Lotus Evangelism is alive and kicking

I posted at another site https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=21077086&postID=5366527023338273982 that asked where are the Supermen of Lotus. And Women.
Well they exist, and like Clark Kent, do not want to be known in the public eye.
It's easy for Ed, Alan and others because that is not their true job, they are high profile people and deserve to be evangelists by default. One would hope more would come out to blog as well, I know Ed encourages them so there is hope.
But having been a Lotus EMEA (Europe Middle East & Africa to the uninformed) "technology advocate"/"Product evangelist"/"IT Specialist" , my team and I preferred being more anonymous.
Why?
Think about it, if everyone knew us, we would be blacklisted from conferences and certain competitor events(ya ya, it never happens, right we just get funny colored badges).

We covered everything we could from ancient times(OS/2, cc:mail DOS) to the mainframe to advanced application design(way out of my field) and java/linux you name it as it came up.
AND we had to be fully knowledgable on every announced product or demo'd at Lotusphere or just downloaded. e-suite? Extended Search? Death of cc:mail? You name it we had to know it.

Calls at anytime of day/night because we could be anywhere in the world, emails/IM's everywhere on everything, meetings with clients in Saunas in Helsinki, yep we did it all.

Sometimes you were saving Lotus during a merger, sometimes it was a "tell us what's new" discussion, other times it was just "so happy someone from corporate came to meet us". Sometimes it was a premiere like R5, Domino.Doc, Quickplace were some of my big ones.

The equivalent of a rock star life within the IT profession, we joked about tour shirts but figured we would run out of space on the shirt.

Demo's, multiple laptops(before vmware), 4 versions of servers, 8 clients running on a thinkpad and someone wants to know how you did it? Magic my friend, and a long plane flight with electrical power.

I was privileged to work with some of the smartest and funniest people I ever could imagine. People who equalled my knowledge in messaging or OS's with their appdev ways or A/V or telco understandings.

Finally after many years some of those people are running the SWAT teams and thank god, because unless you have done the work, you can't possibly understand how to manage a group like us. These guys were all over Orlando, but you had no idea, you watched some of them on stage, maybe on BP day(which is when I used to do most of mine). Maybe the guy in the lab you visited that seemed to know way more about your topic than you expected from them.

So yes, Supermen, and women do exist and they regularly come to your town, but don't tell them I told you.

Lotus Notes8 and a Phoenix rises from the Ashes

Well it came out, finally, and no complaints.
Sure it crashes, what beta doesn't?

But the UI is fluid, cool(really) and highly productive.

I haven't been able to sit in one spot to do almost everything since the days of QEMM and Direct Access Menus.(If you remember those, you like me have been doing this for a LONG time).

Anyway, the sidebar is now for the first time since R5 able to much more than email pieces.
It handles Sametime and the Phoenix rising, "reborn/renewed" Lotus Smartsuite or e-suite which has a word processor, spreadsheet and presenter.
And of course your calendar, and will do much more.

But it's the Rss feeds/reader which is most impressive IMHO of the sidebar functionality.
Why?
Because I was using "my yahoo's page" as a reader(bad) or MS clients which I am beta testing(not bad but yet another piece of sofware).
Now it's not only in one spot, but provides listings, opens in the Lotus client or my browser, pops up when something new is posted from one of my followed sites and well, just makes the day to day of the executive who is a little techy, much more useful.

The downside might be many more calls to the helpdesk until the exec gets it right and setup.

But hey, office 2007's ribbon is no less confusing so I guess the new UI is the old time UI of "guess where/what the function you need is hiding".
And I thought software should make your life easier.

Again it's BETA people, get over it, these things will be worked out before it goes live.
Well, not in Office 2007's case :-P