Eric Mack On-Line

It's no secret that I think Lotus Notes is an amazing program. I've been working with Notes for 15+ years and in that time, I've yet to find a product that can do as much with so little, for so little cost. Yet, I routinely hear the "I hate Notes" cry from the uninformed or worse - people who've had Notes thrust upon them with no training or support. It's no wonder that these people don't think the same about Notes as I do. I have a well known client in the productivity business that uses Notes. People often ask him why he doesn't use Outlook (or many other products), to which he responds with a list of features that Notes has and that he relies upon that other programs, like Outlook, can't touch.

So what's the problem? I'll tell you. IBM sells Notes to companies. But people use Notes - not companies. It's time, in my humble opinion, to put Notes in the hands of the people. I mean really put it in their hands - in a way that they can use it and innovate with it. My wife uses Notes and loves it. She doesn't really know what Notes is or does. She just knows that Notes is the tool that lets her have her information anywhere, any time, period. And she knows that it is what makes her paperless filing system possible. While she hasn't designed any databases, she's thought up many. Fortunately, Kathy has me to help her. Many Notes users are not as fortunate.

Continue Reading "What IBM needs to do to gain end-user traction with Notes" »

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to interview Harlan Hugh and Shelley Hayduk of The Brain Technologies at their offices in beautiful Marina Del Rey, California. Also joining me, was my colleague and KM expert, Steve Barth.
 
Personal Brain is an amazing tool for mapping your brain. You might even call it a true mind mapping tool. Listen to the podcast and you hear why I think so. I plan to make The Brain a key component to my personal knowledge management toolkit so I expect that I'll return to visit Shelly and Harlan again. If you have comments or questions, post away. I'm not sure that I can or will answer all of them but perhaps some of my other readers will.

I've just posted the first of a two-part interview with Harlan and Shelley over on my Notes on Productivity site.

I've received several emails from folks asking how well the new SuperView screen coating works on the Lenovo X61 Tablet PC, so I decided to conduct some tests.  

There are three places outside of my office or a client's office where I'm likely to use my new Lenovo X61 Tablet in bright light: Kathy's car on the way to Disneyland, at the local pool, or at the local lake. I decided to test the first two. Yesterday, under the premise of conducting "research," we headed down to Anaheim to test the X61 on the way to Disneyland. Kathy drove and I sat in the passenger seat and processed my pending email. Well, actually, I sorted my pending email to process later and spent the rest of the time Skyping Michael Sampson from the car, but that's another story.

Continue Reading "Lenovo X61 Screen test: SuperView coating works well" »

I've returned from Boston and I'm in the process of downloading my video and audio files. Included are several podcasts and interviews. I'll start posting these this week.

Including:

Interview with The Brain creator, Harlan Hugh
Interview with Marc "Batman" Orchant and his gadget bag
Interview with Alan Lepofsky, Michael Sampson, and others.

If any of these are of interest  you may wish to add my RSS feed to your iTunes or other podcatcher software.

A potential client called me this week and asked if I would be interested in delivering an eProductivity seminar to a very large audience in Asia. I told him I was. He seemed most interested to know if I was comfortable speaking to a very large audience - like 5,000-8,000 people. I said that I was and I shared that I had a life-changing event many many years ago that gave me great comfort speaking in front of large audiences. Here's what happened...

Continue Reading "Why I'm not afraid to speak in public" »

Steve Barth and I will present a new workshop on personal knowledge management at the 11th annual KMWorld & Intranets Conference and Exhibition. New Fundamentals of Knowledge Worker Productivity will be on November 5, 2007 while the main sessions and show are Nov. 6-8. The venue is the McEnery Convention Center, in San Jose, California. Steve's posted the details here.

I'm on board United flight 167 To Los Angeles with my Lenovo X61 Tablet PC. I neglected to charge my second battery so I decided to conduct an experiment to see if I could get coast to coast or ore Battery with only a few brief Breaks.

Continue Reading "Lenovo X61: BOS to LAX on one battery!" »

We're in the home stretch on the Enterprise 2.0 conference sessions. Live blogging the conference has been an interesting experiment for me and the new Lenovo X61 Tablet PC had made the process easier - factors contributing to the tablet success for me include, small size, weight, excellent battery and power saver modes. Michael and I will try to do a podcast about our tablet experience later today.

We spend much time today on Many-to-Many collaboration. One-to-One collaboration works via email, phone, and IM, but the group aspect is the greater challenge and opportunity.

Expediting innovation:

What does it take to drive innovation?
The technology is only as good as the people and processes around it. So, let's look at the soft stuff.

Got group intelligence?
Speaker theme, "Personal Productivity is yesterday" (ouch! Sorry David.) Let's see where he goes with this theme...

Continue Reading "Notes on Group Intelligence Across the Enterprise" »

Sam Weber, VP, Technical Services, KnowNow, presents on using RSS to bridge the information management gap between the people and information that drive business.

KnowNow's premise: information overload creates a gap.
E-Mail is overused
- 50% of email is junk
- a communication platform or storage device?

Static portals are broken
- <20% find portals useful
- 16 clicks to find useful information

Search isn't the answer, either
- > 50% of searches are successful
- Burden lies on user

Continue Reading "RSS: the glue between people, applications, & information" »

Our second  GEEC (Global Experts in Electronic Collaboration) & GTD dinner was a success. A great time and some very interesting discussions. Tom Hagan of Actioneer joined us, too...



Thank you to all who attended.

Fellow GEEC, Michael Sampson, blogged the dinner from his Blackberry.

Michael has my USB cable so I'm using his photos.

Thanks, Michael.

BTW: Nice job on your presentation today.

Don Tapscott, Author of Wikinomics, spoke about how Enterprise 2.0 will change the way we do business.



Don agrees that the enterprise is moving into the second generation.

Transition from closed hierarchical structure to a new kind of open networked enterprise.

Nicholas Carr is wrong :-) in that IT does matter, says Tapscott.

Continue Reading "Wikinomics: Winning with Enterprise 2.0" »

Hosted by David Coleman... What technologies will be the next big thing? David Coleman walks us through three examples of 2.0 tech from the bleeding edge of tech...

Continue Reading "E2.0 from the labs" »

Four companies, two we've heard of and two new ones, will launch their products. Sort of a DEMO-style presentation.

Continue Reading "E2.0 Launch Pad with Michael Sampson" »

This was one of the best presentations. So much so that I stopped typing and decided to record. I'll collect my thoughts and blog later.

Notes from presentation: (Typing quickly)
Lots of pressure in three areas:
How to embrace changes in the business climate?
How to maximize business effectiveness in the workplace?
How do we promote innovation?

Continue Reading "Ken Bisconti: Enabling the Virtual Workplace Today" »

I've got Notes 7.02 HF534 installed on this new Lenovo X61 Tablet PC (with Vista). As I always do first thing is enable "Right double-click closes window." I then exit and restart Notes.

But, it doesn't work.

Same problem on my new T60p.

Not that I think the hardware would have anything to do with it. It's working everywhere else.

This is a major productivity drop for me.

Any ideas?

My reticular activating system continues to call to my attention the growing number of Tablet PCs -especially Lenovo Thinkpads, but several kinds.

I'm sitting next to Tom Austin, an analyst in high performance workplace computing at Gartner Group. He's got his Lenovo X60 Tablet PC on his lap, with OneNote 2007 open and taking notes. I'm here with my new Lenovo X61 Tablet doing the same, blogging in real-time with Lotus Notes.

I'm not taking notes in Ink - too time-consuming given that I'm blogging in real time. And, you should be thankful, given my handwriting.

Web 1.0 - Publish and everyone could view. Put up information anywhere and access it.
Web 2.0 - See a web page and comment on it.

Web 2.0 Goes to work
Economic
- New business designs that address the "long tail"
Technology
- Lighter weight infrastructure & simpler programming models
Community
- Tapping the collective knowledge

Continue Reading "Ambuj Goyal on innovation and growth in E 2.0" »

Andrew McAfee: A report card on the progress since Andy coined the term "Enterprise 2.0."

How are we doing with Enterprise 2.0?

Continue Reading "McAfee on Enterprise 2.0 - The State of the Meme" »

The digitizing of information and communication is restructuring the basic mechanisms of control business has used internal and externally.
David Weinberger keynote:
Enterprise 2.0 is about meta data - information about the information.

When organizing physical stuff, limitation of current taxonomies is that the organizer decides how the physical world will be filed.

It's a sad thing that our information organization skills follow the way we organize our laundry.

Filing systems in the new paradigm:
1. Leaf on many branches
2. Messiness is a virtue
3. No difference between data and meta data
Everything is now meta data. Meta data is the stuff you know and data is the stuff you don't know.
4. Users own the organization of their stuff (tagging, classification, etc.)
You cannot tell what people are going to be interested in.

Continue Reading "Meta data - information about the information." »