During the opening session LotusLive, IBM's offering for the 'cloud', was announced. For companies up to 10 000 users it may be cheaper than hosting their own email services. However for a company of Mars' size it could allow an extension of the intranet into the IBM data centre based in the US.
The idea may seem a little farfetched; but there are features such as 'Click to Cloud’ which allows documents to be shared from Domino into LotusLive and vice versa. This would allow people from other companies to collaborate with people from Mars seamlessly. There is a plug-in for the notes sidebar to allow documents to be taken offline, Skype integration and some other IBM business partner involvement.
A more realistic service is set to be released later this year, called LotusLive iNotes, which is a product aimed at boundary workers.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
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BlueHouse is quite an exciting product and I'm curious to see how user behaviour and ways of working will evolve over time with the use of such products.
External hosting of collaboration services or even buying collaboration as a service in the Google type model can be risky but the sharing only happens up to the application layer, if that. There is still with these concepts a certain level of security that the environment still somehow belongs to the hosted company.
With BlueHouse, it's a different game. Collaboration which used to happen within the boundaries of a company is now suddenly happening in a much larger community. Yes there are still boundaries via access rights etc. but the way I see it is - this is going to be cheesy - users used to operate on small islands and now suddenly their islands are being moved onto one big continent. Will they continue to operate in their silos or will they get connected? The opportunities are massive and I think will radically reshape the way we work.
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