Stu Downes

Adam commented on my previous post (thanks for the fast response Adam).  This will be fixed:

“I’ve got an update from the previous comment you quoted – we are planning to issue a fix pack in the near future, and one of the updates will give the Sametime 7.5 client priority for incoming IMs regardless of which version of the Sametime server you are running.”

This is great news and will be welcomed by many of us.

Well most of us playing with Sametime 7.5 connect will experience issues where other sametime clients (Notes or Meeting clients) open any new chats sent to you by default if you are running a Sametime 3 or Sametime 6.x server infrastructure.  I raised the issue in the LDD Forum some time ago and also found this comment in the Taking Notes podcast blog.  There Adam Gartenberg explained:

“The design goal is that if you’re running a Sametime 7.5 server and the Sametime 7.5 client, all incoming IMs would default to the 7.5 client, even if you’re also signed into Notes IM. If you’re running a Sametime 7.0 or previous server it would likely default to the Notes IM client. Regardless of which server you’re running, initiating a chat from Notes 7.0 would use the embedded Notes IM client. In Hannover, however, everything will change, and we will have a truly integrated IM experience so it won’t matter whether you’re signed in to both clients or where you initiate a chat.”

Darren Adams talked breifly about this issue yesterday.  His understanding of the problem is that each sametime client has an index number.  Older Sametime clients have an index number which is prioritised by the Sametime 3.x and Sametime 6.x servers.  So we’ll have to wait till Sametime 7.5 servers are rolled out into our domains before this issue will be resolved…mental note to push this issue where I work

 

Yesterday was the Sametime 7.5 launch in Manchester.  Attendance was good and the venue and organisation were excellent.  Thanks to Stephen Harris and his team from Polymorph for hosting the event.  The venue was the 9th floor of the SAS Raddison hotel at Manchester Airport overlooking the apron for Terminals 1 & 2 and the runway.  Although the view was interesting (I would have shared had I not turned up with empty camera batteries!) the content was much better.  Steve gave an introduction and overview of Polymorph and was followed by Darren Adams and Keiren Byrne from IBM.

Despite being very well read on Sametime 7.5 it was an interesting day with some nice plug-ins demonstrated and some even more interesting dates:

• Real Time Collaboration Server : released Q4.  Still working with some public IM vendors to overcome federation agreements.
• Office integration released Q1/Q2 2007.
• Social software bolt-ons (Skill Tap, Forums, Polls) due early/mid 2007. 
• Plug-in Catalog very close (1-2 months).
• As soon as the plug in catalog is released we can expect the Instant Share plug-in to be available.  This is one of the best plug-ins for me (don’t understand why it isn’t bundled with the client) as the plugin offers 1-to-1 screen sharing via the connect client.  Great for instant small scale collaborations.

Excellent event, thanks to all concerned.  The venue is great for me, no driving round Manchester, train to the airport then walkway to the hotel.

 

Well I’m happy to report (via Chris Miller) that IBM are dropping the Workplace name for their products and focussing on Workplace as a strategy.  Here is what Chris blogged:

“Ken Bisconti, Vice President Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Products had his opening session.  Now he made a comment we debated posting at first, but since it was said in front of people from 12 countries in a general forum, here is the snapshot that I am paraphrasing (yes that means not direct word for word but the whole thing in a very clear nutshell):

You will see the name Workplace being pulled from products and being shown as a strategy and direction.

Yes, the Workplace being removed from products, but very much the focus and strategy.”

For me this is excellent news.  The announcement will avoid the confusion and issues you face when trying to make people understand what Workplace is.  It becomes something of a challenge to describe a strategy then follow on with solutions in that strategy that have the same name.  Well done IBM.

Those with a good memory will remember from my posts that I was lucky enough to attend the Collaborative Technologies Convergence back in June.  In posted here that in a room of about 80 people 75% had implemented a new collaborative solution in the previous 12 months and 0% had got over 80% adoption.  That number still bothers me.  It is a problem I feel is there but have little proof or evidence to support.  During some googling I did come across this interesting paper from CREW and would like to share some of their conclusions:

“The foremost conclusion of this study is that
collaborative tools must meet a specific need to merit the
effort of deployment, adoption, and subsequent use.”

“the new tools seemingly imposed too
great a burden to learn and master, relative to the
perceived benefits.”

“The level of support varies with the complexity and novelty of the proposed tool.”

In that last comment support is referencing the adoption, or support for the technology.  It was an interesting point which stated that if a user was familiar with a process they would adopt it in its technological form quite easily but if they weren’t used to it they wouldn’t.  Perhaps that is why most video phones on contracts with free video call minutes are not used at the moment.

An interesting note to leave on from the research is the fact that if you try and by too novel when implementing a technology for a project then adoption may not be high.  I’ll infer that in fact you could damage critical projects without understanding the up front effort to train team members how to use the latest and greatest technology.  An interesting thought for us all to leave on…

“adoption of novel tools with accompanying
novel practices is not something that unfolds on a time
scale consistent with most projects.”

tags: collaboration, adoption, technology

Very soon high definition USB web cameras will be an affordable solution for information workers to consider their addition as a tool for collaboration.  Right now some of the same information workers, like me, will be using medium resolution web cameras for conferencing.  But at the moment we all face the same problem…the screen.  We need to look at it to interact with other parties and thus the camera is not in eye contact.

Camera on my monitor

Under the monitor

It doesn’t take long looking at the top of my head or my chin and not getting eye contact before the power of the video image portraying my emotions is lost.  Much better (some would argue not!) if you could see my face and have some eye contact.

Enough scary pictures of me!  O’Reilly published a blog post on this issue back in 2005, however desktop video conferencing wasn’t quite at the inflection point it is now.

There have been some innovative solutions most of which rely on an image projected onto a splitter (a coated optic which while reflecting the image to your eyes still allows the camera to record through the screen to give viewers of your camera the impression of eye contact.  This paper shows the concept excellently.

 

The concept

Between you and your monitor you have the splitter.  The camera sees your eye as you look at the screen.  The optics of the splitter mean you see the screen.  In optics terms it isn’t very complex.  In desktop ergonomics is is more complex.  I’m sure some budding inventor can come up with a lightweight splitter and camera mount that sits on your monitor.  If you do having read this remember me

Ultimately I feel the real power will come when the optics within the monitor itself allows for a camera to photograph you through the screen.  Ideally behind the picture of the person who is talking to you at the time (as normally on a multipoint conference you have 2-4 people on the call.

 

The ultimate goal

It would appear that some clever spark who is a bit quicker than me patented this idea earlier in 2006 and according to the New Scientist and Engadget Apple are developing just such a solution.  Well I look forward to the day it is common place this allowing all of us to benefit from eye to eye contact interactive video conferencing without the expense of the existing corporate executive level solutions like HP Halo (and others).

tags: video+conferencing, camera, eye+contact, conferecing

Thanks to the Taking Notes Podcast making short reports from Collaboration University more information has been publicised about Wiliki.  The codename which may be called QWiki is a Wiki template for Quickplace, which will allow simple Wiki deployment within Quickplaces in a similar way to creating a new room now.  Following shortly behind will be a blog template for Quickplace.  Both templates will be open source.  It isn’t clear from what I have heard whether this is an IBM initiative or a community innitiative, whichever is true this is a welcome addition to Quickplace.  It has been developed on Quickplace 7 but the developers can’t see any reason it wouldn’t work on Quickplace 6.5.  These build on the community build Domino templates for Blogs and Wiki’s and the shortly to be released blog template from IBM in Domino 7.0.2.

The call also mentioned Quickplace 8, the code for which has just been completed and I assume is now ready for alpha testing within IBM.

UPDATE : QWiki is the formal name.  It is a community effort with significant support from SNAPPS.  Here is the homepage

tags: Wiliki, Quickplace, Blogs, Wikis

At Collaboration University (a Sametime and Quickplace training conference) we are expecting an announcement on what I’m guessing, I have no inside knowledge, is an extension to Quickplace presently codenamed “wiliki“.  Well I hope this will be news of wiki style functionality within Quickplace … given that Wiliki is also an open source Wiki platform.  But I’m normally a million miles away from reality with my speculation given that my last speculation before Lotusphere 2006 was of a Hannover beta (duh!).  So for now I’ll happily rest and wait for the news hoping it will be something a little exciting!  There have been some hints with an image which match up to the Wiliki Wiki.  But we will see tomorrow in the UK!

tags: Quickplace, Wiki, Wiliki, Collaboration+University

Well some of us may have been playing with it for a while but Sametime 7.5 was officially launched yesterday in New York, see the launch here.  I’ve been experimenting with the client for a while now amd have to say I’m very impressed with the client.  The aesthetics are good but more importantly the extensible nature of the client, and the open standards approach to plugins and extensions is already fostering a large community of developers.  This community is a mixture of commercial entities and hopefully eventually a thriving open community and will be the strength of the client for me.

I did have a play with installing Eclipse and J9 and the Connect client toolkit … hmmm … I now realise I’m definitely not a developer!  I’ll need to take a few hours playing with it to get to the point of being able to write a hello world app!  But for those true developers in the world this has got to be good news.  Lotus are keen to call Sametime 7.5 a Real Time Collaboration Platform rather than a product.  I’d say its the most extensible client from Lotus that I have ever seen, but maybe I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it a platform.

The entire Eclipse framework makes both the product development cycle very short, Mike Rhodin intimated that the majority of Sametime 7.5 development has been completed in the last 8 months.  Given that information and the fact that plugin developers (not me obvoiusly) are taking anything from a few hours to a couple of weeks to develop the most complex extensions then I can see that this product will be quite exciting.  I do wonder how the poor IT departments will cope with the range of available plugins – although I know their installation can be controlled via policy.

My only dissappointment at the moment is the difficulty to install plugins without the forthcoming IBM plugin catalog server (I’m like the kid who wants Christmas and Easter at once!).  At the moment the only way to install them is to produce a site locally using Eclipse (which is the point I have got to but haven’t managed to put any of the sample plugins onto that site….more playing required!).

But let me leave on a more positive note.  This release is the best thing that has come from Lotus since Sametime itself was released (in my opinion!).  Well done all involved.  I look forward to Notes 8, Quickplace 8, Activities, the new social tools.  One of the guest panelists at the Sametime 7.5 launch summed it up nicely saying it was nice to see Lotus back in the game.

tags: Sametime+7.5, Lotus, Eclipse

How enterprises will deal with the growing web2.0 services available freely through port 80 and 443 on their firewalls?  I perceive that enterprises will be hiding behind policy documents which state though shalt not, must not, do not, action will be taken.

Well if you are anything like me the security policy is still in that “to read never” pile and if you are lucky I’ve read some parts of some corporate emails on security.  I wouldn’t class myself as a rule breaker so I guess I’m common amongst employees.

So what should I do when the day comes that a business partner wants me to collaborate and use a hosted web2.0 service?  I think at that point I’ll have to take a common sense approach and ensure that I only post data up there that I’d be willing to email to the partner anyway.  So how could corporate’s deal with web2.0?

Well the simplest way is if you want control put something in place that allows users to easily deliver web based teamspaces and IM federation (not too worried about email as we have that now already so I can’t see any scope in a web2.0 service that delivers email on top of my corporate email).  Make the provisioning of the provisioning of the teamspaces simple, make the provisioning of user accounts and permissions simple (if it takes more than 2 minutes to configure a workspace and users then there is a problem for me).  Finally IM federation – this is key.  If I were the customer and could see presence information and IM my contacts within the partner organisations then I’d be very happy.

In the long run however I can’t think of any large organisation which will be without disrupters using the latest internet based tools for collaboration.  Instead of factoring all this new technology out by policies and rules organisations could use the data they hold on their corporate firewalls to see what services their users are demanding and then consider how to integrate these services into their offerings (either internally, in DMZs or direct from a service provider on the internet).

tags: web2.0, collaboration, enterprise