Does Lotus have a death wish?OK. Now that I have your attention, let's begin.
Volker draws to my attention the fact that Lotus seems to be contemplating dropping week numbers from the Notes calendar.
Perhaps it is worth dwelling briefly on the nature of the competitive environment in which Lotus operates.
The main (one might reasonably say only) competition to IBM Lotus Notes is Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft has succeeded in becoming the single most pervasive purveyor of software in homes, at the enterprise desktop and in very many enterprise server environments because...?
Well, it isn't to do with technical excellence, is it? It is to do with consistency (at least from the users' points of view) and more importantly, presentation.
To succeed in a user driven IT environment, presentation is everything.
What do I mean by "user driven"?
The days when you and I, IT professionals, could dictate the technology used in business purely on its technological merit, including fitness for purpose, are gone. Nowadays, everybody is an IT expert because they all have computers at home. They all run XP or Vista and they are all loaded with lots of Microsoft software (we'll not dwell too long on the means by which a lot of that software is acquired).
Everybody here includes your CEO, your CFO, in fact your entire board of directors. And they all know what they like - Microsoft. Specifically Microsoft's many and variegated user interfaces to which, by and large, they have become accustomed *. Our job as IT professionals is to bring all of these influential people along with us as we develop and grow the various elements of our enterprise architectures, of which messaging and collaboration are increasingly important parts.
We Lotus users all know too well that the back end infrastructure afforded by Domino is simply peerless. It is secure, scalable, robust, resilient, reliable, capable of being simply deployed across global organisations and in multilingual environments, largely platform independent...
I could go on for days, but I really don't need to emphasis this point further save to say that, from the users' perspective, this is largely irrelevant.
What matters to users (including, remember, your CEO, CFO and so on) is how they feel about using the technology you have provided.
No CIO level sponsor of a Domino based infrastructure can possibly have avoided those occasional conversations with other senior execs along the lines of "why are we still using Notes?" and "my last company used Outlook and that was much better than this."
So, while Notes/Domino has continually proven its value to us IT folk over the years, its UI has become disliked by non-IT folk (and some IT folk too) and this is frequently seen as sufficient justification for a move away from what remains the best (and I mean best in pretty much every applicable sense of the word here) enterprise messaging and collaboration tool.
It matters not that Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange ** is so much lipstick on a pig, or that the pig is suffering from chronic immune deficiency and needs to be constantly medicated. That is still one fine looking pig.
And in this context, IBM/Lotus toys with further reducing users' regard for its UI by omitting from it a mandatory feature, week numbers in the calendar.
ND8 is supposed to be primarily a client upgrade - much as 7 was mainly a server upgrade. So much good work has been put into the new UI and many people seem to like what has been done. But, like it or not, the benchmark for UI acceptability was, is and will remain Outlook.
Does Outlook have week numbers?
Why of course it does!
I can almost hear the opening lines of those conversations with directors of ops or marketing the first time we speak after the Notes 8 upgrade - this new calendar doesn't show me week numbers - when can I have Outlook?
* The single exception here is Office 2007's ribbon UI which seems to cause nothing but confusion among users here who have tried it.
** Like most of Microsoft's other enterprise software.
Category: Notes
Technorati: IBM Lotus Notes+8
1. Jan-Piet Mens31/05/2007 10:47:53
Homepage: http://blog.fupps.com
Brilliantly written! It really would seem as though IBM/Lotus want to push their clients to the other side... Why on Earth would they remove week numbers from the calendar? Is it a matter of missing screen real-estate (doubtful) or have they lost the formula for calculating the week number?
2. Sander Zwart31/05/2007 10:54:41
IBM does not remove weeknumbers in the production version. I posted a topic about this in the beta forum. This was a reaction:
"We are working on adding week numbers to the footer area of the Java calendar views."
so don't worry 
3. Chris Linfoot31/05/2007 12:15:18
@2 so which is it?
"We are working on adding week numbers to the footer area of the Java calendar views."
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/Customer/8e526d771523d1fa852572e60063e85b?OpenDocument
OR
"Week numbers will not, unfortunately, be in Notes 8. We do realize how important they are, and we are working very, very hard to get them into the 8.01 release."
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/5f27803bba85d8e285256bf10054620d/390ce609abdbb007852572ea004c4dee?OpenDocument
I'm confused.
4. Ed Brill31/05/2007 13:57:27
Homepage: http://www.edbrill.com
@Sander, the comment you link to does not specify a timeframe. The comment that Chris links to in #3 (and that vowe links to) says 8.0.1. As of this moment in time (31 May 9 AM EDT), 8.0.1 is the plan... but I'm working on it. Being told that I/we have a "death wish" is one way to get attention 
5. Mark Dowling31/05/2007 15:55:20
Homepage: http://cork2toronto.blogspot.com
Some more discussion on this subject here:
http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/marybeth?entry=week_numbers_in_calendar
6. Nathan T. Freeman31/05/2007 18:44:45
Homepage: http://nathan.lotus911.com
Let us note what's "dropped" here.
Week numbers are not displayed in the footers of the new Calendar in the Notes 8 standard client. They are displayed in any custom Calendar view anywhere in the client, just not in the user's general ONE WEEK calendar view, if you're using the Mail 8 template. They didn't "drop" the code out. They just haven't duplicated the functionality in the new Java-based rendering model.
Therefore, possible work arounds include...
1) Don't upgrade your mail template
2) Make a custom version of the calendar view instead of using the default (because all custom versions show week number)
3) Use the Basic client
Another way you might handle this during the 8.0.0 timeframe, if you're forced to, is to create an ICS file that defines the week start number as an event subject line for each week, and then import that into your calendar.
Actually, come to think of it, that might be a nice thing to put out on my blog.
7. Eric Parsons02/06/2007 05:43:56
Homepage: http://startingblockcomputing.com
Wow... did I miss the point, or did everyone else? CONSISTENCY was what I'm bringing out of this, and it's bad enough that Lotus is considering not offering at the 8.0 level. But, then to add it back lends a whole ton of fodder to the Outlook encampment.
Consistency is what makes standards. Consistency is what makes the appearance of robustness. Consistency is how we humans get through the day without automatic weapon fire. (Ok, that last one may have been over the top, but you get the picture.)
Brill's right, Lotus must wake up, or else we'll all be running for the doors. (This show will come to a close)
8. Kevin Pettitt02/06/2007 18:43:37
Homepage: http://www.lotusguru.com
Chris, Kudos for doing a great job explaining the larger point about our "user driven" IT environments. I think you have better than anyone I know laid out a coherent argument for Lotus to start putting out some sort of consumer- or super-small-business-oriented Notes client. In a user-driven IT environment, *user* mindshare matters most and IBM needs to wake up to this fact and start focusing on impressing this audience.
9. Bradon Yarbrough12/06/2007 22:51:37
Fear not! The week number status bar will be visible in the Notes 8.0 calendar, and it will likely have expanded, extensible functionality in Notes 8.01.
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