Tuesday, January 26, 2010

LotusSphere 2010: Remix

While I keep working on some notes and editing some pictures on LotusSphere 2010, here's a short under 3 minute recap of the entire event by DJ Steve Porter

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LotusSphere 2010: Connections Next!

The big session we've all been waiting for at LotusSphere 2010 was "Connections Next!" on the upcoming features for Lotus Connections 2.5 and Lotus Connections Next (probably 3.0) presented by IBM's Demo-Queen Suzanne Livingston f.k.a. Minassian.
Big news in this session was that Forums will be extended into a standalone service, and not just a subset of communities. However, what I missed in the presentation was the further integration of Quickr into files, or highly desired additions to the files service and the addition of video libraries to Lotus Connections.

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LotusSphere 2010,IBM,Connections,Orlando,Florida,Walt Disney World
Profile Background gets seperate tabs for adding education and stuff like that.

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LotusSphere 2010,IBM,Connections,Orlando,Florida,Walt Disney World
LotusSphere 2010,IBM,Connections,Orlando,Florida,Walt Disney World
Social Analytics seems to be a keyword for Lotus Connections in 2010. We need metrics!

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To improve building the social network, Lotus Connections will be extended with recommendations; suggested blogs, communities and people based on your own searches and tags.

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LotusSphere 2010,IBM,Connections,Orlando,Florida,Walt Disney World
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LotusSphere 2010: Orlando, we have a problem!

"Orlando, we have a problem" was the title of the funniest session I attended during LotusSphere 2010 on monday Januari 18. Two crazy Scotsmen, but crack lotus admins Paul Mooney and Bill Buchan did a very inspiring session on how small mistakes can lead to huge catastrophes.
(photo Ed Brill)
Paul and Bill discussed 10 worst cases of 'fatal errors' that literally crippled entire companies. How can you send all 18,000 employees on holiday in just one click? Well, it happened! Of course, they did not just share the best jokes in sysadmin land to us, they investigated how these errors were made and presented the lessons learned.

Link to the presentation at Paul Mooney's site.

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Monday, January 18, 2010

LotusSphere 2010: TeamPark the best solution in the market

During the first major keynote with client showcases, one of the case studies was Sogeti's offering of TeamPark which was introduced to the 8,000 + audience by Sogeti CTO Michiel Boreel.

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As said in a previous blogpost, many companies find it hard to put real KPI's on Corporate Social Networking and Michiel also touched this subject; "there is a chance that your managers see social collaboration as a whole new waste of time" but in this day and age you have to push the limits, especially as a global IT company. The world is changing fast and competition heats up. As a company, you need to be agile and close to the market. You need to keep up to speed in terms of the latest developments. That is the reason why Sogeti chose to implement Lotus Connections 2.5 by the end of 2009: It's the challenge to increase the speed of innovation by engaging the talent of your employees.

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Michiel described the for stages of the TeamPark methodology; Awareness, Strategy, Implementation and Live. In many IT projects we do the strategy and the implementation but we do not do the first and last phase: Awareness and bringing the platform to Live. Especially when it comes to corporate social networking, these stages are essential. Else you would have an empty restaurant. And where do people eat? Not in the empty restaurant, but one across the street where it's busy. Now if your company would be like that, your employees would probably eat out in restaurants like Facebook or LinkedIn.


A social environment breaks down into five areas: Socialness, Organicness, Collective Intelligence, Aliveness and Linkedess (it needs to be S.O.CI.A.L.)

According to IBM, Sogeti's TeamPark offering currently is the best in the market when it comes to implementing social software in companies. If you would like to know more about TeamPark, just leave me a message or contact me on twitter (@vjburns), or call your nearest Sogeti Offices off course ;)

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LotusSphere 2010: Social Collaboration delivers Real Business Value

The first big keynote session after the OGS (Opening General Session) was KEY106: Social Collaboration delivers Real Business Value in which Jeff Schick asked: What is your companies collaboration culture? Is it phone? Is it email?

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What do you think will get you the best response? Is that dropping an email bomb on your employees or a dynamic search of a live site? Not surprisingly we are still in the proces of justifying corporate social software. We need metrics to convince our managers.

A number of partners and clients came on stage to showcase how collaboration has helped their business grow. First of all, Saleem Avan, Head of IT at the United Nations showed us how collaboration helps them to be agile and creative in harsh situations.

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Other client showcases included Thomas Anger, manager Collaboration Services at Sun Life Financial (and guess what his blog is called: Anger Management. That drew a few laughs), Sogeti CTO Michiel Boreel (which I'll get into later), Travis Hall - Director of Client Engineering at Union Pacific and Eve McLain from ACI which deliver payment processing solutions

KEY106 Social Collaboration Delivers Real Business Value at Collaboration Matters.

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LotusSphere 2010: Poject Vulcan

Well, we had Shatner and the Social Enterprise for starters and now we have Vulcans. Where is this all heading to?


Project Vulcan was announced by IBM at LotusSphere 2010 as the IBM vision on the Future of Collaboration, and not yet the near future, but Vulcan kicks off a preliminary roadmap towards 2020.

The project is not about new IBM products but about making IBM products integrate more seamlessly and expanding their functionality. Key elements in the future development will be social analysis and business analysis. This seems to be a hot topic in Corporate Social Networking as many companies find it hard to put meaningfull metrics to Social Networking: Can it really improve my business?

Instead of using mockups IBM was working with real code during the demos and showed us a client interface much like the one we are used to from the Lotus Notes client and a webbased client. For end users there should not be a difference between desktop and webclients anymore and the client should integrate products like Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Sharepoint into one seamless user experience.


You can tell IBM has been looking very closely at social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIN in continuing their Lotus Connections development of the homepage, which should become a central hub that lets users see and edit information from business applications in a relative context.

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LotusSphere 2010: Starship Social Enterprise

Early monday morning the LotusSphere 2010 Convention officially kicked off in the grand opening session. General Manager of Lotus Software Bob Piccanio did the introduction, then quit the job as he introduced Alistair Rennie as his successor.

We weren't expecting any kick ass announcements as Jeff Schick had already given a few sneak previews at the Business Development Day session yesterday, so we were all waiting for the big star to open the ball. This time it was William Shatner, or Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.

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His performance drew a lot of laughs as he talked about collaboration in the movie industry. For a pretty extensive live blogging coverage of the OGS (Opening General Session) check out the Collaboration Matters website.

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LotusSphere 2010: The Tweet Up

After the Business Development Session it was time for the grand welcoming reception, a meet and greet with proper bites and drinks. for folks on Twitter we organized a little tweet up party - fun part was that there was no WiFi available so I couldn't tweet.

Anyway, I ran into Doc Brown (who isn't on Twitter)
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and finally met with Luis Benitez (left) and Luis Suarez (right), the first one kind enough to shoot the above and picture.

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I'm still looking for the picture we took in front of the DeLorean! Please let me know where to get it.

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LotusSphere 2010: Business Development Day

I woke up surprisingly fit this morning and had breakfast with the gang; Goofy, Donald Duck, Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Here's me with Minnie.

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I'm not really happy that IBM already programmed a lot of sessions on Sunday, but alas, duty calls. After an informal chat with the Sr. VP of Social Software at IBM, Jeff Schick we went into the first presentation in which Jeff gave a sneak preview of what was to come.

Also on stage in the same meeting was John Newton of Alfresco, the unchallenged champion of lightweight open source Content Management Systems announcing integration with Lotus Connections.

First to kick off the Sogeti spotlights this week was our group CIO Didier Coffin who gave a brief overview of our TeamPark project.

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Sunday, January 17, 2010

LotusSphere 2010: Here we come

Saturday Jan 16th I flew into Orlando, FL to attend the IBM LotusSphere 2010 convention, held at the Walt Disney World Dophin & Swan Hotels. A shot from the plane over the US Eastcoast ... or was this still Canada?

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After a 10 hour flight we arrived at Orlando airport and got stripsearched... sorry, no pictures ;) and took a cab to the Beach hotel where we arrived at 9 pm local time

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To avoid Jet Lag we stayed up a little and had a beer & burger in the ESPN club.

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