Notes on Productivity Home Page

I may have an opportunity for a few enterprising IBM Lotus Business partners that want to help people purchase and install Lotus Notes.

Here's the situation: Last year we launched the public version of eProductivity™ for IBM Lotus Notes. eProductivity™ is the software application that makes implementing David Allen's “Getting Things Done®” (“GTD®”) methodology in IBM Lotus Notes, easy. We designed eProductivity to be simple enough to install and use that an end-user could do the installation himself with no support from the Notes Administrator. Over the past 24 months, we've proven this model works well as over  two thirds of our customer installations were installed by end-users with no Admin support.

Unintended consequences...
As a result of our creating eProductivity for Lotus Notes, we are seeing many non-Notes users requesting to migrate to Lotus Notes in order to get eProductivity. These are not huge numbers... yet. The largest single site was only 100 users and most of these requests so far are from SMBs or individual users. That's a problem for us. As long as someone has Lotus Notes up and running, eProductivity is a piece of cake to install and configure. Things get trickier for first-time Notes users that want to self-install and then get Notes to work with POP3, IMAP, or multiple e-mail accounts.

To try and help, I created this page for first-time users of IBM Lotus Notes to point them in the right direction so that they could purchase and install Notes on their own. Many users have reported success with this and have since become customers of eProductivity. Others have written to us to report that they were having difficulty getting answers to simple pre-sales questions or installation support from the links on the IBM Lotus site. Many have called us to ask if we would help them purchase and install Notes or refer them to someone who can.

We are no longer equipped to support people with their individual installations of Lotus Notes. While I could staff up to do this, I would much rather stay focused on our core products and services and refer the business to other people who are qualified to support end-users and SMBs with their acquisition and installation of Lotus Notes. Then, once these people have Lotus Notes up and running to their satisfaction, they can purchase and install eProductivity themselves.

An opportunity for a few enterprising IBM Lotus Business Partners
What I propose to do is to maintain an internal list of business partners that we can share with people who call us asking for help getting Notes installed. Remember most of these referrals will be coming from small businesses and individuals.

I'm aware of at least one Lotus Business Partner that has put a twist on this: he's offering eProductivity along with Lotus Foundations for a turn-key productivity solution for his SMB customers. There are many opportunities for people to add value to Lotus Notes and eProductivity. I should know - we've used eProductivity as our consulting engagement tool for many years.

If this sounds interesting to you, please get in touch with me and let me know of your experience as a Lotus BP and anything that you think would be of interest to share (e.g. familiar with mobile devices, iPhone, Blackberry, etc). Experience with eProductivity is not mandatory, however, this would be a plus and we're more likely to refer to people that are familiar with our product. Right now, however, I just need to create a list.