Lotus Notes Personal Edition Coming in 2009?

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
I've often lamented the fact that there is no way for an individual to easily get his hands on Lotus Notes for personal use. (Yes, he can sign up for passport and buy and express license, which is what I recommend, but the process is not easy.)

I've long advocated for a Lotus Notes personal edition and I'm not alone in this. Fellow Notes blogger, Karl-Henry Martinsson  (aka Texas Swede) just blogged his thoughts on a Notes personal edition he'd like to see. Nice work, Karl. As far as how to limit the use of personal clients against an enterprise, that's actually very easy. I've blogged about that before:
In short, a personal user, not attached to a Domino server, will get a UserID in the form of Name/Name. E.g. "Eric Mack/Eric Mack". This means that I am a user "Eric Mack" in the domain of "Eric Mack." This in itself will prevent me from accessing any server unless I have been cross certified with it. One thing Lotus could do would be to make a restriction to not allow certifying an ID to servers where the name and domain are the same, thus blocking out personal users. Or, a fancier mechanism could be employed.

My point here is not to argue how to make it happen technically - IBM Lotus has many smart people who can do that, but to support the idea of a personal version of Notes. A stand-alone Notes client that could pull mail from a variety of sources would be an ideal alternative to a Thunderbird or Outlook client. It could even be the entry point to a cloud offering. Then, if there were a way to buy server access in the cloud so that I, as an individual could have all of my stuff in sync (e.g. the old Groove model) and share it - that would be cool.

I've made no secret that I believe that IBM Lotus needs to get personal with Notes before there's no room left to enter that space. Focusing in the features that enable individuals to become more productive and giving them the tools (e.g. a personal version of Notes) are steps I'd like to see.

So, will we see any of this in 2009? Your guess is as good as mine. What do you think?

See: "Lotus Notes Home Edition" - my thoughts

Update: there'a a great discussion going on at Bruce's blog. Ed Brill is addressing some of the comments. Not sure how I mised that post & thread. See: This is what IBM Lotus needs to (figure out how to) do

Discussion/Comments (2):

Eric Mack (http://www.EricMackOnline.com): 12/31/2008 3:31:42 PM
A great discussion over on Bruce’s blog

Update: there'a a great discussion going on at Bruce's blog. Ed Brill is addressing some of the comments. Not sure how I mised that post & thread. See the updated blog post above for a link.


Maurice del Prado (): 1/4/2009 9:58:19 AM
Lotus Notes Personal Edition Coming in 2009?

Eric,

After listening to the Taking Notes podcast which you were on recently with David Allen, I thought the exact same thing.

One reason that Outlook is so popular is that one can get Outlook ("Express" is it called?) for free. And then you get suckered in to the enterprise edition. Everyone gets used to the free version so they accept the enterprise version more readily. Smart marketing, actually, on Microsoft's part, don't you think?

So, why hasn't Notes done the same thing! It's just what we need to get more exposure. Perhaps it will create more pull (from users of the free version wanting to see it used at their workplace) vs. IBMer pushing it.

I'll go check Bruce's blog too.


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