Breaking with the tradition of keeping home events on the homeblog I’m delighted to announce the arrival of our second child Aidan William. For more info see the homeblog.
Last night I listened to In Business on radio 4. The show is available for 7 days online and is well worth listening to. Peter Day interviews Nathan Myhrvold (Microsoft’s former chief scientist). While not specifically IT related it is interesting especially a brief discussion on the form that PC’s will take in the future comparing evolution to computing.
If any bloggers have 5 minutes to spare then Karen McCullagh a researcher at Manchester is looking for responses to her research:
I’m conducting an online survey to explore the privacy attitudes and expectations of bloggers.
Please take part in the survey: http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/privacysurvey/
If you participate you will be asked to answer questions anonymously about your blogging practices and your expectations of privacy when publishing online. All answers will be stored and analysed on a confidential basis.
The responses will be used to inform academic and policy discussions on blogging practices and attitudes towards privacy.
Finally, could you please encourage other bloggers to participate in the study.
It takes less than 5 minutes to complete the survey!
For further information on my research please visit http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/staff/km.htm.
I am a PhD researcher at CCSR, University of Manchester, England. I am sponsored by the ESRC and Office of the Information Commissioner, UK.
Many thanks,
Karen
For those not following the present debate in the Lotus Blogs after Rod Boothby suggested a method for migrating applications from Notes, please see these links(Rod’s initial post , Ed Brill’s first post, Rod’s second post, Ed Brill’s second post). Many people in the comment threads have pointed out that Rod’s methodology would not work for the majority of Notes applications. I agree with the technical content, if not with some of the tone or personal content, of most of the comments made to Rod as I feel his approach to migration is not suited to migrating databases from Domino. Back in January 2006 during the “Red Bull” hype I posted 3 items on migration from Domino and on my experience of Domino applications:
Domino Applications – The Power – The legacy
Migrating from Notes – Part 2 – the applications
So yer gonner migrate to Exchange- What do you need to consider-
My experience from enterprises where a migration away from Domino has occured is that 80% of the applications, based on standard templates, are easy to migrate – not usng Rod’s methods but other standard migration tools. 20% of the applications however are generally very difficult to migrate. [This is based on real experience of being the key Lead Lotus Admin resource on one 15,000 user, 2,000 application migration and a mentoring resource on a second 12,000 user, 1,000 application migration >> both migrations required due to mergers or acquisitions].
Like any database system be it Oracle, SQL, MySQL, DB2 the migration of complex bespoke applications is difficult so I would also disagree with some arguments which say “why have Domino if it makes migration so difficult” – well Domino doesn’t make it any more complex than another platform it is the necessary complexity of some bespoke applications which do (and that isn’t a Domino thing its an IT thing). I know of many people who don’t think of Domino as an application platform – well in my view it is and if you look round most large Domino shops you’ll see some legacy applications (which drive users nuts) and some leading edge bespoke applications. When assessing applications for migration you’ll soon stumble across that application well off the IT radar which is mission critical. You’ll also then see that the costs to migrate complex applications are high – and again this isn’t solely a Domino issue it is a wider issue of migrating databases from one platform to another.
There are a bigger questions for each application in every enterprise and they are – what is the best platform for this application? what will the end user experience be? how will it integrate with my collaborative and desktop tools? When answering these you may find some applications fall off the Domino platform but you may well be surprised at the number that would fall in.
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Several bloggers have commented recently on IM. The posts that caught my eyes were those by Graham and Adam. I’d like to expand the discussion a little and focus on a wider spectrum.
IM
Well for me instant messaging doesn’t fulfill all my needs, as Graham stated in his post. IM is not the best way for sharing files with a number of colleagues not is it a great mechanism for a high volume of information. What IM for me is presence awareness. Is Jim online? No = ok I’ll email him or schedule a meeting. Is Jim online? Yes = ok I’ll chat with him. Its the power to let someone who may be on the telephone already tell you they are busy and will ping you back when free. This for me is instant messaging.
Tomorrows enterprise (in my opinion!) will extend IM to make far greater use of bots and integrate the IM experience with the telephony experience. Closely following that integration will be rich video integration when better eye contact systems are available (see previous post here).
At the moment I suffer email. I don’t enjoy the experience (and it doesn’t matter which product I use). Email is a necessity for me but it is a limited tool. My email is a silo for my work. Its difficult to share information historically and add new participants to an email thread. Threads become uncontrolled and multiple threads become commonplace from a single message. What email is good for – and is effectively the only option for at the moment is asynchronous information sharing on a small scale. I know there are team workspaces and peer to peer products like Groove but they don’t fill the gap I use email for. I liken email to my television viewing. I don’t watch much TV and when I do it is pre-recorded so I don’t watch the adverts. Email is the same for me as I group it all up and deal with it 2-3 times per day and most email gets previewed (not fully read) and deleted. Thats because most of the email I get isn’t directly related to me or what I’m doing – hence I haven’t the time for it. The main reason I use email isn’t actually email – its the calendar and scheduling functionality. I’d like a tool with a thread based view and the activities product from IBM fits that bill.
Activities
This is the product that I think will fill the gap between email , IM and workspaces. I’ve blogged about it previously (1,2). IBM released the product as a in the Workplace Managed Client but have since re-architected the product to integrate tightly with Notes 8 and Sametime but also have recognised the power of the product and I expect we’ll see plugins for competitor products.
So what are activities? Well they are just things we do.
How would a user gain any benefit from them? Well rather than start an email you simply start an activity. You’d normally start it with some information or explanation. Sharing it with colleagues means they see the activity in their list. As more people are invited they too see the activity. Activities are intended for small collaborations and sit in the middle of this IBM image:
So ok I now have a thread of information which is shared with colleagues. The thread is timeless and isn’t destroyed when new participants join the thread.
Why is this so good?
Well anything goes in there:
Why is all this so powerful for me?
This I believe will be the turning point of email within organisations that use activities. Email will become much more a tool for communication rather than collaboration. Activities would allow employees to share information and work together on small items more easily.
What is missing?
Well with all these new tools we need a better information flow from technology to how to use it and in what context it should be used. All these new tools which are 48 months off for most enterprises but the wheels turn slowly in those organisations and the shock factor of these agile tools on the way those enterprises work will be interesting to observe. There also needs to be a hierarchy of tools and tools for purpose. Interesting that if you were a plumber or an electrician there are obvious training courses to follow. If you are an information worker you have little access to training to help you best use all the tools on offer or understand which tool to use best. I think all the forms of collaboration we see today will survive, I don’t see activities replacing any of them but it will give us another tool in our box – and a very powerful tool.
With the release of Domino 7.0.2 on Friday for Partnerworld subscribers. As well as an official blog template from IBM (others have been available for a few years) there is also a tool developers can use to integrate RSS into all their databases allowing views to become enabled and subscription based. Excellent news and I now hope to see that RSS enablement become a standard in all the templates IBM product.
Image used courtesy of Bruce Elgort via creative commons licencing on his flickr.
As most of you know I work for a large IT organisation. We deal with suppliers on a regular basis, and you can guess from my blog content which one I talk to most. However, talk might be the wrong way to describe this communication channel as I’m increasingly finding that the communications are not synchronous and tend mainly to be near synchronous or asynchronous. Recently though I’ve been finding that tagged blog articles are gaining responses from the real experts within large organisations. Normally when you deal with a large organisation you face off to a support or sales contact. To get through to the product experts is generally very difficult. As large organisations open up and allow bloggers to generate public content (either through a corporate blog service or their personal blog spaces) I am seeing a trend where those bloggers also monitor tag based feeds and pick up articles on their subject area. Even better is the observation that these subject matter experts are also willing to respond to posts. For example recently I posted some information on Sametime 7.5 and within 24 hours the offering manager from IBM had responded to me.
Now had I logged a call for the same information I would have got a response, maybe as quick – probably not as it was a low priority question. There is no way through the support route that the call would have bridged the internal company divisions and been picked up by the offering manager with a great view of the product and of the roadmap. I hope to see increasingly see blogs being used as a tool to foster asynchronous collaboration with the right people from the right teams in large enterprises.
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