NotesBuddy
Unified notification and messaging tool for e-mail (Lotus Notes and POP3), instant messaging (Sametime), and buddy status.
Date Posted: December 10, 1999
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This technology graduated on November 5, 2007.
Users should now migrate to Sametime Connect 7.5.1. Contact your system administrator for local procedures.
NotesBuddy has been the most-downloaded technology from alphaWorks every month for over five years, with several hundred thousand downloads in the past few years. Over 20 innovations from NotesBuddy have been incorporated into Lotus Sametime Connect 7.5.1.
NotesBuddy was a unified notification and messaging tool for e-mail (Lotus Notes and POP3), instant messaging (Sametime), directory information, and buddy status. This tool was made available by the IBM Ease of Use team.
Users were both inside and outside IBM. Over 110,000 IBM employees (30%) used NotesBuddy every day, and the IBM CIO's office recognized NotesBuddy as an "alternative" Sametime program in employee surveys and infrastructure planning.
As graded by the user community, NotesBuddy was among the highest-ranked technologies on alphaWorks, with a score of 4.45 out of 5.0. Overall satisfaction was consistently high at 84%. NotesBuddy had the highest amount of feedback from the community, with 2824 evaluation surveys completed in one year alone. Several articles about NotesBuddy appeared in the press.
NotesBuddy has had tremendous product influence: Major features in Sametime 7.5 had their roots in NotesBuddy and got into 7.5 either directly from NotesBuddy or indirectly via feature adoption by other IBM clients such as ICT.
In 2003, Craig Swearingen, the lead programmer for NotesBuddy, received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (OTAA) for his work on NotesBuddy. According to Mr. Swearingen, "It's a research project to find out what people like and will use." Alan Tannenbaum, concept and user experience leader for NotesBuddy, received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award (OIA) for the concepts and design of the NotesBuddy interface. Mr. Tannenbaum adds that "NotesBuddy is a platform for experimenting with new and innovative messaging features without users having the high expectations that come with using the mainstream products. We add about five to eight new features in each release, based on user feedback. The NotesBuddy discussion forum on alphaWorks is very active. Now that we have migrated the majority of the popular NotesBuddy features into the Sametime 7.5.1 commercial product, we are confident that the high customer appeal will be experienced by the full Sametime community. Customer feedback has been great so far, and Craig and I feel very satisifed that our contributions are so well-received."
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| | About the technology author(s):
The IBM Ease-of-Use Team strives to make everything simpler, both within IBM and throughout the industry. Team members create tools, guidelines, and processes for designing more usable software. In addition, the team continually experiments with new ideas, such as NotesBuddy, to exercise our own methodologies; and, through multidisciplinary teams and User-Centered Design practices, we attempt to create products that will delight our customers. Originally conceived as an experiment with new user interfaces, NotesBuddy became a test of our User-Centered Design methodology.
The NotesBuddy team consists of Craig Swearingen (lead programmer) and Alan Tannenbaum (concept and user experience leader). They tap into the skills and experience of a multidisciplinary team of visual designers, most notably Peter Hsu (smileys, bubbles, all things Web), user researchers, and system experts as they develop each new version. You can learn more about IBM's Ease-of-Use efforts at http://www.ibm.com/easy. |
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