Stu Downes

I was pleased to hear about the tabbed browsing and in presentations I saw under NDA before Lotusphere and the images on Adam’s blog I was concerned that it would only work with directories with photo’s enabled.

I’m pleased to see via the photographs in the Lotusphere Presskit that photos are not the only option.  I don’t like photos for two reasons:

1. You have to store them in a directory.
2. I may have 10 tabs open for chats and have 3 people I’ve never chatted with before so struggle to differentiate between who is who.

The named tab option seems much more user friendly to me, even telling you the last time anything was said and the presence information.

I’m also pleased to see that for companies who encourage web cameras there will be the option for peer-to-peer video chats.

This will become increasingly prevelant in enterprises especially as eye-contact telepresence systems migrate from fortune 500 board rooms to our desktops and laptops.  I’ve blogged about this before (for those of nervous disposition be warned some awful webcam images of the author to make a point about eye contact).

Collaboration

Well, here is one announcement I’ve waited many years to see, from Richard Ingram on the DominoBlog.

“Beyond Domino 8, the roadmap gets even more exciting. We are planning to deliver a Domino “Next” release that will include :

•  More openness with native support of LDAP directory and Active Directory;
• Alternative forms of authentication, including making the use of Notes ID files optional; “

Much as Domino Admins love their directory enterprises have always aimed to reduce the number of directories, adminstrators, and level of expertise required to manage those directories.

Collaboration

Mark pointed me to the Lotusphere Connections site where delegates can experience all the new technology in that suite.  Its good to see that the products aren’t just vapourware.  Interesting the way they are scraping the tagged feeds onto the homepage and delivering an external bloggers view through the site.  I’ve made it onto the related blogs section so thanks guys!  The guts of the site are reserved for conference attendees … now I need to work on an ID to get into the interesting parts of the site.  But this is positive, if IBM are prepared to stand up their web 2.0 site for 7,000 attendees in pre-beta format then there must be confidence in their technology.  Web 2.0 despite having only a small enterprise following today sparks an interest and longing to explore, investigate and deploy for me.  More than any set of technologies in IT.  I’m looking forwards to learning more and exploring how these tools will actually sit in the enterprise for individuals, groups, departments, joint ventures and the enterprise as a whole.  I’ll also be interested to see how this IBM offering compares to SuiteTwo in terms of usability.  Craig has already commented and contrasted the two products:

“The most important distinction is that this suite was built as an integrated solution from the get-go and even more importantly is built on one platform. S2 is from 4 or more vendors…”

It will come down to functionality, usability, cost and supportability for enterprise customers.  In time I hope to be able to comment more on both solutions, for now I look forward to using both.

Collaboration

This is a recent Gartner post (originally posted on 4th January 2007), but now is a good time to think more about what is says.

“IBM would be better off not relying on a single event to inform and excite its users. Users would also benefit from a steady stream of announcements and the opportunity to get more information closer to home. “

My personal opinion is I’d rather focus on announcements once per year and analyse them than spend the whole year with little snippets.  I would like all conference organisers to consider other means of live-streaming content to ensure a wider audience than those lucky enough to attend, see here.  Its good to see IBM in secondlife for Lotusphere.

One comment I’d like to pick up on from the Gartner weblog is the following related to Lotusphere 2006:

“I spoke with a customer who did not go to Lotusphere and, consequently, knew nothing about the new features in Sametime 7.5.”

I’ll take Gartner to task for the second comment as IBM did a good job last year with Lotusphere Comes to You events all round the globe and the Sametime 7.5 launch events.  Anyone who wanted to know about Sametime 7.5 could get access to a reasonably local event.

 

Collaboration

Although I have yet to watch the keynote but am pleased to hear it will be on YouTube.  IBM have started their annual Lotusphere event with a slew of announcements:

So what does all this mean to me?  In summary Web 2.0 is now key to IBM’s strategy.  During the same event IBM restated the previous announcement that Workplace Messaging is no more making Notes and Domino 8 their email platform (no real shock there).  I’ll focus on Connections and Quickr:

Lotus Connections

This didn’t take me by surprise, though I am pleased they have packaged (or are packaging) their research work into a product.  I had the luxury of spending more than an hour with Marty Moore during the collaborative technologies conference talking about blogging and the activity server and Dogear (blogged here).  I’m excited by the fact that a large vendor like IBM is packaging the following functionality into a supported product:

• Blogging
• Tagging and Folksonomies
• Activities
• Social Network Analysis

This announcement will give IBM a clear differentiator in the web 2.0 space.  Although Microsoft have wrapped a lot of web 2.0 technologies into Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services 2007 the real differentiator from what I have read to date is the fact that this has been designed from the ground up as a web 2.0 platform.  It isn’t based on Notes or Domino its new, its a development effort from IBM Watson Research lab and as you’ll see their research articles go back years.

The other key differentiator is that IBM have actually been eating their own dog food with Dogear with some claims of 20,000 internal blogs.  If I were a small web 2.0 player I’d possibly be a little worried right now.

Lotus Quickr

Well this did take me by surprise.  Its a “a new Web 2.0-based collaborative content offering“.  Now apart from that I don’t know very much.  I do have some questions though.

• Is it Quickplace scaled up or down?
• Does it integrate with the OS file system?
• Does that integration include support for new metadata in Vista?

The screen shots would lead you to believe that the client is a form of information aggregator allowing you to share content with others (presumably via some Quickr infrastructure).  Now I wish I was at Lotusphere!.    The Quickr Teamspace also looks interesting hinting at a combined blogging, wiki and document sharing platform each supported with RSS subscription.

If Quickr is a single product then this for me would fill the gap between simple Quickplace deployments and enterprise websphere portal solutions.  In fact it would position itself against Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 - however to compete there the price point needs to be very attractive, i.e. free.  Quickr will obviously, as confirmed in the press release have the in-built integration with Lotus products which will differentiate it from WSS 3.0 for IBM shops.

Whats missing?

Well not just IBM but all the major vendors haven’t revealed their hand in two areas:

1. How are we going to manage all this new data?
2. The RSS appliance - which would sit perfectly onto an email server architecture.

I’ll wait and see what happens in this area!

Collaboration

Here is the chat transcript from numerous bloggers in the opening session of Lotusphere.

Thanks to instanttechnologies for setting this up and connectria for hosting it.

I have moved the html here as it was causing issues with my blog software.

Lotusphere2007

Collaboration

Thanks to Charlie I’ve installed the snap (though this wordpress plugin) giving a screenshot of links as you hover over them when viewing this site in a browser.  I’m not 100% convinced it adds value.  Let me know your views and that will help me decide whether its a permanent addition.

Collaboration

This is not directed at any specific conference, those with conferences coming up please don’t take offence.  Many large conferences occur in the collaboration field each year.  The majority of those conferences are hosted in the United States.  For me, anyone else a significant distance awat we have to fly.  For many conferences that will mean that around 20% or more of attendees are flying across the Atlantic from Europe.  Lets assume there are about 100,000 delegates each year for just collaborative conferences and there are 20,000 people traveling across the Atlantic from Europe (and more flying internally within the United States).  Each of those passengers leaves an environmental footprint, most notably they’ll use there annual carbon allowance in one such trans-Atlantic trip.  Well I killed mine last year with 2 trans-atlantic journeys.

Specifically for conferences and to assist with both environmental footprint and fiscal restrictions surrounding travel I’d like to suggest the following.  Large events generally have overflow rooms where the session is broadcast.  Would it not be possible where such facilities exist for a “virtual conference” to also take place where the same media content is streamed to web based fee paying subscribers?  Could conferences be regionalised to allow multi-venue conferences to take place so that speaker and delegate journey lengths are minimsed to their nearest regional centre?

Many will argue that face to face is key, and I do agree with that.  I also feel that in the short to medium term the environmental impact of travelling will be penalised more and more (both in environmental taxes and increased fuel costs) to a point that conference organisers will in future need to consider these impacts and ways to mitigate them without numbers falling.

For now this appears not to be an issue, most conferences in the collaborative arena are seeing increased attendances as companies rightly recognise the importance of collaboration.  However we all need to consider how our actions at home, at work, and at an enterprise level and especially surrounding travel impact the world we live in.

 

Collaboration

When I work I like my experience to be as productive as possible, I may not be productive at the time but I still want the tools I use to be productive.  For me most of my time is spent working on computers and as such its the software which is my window to experience and productivity.

RSS Aggregators

What a great tool these things are, my tool of choice is FeedDemon.  Why do I choose this?  Well I suppose like many bloggers I have a lot of information which I read from about 200 or more RSS feeds and for me, right now, the products which plug into my email client just don’t provide me with the full or fast enough experience (I think they’re great for most people but don’t suit me).

The experience is broken though.  I consume information but for many posts the information is the starting pistol for a comment debate.  For example when Ed posted a response and stimulated a debate around Domino Designer the most amazing insight was from the 130 comments.  I don’t generally get much debate here as my audience is fairly modest but when reading blog articles through RSS I want to interact with the comments, I want to do it from the aggregator and I don’t want to have to rely on co-comment or other plugins.  Here would be my ideal design:

Although I have the article and comments as 2 panes I think my preference would be for one pane which scrolled to allow the comments to be viewed.  In fact I’d be happy for all the right hand 4 panes to be controlled with the same scroll bar, but I’d like the ability to post a comment or respond to float with my scrolling.

Why do I propose this method of working? Well …

• I don’t want to keep switching between applications
• I want to have all my blog reading in one place (comments and articles)
• I like the idea of being able to respond instantly

I did want to link to other articles on the same theme but I haven’t been able to find useful links or references.  Surely I’m not the only person thinking along these lines?  Time to leave that aggregator, open that browser, scroll to the comment box and write a comment (really productive eh!).

Tags : RSS Aggregator UserExperience

Collaboration

This article sparked my interest (computerweekly article).  Email is being introduced for prisoners in London in a trial which could result in widespread email access.  My initial gut reaction was skepticism.  However, the more I thought about it the more it made sense.  We wouldn’t question the prisoner receiving letters so why not email (in this case plain text only).  If something as simple as email can reduce re-offending and hence crime then I’m all for it.

Interestingly the article points out that in reality it is the regular contact which seems to reduce re-offending.  So I wonder whether virtual visiting using telepresence or high definition teleconferencing will become more common to allow visits where long distance traveling would possibly prevent the visit.  I’m sure there are teams in the prison services already thinking about these things but for me looking into a “customer” arena that I have never had any involvement it is very interesting, I’d never in a hundred years thought a benefit of email is reduced crime!

Image courtesy of grendelkhan licenced with creative commons.

Collaboration