developerWorks: You're listening to developerWorks interviews where we feature conversations with technical luminaries and thought leaders from a variety of disciplines on topics of interest to technology professionals. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. This time we're talking about the much anticipated release of Lotus Notes 8. I'm joined today by three key people from the Notes development team. Jan Kenney is design partner and beta program manager for Notes and Domino. Welcome, Jan.

Jan Kenney: Glad to be here today, Scott. Thank you.

developerWorks: Then we have Jeff Eisen, who is Lotus Notes chief architect and an IBM Distinguished Engineer. Welcome to you, Jeff.

Jeff Eisen: Thanks, Scott. Glad to be here, too.

developerWorks: And we have Mary Beth Raven, the lead user experience designer for Lotus Notes 8. Mary Beth is also one of our most popular developerWorks bloggers. Hey, Mary Beth, how are you doing today?

Mary Beth: Hi. Good, thanks.

developerWorks: Now, why don't we take this off talking a bit maybe about the big steps forward in Notes 8? Why are users going to want to upgrade? And Mary Beth, maybe you want to share some stuff about that because I know you're talking with people a lot through your blog.

Mary Beth: Yes, thanks — sure. One of the first reasons is that you're going to initially be really visually hit by the fact that this has new clean, fresh look. Quite a bit different from Notes 7, but not so different that you won't know where to find your mail or things like that.

So, we've spent a fair amount of time coming up with the new visual system that's a little more rich in color. We've done a fair amount of research, both with our marketing team and our user groups to come up with this new visual system.

And so after this new fresh look, then some of the general things are that we really tried to make an effort to follow some more standard operating system conventions across the operating systems on which Notes 8 is going to ship. So that will feel more natural in your terms of interaction, like the way you select things.

And thirdly, we really have overhauled mail, contacts, and our calendar experience to not only give them a fresh look but to add some significant new features. For example, in mail, we added a new feature called Conversation Mode that lets you keep track not just of each individual mail, but the mail threads together as a conversation. So those are just a few of the examples.

developerWorks: That's nice. And I keep having this dream that someone's going to come up with something that actually looks at your mail and answers it for you and throws away all the 80-90 percent of what you don't really need to read each day, but we're not quite there yet, I guess, right?

Jeff: Well, that's one of the nice things about the Conversation Mode. If you get an e-mail that has this long conversation thread, you know, 10-20 type messages in it, Conversation Mode easily hides all the older ones and just kind of shows you the last one. So it really filters down your experience, so you can manage the flood of your e-mail a lot easier.

developerWorks: Well, that sounds nice because the flood of e-mail just keeps getting larger, doesn't it? So that's going to be a great feature.

Jeff, since you're talking — what about developer opportunities around this release. You know that that's our big audience on developerWorks, obviously, and I'm wondering: Is it just that there are always new opportunities around new installations and upgrades? Or is there some real game-changing stuff for developers here?

Jeff: There's some serious game-changers in Notes 8. We still have all the old paradigms that we've had for 20 years, and we've advanced those in Notes 8. So everyone whose been writing their applications in Lotuscript or formula language or what have you in Notes, they can continue to do so and that's still a first-rate experience.

But we've brought new technology into Notes. Notes 8 is based on the Expediter platform, which is essentially an IBM version of Eclipse. It brings all the power of Eclipse and Java technology so your Java programmers out there can extend Notes, extend functionality and in ways they never could before.

In Notes, we've always had a very powerful application model, but with the new powers of Eclipse and Expeditor, you can extend things like add to the menu items, you can add things to what we now have called a sidebar, so you can add little applications to the experience. You can really control the entire experience, not just your little application rectangle in Notes 8.

developerWorks: With the Eclipse aspect of this, do you really expect this to enhance the market penetration ability with this release of Notes? It sounds like you would.

Jeff: Absolutely. I mean, to the end user, they don't have to know anything about Eclipse. For the end user, as Mary Beth was saying, it's a nice-looking product with good features and good functionality and consistent experience. But the developers, they can really add a lot of value easier than they could before and add values in areas that couldn't before. So it will really help the product penetrating in the app dev community.

developerWorks: Yes, and you know this is jumping around a little bit on some of the questions that we talked about, but Mary Beth, I'm wondering at this point if you could talk a bit about some of what you're hearing from developers through your blog? You have one of the most highly read blogs on developerWorks, and you've been talking about some of these new things with Notes 8. What are you hearing from people, and are they pretty excited about this stuff?

Mary Beth: Oh, yes. Most definitely. As a matter of fact, the business partner community is already kind of taking the ball and running with it and playing with some of the things.

For example, it sounds indeed like it's going to present fabulous opportunities for people who know how to write these Eclipse plug-ins, and that's great. But you don't have to be an Eclipse developer. You don't have to know Java even to take advantage of some of the new Notes 8 framework stuff. For example, in the past, you as a developer or even an admin, you couldn't really change much about the look of the Lotus Notes framework that all your users had to use. You know, there was this bookmark bar on the left and you had tabs across the top and that kind of thing.

And now, all you have to know is how to edit a CSS file, that is a Cascading Style Sheet. And if you decided that you don't like blue tabs, which are the tab colors that we ship by default. For example, if your company brand color happens to be brown or red or green, you can go in and make those green or red or brown or whatever without really writing any Eclipse code. It's just taking the power of a Cascading Style Sheet and changing some of these aspects.

So, in simple ways, you can have a dramatic impact that will allow you to customize your UI, and we do have some of the business partners who are doing that. And of course, they're also going ahead and talking about what other plug-ins they can build for the sidebar. As Jeff mentioned, one of the new features in Notes 8 is this sidebar where we have small panels that give you, for example, your day at a glance and your calendar or your Sametime buddy list. And Eclipse developers can write new sidebar plug-ins. And the sky's the limit. Whatever they think they may want to add, they can go to town and add it.

Jeff: And the nice thing about being on the Expeditor platform is that these plug-ins they can write for Notes, they're the same plug-ins that they can write for Sametime 7.5, which has been very popular. It's a consistent model across the IBM product line, so that they can write for one product and deploy it on multiple products.

In terms of the application story, though also, you know, Mary Beth was saying, you don't have to know Java, that's true. I mean, one more part of the application story is composite applications, which is basically a fancy word for what in the Web world is called mashups. It's a way to bring multiple applications together very easily, without really writing any code. Just using a simple wiring assembly, point-and-click type tool where you can bring applications together whether the applications are traditional Notes NSF type of applications, or whether they're Web pages, or whether they're written in Java.

developerWorks: Very cool. Now, I assume the Lotus zone on developerWorks is going to be one of many places to go and really start to dig deeper into the stuff you're talking about, right?

Jeff: Absolutely. And on developerWorks is also a blog around composite apps. So it's another place to look for information on it.

developerWorks: Now, what about digging into some examples of how Notes 8 incorporates Web2 technologies? I mean, we're already hinting at that, but maybe one of you can go a little deeper into some of that.

Jeff: Sure, I'll start. One of the things that we provide in the sidebar that's there by default is a feed reader. So we're incorporating over on the side and your periphery of your working area most users could be either be spending their day in their in-box or a Lotus Notes application where they may spend their day managing their customer contacts or support calls or whatever.

But over in the periphery, we've provided this feed reader so that users can simply subscribe to feeds. For example, my blog, Ed Brill's blog, Jeff's blog and simply get notified when we make new blog postings. And all you have to do really is just single-click on it and we have this cool little animated slide out that slides out, lets you read the first paragraph or two and if it sounds interesting, then one click away, you can open the whole thing in a Web browser. So that's one of the most exciting kind of Web 2.0 type features I think that we're adding.

developerWorks: Cool. What about others? Does anybody want to mention some others while we're on this one?

Jeff: Well, you talk about Web 2.0 and technology — I mean I think even more so, Web 2.0 is about building communities. So, in Notes 8, one of the other things on the sidebar is something called an Activities, where you can have sort of, you know, essentially a very lightweight team room where you build a conversation around various things you're working on.

You know, a presentation you're working on with people, or a problem you're trying to solve, or a bug you're trying to fix or what have you. And you can easily build a community. And that's really where a lot of the power of Web 2.0 is.

developerWorks: So, some of this discussion around Web 2 advancements. Is it fair to say some of this was kind of inherent and really a basic part of Notes all along?

Mary Beth: Yes, absolutely. [LAUGHTER]

Jeff: We started Web 2.0. We just weren't smart enough to call it Web 2.0. [LAUGHTER]

developerWorks: Notes was the first Web 2.0 product maybe. But let's go a little deeper into maybe how some of these features add business value for users. Do you guys have some scenarios you can share? I mean, obviously it makes things more efficient, but how do you really explain the business value behind some of this stuff?

Mary Beth: I'll start. Speaking of using some scenarios, one of the things we did as we were designing this was to very specifically interview current users for the way they did their work today — how they managed their e-mail, how they work with their e-mail in conjunction with their contact list, that is like their personal address book or the corporate address book, and their calendars. And we took several sets of tasks or scenarios right from real current Lotus Notes users and said we were going to try to design for these particular scenarios to make sure that we would improve their user experience with Notes 8.

And then we translated of those into actually a whole set of usability tests, as well. So we've been using these scenarios in our usability test. And one of them is real simple. It's simply, you know, you send e-mail to people all day long. And so we've added this new type ahead feature whereby behind, under the scenes, unbeknownst to our sample end users, we've been kind of storing the people, the names that they send e-mail to and who sends e-mail back to them. So that when I, for example, start typing Jeff Eisen, I just type Jeff and now it automatically gives me a list with Jeff Eisen at the top.

Now I also send mail to Jeff Kalow and other Jeffs, but because I send mail to Jeff Eisen the most, he's right at the top, and it's really easy for me to pick his name off and then just ahead and address the mail without waiting for a big long search, without the IBM corporate name and address book giving me 30,000 Jeffs to choose from. That kind of thing.

Jeff: Part of the power of that also is because I've sent e-mail to her or she's sent e-mail to me, not only am I sort of in her type-ahead list or in the front of her type-ahead list, we also have a mechanism where it automatically will pull down your contact record from the corporate address book.

So that if she's stuck in a hotel in the middle of nowhere, she has my contact record and my contact information automatically. She didn't have to do anything explicit. All she ever did was open an e-mail from me.

developerWorks: What about some other issues around, or other features and their business value? What else can we go into there?

Jeff: Well, I mean Notes 8 certainly has a long laundry list of features, but what I find very powerful about Notes 8 is the integration of everything. And that's where I'm getting a lot of the value from when I use it. In Notes 6.5, we added Sametime integration into Notes, but in Notes 8, with the integration of Sametime 7.5 and a much tighter integration I find that I'm using it a lot more. I'm getting a lot more value out of it.

I can do things like multi-way chats, voice chats, what have you. Those sort of things it really feels like I have the information when it want it, where I want it and if I don't have the information, I can find the person who does a lot easier in Notes 8.

developerWorks: What about the Sametime 7.5 integration with Notes 8? What is that going to look like? Because I know we're always looking for, as you say, a tighter integration so we're not having to jump from app to app and that kind of thing. What is that going to look like?

Mary Beth: Well it's going to look an awful lot like Sametime 7.5 literally because the technology that we've used to build Sametime 7.5 is this Expeditor platform that Notes uses, as well.

So strictly speaking, it's really the same piece of technology that's plugged in — that why we call them plug-ins — plugged into the sidebar in Lotus Notes. So, it's going to be the same exact feature set, the same capabilities, the same exact user interaction which we feel is an improvement.

Now, in previous versions of Notes, we have had integrated Sametime, but we had to make some tweaks, etc. so that there were some little interaction differences and little feature set differences in a way that you won't see these differences now in Notes 8 because it's really going to be the same exact set of technology, same exact menu items, you know, those kinds of things.

Jeff: And for those people who haven't played with Sametime 7.5, it's really a first rate IM experience. Bold, italics, voice, smiley faces, you know, the whole gamut that one would expect.

developerWorks: What about feedback you're getting from beta users of all of this stuff? I'm sure you've been getting a lot of feedback. Can you talk about some of that and maybe what you're hearing through forums and things like that?

Mary Beth: Sure, I'll give you a couple of things. One of the features in the long laundry list of features as Jeff had said, that we've got a ton of features. One of the things that our beta users are really finding particularly useful is a feature that really does talk about the integration or combining information in a way that helps our business users be more productive. And that's a feature called Collaboration History. So on any given person, I can right click on their name, I could be in my in-box and Jan could send me mail, and maybe I don't remember what it was that I'd been working with Jan about. I right-click and there's a menu item called Collaboration History.

And what it does is it goes off and it gathers that last 50 or so e-mails and the last X number of saved instant message chats and puts them in reverse chronological order for me, you know, interleaves the mail messages and chats so that I can kind of help build a history of "OK what was I talking with Jan about? What were these issues?" Etc..

And my example with Jan isn't quite as useful as some of the examples that I've got with external users, particularly when I'm working with customers. I can do the Collaboration History with a sales manager for a particular bank or something. And that really kind of helps me summarize what's going on at that particular customer site before I go back and visit them again and things like that. And so our business partners and our beta sites are giving us good feedback about how they are enjoying that feature in particular.

developerWorks: Others that are standing out as things that people are real excited about? I mean, that sounds like a key one. Are there others that immediately jump to mind?

Jeff: We haven't mentioned yet, but we're getting a lot of excitement around, we have integration of productivity editors. So there's a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation editor that comes as part of the product, as part of the base product based on open office, based on ODF, open standards around file format. And we're getting a lot excitement about including that in the product.

The very full-functional editors and people are really saying, "It's nice to have an alternative." And in terms of alternative, we've also have, you know, we've been on Windows® for years with Notes 8, we're also on Linux® and we're getting a lot of excitement around our Linux offering, too.

developerWorks: You know, with all of this, I know that you all have done some new things with Notes 8 in terms of the interaction with users and the beta testing and all of that. Obviously, that's been a part of what's gone on in the past, but it's really gone to a new level this time. And Mary Beth, for example, with you, how would you describe the result of the experience you've had using your blog to interact and get feedback that way? Has it been real helpful or what are your thoughts on that?

Mary Beth: I think it's been invaluable. And I think it comes back to what we were joking about earlier about how kind of Notes invented Web 2.0 before we know what Web 2.0 was insofar as Notes has always been about collaboration for years. And I feel like we've been able to take that one step further and not just provide collaboration tools to our customers, but really use our own tools to create a collaborative community that then helped me really co-design this.

You know, I made a lot of decisions based on feedback I got from the blog. It was very useful to be able to just do a quick poll of how many people use feature X. Or how do you use feature Y? Or does it matter if we remove such and such a feature? Just to give you an idea of how many people or what kinds of situations a feature was used in in a way that previously it would have been difficult with such a large user base. You know, we sort of would have been guessing a little bit or relying on much smaller data set.

So, that's been not only really useful but I feel like this community has really come together to make this release their own. You know, it's not just a bunch of designers with Jeff the distinguished engineer sitting in our Ivory Tower in Westford. It's been a community effort.

developerWorks: And what does that say to you all about the ways that ... and new ways of developing new release and new products, new applications, new solutions with all that input? I mean, it sounds like there's a great hunger to participate, and it's not simply based on who's going to be hired to work on a development team, but people just wanting to be a part of the intellectual process of working these things out. What does that tell you about new ways of how you might approach this in the future?

Mary Beth: I think this is probably just the beginning. It's the tip of the iceberg of what I'm hoping is a new way that software industries and their users and customer bases work together in a much more collaborative way to create the products and the features that business people really need.

We were joking around here a while ago about when Time Magazine person of the year was you because individual users now have so much information at their fingertips thanks to Internet tools and things like that. And we joked a lot that the designer of the year is you. Or that kind of thing because we really can work together in a way collaboratively that we haven't before. And I've got some challenges that I want to try in future releases. For example, this has all been great, but I'm the first to admit that this has all been in English, you know. We have worldwide customers who use our product in 27 languages or more even. How can we take some of the stuff we've been doing now in English and move that around and beyond so that other cultures and other seekers of other languages can also participate? So that's one of my challenges going forward.

developerWorks: Sounds like it's been a great experience. Jan and Jeff, any other closing thoughts from you all?

Jeff: I'll echo what Mary Beth said. It's been invaluable getting the information. Her blog and the forums and design partners and such have been invaluable. I mean, the example I can think of is in the first public beta we changed the graphics from one of the things we were showing in the in-box. And we had this enormous eternal-internal debate — internal and eternal — [LAUGHTER] on whether to change it back or not. You know, I didn't like the new one, some people did. We were going back and forth. We were going crazy.

Mary Beth posted a question in her blog. Pretty much by the time we got back from lunch, there was like 80 or so responses saying, go back to the old way. End of story, it was a done deal. We were listening to what our customers were saying.

developerWorks: Jan, any other thoughts?

Mary Beth: Yes, I want to add to that. Certainly the interest level and excitement about the public beta has just been unprecedented. Looking back, we're now just completed our eighth week of that beta exposure for 8 and in comparison to the first eight weeks of 7.0, one metric indicator of interest is the number of downloads you have. And we are literally 70-percent higher in the first eight weeks of 8.0 for the client than we were. Granted, we do have a Linux and a Windows client for 8, but that was a pretty impressive and positive reading in terms of excitement about the beta.

We have over the last year and a half, have worked with a small set of customers and partners and conducted a series of design collaborations with them all throughout the year. And as we gain momentum, gain confidence in the established feature set, the group of private customers and partners we work with continue to grow throughout the year leading us up to our public beta splash in March. And we're looking for a similar and perhaps even greater surge of interest with our beta refresh later this month.

Jeff: And I must say, when we first came out with public beta, you know, we posted the beta and like everything ... every project this large we were sitting there with our fingers crossed and praying for the best there. And we've had pretty much universally positive response.

I know I'm not going to get it verbatim, but I think my favorite response was someone was discussing in one of the forums about Notes 8, and they said something like, "Well, I mean, because they were running the beta." So yes, I mean, there's some bugs and it crashes occasionally. That's expected of beta. But you know, am I going back to Notes 7? No way. There's no turning back. Notes 8 was just really adding that much value for them.

developerWorks: That's great. That's got to be exciting to hear all that. Well, it's been great hearing about Notes 8, especially from the up-close perspective that you all have. Jan, Jeff, Mary Beth thank you all for doing this with us today.

Jan: Thank you, Scott. Glad to have joined the call and everyone should stay tuned for announcements about the upcoming beta refresh later this month.

Jeff: Yes, thanks Scott, it's been a pleasure. And yes, look for the bet refresh and if you haven't downloaded the first beta, go for it. It's a pretty powerful product.

Mary Beth: And of course, this is Mary Beth, feel free to follow the Notes 8 design blog. You can simply Google "Mary Beth Raven blog" and you'll find it. And not only that but I'm kind of starting a whirlwind tour. I'll be going to Ireland to the Irish Notes User Group later this month, to the Deutsche Notes User Group in June, and who knows where after that. So, stay tuned. Follow the blog. And you never now, I might be meeting you when I'm coming to your country to visit.

developerWorks: Our guests again have been Jan Kenny, design partner and beta program manager for Notes and Domino; Jeff Eisen, Lotus Notes chief architect and IBM Distinguished Engineer; and Mary Beth Raven, the lead user experience designer for LotusNotes 8.

Find links to Notes 8 Web resources in the show notes for the broadcast. Just go to ibm.com/developerworks/podcast and look for this show entry. That's it for this edition of developerWorks interviews. I'm Scott Laningham. Thanks for listening.

Resources

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• IBM Lotus Notes 8
  
  
• developerWorks' Lotus zone
  
  
• Blog: Designing the User Experience for Lotus Notes and Sametime
  
  
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• Download IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 beta
  
  

About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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