Industry events. You either love them, or you hate them.
We get all get invited to them. Some of us go, some of go to some lengths not to go. So imagine my *excitement* when i was invited to hear
Alistair Rennie (General Manager of Lotus® Software and WebSphere® Portal), give his Executive Breakfast presentation in Sydney on Advanced Collaboration and Exceptional Web Experiences.
*cough*.
My mouth dried up too.
However, they _were_ offering a free breakfast, and it _was_ at the
Ivy. Pro's and Con's weighed, I decide to attend. So after braving the chilly
conditions here in Sydney this morning, I rocked up to the George Street venue and once I was over the usual "are you sure you registered" debacle - I was pleasantly rewarded with fresh coffee, a hot breakfast -- and wait for it.... a really great presentation!
Introduced by Matt Tredinnick, Alistair moved quickly into outlining the collaborative vision that IBM has been pulling together for some time now (after recounting the unexpected landing in Noumea his A380 made on the way to Sydney). As he paints it, IBM are seeing that world of email isn't really going to go away, but that something *does* need to change. People need to be able to work more in context of what they are doing, but to be able to do that from within a single platform. As Alistair pointed out, Gartner last year recommended that email needs some kind of plug-in architecture for it to continue to be successful. IBM sees Notes with its new open archiecture as the vehicle to drive that change. He also discussed
Project Northstar, an IBM initiative focused on delivering exception web experiences to your customers. Remarking on a recent study done by IBM that more the time your customer spent on your site the more "engaged" with you they become. However, this can often be a double edged sword - as customer spending too long on a site can mean theyre not finding what that need - and actually create a "negative" customer experience. Northstar aims to help you change that experience.
A key factor in driving that change is of course telecommunication, and IBM's newly released
Sametime Unified Telephony aims to provide businesses with real-time telephony control and integration based on your personal online presence. Youve probably heard this before, but being able to intelligently divert your calls to voice mail through using routing rules is pretty cool, but with its integration into the Notes client, its made even cooler by its ability to do so by automatically checking your Notes Calendar to see where you are right now. It seems you can even selectively divert or manage calls based on caller id etc - handy for when your boss calls as was suggested by one of the IBM Staffers. The demo we saw of SUT definitely delivers on the "Unified Telephony" moniker, showcasing the ability to be able to hold a three way phone conference right from your desktop (Notes and Sametime), and then seamlessly transfer your participation in the call from your desk phone at work to your mobile phone. Impressive stuff! A feat that most current PABX systems would require some "tinkering" to facilitate.
After SUT,
Lotus Connections 3.0 was brought out from the workshop and taken for a spin. Sporting a new landing page, and redesigned navigation menus, it seems that some work has gone into simplifying and helping you manage your personal networks within the product. The ability to now "follow" someone in Connections seems to be a new and useful feature, along with the ability see who's following you. IBM have recently rolled out version 3.0 to its
Lotus green house site.
Despite
Google officially
pulling the plug on
Google Wave, IBM have been quietly developing an application that allows you to co-author documents in real-time under the banner of
Project Concord. You could for example, assign the introduction paragraph to Joe from Marketing, the second paragraph to HR and sit back and watch as both quite happy edit, and make changes to their respective areas. IBM have even though to include little "business card-like" icons at the footer of the screen so you can see who else is editing the document right. All up, Concord seems quite user-focused, with a very clean crisp user-interface. Definitely a project to keep an eye on
Moving into the "r-next" arena, Alistair segued from the impressive social analytics engine sitting behind Connections, to IBMs
project Vulcan - the "next collaboration client" . In a nutshell, Project Vulcan aims bring together a bunch of feeds from many differents sources, and organise them into some semblance of order - allowing you to performs tasks that you would otherwise need to "switch" contexts for. The example was given, of being to move *that* email thread thats been going on for too long, out of your inbox and into the public arena by simply draggin-and-dropping. You could then invite other people to collaborate with on that thread -- and hopefully put it to rest. He also showed Vulcans capabilities a super file/document/information viewer, displaying Status updates from Connections, information from email attachments, and even PowerPoint Presntations all being being rendered inline, one screen -- kind of like a huge "status" update thread on Facebook. Also demod was the role that the analytics component plays, with Vulcan being smart enough to know that if you're creating a meeting invite as a response to an email about "Project A" - then you'll most likely be wanting to include the people working on "Project A" in the meeting, and so will pre-fill or suggest most of the information for you. Nice. Apparently Vulcan APIs are due out toward the end of this year - so watch out for these.
All up, IBM seem to have really "understood" the benefit of working socially and really have some first class tools in the pipeline. Whether or not it can translate this into actual business adoption is another thing entirely. However the future does looks bright Alistairs point of view. Especially from the
tarmac in Noumea.
If you get the chance to attend the seminar, go along. Its worth a look.
