Woowar

Category
David Allen on Lotus Notes : "we don't need it in the cloud - we've already got it here"

Posted by Julian Woodward At 10:07 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category
Marketing talk. Mention of "air cover" again.

IBM Smarter promo - just been shown a preview of an ad. Where will we see the ad, I wonder? Please tell me it'll be on primetime TV. I will fall on my knees and cry with gratitude, that IBM finally recognises the need to lead from the front. Please.

Bob Picciano back on stage for a wrap-up. Elguji announced as CTO award winners - yay!!!!!

Blue Man Group back on stage to finish off.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 3:40 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category
LotusLive

The old "BlueHouse" is now "LotusLive Engage". But LotusLive is more than just that. It's the best of Lotus, put online, and made available to anyone. File sharing, social networking, email, and all.

LotusLive Engage is "much more than just a meeting service". Activities, Files, Forms (surveys etc), Profiles.

Demo time ...

The main thing here is that this is all cloud stuff. Feature-wise this looks like bits of Connections, bits of Quickr, and Sametime Unyte, all thrown into a pot and gently boiled. But the cloud-based architecture means that this is open to all to use at low cost.

Quite where this fits into the partner model is open to question. It will be possible to integrate existing products into LotusLive ... but how many partners will really want to do that? It probably only makes sense for partners that have products with a large target market in the 'S' end of 'SMB'. Somebody needs to explain to the wider business partner community where this fits into the partnering model. Especially as IBM traditionally relies on BP's to do it's marketing for it: how is this going to get to market if there's no clear revenue stream for most BPs? Or am I just being thick? Answers on a postcard please.

Impressive bit of demo: webmeeting client for the Blackberry - impressive stuff. Didn't catch whether that's a core feature or a partner offering.

Annoucment of partnerships with salesforce.com, LinkedIn and Skype. LotusLive users will be able to search for and collaborate with LinkedIn and Skype users. Okay, to some extent I take it back! This is a smart way to market: maybe IBM is finally getting "viral" after all?!

Posted by Julian Woodward At 3:28 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
So, while portal guy drones on, what do we think of it so far?

There's definitely an element of consolidation this year. The last 2 years have seen a lot of announcements: Connections, Quickr, Notes/Domino 8, 801 and 8.5, Protector, Foundations. There are probably more I've forgotten about! This year it's more about maturing those products, and bringing incremental upgrades to market. This is probably what was needed. Some of the releases of the upgraded products have been, let's face it, less than 100% ready for primetime deployment. A year of relative quiet would be good, to allow the development teams, UI people, etc to polish things, iron out glitches, and improve reliability, performance, integration options, configuration, quality, etc.

Having said that, actually there's a lot of incremental stuff happening this year, some of which is quite significant. Connections 2.5 for example is a big upgrade from 2.0: probably bigger than the change from 1.0 to 2.0. Great to see, and it definitely becomes more compelling with each version.

Good to see a bit of focus on Quickr too. After an initial bit of energy, that seemed to go off the rails somewhat. The integration with xpages (talking about the Domino version here - does anybody use the J2EE flavour?) will make it many many times easier to customise and extend Quickr. I'm assuming, of course, that the execution of the idea is good: let's give the benefit of the doubt for now.

Symphony 1.3 was mentioned, but I would have liked to know a few more details about that, about timing, and about what's coming in future versions. I suppose that means I need to find the right session to attend to find out this stuff.

We've seen conspicuously nothing at all about the future of Notes/Domino in this session. One knows that time is short, but I would have thought they could spend a few minutes talking about what's coming down the pipe. There are separate sessions covering the future plans for Notes/Domino, but it would be beneficial - for the press & analysts if nothing else - to showcase some ideas for the next major version (which may or may not be called "9", of course).

The closeness of the working relationship with RIM is interesting to see. Again, one hopes that the delivery can be as good as the promise.

Now portal guy has gone ....

Posted by Julian Woodward At 3:15 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
Oh god, portal guy is on stage. Time for a snooze.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 3:13 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category
Jeff Schick (spelling?!) - on-stage now to talk about Social Software.

He's shouting at us. Jeff, Jeff, you have a microphone you know!

Content-free thus far. Ah, right, now we're onto Connections 2.5:
- Better UI customisation
- Microblogging features
- Best-of-breed wiki (also supported in Quickr - I'm guessing the Websphere version only though, not Domino)
- Content-sharing - a SharePoint-bashing comment from Jeff
- Integraiton with LinkedIn
- Facebook-style news feed on your homepage

This is not exactly thought-leadership here. Most of this is either basic stuff (UI reskinning), integration with market-leading apps (LinkedIn), and rip-offs of other people's ideas (Facebook and Twitter). That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes me nervous. To really claim the higher ground, IBM needs to start genuiinely innovating in this "Social Software" space, not just do copycat stuff. I'll have to visit the lab to see what's coming down the pipe.

Showing the wiki now. Yes, it's a proper wiki - a good thing, definitely.

File-sharing stuff is clearly an aim at companies using SharePoint in an 'extranet' mode.

Verdict: Connections 2.5 is a pretty compelling upgrade for existing users. And it's definitely a lot more complete and rounded now. The progress on this product - which was only announced at the beginning of 2007 - has been pretty fast actually. I would just like to see some real thought-leadership, instead of merely (I say 'merely' - in no way to I want to downplay the amount of work involved!) playing the feature-match game with SharePoint, Facebook and Twitter. That's a dangerous game to play, because the public stuff - Facebook and Twitter - can move much faster than IBM seems to be able to, and SharePoint is very good at doing the stuff it does (albeit Connections does stuff that SharePoint simply can't do).

Onto Quickr now...

Talking about integration between Quickr and Filenet, and Quickr and ECM8. Quickr Connectors now give direct access to content in FileNet, for instance.

Q2 will see Quickr 8.2 for Domino
- new extensibility
- more reliable, support for Domino 8.5, support for Connections

Later in the year will be the release that will be more intersting: xpages support, wiki (for Domino as well?). This all went past very fact. There's a keynote later in the week that will give more details.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 2:55 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
Bruce Morse on stage now, talking about Sametime.

2009: will deliver Sametime Unified Telephony, and Sametime 8.5

Sametime Unified Telephony: I'm sure we saw this in last year's OGS ... and the year before too. But getting to a delivery promise of 2009 is good. It does look like a very powerful and flexible system. I wonder how comprehensive the support for existing telephony exchange kit is?
Automatic single-click conversion of an n-way chat to an n-way conference call. Using a call-out service integrated with telephony - pretty cool. Drag and drop to add another person to the call. Nice. Ability to transfer your end of the call to a different device e.g. a mobile during the conf call without interruption. Blue Man Group made another brief appreance on the other end of the video conf call - lightened the mood nicely.

SameTime 8.5
Including iphone browser support, and Web 2.0 UI. No more Java applets in meetings (applause - yay!), plus straight-forward HTTP connection - more firewall-friendly.
Will be MUCH easier to create meetings from within Notes, browser, Sametime client, etc etc. Also persistent meetings are supported now.
Demo time.
There's a consistent focus on Sametime at these OGS events. This kind of technology is nowhere near saturation level in the market. Unlike email, where IBM is just skirmishing with Microsoft to retain market share of the world's large corporations. UC2 is nowhere near that pervasive - hence the focus here. There's a good cost-saving (reduce travel costs+time) story to push in a downturn market too.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 2:39 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category lotusphere
Sorry about the lack of formatting in previous entries - now fixed

Alistair Rennie on stage now.

Lotus Notes is 20 years old in 2009. "Tried and tested" most definitely!

Kevin Cavanaugh on stage now. Notes is a 20-year-old rebel: ignoring the rules. Notes hangs out with disruptive friends ("a lot of you are here")

Lotus Symphony: 3 million downloads to date. I wonder how many downloads OpenOffice 3.0 has had to date?
Version 1.3 will support Office 2007 formats.
Claiming over 50% of customers are deploying Notes 8 now.

ANNOUNCEMENT:
Project Atlantic now becomes "Alloy by IBM and SAP"
Planned availability in March 2009.

DEMO: Alloy and Notes 8.5
Calendar overlays supported in iNotes as well - didn't spot that before. That's cool. Also support for saving attachments into Quickr, plus some support for Notes Widgets. Why did they keep this stuff so quiet before?
Domino Designer 8.5 - the biggest upgrade since LotusScript. Ron S is doing a live demo of Domino Design 8.5 - he's a brave man! And he's adding a tag cloud - woo hoo.
xpages and Blackberry: Blackberry browser support for ajax. Not a huge thing in one sense, but indicative of the way that IBM and RIM are working closely together.
BES 5.0 for Symphony (ODF) documents.

Taster: there will be mention later of Quickr support for xpages. Will be interesting to see.

ANNOUNCEMENT: SmartMarket
http://www.ibm.com/smartmarket
Open to ALL partners as a distribution channel. Will have to investigate to see what that really means.

ANNOUCEMENT: OpenNTF
IBM will work closely with OpenNTF. Again, will have to see how this plays out in real life. Got a big round of applause though, and rightly so.

Lotus Foundations
I've been looking into this already, so will blog separately. But in my opinion this ... is ... hot ... stuff.

Brief mention of Lotus Protector, but no more.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 2:17 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM on stage now. Blackberry is 10 years old today. Happy birthday to you ...

Announcing support for Domino 8.5 with BES 4.1.6 - fantastic news.

Despite global downturn, bullish about growth in mobile business applications. Makes sense - relatively low-cost game-changing productivity gains.

Largest customers (I guess IBM is one of these) support up to 100,000 Blackberries worldwide. That's probably more than 1 BES server, I reckon

ANNOUNCEMENT: New Blackberry applications:
- new Lotus Connections client - support blogs, activities and communities - significant enhancement
- new Lotus SameTime client - file transfer, public groups, better presence integration
- Lotus Symphony support for Blackberry! (Actually, presumably this is just ODF support, isn't it?)
- Lotus Quickr
- Domino Designer with xpages: Blackberry apps can be developed within Domino Designer - removes entry barrier for BB development.

"Tomorrow at Work" logo - better not comment on that particular bit of graphic design.

Major announcement: LotusLive
Reworking of BlueHouse, plus more. SameTime Unyte, for example, will be re-branded under the LotusLive banner.
World's worst-kept secret, after it was pre-announced to the Business Partners yesterday.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 2:06 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
Bob Picciano on stage now.

"Customer attendance" up by 2% - overall attendance ... I wonder.

I particularly like the Lotus-coloured yellow and orange tie he's wearing. I'm sure there'll be pictures of that around before long

The Microsoft-bashing has started! Entertaining graphic of the Windows logo being 'shattered'. Nice, if a teeny bit cheesy.

Customers are being given a lot of visibility in this OGS. Early on stage, and quite a lot of time.

First is Coca-Cola. Did he just say "marketing" - yes. And he's said it again. C-C is a big SAP shop, plus Business Objects. Using Notes 8 and Connections. SAP Portal on top of that. Using Blackberry (and WMD to a lesser extent) for mobile access to business apps. Working with IBM on Project Atlantic.

Bob P commenting: a big focus is integration, specifically integration of collaborative capabilities into line-of-business applications. Notes integration w Web via widgets, composite apps. SameTime integration into other apps.

Next customer is NetJets. Bob P has just said "portal" about 97 times while introducing them. NetJets offer "fractional jet ownership" - part-ownership of a private jet. Hmm, I fancy a bit of that! 800 jets, shared by 5000 customers. 173 countries covered. Impressive niche business. 390,000 flying hours covering 2million miles per year. That's a lot of aviation fuel - doesn't go too well with the IBM focus on 'green computing' - I wonder if they thought of that?
Portal, Connections, Omnifind - very much a purple, more than a yellow, customer testimonial this one.
He's now bragging about the fact that if you book a jet from city X, the jet might have to fly hundreds, or thousands, of miles to get to you before going on your journey. Green. It. Ain't.

Bob P commenting: breakdown of traditional hierarchical business structures to flatter, or even inverted pyramid, styles. All about empowering your people to work more efficiently and collaborate effectively.

Third customer is HSBC. Ian Haynes - Head of Staff, Collaboration Infrastructure. Playing the "global local bank" card - requires a comprehensive collaboration infrastructure to allow this to happen. No one company can provide all the technical pieces. In fact, it's difficult to define all the technical pieces, as the arena is still developing. Notes, SameTime, Websphere Portal and Lotus Connections. Being quite frank about how some staff take up the new features/capabilities easily and quickly, but also identify issues. Still a work-in-progress rollout of all this stuff, it seems.

Bob P commenting: actually, no he's not, he's moving on to talk about partners now.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 1:36 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
Opening entertainment was the Blue Man Group - very good.

IBM will announce Q4 financials tomorrow.

12,236 new customers to the Lotus portfolio since R8 was delivered. This is across ALL the Lotus products - not just Notes/Domino. Some much-needed clarification.

Special guest speaker ... is ... Dan Aykroyd!

Posted by Julian Woodward At 1:32 PM Location lotusphere | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
If so, and you're attending Lotusphere 2009, there's a 'Birds of a Feather' session on Wednesday afternoon that may interest you:

Developing Lotus Notes Applications in an Microsoft Outlook Email Environment

If you're in that position, and have experiences to share or want to hear how others deal with the challenges raised, come along to BOF208 on Wednesday at 5:45 in Swan Macaw 2. Got that? Hope to see literally several of you there. And then we can head straight off to the closing-night party afterwards.

Note that this is specifically to talk about Notes client applications - not Domino (web-based) ones.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 9:29 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category alliances lotusphere2009
Last year, immediately after Lotusphere 2008, I wrote a post outlining a number of predictions for Lotusphere 2009. I thought it would be fun to revisit (or, ahem, revise) them before Lotusphere 2009 starts in a couple of days ...

• Attendance will be up significantly - book early kids - my money is on the numbers crashing through the 8000 barrier for the first time in a few years
  Okay, that was reckoning without the "global downturn". We'll see ...
   
• The Notes/Domino 9.0 feature set will be announced
  Hmm. I think I'll stick with this one, because I would like it to be true.
   
• It will be MUCH harder to pick sessions (like it was so easy before, right?), given the incredible number of 2008 announcements that will have become released products by then:
  • Quickr 8.1
  • Connections 2.0
  • Foundations
  • Mashups
  • Notes/Domino 8.0.1 including Traveler
  • Notes/Domino 8.5 including Domino Designer in Eclipse
  • "BlueHouse"
  Well, BlueHouse is still in beta. But the rest are out there in the wild. And it is very hard to select sessions this year!
   
• Dan Lyons will say something crap and stupid, again (will he ever grow up?)
  Come on Dan, I'm waiting, don't disappoint me.
   
• Microsoft will release a set of spoiler announcements, yet again (will they ever grow up?)
  Very half-hearted from Murkysoft so far. Do they have something more engaging up their sleeve to hit us with before Monday?
   
• The opening general session special guest speaker will be better than 2008 (hardly a challenge) but not as good as Neil Armstrong in 2007
  Sticking with this one - it's a safe bet
   
• The purple websphere logo will have disappeared and there'll be a "new" Lotus Portal product (okay, this may be wishful thinking ... 2010?)
  I WISH!
   
• There will be at least one complete surprise new product announcement - as surprising as Connections in 2007 and Foundations in 2008 - and it will be another low-end SME-based play
  I'll stick with this one too ... nervously.
   
• Paul Mooney will purchase unfeasible quantities of sake in Kimono's
  
   
• Wild Bill will have another significant birthday
  This is too easy
   
• The Lotus911 crowd will ask a minimum of three questions at the 'Ask the Developers' session
  I was cheating on the last few wasn't I ... dead cert.

Posted by Julian Woodward At 9:03 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category
Last year, IBM announced the acquisition of Nitix on the eve of the annual Lotusphere conference.

This year, they've done a similar thing, with this announcement popping into my inbox just now:

Today, we have announced our intent to acquire the email messaging assets, supporting staff, and customers of Outblaze Ltd., a privately-held provider of online messaging and collaboration services.

Based in Hong Kong, Outblaze has 10 years of experience in delivering online services and was one of the first companies to offer fully-hosted, multilingual email services. Today, Outblaze operates one of the world's largest online platforms that provides private-labeled email, collaboration, and social media services for enterprise clients, service providers and academia.

The Web-mail assets of Outblaze will be combined with Project "Bluehouse," IBM's social networking and online collaboration service. These assets will also be incorporated into our Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging solution, which will give customers a broad choice of online messaging solutions and our Partners great opportunities.

We may hear mention of this in the OGS on Monday, methinks.

Interestingly, this only mentions acquiring the "email messaging assets" and integrating the "web-mail assets" of Outblaze. From what I can tell, Outblaze does a whole load more than just webmail: calendaring, file/document sharing, social networking (forums, blogs, picture/video albums, tagging, search): I wonder what will become of those? Certainly, those features tread on the toes of the existing Bluehouse beta feature-set. Mind you, Bluehouse treads on the toes of SameTime Unyte, Quickr and Connections already anyway, so perhaps the picture is going to get even more confused before it gets clearer ...?

Posted by Julian Woodward At 7:13 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category
Google Alerts sometimes come up with the strangest hits. I have no idea why it came up, but I'm jolly grateful.

Odd, though, that the article neglects to mention his tenure at IT Factory .. er, the first time it imploded. Which wasn't nearly as colourful as the second time!

Posted by Julian Woodward At 7:57 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category government

Both Chris and Ben have drawn attention to the story in the Times (link below) this week about UK-government-sponsored hacking of private individuals' computers. Words fail me ... but ones like "digraceful" and "outrageous" and "incompetent" and "idiots" and "bastards" spring to mind.

Don't forget, this is the same bunch of useless prats government that passed "anti-terror" laws SO badly thought-through and SO widely framed that they are now frequently used (let's face it, "abused") as extreme police powers in cases that have no terrorist connection at all. And the same insane control freaks government that want to have a giant database of every email or instant message (and no doubt blog post - I look forward to the boots kicking down my door any second now) that anybody sends to/from/within the UK. And this is the same UK that has 1% of the world's population, but 20% of the world's deployed CCTV cameras.

I'm seriously wishing I hadn't started typing this, because it genuinely is frightening.

The Times: Police set to step up hacking of home PCs (via Chris Linfoot).

Posted by Julian Woodward At 1:08 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category alliances

What's the big news? Well, there are two parts ...

Part one. In October, soon after my life changed for good (in both senses), I was elected as a full member of The Penumbra Group. There's a press release on the Axiot website giving more details, but needless to say this is a very positive thing both for me and for Axiot.

Part two. A few days ago, my membership of the London Developer Co-op was confirmed. Again, there's a press release on the Axiot website giving more details, but (again again) this is hugely positive for both myself and for Axiot.

I hesitate to highlight individuals, but it is a delight to find oneself in the company of the members of these two groups, including Rob Novak, Jamie Magee, Ben Poole, Carl Tyler, Matt White, Ben Langhinrichs, Daniel Nashed, Andrew Pollack, Gabriella Davis and many others. I'm looking forward to catching up with all of them - with at least one "notable" exception* - at Lotusphere in just 11 short days from now.

* Do you see what I did there?

Posted by Julian Woodward At 1:02 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (1)