Notes on Productivity Home Page

My e-mail, Skype, Twitter, and Sametime  have been buzzing all morning over Ed Brill's post. This combined with some ideas I have about Andrew Pollack's question today "What can IBM Do to help grow the Lotus Community" have me thinking. Here are some hastily collected thoughts on this.

At the GTD Summit, many people stopped by our booth. Many raved about eProductivity, but one of them fell in love with what she saw. Unfortunately, she was not a Notes user. In fact, she had not heard of Notes.

This smart woman decided that she had to have eProductivity and if that meant getting Notes, she would. I was both excited and frustrated -- Excited because I knew from our conversation that GTD along with Notes and eProductivity would be a big help t her. Frustrated because, at present, IBM does little to make it EASY for individuals (future Notes champions) to learn about, buy, and install Notes for personal use.

Two days later this enterprising individual sent an email to let me know that she had downloaded Lotus Notes and eProductivity and had self installed them. A few days later she informed me that she had dumped Outlook in favor of Notes and eProductivity. This isn't the first time this has happened but it's starting to happen more often.

Ed Brill posted his thoughts this morning and I encourage you to read his post and the comments from David Allen, Chris Blatnick, and many others.

I've always wanted to see eProductivity marketed to individuals as a tool for personal productivity and personal information and knowledge management. I mention Notes at every one of my PKM and eProductivity seminars. It's great to see Ed picking up this idea.

My two cents:

For individuals, I think that offering (that means educating and marketing) Lotus Notes as the ultimate tool for personal information management would be a smart move for both IBM and customers. If IBM improves the IMAP functionality in Notes it could become a drop-in replacement for many current E-Mail/PIM clients.

For small to medium sized businesses, I also think that the combination of Lotus Foundations preloaded with Notes/Domino, Lotus Symphony and eProductivity along with the new GTD eLearning modules would make a terrific productivity server. Focus on results.

What do YOU think?

Update:
If you are an IBMer, please see this post which you can apparently use to vote on getting GTD and eProductivity at IBM. (I cannot access this; seems to be internal to IBM)

If you would like to learn more about eProductivity, visit the web site or read/listen to what David Allen has to say about getting things done with Lotus Notes.