(

Technorati Tags: IBM,Lotus Software,Lotus Notes,Lotus Domino,Branding,Microsoft,Ballmer

Google aims to go “speedy” with HTML – let’s all support them

I sincerely hope that Google’s draft SPDY Protocol will be supported by all the big players in the Internetosphere -- my term, feel free to spread it --  since it has the admirable aim of significantly speeding up the Internet for all of us.

“In a nutshell,” they say, “SPDY adds a framing layer for multiplexing multiple, concurrent streams across a single TCP connection.  The framing layer is optimized for HTTP-like request-response streams.”

If the draft protocol page is a little too intimidating for you, you’ll find a nice overview of SPDY by Abel Avram here: Google Works on a Protocol Intended to Replace HTTP

Technorati Tags: Internet,Performance & Scalability,Web Server,Web Browser,Chrome,SPDY,HTTP,Google

Rearrange items in Domino Designer 8.5 working set?

Calling all Lotus Notes/Domino developers. Vote for this ideajam suggestion of mine requesting the ability to drag’n’drop items in the Domino Designer 8.5 applications list, as indicated by the green arrow:

You could rearrange apps by doing this in the old Domino Designer, and frankly I find it a big pain not to be able to do the same in the new Designer.

The new working set feature is fantastic, the inability to rearrange apps by dragging them around definitely is not!

Technorati Tags: Domino Designer 8.5,Working Sets,Drag'n'Drop,Rearrange application lists

UPDATE:
Just to make my point crystal clear, here's an explanatory video...

Shame! Webshots.com still doesn’t support Windows 7 (updated)

I’ve been using webshots.com to download glorious Windows wallpaper background images for years.

Well, I had been, but as stated still as of today (10 November 2009, several weeks after the general release of Windows 7) on the Webshots FAQs page:

What platforms are supported for the Webshots Desktop?
The Webshots Desktop is supported for Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

Well, that’s not good enough, not by a long shot!

I’ve paid my Premium membership dues over a number of years, in order to be able to download Windows desktop wallpapers in high resolution, and now you’re telling me that I can’t view them under the latest, brightest and whitest Windows version?

But now that I’ve upgraded to Windows 7, several months ago, all of my download time and effort not to mention the monies spent have gone to waste.

In my opinion, it’s rather pathetic and shameful that a large organization like AG Interactive, Inc. (the corporation behind Webshots) did not ensure that it had upgraded its desktop software and had it ready for release on the same day that Windows 7 was launched (22 October). What’s your lame excuse, AG Interactive?

I mean, really now… Windows 7 was in beta testing for a very long time.

Does anybody have insights on all this?

UPDATE [16 November 2009]:
I found out how to migrate all my 16,000 or so Webshots images into the appropriate form and location in Windows 7. They're now cycling every minute, to inspire me and lift my spirits!

I used a free migration tool, so all it took was some time and a bit of sweat. If anybody's interested, I'll outline out how to go about it (but not unless asked) ...

UPDATE #2 [19 December 2009]:
I checked the Webshots web site again today, to see if they had updated their statement of which Windows platforms are supported and it still only mentions Windows 2000, XP and Vista

Despite the fact that they don’t state their official support for Windows 7, I decided anyway to download and install the latest version of Webshots Desktop. The good news is that it seems to work fine under 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate.

My main reason for doing this is because, over the years, I’ve downloaded so many high-resolution images -- nearly 16,000 of them -- that I needed the picture title to be displayed else I have no hope of knowing what some of the images are.

Technorati Tags: Webshots Desktop software,Windows 7,AGI,AG Interaxtive,American Greetings Interactive

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Purchase a copy of NotesTracker for all your IBM Lotus Notes and Domino database application compliance and usage tracking needs!

Simple Signer Version 1.1 for IBM Lotus Notes released

When a Lotus Notes application is developed, it is a quite common requirement that it must be "signed" by an appropriate Lotus Notes user ID or Lotus Domino server ID before it will operate correctly in a production environment.

The developer (or developers) who over time created the various design elements in the database (forms, views, agents, etc) will have placed their own "signature" against each design element every time that they save it.

The situation commonly arises that the developer(s) who coded the database have  signatures that do not provide sufficient or appropriate authority for agents that are to run on a Domino server, for formulae to be executed in a form, etc).

This is especially the case for “alien” Notes applications that come to you from outside organizations such IBM Business Partners and Independent Software Vendors, but can be true even internally in your organization when there are multiple developers over time or for a specific release of the application..

Therefore a given version of a database application is put into production, its design elements need to be signed by a Notes ID with the appropriate authority. (Refer to the IBM Lotus Notes documentation for full details about the concept of signing Notes databases.)

Although signing is not all that difficult to do, it can be a somewhat circumspect process for the uninitiated!

Hence a few years ago I released the “Simple Signer” for IBM Lotus notes. This is a single-purpose database that was developed to make life a little easier for everybody (including myself) who at some time or other, frequently or only occasionally, has to sign Lotus Notes databases.

Its one an only design goal is to make it extremely quick and easy to sign each and every design element in a given database.

Just switch the Notes ID (if necessary), select the database to be signed, and click on the big pink button.

Note that it works only in Notes 6.0 and later versions (because it relies on the LotusScript  "Sign" method introduced in Release 6.0), but this is not much of nowadays.

Also note that the database’s design is not hidden, so by modifying a few lines of  LotusScript you can alter the way that signing is carried out, to sign only agents for example.

Version 1.1 has no functional changes, it’s still as easy to use as always, but the “Help Using This Database” built-in documentation has been enhanced to show you how add a toolbar button to make it faster to launch Simple Signer.

Download version 1.1 of the Simple Signer from either of our mirrors at notestracker.com or asiapac.com.au.

Golly, gosh, it’s nearly quarter past 1 AM here Down Under so I’m heading off to the cot right away after submitting this post.

Technorati Tags: IBM,Lotus Notes,Lotus Domino,Sign,Database,Application,Security,Authorization,Ease of Use,Freeware,Asia/Pacific Computer Services

How to resize text in embedded IE browser for IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony

Not all web pages are easy to read, and small text is one of the main culprits.

I have a bee in my bonnet about website usability. Indeed, that bee has been buzzing around in my noggin since attending a usability workshop as an IBM Systems Engineer way back in the mid-1970s.

Yes indeed folks, IBM has focused on good design for usability in both its hardware and software products for quite a few decades, way before some famous IT industry names were hardly a twinkle in their founders’ eyes.  (I’m thinking of the Apple Computers of this world and the way that people rave over the design of its iPhone and the like.)

For example, I recall back in 1983 or thereabouts attending an engineering design meeting at the IBM Rochester Lab in Minnesota, when I was going to give my feedback on IBM System/38 database journaling, an exceedingly important software feature that was about to be announced. But nearly all of that meeting finished up being consumed by a vigorous debate about the precise repositioning and relabelling of knobs on the system’s console. Now that’s what I call being picky!

Anyway, often when I visit a website I test to see if its text can be resized, and amazingly find that, being generous, not more than maybe fifty percent of sites provide for text resizing. A big FAIL for all those sites that overlook this basic capability.

TIP: review the tons of resource links here or backup site here that I’ve assembled about a wide range of usability and interface design topics.

Regarding web page text siding, one person in particular who seems to have hornets (rather than mere bees) buzzing around in his noggin: see Minimum font sizes for Thomas Baekdal’s firm views on this matter. His site has lots of other interesting articles, too.

The current crop of web browsers provide functions for zooming web pages, but the problem with this is that everything on the page gets resized, not just the hard-to-read text. Some of the browsers have a menu item, albeit often hidden away where a user may not find it, for text resizing.

When it comes to browsers that are embedded inside another product, such as IE inside IBM Lotus Notes or Lotus Symphony to name just two (and there are many more), sadly we find that there are rarely if ever any options that allow you to resize fonts or zoom pages.

With such embedded browsers you’re stuck with what font size the product designers built in. If your vision is poor, or if the built-in font is tiny, such embedded browsers can deliver a very poor reading experience.

Here’s my “how to” tip for today, which should assist you for all those cases where the embedded browser happens to be Internet Explorer, and this is the majority of cases.

Download and install the FREE EasyRead tool from Iconico. This provides two browser toolbar buttons labelled '+' and '-' (for Zoom In and Zoom Out respectively).

But these two buttons are not available for the embedded browsers, so instead you can make use of the similar EasyRead context menu options ‘EasyRead +’ and ‘EasyRead –‘ which, of course, are displayed when you right-click on a page. These context menu should work for you in most embedded browsers.

For example, below is what you might see from the embedded IE browser of IBM Lotus Symphony (similarly for Lotus Notes, and quite a few other situations). The two context menu items are circled:

(Click for a larger image)

Issue resolved -- in most cases, at least.

Technorati Tags: Usability,Text Size,Readability,Legibility,Embedded Browser

Manipulating images resources directly in IBM Lotus Notes and Domino

See my suggestion for two new Lotus Notes formula language functions for programmatically manipulating images in Notes Client and Web browser environments, and please visit IdeaJam to place your vote on my idea.

Visit...

New formula language functions: @SetImageResource and @GetImageResource

Internet filtering by ISPs? The ACS looks at technical pros and cons

Internet filtering is a contentious issue here way Down Under in Australia, as it is in other countries.

If compulsory ISP filtering is introduced in Australia -- as is possible, or maybe likely, in the not-too-distant future -- the ACS (Australian Computer Society) has just released a report recommending the creation of an independent oversighting system and an annual auditing process for blackIists.

It makes interesting reading. Take a look at the news release and the full report is downloadable in PDF format.

Much of what it says of course will apply in other countries.

How Aussies succumb to e-mail fraud (and other online evils)

Yesterday I penned an article about a favourite e-mail tracking tool of mine, eMailTrackerPro, see here.

Following that up, I’d like to point out that the Australian Institute of Criminology has just published a report related to that:

Consumer fraud in Australia: costs, rates and awareness of the risks in 2008 (by Russell Smith and Carolyn Budd).

Abstract

This paper examines the current evidence of the cost, extent of and awareness of consumer fraud in Australia. In 2008, the ABS found that approximately five percent of the Australian population reported being victimised by consumer scams, with personal losses reaching almost $1b. This paper compares the findings of the ABS survey with those gathered by the AIC during the annual fraud awareness-raising activities conducted by the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce. In 2008, a self-selected sample of 919 respondents to the AIC’s online survey reported being victimised by a wide variety of scams, including those relating to fictitious lotteries, phishing scams, financial advice and other attempts to elicit personal information from respondents. Individuals from all age groups were targeted in these scams, with older Australians being victimised to a similar extent to those in their middle years. Armed with an understanding of the nature and scope of the risks, consumer protection and other regulatory agencies can tailor their fraud prevention activities to maximise their impact—therefore reducing the extent to which consumers take up offers which are too good to be true.

Remember that, it applies globally (and in outer space too, I suppose):
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.

Tools I like – eMailTrackerPro

A nice tool that I use every now and then to delve into the origin of a particular message is eMailTrackerPro from Visualware.

I’ve received many spam and suspicious e-mails over the years (nearly two decades as an active Web user). I’ve archived them all, an interesting collection they do indeed make!

By the way, this is the first in an occasional series about PC tools that I use and which I like enough to recommend to you – otherwise, I wouldn’t waste your time. And lest you doubt my motives, the products that I describe will in nearly every case be either freeware or paid for by myself.

For example, today I got this “Nigerian 419 scam” message:

From Miss Sarah Jones Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire.                         (CONFIDENTIAL MESSAGE) Dear Good thing to write you. I have a proposal for you.This however is not mandatory nor will I in any manner compel you to honour against your will. I am Miss Sarah Jones, the only daughter of my late parents Mr.and Mrs Jones. My father was a highly reputable busnness magnet-(a Cocoa Merchant, Diamond and Gold Dealer)who operated in the capital of Ivory coast during his days. It is sad to say that he passed away mysteriously in France during one of his business trips abroad on 2nd March 2008.Though his sudden death was linked or rather suspected to have been masterminded by an uncle of his who travelled with him at that time. But God knows the truth! My mother died when I was just 4 years old,and since then my father took me so special. Before his death on 2nd March 2008 he called the secretary who accompanied him to the hospital and told him that he has the sum of Seventeen  Million,Seven  Hundred Thousand United State Dollars.(USD$17.700) deposited in  SECURITY COMPANY in Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire. He further told him that he deposited the Consignment in my name as the next of kin,and he registered the Consignment as Family Valuables and finally issued a written instruction to his lawyer whom he said is in possession to handle all the necessary legal documents of the Consignment which he deposited in the SECURITY COMPANY and he instructed the lawyer to handover the documents to me whenever I need it. I am  a university undergraduate and really don't know what to do. Now I want a foreign partner who assist me to retrieve this consignment from the SECURITY  COMPANY in Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire . This is because I have suffered a lot of set backs as a result of incessant political crisis here in Ivory coast.The death of my father actually brought sorrow to my life.I am in a sincere desire of your humble assistance in this regards. Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded. Now permit me to ask these few questions:- 1.Can you kindly tell me what the type of a profitable venture this fund will uesd to invest avoid waste of it. 2). Can you honestly help me as your daughter? 3). Can I completely trust you? 4). What percentage of the total amount in question will be good for you after you have collected this consigment on my behalf? Thank you so much. Yours Sincerely, Miss Sarah Jones Please reply me in my private email address sarah209jones03@yahoo.co.jp for more details

Where did it come from (precisely, or as near as can possibly be determined)?

Well, I fired up eMailTrackerPro, copied the e-mail’s header info into the Windows clipboard, from where it automatically got pasted into eMailTrackerPro, thus:

Clicking on the Advanced Trace option yielded, after a few seconds hopping around the globe, the following earth map view and trace route table:

And selecting the View Report option (circled) gave a browser page like this:

Starting in central Africa and ending in south-eastern Australia. Easy, eh?