| I have been lucky enough to be chosen to present a Birds of a Feather session around the connections user community with my good friends Simon Vaughan and Stuart McIntyre.
BOF115 - IBM Connections 3.01 – Enhancement ideas from Connections users
With the anticipated release of Connections 4, the aim of this session
is to review what users have requested in future versions of Connections
and how these improvements are designed to help increase the adoption
of Social business tools in an organization. Since the introductions of
‘idea blogs’ in Connections 3.01, an active community of users have been
submitting, commenting and sharing ideas via the Connections User
Community in Greenhouse - a community product managers and developers
also participate in. With the audience's help, we will do a deep dive
into some of these ideas. Simon Vaughan will focus on the user requests,
Sharon Bellamy will focus on the technical improvements.
Speakers :
Simon Vaughan - Cardiff University, Stuart McIntyre - Collaboration Matters, Sharon Bellamy - Applicable
DATE: Wednesday 1/18, TIME: 7:00 am – 8:00 am, LOCATION: Swan Toucan 2
If you are lucky enough to be at Lotusphere and are interested in Connections please come and check our session.
I will also be blogging and tweeting from Lotusphere as it is going to be a very busy and exciting conference this year.
There are a lot of new software releases and lots of new features coming - there is a lot of buzz in the Community that this year is going to be something big.
|
| Well it depends on which vendor that you ask!
Here is my view. On the one hand, IT is being more and more led by consumer
demand. Examples of this are the rise of IOS and android as mobile platforms at
the expense of Blackberry and of course Microsoft's Windows Mobile offerings (lest we
forget). The other major driver is the improvements in user experience evidence
in major players products. Examples of this include Facebook and Twitter with
their stripped down Web 2.0, user interface. Interface and “User Experience is Everything”
approach to product development.
Facebook is a good example of this. You
hardly notice the applications that sit behind the user experience. You just
consume them. The important thing here is that you don’t go away from
Facebook’s user interface to do that. Twitter is moving down the same tramlines
– “user
interface is everything”.
So where does that leave Microsoft and IBM,
our two favourite venders?
Well, I’m glad you’ve asked me that because
I’ve been thinking about it quite hard for some time and the conclusion I’ve
come to is that they both have very different approaches to user interface and
integration as a whole. Let’s start with IBM. Two years ago, at Lotusphere 2010,
IBM announced Project Vulcan. Nobody really understood what this meant at the
time but I think the fruits are now ripening in this project. I think it will
define the user interface, user experience and product integration architecture
for IBM for the next decade. I think the project brief for Vulcan must’ve run
something like this: “We’ve lost the desktop war how can we win
the interface war?” I think the answer that they came with was: Web
2.0, Ajax, rich user interface application development techniques with loose back-end,
lightweight integration (well I had a little of help their because that’s what
they developed!) This is what will lead to IBM Connections or Portal likely
becoming the interface for all IBM collaboration technologies (including
document management). This is obviously at the expense of IBM’s premier, and in
my mind excellent collaboration client called Lotus Notes. It does have some
advantages in terms of portability–Web 2.0 technologies can be consumed on a
variety of devices without recoding.
Looking at Microsoft’s collaboration stack,
Microsoft Exchange, Lync and SharePoint servers and the Microsoft Office client products,
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and of course Outlook we see a very different
approach. At least for the time being, Microsoft’s business model is predicated
on the success of these products and changing the approach that they go to
market would introduce risk. Supporting these products on multiple platforms is
problematic and extending them to other form factors is costly. However
Microsoft have dominance, which buys the time to change. And you can see this
happening already. The Office 365 offering is a great example of Microsoft’s
recognition that consumer led, cloud delivered collaboration is the way
forward; and well executed too. But it can take some time to get there – in the meantime
collaboration will be delivered in their silo'd client user interfaces. Just
look at the web apps (which are excellent by the way) to see the future in action.
So in conclusion: What is the future of collaboration and the desktop? Well in my opinion it will be a single screen with all
the relevant information and people that you need to collaborate with and around for the task at hand. I
suspect, over the next few years, we will see less single vendor
implementations and more heterogeneous architectures where customers favour
applications that can plug-in to their collaboration user experience and not
disrupt it. This collaboration best of breed ecosystem will be identical on most form factors available to the 21st century
knowledge worker, ranging from smart phone all the way up to high-performance
workstation. Your 21st century knowledge worker will not even know
the name of the server product that delivers his email or presence – it just
lights up his or her world!
|
|
It’s been a
busy couple of weeks on the event circuit; last week was the Applicable Power
of Choice event with IBM at their new facility in Southbank. This event was all
about how to leverage the cloud and assess how the cloud is not a binary debate
about  moving to it or not. The event had a very good
attendance and some lively debate. It was clear that the cloud has certainly
created disruption and that some of the marketing messages and dollars have
served mainly to confuse or  drive behavior in customers not always to their best
interests. It isn't a surprise that public cloud offerings are being pushed
hard from the big 3 Microsoft, IBM and Google. Google only has a cloud offer
and both Microsoft and IBM have sales force s compensated on Office365 and  LotusLive, guess what they would like you to buy?
For me and
the vast majority of our customers the cloud debate isn't polar and it
certainly  isn’t about being in or out. For Applicable the cloud
debate is about how to leverage it where appropriate and beneficial and how to
stay clear when its not. The vast majority of people already use the cloud in
their businesses today, who generates their own power for instance, we all buy
that from the cloud, we call it a grid in the UK, and we have done for years.
The same principles apply when considering software and services, albeit some
more complex debates. We had lots of interest in the hybrid model and our
opinion that you  shouldn’t consider services as  commodity. I hear it a lot that email is just
commodity so  that’s an obvious thing to put in the cloud. Well it’s
not that simple, email is pretty well defined in the cloud but the service
wrapped around it is what  customers really care about at the enterprise scale.
This is really driving fast adoption for private cloud services where the
customer gets exactly what they want without having to run it, albeit at a
different price point for cloud. We are seeing a rapid growth in this market as
customers take their first steps towards the cloud. Will everyone be in the
cloud in 3 years, of course not, outsourcing has been with us since the 70's
and everybody  didn’t jump on that. The market will in my view be a
mix of on premise, private  cloud, public cloud and we will see an increase in
cloud aggregators who tie together the best services and features of multiple
clouds to offer a rich and single point of service solution for their
customers.
I was
fortunate enough this week to speak at the IBM Accelerated Value Forum and this
time I spoke about cloud and the disruptions in the market that are causing
people to stop and think. The disruptions we are seeing driving debates around
how are we going to deploy this stuff are around
•
Unified communications
•
Cloud Computing
•
Social Computing
Together
with the ever-present gloomy economic outlook means we effectively have a
perfect storm of exciting new technology but little  Capex to take advantage of it. This is driving many
CIO's to look at ways to squeeze every last drop from the IT budget and this
is inevitably leading to discussions about lowering TCO which forms the
start point of many cloud or hosting discussions. There was a good discussion
about how to approach cloud solutions commercially, with some delegates feeling
that the per user per month price model doesn’t work at their scale as it often
leads to a higher than expected TCO, compared to in-house delivery. As a
private cloud provider you have to be sensitive that customers who want to
leverage some of the new exiting technology want to do so at a small scale but
at a price point that will scale for their organisation and this is not always
easy for service providers as margin comes at scale. I discussed some
approaches to how you deal with this as a customer when negotiating with a
cloud provider so you can get on the path at the right price and with your
provider still valuing your business. Many of the commercial debates that occur
in a private cloud model always start with well I can get this for $5 in the
cloud (public), to which the answer always is well why don’t you do that then,
and of course they don’t because it isn’t the service they really want. Cloud
providers should look to embrace the public clouds such as Office365 and
LotusLive and transition customers there when it is appropriate and not try and
sell against it. A private cloud service is a different proposition with a
different price point and one which customers are really starting to want. It
will be interesting to see how take up of cloud continues to grow and change
into 2012 and beyond, my prediction is there will be large take up of private
cloud up until 2013 with hybrid and public cloud continuing to grow as
customers get more used to the model. We will end up in a very hybrid world and
integration will become very very key to delivering diverse IT services.
|
| So after a morning talking about email migration and the all so often debate I here these days about what do we do with our legacy Domino applications the Applicable team headed over to the Polycom exec briefing centre. We are working with Polycom and our friends at BT to look at the integration of the Polycom range with our hosted Lync offering.
The briefing centre is as you would expect and a very high specification set of suites at the top of the office block with panaromic views across London, pretty impressive.
Polycom took us through the integration of their range of hardware and software with Lync. The integration appears native, very slick, easy to use and the functionality was right where it needs to be.
The ability to have proper multi-way HD video seeing all the people all the time whether they are on a lync client, IOS device, or one of Polycoms own systems really was very impressive. The question for me is where does Lync finish and Polycom start and that is not an easy answer. Lync clearly has good video conferencing capabilities and its only by using and discovering these that you will understand its limitations. For instance I don't like the the way Lync seitches to the active participant so in a multi way call I cannot see everyone, which for me is key in a meeting so you can read the room. Clearly there are cost considerations and I see the market being pretty much like it is today with Polycom providng capabilities that segue into Lync and not trying to compete with it. Polycom have taken the right stance with Microsoft and the only one I think works for a vendor partner, embrace what comes out of Redmond and extend its capabilities with your own offerings that way Microsoft will support you and not crush you. There is clearly a very close working relationship between Polycom and Microsoft and that bring the tight integration and quality product. We have ordered a whole truck load of Polycom kit for our offices and look forward to seeing all that in operation very soon. |
| The Lync for Mac 14.0.1 update is now available from Microsoft AutoUpdate.
To use AutoUpdate, start Microsoft Lync or another Microsoft Office application, and then on the Help menu, click Check for Updates.
The Lync for Mac 14.0.1 update fixes problems associated with sign-in on Mac OS X 10.7.2 Lion, and also improves support for Office 365.
Downloading it now, will post if it fixes and if it has any new features or fixes. |
| A question I get asked a lot is :-
Will people really use Lync for all their voice and replace traditional PBX's?
short answer is yes and it is already happening, slightly longer answer is there will probably be a roadmap to full voice. Many enterprises today have a wide range of voice techologies in play, from traditional analogue systems like MD110's(showing my age), to digital PBX's, VOIP enabled traditional PBX's like Nortel system 25, right the way to Cisco and Avaya type solutions. Will people look to replace all that investment in one project, probably not as the legacy systems will still have value both real and book value. We are seeing that a voice to voice replacement is much like a migration between email platforms, pretty pointless on its own. I always advise customers to look at the value they can get from adopting unified comms and build a roadmap of value which logically will end with voice but don't be obsessed about having a homegnous voice network as they never have before !
We are finding that the adoption roadmap for UC is becoming similar across organisations. We have tried to vuild a graphic for my various slide decks, below.
What we are really saying is start with traditional instant messaging and presence, moving to desk to desk AV with web conferencing and replacing traditional AV conference bridges like webex and BT meetme to get real cost savings. The move to enterprise voice can then be rolled out in line with the PBX replacement strategy or at natural break points like hardware requiring upgrades, maintenance renewals or big software changes. We are seeing an explosion in UC right now driven aprtly by consumer IT expecting to have a rich social experience on any device at anytime and from anywhere.
We are also seeing a growing number of enterprises looking to put UC into the cloud, currently mainly private cloud, to avoid the skill up required to run UC which is inherently more complex than something like Exchange as you generally have to have the comms people talking to the servers/OS and application guys, always a challenge ! As the market matures we are sure to see different adoption models and I will be sure to give inisghts into what we are seeing in the market. |
| It's been a busy week so far here in the US. Everybody is talking Unified Comms (UC) whether that be for soft phone calling, desk to desk voice or video or web conferencing it is certainly a disruptive technology.
Microsoft Lync is making a big splash in the market and shaking up some of the traditional offers from the big boys Cisco, Avaya etc. On the eastern seaboard we have IBM making inroads with there Sametime offering and the new Samtime Unified Telephony(SUT) Lite option recently anounced. It is certainly a market with some new entrants bringing options to customers.
Will be people choose traditional email and collaboration vendors such as Microsoft and IBM for enterprise voice solutions. Short answer, probably not yet. Longer answer, it depends. So what does that mean. I think for an enterprise customer who have traditionally used Cisco, Avaya or Nortel type voice solutions they will find it hard to move today to Microsoft or IBM solutions I think. The larger customers will probably wait for the technology to adopt and mature before they make the move for the enterprise. We are seeing customers dip their toes(upto the knees!), we are seeing customers start with IM/Presence, desk to desk AV and web meetings. I think this will be followed by SIP integration to give dial in/out conferencing as this is an easy to justify cost reduction play. Integration into existing VOIP and PBX's will follow for some offices as older equipment is fully depreciated and eventually coice can become a standard server based solution much like email or other traditional client-server applications.
Will enterprise voice be delivered in the cloud ?
Thats a longer answer and one I will give my own views on in my next blog update. Short answer yes, but will require proper geo-planning and continuity planning. |
| Well been using it for a couple of weeks now and a bit disappointed. The client logs itself out after a couple of minutes repeatedly, my tech support tell me there is a common issue being reported by many on the net. I was really hoping to start to use it in anger on the amc instead of the more limited Communicator client or switching to my Windows 7 VM.
Whilst over here in Dallas I decided to give an Android phone a try, the major stockists AT&T and T-Mobile were carrynig hardly any Windows phone 7 devices, T-Mobile had none in stock and AT&T had the HTC HD7 only, pretty poor really. I bought a PAYG Android which seems OK, pretty smooth and all the features you would expect. The multimedia is a bit clumsy, not intuitive how to put songs etc on it. It also keeps popping up a message asking me to populate my location in case of 911 emergencies when on wifi calling. This is an interesting point as I was discussing this the other day with our UC partner, BT. We were discussing how we would support E911 for global deployments of Microsoft Lync. It is a requirement of the FCC and providers and users of UC need to think carefully about how they approach traditional voice services in a world of IP everywhere and portable numbers. There are a number of providers out there who have appliances which track the location of IP phones and end points and integrate into the well known vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco and Avaya. In the converging world the traditional IT department is going to need to quickly get to grips with some of the challenges of an ever more mobile workforce. I will be reviewing the issues around E911 in a later post a pretty dry but important topic for UC users and providers. |
| We recently held a terrific customer event to discuss why there has never been a better time to upgrade to Microsoft Exchange 2010. We welcomed 24 customers into a room designed to fit 16 people – a problem we were delighted to be faced with! Our 12 years of managing and migrating tens of thousands of Exchange public, private and hybrid cloud seats across the globe means we understand the benefits and challenges of upgrading to Exchange 2010. We're happy to share that experience in events like these to prompt discussion and get you thinking. The presentations went well and the feedback was very complimentary for all 4 sessions. Speaking with customers during the breaks and over lunch we were really pleased to learn that it had been a useful event with plenty of follow up engagements agreed. Thank you to everyone who attended and made the day a success. If you have any follow up questions, please get in contact, or sign-up for our other upcoming events. |
| Agility - Clouds help our customers delivery step changes to their capacity plans, deploy new workloads in the knowledge that the platform will just work, and deliver new technologies with ease.
Focus - Allowing our customers to focus on their competitive edge by delivering core IT services from public clouds, remotely managed private clouds, or enabling central IT functions to deliver seamless services to their businesses. This helps organisations focus their talent on competitive wins.
Economics - and of course the economics, of scale.
This is a chart from #WPC11 which Microsoft provided based on some research they have done - looking at the costs of cloud computing.
Not many organisations can scale to 10's or 100's of thousands of server workloads.
![]() ![]() ![]()
|
View in Web Browser /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/VisioWebAccess/VisioWebAccess.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 0x0 0x1 FileType vdw 255 Compliance Details javascript:commonShowModalDialog('{SiteUrl}/_layouts/itemexpiration.aspx?ID={ItemId}&List={ListId}', 'center:1;dialogHeight:500px;dialogWidth:500px;resizable:yes;status:no;location:no;menubar:no;help:no', function GotoPageAfterClose(pageid){if(pageid == 'hold') {STSNavigate(unescape(decodeURI('{SiteUrl}'))+'/_layouts/hold.aspx?ID={ItemId}&List={ListId}'); return false;} if(pageid == 'audit') {STSNavigate(unescape(decodeURI('{SiteUrl}'))+'/_layouts/Reporting.aspx?Category=Auditing&backtype=item&ID={ItemId}&List={ListId}'); return false;} if(pageid == 'config') {STSNavigate(unescape(decodeURI('{SiteUrl}'))+'/_layouts/expirationconfig.aspx?ID={ItemId}&List={ListId}'); return false;}}, null); return false; 0x0 0x1 ContentType 0x01 898 Edit in Browser /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XsnLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser&Source={Source} 0x0 0x1 FileType xsn 255 Edit in Browser /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser&Source={Source} 0x0 0x1 ProgId InfoPath.Document 255 Edit in Browser /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser&Source={Source} 0x0 0x1 ProgId InfoPath.Document.2 255 Edit in Browser /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser&Source={Source} 0x0 0x1 ProgId InfoPath.Document.3 255 Edit in Browser /_layouts/images/icxddoc.gif /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/formserver.aspx?XmlLocation={ItemUrl}&OpenIn=Browser&Source={Source} 0x0 0x1 ProgId InfoPath.Document.4 255 View in Browser /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id={ItemUrl}&DefaultItemOpen=1 0x0 0x1 FileType xlsx 255 View in Browser /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id={ItemUrl}&DefaultItemOpen=1 0x0 0x1 FileType xlsm 255 View in Browser /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id={ItemUrl}&DefaultItemOpen=1 0x0 0x1 FileType xlsb 255 View in Browser /AboutUs/blog/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id={ItemUrl}&DefaultItemOpen=1 0x0 0x1 FileType ods 255 Document Set Version History javascript:SP.UI.ModalDialog.ShowPopupDialog('{SiteUrl}/_layouts/DocSetVersions.aspx?List={ListId}&ID={ItemId}') 0x0 0x0 ContentType 0x0120D520 330 Send To other location javascript:GoToPage('{SiteUrl}/_layouts/docsetsend.aspx?List={ListId}&ID={ItemId}') 0x0 0x0 ContentType 0x0120D520 350 |
|
|
|
|
 |
| Welcome to the Applicable blog. Our blog gives you insight into Applicable, our strategy and the things which are on our mind. |
|
|
|
