| Social Software – a business imperative |
It's been a fascinating conference for those interested in Social Software. The key message for businesses to take away is that if you're not interested in social software you should be.
At the keynote session yesterday we saw five customers talk about how they are using social software in their organisations and why they chose Lotus Connections as their platform.
The United Nations, Sun Life Financial, Sogeti (part of Cap Gemini), Union Pacific and ACI were the five customers; some very large organisations. The speakers were incredibly passionate about how social software is transforming the way they operate.
For example, Thomas Anger of Sun Life Financial talked about how they are trying to attract the best new people into their company by offering the kind of business tools that graduates already use at home. Secondly, as an organisation of 16,000 people, there is a huge amount of tacit knowledge locked in the heads and in-boxes of their people. Social Software has enabled them to tap that knowledge and to establish productive business connections (sorry!) between people who have never met. Thomas' view is that social software is becoming a business imperative and that all organisations need to wake up it if they want to compete. Companies need to start thinking about it now if they are not already.
This is born out by the fact that there are a lot of other companies out there building their own social software for business offerings and it's no coincidence that Microsoft are jumping on the bandwagon in Sharepoint 2010.
The good news is that Lotus have had a very good sales year with Connections. Customers in all industry sectors are buying and getting real business value from it. At the session on what's coming in the next version I was pleased to see some interesting new features and management tools that indicate that the IBM offering is getting even more compelling than it is now. | | Connections and Communities and what benefits they bring to an organisation |
This was a great talk about the benefits of communities and how they can add value to individuals, the community itself and an organisation.
Communities centre around individuals with shared interests or passions. You can dip in and out when you need to access that interest and related knowledge – or you can live in the community and establish long term relationships. People join for different reasons: -
- Need content
- Need and expert
- Listen and learn
- Support
- Recognition
- Power / Culture
There is a matrix of benefits between Short and long term communities vs Individual benefits and the benefits to an organisation. Benefits to organisations are improved collaboration beyond the team and reduced costs because travel is less required. Some long term costs are brand recognition, rate of innovation etc. This also scales between individual, community and organisation – there are different benefits at each level.
This is a good quote describing how to get the most out of communities - “Communities are powerful tools as long as you put members first” – Forrester, 2008 – indicating that if you don’t put the needs of the member first – you wont derive business benefit at the organisational level. | | Applicable at Lotusphere 2010 - presenting on TCO and a mention from Ed Brill |
Day one draws to a close on Lotusphere 2010 and it's been interesting. My technical colleagues have already blogged about what's new from a technical standpoint, so I won't repeat what they have written. I will be blogging on technology news over the next few days so please check out my blog every day and/or follow my tweets: http://twitter.com/JF_ApplicableUK.
From my perspective it has certainly been a new experience this year. At yesterday's Business Development day we delivered our first ever Lotusphere presentation. Our pitch on the Total Cost of Ownership of messaging and collaboration played to a packed audience in both our sessions and the reaction was extremely positive, judging from the twitter posts that were posted at the time.
Even more thrilling for a seasoned Lotusphere veteran like myself, Ed Brill highlighted the TCO work we did last year in his keynote address on the future of Lotus Notes and the Desktop. Seeing our name in huge letters on the screen was certainly a buzz in an audience of well over a thousand delegates.
I'll now be spending the rest of the week catching up with IBMers, gathering customer experiences with Lotus Connections and finding out what's on the IBM roadmap for Lotus Connections, Lotus Notes & Domino and Lotus mobility solutions. Tune in again tomorrow! John Faria. | | LS10 - Thoughts on first day | Product Announcements: -
Sympony Next for 2nd Quarter (Beta available in Feb).
Android supported by Lotus Traveller – new encryption companion for iPhone.
Xpages Quickr Components in Designer – drag Quickr components straight onto forms.
GIST – Social media plugin for Domino – update Twitter and connections micro-blogging sites from Domino.
Connections 3.0 slated for 2nd Quarter – Auditing/Compliance and Social Analytics. Allows connections to “recommend” connections to you based on usage. Can also suggest communities. Mobile Browser interface improved – looks very slick – improved access to services.
Websphere Portal – accelerators – for healthcare / banking / Finance and Government. Deepened integration with the rest of the stack – the aim is to get to hero from zero in short timescales. Mashups – Accelerators for Cognos BI as well – can run inside Portal. Industry and Travel/Transportation slated for this year.
Websphere Portal Next – external site hosting / simplified deployment – also slated for this year.
LotusLive – to include full function Notes/Domino in the cloud during 2010.
Connections also moving to the cloud to provide full symetry with on-premise (need to figure out what that means).
Lotus Live Labs announced – available to partners now.
Then a bunch of Partners got up and spoke about their products.
Project Vulcan – the road map and “Vision Lens” for Lotus Notes/Domino – more on this later.
| | Our Business Development Presentation about TCO | We have just completed our first stint at the podium – a very well attended (standing room only) session split into two parts. The first part from IBM’er Brian Pearson who elaborated on the Collaboration Agenda – and how IBM see competitive conversations happening. This was followed by a presentation of our Total Cost of Ownership studies by John Faria and yours truly. We got the first laughs we heard in any session yet – and lots of interesting questions – and the twitterverse showed some good feedback. We are on again at 4.15pm. | | Lotusphere Begins | Although Lotusphere officially starts tomorrow, today is the Business Development Day, aimed at Business Partners like ourselves. The opening general session was interesting; IBM are launching a new initiative this year called the "Collaboration Agenda" aimed at a business-led approach to collaboration solutions for customers. I expect a lot more detail to follow over the week. The other interesting announcement is that the rest of the Lotus Software Portfolio will be included in the Software Value Plus scheme in 2010. This essentially means that we will need full certifications in all Lotus products in order to sell licenses. This is great news as it means that value-add partners like Applicable will have continue to be a strategic licensing partner for Lotus customers.
On a personal note I'm excited because Mark Dixon and myself are going to be presenting at the conference. In about 30 minutes from now in fact! I'll let you know tomorrow how it went.
The major announcements are going to be tomorrow so please come back and read my blog then to find out what's happening in the world of Lotus. | | IBM give up on directory independence for Domino | After waiting a number of years for directory independence to be provided for Domino, IBM published a technote this week that they no longer have plans to continue developing this feature. Originally planned for Domino 8.5, it didn't materialize in the gold release. Fortunately there have been a number of significant new features released with Domino 8.5 that are designed to make identity management easier and the reduce the administrative burden associated with having a Domino Directory.
The Notes ID Vault is already proving popular with customers who have upgraded to version 8.5, reducing the reliance on your administrators to manage user authentication and password problems. In addition, the Notes Shared Login feature, also released in 8.5, allows users to log into Lotus Notes without having to type in another password, provided that they have already logged into Windows. These features combined go a long way towards a simplified Identity Management model for Lotus Domino.
John | | Lotus Connections takes off at Applicable |
I thought it was time I reviewed how well Lotus Connections is doing at Applicable. Any initial fears that adoption might be slow have long since gone.
We rolled out Lotus Connections 2.5 internally in September. In only a couple of months pretty much the entire company has embraced this technology, regardless of role or vendor alignment. It's become the de facto standard at Applicable for knowledge sharing. Mail volumes are down and we rarely receive attachments in our inboxes. I keep hearing the phrase "You'll find it in Connections" in different parts of the business.
There have been over 60 blog posts, covering subjects as diverse as customer wins, new staff appointments, technical advice, industry news, exam passes, new product releases and the venue for the Applicable Christmas Party.
We've got over 30 communities, ranging from business development communities, MAC users, the management team, social communities, groups with common technical expertise and the Applicable footie team.
On a personal level 've moved a lot of my ongoing activities into Connections, so that I can collaborate on sales and marketing tasks with my colleagues and keep the business up to speed on progress.
I used to think that Connections would be a fantastic tool for the large enterprise. I've now changed my mind - it's a fantastic tool for any organization.
| | Harness the power of the ID Vault in Domino 8.5 | I recently attended a great presentation about the ID Vault in Domino 8.5. This is a really great tool for notes administrators. Customers really ought to be looking at this. It can dramatically reduce admin overheads and desktop visits.
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You can set up new users - when they first start the notes client, as long as they have a notes password, the vault will download their notes id to the workstation. So you don't need to deploy the ID to the workstation during the install.
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No need to keep id's on a file server
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If users forget their password they can automatically click on a button or link to request a new password or be prompted with the helpdesk phone number.
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Administrators can automaticaly reset user passwords remotely with a couple of clicks. No need for recerts or id recovery.
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The user who is issued with a new password then gets automatically prompted to choose a new password.
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Lost user id's can be automatically downloaded by end users, as long as they know their password.
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ID's in the vault get automatically updated when users change their password. No need to keep them in synch manually
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passwords can be reset by helpdesk people who may not need notes admin training.
On the face of it this is revolutionary for Notes customers.
| | Getting started with Lotus Connections |
Hopefully you are reading this blog because you've recently started using Lotus Connections or you are interested in what it can do for your business.
I have to say that using it can be a little daunting at first - there is so much you can do! My advice is to start simple and update your personal profile. This is a great way for everyone in your organisation to start getting value out of Connections.
Put in as much information about yourself as you can - especially information that you think is relevent to your role - i.e. areas of expertise, people in your team, products or areas that you know a lot about, any professional qualifications you have. This will give other people in your organisation the chance find out more about who you are and what you know. Once you've uploaded this information, anyone looking for your skills will be able to find you with a quick search.
One of the real strengths of Connections is in helping people find expertise, no matter where they are. By starting with profiles, users will get familiar to the interface quickly while the whole business will be getting immediate value from software.
John Faria
| | Software as a Service - IBM style | John Faria takes a look at the new Lotus Software as a Service product, launched this week at Lotusphere -It's called LotusLive!
The Wednesday keynote heralded the impending release of LotusLive, IBM's offering for Software as a Service.
Essentially LotusLive is a brand - an umbrella name for a collection of products, some existing and some new, that have been rebadged under a single common name.
The new product that is at the vanguard of this brand is called "Engage". It's an online service providing a combination of web collaboration and business networking. In a nutshell it has online web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging, user profiles and dashboards, all available as cloud solution, hosted by IBM and available under a Passport Advantage agreement. IBM have set up a partnership with Skype, Salesforce and LinkedIn, to bolster the functionality to include CRM, voice and video, and online business networking. It's not like any other product I have seen in the market and it will certainly be interesting to see what level of interest it generates. For those techies out there, LotusLive Engage is built on WebSphere Application Server and DB2.
Other LotusLive products include IBM's existing own Domino hosting offering, now called LotusLive Notes and IBM's Sametime Unyte webconferencing solution, now rebadged as LotusLive Meetings.
John Faria
Account Manager, Applicable | | Are you having storage problems on your Domino servers? Thinking of an archiving solution? | John Faria takes a look at Domino 8.5 and discovers some serious cost-saving opportunities for IT managers.
This is my third Lotusphere and it's fair to say that it was less eagerly anticipated than in previous years. It was always going to be tricky to make the release of Domino 8.5, seem as exciting as when Domino 8.0 came out in 2007.
Domino 8.5 is mainly a server release;client releases tend to get more publicity and buzz because they directly affect the user experience.Personally, with my Domino engineering background, it's the server functionality that's always floated my boat and I really believe that customers should sit up and take notice of this one - this release could save customers a lot of money.
The most significant new feature that Domino customers should be getting excited about is the Domino Attached Object Store (DAOS). DAOS will make IT managers everywhere breathe a sigh of relief. This new functionality will strip mail files of attachments and store them as compressed flat files in single copy only. This means that if the same attachment exists in several people's mail files, it will now be replaced with a single copy, stored outside of the notes mail file.This will result in significantly reduced mail file sizes and therefore massive savings on server storage and therefore backup storage.
So if you are considering buying an expensive archiving solution for the purpose of reducing storage, you might want to wait. Customers who have entitlement to a Domino 8 upgrade, will be able to solve their storage problems and get significant IO improvements at the same time, without having to invest in new hardware or software.
And just in case you are not sure whether this will really help your business, we have a tool that we can run across your existing Domino servers that will give you an accurate estimate of how much disk space you will save if you enable DAOS.
It's a pretty compelling story.
John Faria
Account Manager, Applicable |
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