Mr. Nicholas (Nick) Shelness

A 1999 IBM Fellow, the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve, he is a world-class expert on messaging and groupware. He held a number of technical positions at Lotus Development Corp., eventually working from home in a renovated 17th century corn mill in Scotland. He became Chief Technology Officer and a Lotus Fellow. As a Lotus Fellow, he made significant contributions to Lotus' e-mail and collaboration products including Notes, Domino and cc:Mail. He played a leading role in making Notes/Domino the industry's best-selling and most critically praised enterprise messaging platform. He architected the Lotus Messaging Switch, was a major contributor to the Asynchronous Protocol Standard and co-authored another standard that defines how a Web page and related information can be delivered simultaneously. Previously, he worked in IT at British National Oil Corporation/BritOil plc. In the 1970s he held a number of research and teaching positions at the University of Edinburgh, including an appointment as tenured Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Edinburgh. He was also doing research on what was needed to run early Local Area Networks (LANs). In 1984 he founded the UK arm of Soft-Switch where he was responsible for its LAN gateway products. He held both senior technical and managerial positions and became its Chief Scientist in 1993. The company was acquired by Lotus in 1994 and he became the Lotus CTO in 1998. He has also worked on Internet protocols and is a co-author of the Internet Engineering Task Force's MHTML standard for sending Web pages as e-mail. As well as championing open standards, he is also interested in the open source movement and says Domino will be able to work with the Linux free Operating System.