Stu Downes

OK so its been around for years in various products but finally we are seeing it emerge into the enterprise software landscape through Sametime Advanced and I’m sure something is coming along soon following Microsoft’s purchase of Parlano.

On the IBM front Adam can tell you more about this in much better detail than I (link).  From my perspective the importance of the IBM announcement is that it is linked with the concept of persistent chat for communities.  This is the most powerful thing that an IM solution can offer today in my opinion.  Twitter for the enterprise? I’m not sure it is but I still think it will be a very powerful tool in the armory.  Here is what Sametime Advanced will offer in this arena:

“Keep a continuous discussion running on a specific topic with an interested community of people — in the atmosphere of an informal conversation. You can monitor the chat rooms to which you have subscribed, see how many people/unread messages are in each, the number of unread messages or the number of active participants. Keep yourself in the loop with alerts so you’ll be notified when a group is discussing keywords in which you’re interested.”

This is a very powerful tool for information workers and more importantly groups and teams.  Twitter and other tools are filling the gap today but are they truly secure?  I don’t share sensitive information through twitter but I’d like a tool which I can use for that purpose.  But just how important is twitter – important enough for myself and collegues to never forget to log in to twitter but sometimes forget to log in to sametime!

The next question will be federation of corporate persistent chat tools with public services At that point I’ll end this mindless ramble.

James is organising an enterprise RSS day of action (April 24th).  To learn more visit the event wiki.

Steve picked out the best description of the day:

“The purpose of the Enterprise RSS Day of Action on the Thursday 24th April is to help raise awareness for the potential for Enterprise RSS. This wiki will provide Enterprise RSS champions with materials and information they can use to run their own awareness campaigns inside their own organisations.”

Any of the readers who are half decent (i.e. better than me) with GIMP or photoshop can probably improve on this logo attempt from me:

Could all vendors have a URL for bloggers (www.mycompany.com/forblogggers) where we can find images and other information which we can freely reproduce data and images without fear of breaking copyright (especially for images).  Am I the only person who finds it difficult at times to publish posts with suitable images?

Although I can’t publish the images here this series of images give an excellent representation of business, home and alternative uses of video in communications and meetings. (hat tip Chase)

Steve commented recently on desktop video conferencing and whether it is ready for prime time.  I regularly talk to enterprise customers about video conferencing.  One of the main issues I come across is everyone, almost without fail, has unused video conferencing equipment in the corner of a meeting room somewhere in their offices.  These folks embraced video conferencing but soon fell out of love. 

I now try to talk to these same people about the benefits of modern day desktop video solutions, room based high definition video solutions and even telepresence solutions.  Its always a difficult conversation to start but I try and reflect on those old implementations.  Normally we discuss how video was implemeted into existing meeting rooms, and normally the picture from those generation 1 implementations went like this:

• we have a table with chairs on 2 or 3 sides
• we then wheeled a screen and camera into the room and place it on the 4th side
• normally the screen blocked the view to the projector or whiteboard we’d use in meetings
• No-one is positioned to face the camera
• no thought has gone into lighting
• no consideration has been given into how the meeting will be effective. 

Effectiveness comes from combining video with the other media we used to make meetings effective:

• whiteboarding
• application sharing
• co-editing content
• discussions
• presentations
• etc

For me the use of video during meetings has meant that video does provide the primary focus for periods during the meeting.  However much of the meeting is actually spent with people concentrating on other collaboration media and the audio.   Given the choice would I use video = YES.  Given the choice would I use HD video = YES.  The reason is just as in a real meeting you need to focus on slides and information, you need to think but then when you talk you want eye contact and to see the body language.

I think we are about to see the emergence of video conferencing especially given the green agenda, organisations will be more and more keen to show their credentials – and the simplest way is to reduce travel.  I attended a live webcast from VoiceCon where CISCO hosted an event using their telepresence solution.  They made some substantial claims as to how telepresence had reduced their costs and carbon footprint:

“use of videoconferencing at 185 locations has saved the company about $100 million in travel expenses, eliminating about 15 million cubic tons of carbon emissions”, Sue Bostrom, CISCO

CISCO should be congratulated for this.  My hope is that I can influence the people I talk to in such a way that they can see the benefits and reap both the cost savings and CO2 savings that CISCO claim.

They are subject to a recall …. http://www.netgear.co.uk/xe103_recall.php