At that time, Jim recalls, Lotus was experimenting with the Large Account Management Process (LAMP), and I was assigned to one of those accounts, IBM. Windows was just becoming popular, and, though it seems like a really distant memory now, there was a war in the marketplace between Windows and OS/2. We sold what now seems like unbelievable amounts of Freelance/G and 1-2-3/G to IBM. Notes wasn’t yet a popular product at IBM, with only Jim Cannavino’s PS/LOB making a big commitment.

In 1993, shortly after the North American Sales Meeting in San Jose, Jim left Lotus to pursue an opportunity to broaden his Notes skills at The Human Interface Group (THIG), a small Notes consultancy based in Hartford, Connecticut. The most exciting thing I got involved in there was an application we worked on for one of the big insurance companies in Hartford. The CIO and his direct reports were meeting all day once a week, and for a full-day offsite once a month, and they felt like they were continually falling farther and farther behind. They were convinced that they needed a Notes-based application to take and distribute minutes from these meetings. As we talked to them more and more, what we quickly realized was that they didn’t need a meeting minutes app. They were covering quite a lot of ground in their meetings, but no action items were ever getting assigned or tracked. They’d have great, really important discussions, which would die at the end of the meeting. So, Jim and Rob Cantor sat down and started building a virtual meeting space in Notes, which assigned action items and tracked their completion, and became a living space where the CIO and his team could gather anytime to work with one another, share information, and get work done with each other, outside the context of their weekly meetings. In 1994, when Lotus bought The Human Interface Group and turned it into the Lotus Institute, that application became the foundation for TeamRoom.

By then, Jim had left THIG, and went on to found a Notes consultancy at Software House, one of Lotus’s largest distributors, and then briefly worked as a contractor on the Notes team at JP Morgan, in New York. It was quite an education to see Notes from the other side of the fence, to watch a company which relied upon the product to run part of its business it’s a perspective that was invaluable to me when I came back to Lotus. In late 1994 (about two days before the end of 1994!) Jim returned, working for Lynne Capozzi as a Workgroup Specialist in the Product Sales organization in New York City. That was probably the most talented group of folks I ever worked with, anywhere. Lynne remains the best manager I’ve ever worked for, anywhere, and having to bring my game up to the level of people like Todd Headrick, John Donahue, Lisa Putnam, Jack Leary, Gregg Steinman and Heyward Drummond was one of the biggest, and most rewarding challenges I’ve ever faced. From Product Sales, Jim went on to join the WW Field Enablement organization, where he worked on the Knowledge Architecture and Communication Team (the KNAC), and was the host of LotusTalk, a monthly worldwide Lotus and IBM sales conference call. He ran the Lotus Executive Briefing Center for a short time, moved to North America Marketing to manage customer loyalty programs, and finally, was promoted to Director of the Lotus WarRoom (hands down the most stressful job I’ve ever had!).