Getting Users to USE Their Lotus Notes Calendar

I find I can preach all day about how powerful Lotus Notes is for calendar, but some users just won't use it.  They have a mental checklist or they *cough* write things down. 

That is, until I show them how to integrate their Facebook birthdays and a 7 day weather forecast in there.

Some users just need to be shown the fun stuff.  Then they have their reason to use the calendar. 

I encourage all my users to meld their personal schedule with their work schedule.  Print a weekly calendar to a document and forward it to your spouse as an FYI, especially if you do a lot of travelling.  Put the grocery list in the description in a reminder.  Put the dog grooming, dentist, doctor, auto shop and haircut appointments in there.  Once they get familiar with the calendar for personal use, they start using it to get the real value: an informed and organized work environment.

A big kudos to Mat Newman for the Facebook tip and to Darren Adams for the weather tip.

In The Wheelhouse

I have a new bi-weekly column at MC Press Online called In The Wheelhouse.  I'll be covering industry events and analysis.  Most of the content have an IBM flavor, but there's plenty of other things I'll be talking about.

In this edition I'll talk about IBM PureSystems, IBM Collaboration Solutions (Lotus) education, Betamax vs. IBM i, and the striking similarities between the RPG programming language and Freddy Krueger.

I knew Lotus Notes was awesome, but how about THIS?

The Irish Times has reported some information on IBM's Dublin involvement in the development of Watson.  You remember Watson, don't you?  It's the IBM system that beat two very skilled human contestants on Jeopardy! about a year and a half ago.

While the hardware of Watson is outstandingly impressive (about 90 Power Systems 750's, 2880 processor nodes and 16 TB of RAM), the software of Watson is what stole the show.  The ability for a computer to analyze incredible amounts of data and then provide the question to the answer (if it's confident in it's response) is now being utilized by healthcare and other industries to provide invaluable services for the future.

One of the nice little tidbits in the article is that the language analysis technology for Watson had been developed out of the spell checking system for another well known technology years before.

The name of that technology?  You guessed it.

IBM's very own Lotus Notes.