Now in its 19th year, Lotusphere will once again attempt to make up the ground Lotus Notes lost as a result of shifts in strategy at IBM and changes in the market in the past few years. But with Lotus Notes facing an uphill battle, five days at "the happiest place on Earth" will have to go a long way.

. . . But even with the help of the Connect conference, some in the industry are concerned that Lotusphere '12 may be too little, too late.

"They do have to focus on a couple very specific messages instead of trying to be so broad, and show not the features but the benefits that come out of it - focusing on the end result and not focusing on the tools," Lepofsky says. "As much as the business partners want the advertising and marketing around specific tools, I think it's more important to focus on the end result of what these tools can do for you."

In 2006 Noah Kravitz went to work for Phonedog, a news site specializing in mobile phone related news. During his four years as a writer for Phonedog, his Twitter profile, Phonedog_Noah, picked up 17,000 followers. When he left the company last October, he was told that he could keep the account, provided he tweeted about Phonedog once in a while. When he left, Kravitz changed the profile’s name to NoahKravitz, and proceeded to continue tweeting – including the occasional mention of Phonedog, as requested.

Now, however, the company is taking Kravitz to court. Over the summer Phonedog filed suit against him, claiming that his 17,000 followers were a customer list, and therefore Phonedog’s property. They are seeking $340,000, or $2.50 per follower per month for the eight months between Kravitz’s departure from the company and the filing of the suit.

RCP: Gartner recently endorsed Google Apps for Business as enterprise ready. Has that upped the competitive stakes, as far as you're concerned?

Rizzo: You know, the interesting thing about that Gartner report, I believe one of the 10 references listed was the city of L.A., and the LAPD has pulled out of deploying Google Apps. So I'd read through that list with a fine-toothed comb, as far as the references [are concerned]. We haven't seen it as an uptick -- we fundamentally disagree that Google is actually ready for enterprise, as you can see by folks like the city of L.A. Google loves to announce customers, but announcing and deploying are two very different things, as you saw in the city of L.A. We have not seen them making a dent in the enterprise. In fact, I'd say we're stealing more customers in SMB then they're winning in the enterprise against us. We're seeing a mass migration of folks off of Google onto the Microsoft Office 365 cloud.

Ah, the irony: over the past few weeks even RIM has admitted that the BlackBerry PlayBook is so unloved it can’t even give it away, and now $1.7m-worth of the 7-inch slates have actually been stolen. A truck transporting 22 pallets of the PlayBook to Ontario, Canada, was parked up for the driver to take a rest break, The Herald Bulletin reports, when it was stolen by person or persons unknown.

Beginning in December 2009, we will begin transitioning users away from Lotus Notes and onto Microsoft Exchange 2007. The reasons for this are:

• Staying current with technology. We have felt for a long time that Notes is a dated email platform.
• Listening to our users. The highest volume of help-desk calls and general complaints stem from user frustration with Lotus Notes. These range from usability problems, compatibility issues with other email systems (client calendar requests etc), application slowdowns and crashes, and poor webmail service etc. Most of our new hires have Outlook or Entourage experience and are forced to learn Lotus Notes upon joining JWT.
• Reliability. We feel that the Exchange environment we're migrating toward will deliver a far more reliable end-user experience, both inside and outside of the office.
• Client relationships. Microsoft is a very important strategic client for JWT, so adopting Exchange demonstrates our commitment to this client’s long-term vision.
• Cost. We believe that ultimately we'll be able to deliver a better service catalog of messaging features to the users with a lower cost of ownership.

The new Exchange service will be delivered as a cloud-based solution that will be hosted and managed by Microsoft. The marketing term for this service is BPOS-S (Business Productivity On-line Suit Standard).

Reasons we are adopting a cloud-based solution are:

• Email is a commodity IT service. Our email platform doesn’t give us any strategic business advantage over the competition. Therefore it makes sense to allow a company that specializes in this field to concentrate on delivering JWT the best email service possible while freeing our time and resources to focus on delivering more strategic IT services to the business.
• Our capital spend on email will stop (server refreshes etc) and email will become an operational cost item.
• We will have a real financially backed SLA with Microsoft around our email platform.
• The email system will be far more reliable and redundant, since it will be hosted in specialized data centers with higher levels of security and redundancy than we could hope to deliver from our own internal data centers. The Microsoft data centers also are geographically redundant, so if one should completely fail, we will automatically connect over to the backup site.
• We will gain additional levels of Business Continuity Protection for our email platform, since the email servers will be hosted externally from JWT offices. Should a JWT office become unavailable due to disaster/power outage/network outage, etc., users still will have full access to email from their homes, hotels, etc.
• Roaming/Home users no longer will need to connect via the Cisco VPN client before they can get access to their email. Instead, they will transparently connect through a secure RPC-HTTP connection to our mail servers within the Microsoft data centers.
• The hosted solution will be an Evergreen environment (hence the project name). This means that we always will have the option to be on the latest versions of Exchange when they are released by Microsoft, and this will be at no additional cost or effort on our part. This is big: Most group companies are still running Exchange 2003 because they cannot afford the capital uplift for new servers or the project/resource time required migrating to the latest version. The hosted version of Exchange 2010 will be available in the middle of next year; if we so choose, we can have all our users transparently switched to this new version over one weekend.
• With the hosted approach, we will be providing some additional messaging services to our users. All PC users (MACs to follow in late 2010) will get an enterprise IM solution, which will also deliver global presence, person-to-person video & voice and file transfers. We also will introduce a complete hosted email archiving service.

. . . We hope you all agree that this is an exciting project. The outcome of this will see JWT on the most modern email platform within WPP and embracing the benefits of the industry-shifting technology that is cloud computing.

New details are emerging about the rowdy behaviour of two Research In Motion executives who were fired for disrupting an intercontinental flight — including that they managed to chew their way out of restraints after being handcuffed by crew members.

George Campbell, 45, and Paul Alexander Wilson, 38, each pleaded guilty to mischief for disrupting an Air Canada flight from Toronto to Beijing last week.

The plane landed instead in Vancouver, where a court later ordered them to pay $72,000 in restitution. They also received suspended sentences and were placed on parole for a year.

RIM fired both men after investigating the incident, but little information has been made public about what was so disruptive about their behaviour.

However, court documents obtained by CBC News paint a very chaotic picture.