Stu Downes

The beta for Sametime 7.5 client is now available on the beta test server.  You’ll need to register for an ID, log in to the server and then you can download the client.  My first impressions:

• Love the UI compared to the old client.
• Love the fact that if I hit escape accidentally and close a chat window I simply click on the person from my buddy list and the historic chat returns.
• Away, offline, available status reminders within chat windows is excellent.
• Stopping me typing a message to someone who goes offline during a chat is great.
• Telling me that someone has closed the chat window helps clarify when a conversation has ended.
• Searching for contacts in buddy lists is a great productivity improvement for me.
• Chat history is finally usable!
• Location awareness with other Sametime 7.5 users is a real benefit (we need to educate people on giving better location descriptors though!).

Overall the client really catches up with public IM clients and competition.  It isn’t a step change compared to what is on the market today however it is a step change compared to the old version of Sametime.

Where will the real interesting areas be?

In my opinion it is the extensible nature of the client which will be the key.  The ability to mashup between presense and lcoation information with existing collaborative applications and bots will be very powerful.  IBM internally are already using mashups in this way to show activities you share with a buddy prior to commencing a chat, so you can catch up before the chat (perhaps negate the need for the chat).  Just one example of what I see will be the real power of this new Sametime client.

I haven’t used the meeting services on the demo site so when I do I’ll post my opninions on those.

 

Although my son Ryan is a little young to understand how computers work he does already understand that by pestering me enough he’ll get to see the sing along with The Tweenies. So even at 1 he knows that the computer is a source of information. By the time he is in his early 20′s I’ll be in my late 50′s. Between now and then there will be a step change in technologies. How will I, as a potential decision maker in my late 50′s be able to cope with his demands for new technology which I may not fully understand.

The same dilema is faced by today’s decision makers in respect to social technology savvy graduates leaving university. How do you translate “this is way cool” into business language identifying benefits. This is the key I think. Younger workers understand the benefits of the newer technologies but do not have the business language skills to translate the benefits to their senior business managers. It isn’t just senior managers who don’t understand social technology.

Libby Ingrissia surveyed the Lotus User Group last week to see how many people used social bookmarking – 63% responded “what is social bookmarking” – I hazard a guess that most user group readers are system administrators or developers. So the challenge from those of us who THINK we understand social software is to try and bridge the gap between our users, techies and managers. I struggle at times because highly technical people who understand what a blog is can’t understand why they would benefit from one and hence adoption of social technology becomes more of an issue. Selling email, IM, and conference software is simple, the langauge can be phrased in such a way and people grasp the nettle immediately. Talk about social bookmarking, blogs, wikis and my perception is people glaze over so I must think of a way in my enterprise to spell out the benefits of this emerging technology (I say emerging from an enterprise perspective). How we talk about social software in a way which engages all is the challenge (if anyone has managed it please pass on your secret!).
Tomorrow I feel will be the same challenges just for a different technology set so I guess I’ll just have to arm myself ready for that, who knows what those challenges will be but I’m sure they’ll be fun.

 

IBM have recently started to publicise the forthcoming 7.0.2 Notes/Domino point upgrade and emphasise the new features in terms of an out of the box blog template.  Their blog template development team was strengthened earlier this year when they hired Steve Castledine (developer of the ProjectDX Domino blog template).

So here we go … we have an access controlled Domino database providing a blog on a Domino server which has a http stack running.  Super, but who will use it?  How will users use it?  How will IT departments manage it?  Who will see and read the blogs?  Is Domino the right platform?

Read more…

 

 Rod Boothby triggered these thoughts in his presentation (available as a webcast) at the Collaborative Technologies Conference.  He presented the concept that the as the number of people who tag increases above 50 you quickly cease producing unique tags.  This is backed up by research from HP.  I find this concept and the research from HP exciting and as Graham has also blogged there will be some interesting work to make this a standard in the enterprise.  The faster we can encourage people to tag all their work, and the quicker we can encourage vendors to have open document formats that support tagging, then the faster that we will start to see the power of tagging, and more importantly the folksonomy that produces in the enterprise.  There are a number of papers on social bookmarking producing folksonomies,  this paper examines the IBM Dogear system.

The folksonomy clouds that we presently observe are generally number oriented e.g. I have tagged six documents with this tag.  In the future I would find it hard in an enterprise just to use a simple counting mechanism.  Time must come into the folksonomy and as the period of time passes the relevance of that document, and hence its weighting within the cloud, must decline.  The whole concept for the enterprise is to find people, teams, documents and projects with similar themes that are happening now or have recently completed.

So the challenge for people like myself who influence both vendors into ensuring that users can tag with their products and influence enterprises that this new method of social bookmarking makes folksonomy a must for their enterprise.  The trouble will come in the fact that many enterprises have categorised discussions and they simply exploded into a degenerating mess of categories, now what we need to do is say to them that the mess is fine because once you use the categorisation to produce s folksonomy cloud it becomes much easier to navigate and much more managable – especially if the systems which vendors develop will identify and suggest tags from within the content.

As an aside I have now updated the sidebar of my website to include tag clouds of what I blog (through a wordpress plugin) and what I read (through the tag cloud facility from del.icio.us).  And a final note to let you know that the quiet blog was due to holidays nothing more serious as one reader thought!