Tomorrow is going to be the 4th day since Brian and I landed. 4 days, that's 96 hours and we have not had any time at all to go shopping. Not that we are complaining, but the closest experience we have had of shopping so far was the far away massive mall we had a fleeting glimpse of through the window of the car that carried us straight from the airport to the hotel.
4 days in. No shopping. My dollar notes reside unspent, untouched, neatly folded in my purse. Dreadfully painful as you can imagine this is, I'm however amongst the least badly hit. Poor Brian brought with him only 3 watches. Tomorrow is Day 4. He only has 3 watches. Is the fashionista going to have to completely shatter his belief system and wear the same watch twice in 4 days??
This is how hard Life @ Lotusphere is. Our heart goes out to all of those people who are stranded in the desert without any water for days. We know how you feel.
-- blogged by me on Brian's behalf
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Sametime Unified Telephony
I attended two sessions on this, and the more I see, the more I like.
It encompasses most of the features that OCS 2007 Release 2 does (eg. Telephone/IM presence, Click-to-call, Click-to-conference, VC, embedded softphone, etc.) but with a few nice extras too.
Call routing is a good one. Users can add their own home, mobile, other numbers and establish rules on where calls will go. This goes way beyond call forwarding, though.
You can base which phone (if any) based on time of day, your Sametime status, physical location (as documented in Sametime via Location Awareness), and who the calling party is. It can try one phone, then divert to another on no answer, with different diversions based on these rules - almost the same level of functionality as an inbox rule.
The paradigm of having a personal number, that identifies YOU rather than a physical device is also a good one, which I can personally resonate with today. As my co-bloggers are aware, I ran out of mobile phone credit (mainly because I have to pay the inbound portion of international calls to the US). Sure, I could have purchased a pre-paid SIM, but then I'd have to tell everyone the new number.
With SUT (Sametime Unified Telephony), I could get a prepaid SIM here, and set that phone up in Sametime. A UK caller would call my same number, which would come in to ISB, hop over the WAN link as a VoIP and have a Mars USA PBX make a domestic call to me. So far, so good. UK calleds can reach me at my own number.
BUT.... If I wanted to make an outbound call to the UK, I can initiate that through Sametime too. Mars USA would initiate a call to my mobile, then it would route it over the WAN and the UK PBX initiates the other side of the call. Therefore, at each point it's a local call - even for outbound calls that (in theory) originate from my mobile.
Now, because the ST server is brokering the call, that means I can now seamlessly transfer the call between my mobile, desk phone, hotel phone, IP softphone, etc without hanging up the call, and the other party would never know.
The main strength of SUT over OCS is that the end user has full control over their personal call rules.
It encompasses most of the features that OCS 2007 Release 2 does (eg. Telephone/IM presence, Click-to-call, Click-to-conference, VC, embedded softphone, etc.) but with a few nice extras too.
Call routing is a good one. Users can add their own home, mobile, other numbers and establish rules on where calls will go. This goes way beyond call forwarding, though.
You can base which phone (if any) based on time of day, your Sametime status, physical location (as documented in Sametime via Location Awareness), and who the calling party is. It can try one phone, then divert to another on no answer, with different diversions based on these rules - almost the same level of functionality as an inbox rule.
The paradigm of having a personal number, that identifies YOU rather than a physical device is also a good one, which I can personally resonate with today. As my co-bloggers are aware, I ran out of mobile phone credit (mainly because I have to pay the inbound portion of international calls to the US). Sure, I could have purchased a pre-paid SIM, but then I'd have to tell everyone the new number.
With SUT (Sametime Unified Telephony), I could get a prepaid SIM here, and set that phone up in Sametime. A UK caller would call my same number, which would come in to ISB, hop over the WAN link as a VoIP and have a Mars USA PBX make a domestic call to me. So far, so good. UK calleds can reach me at my own number.
BUT.... If I wanted to make an outbound call to the UK, I can initiate that through Sametime too. Mars USA would initiate a call to my mobile, then it would route it over the WAN and the UK PBX initiates the other side of the call. Therefore, at each point it's a local call - even for outbound calls that (in theory) originate from my mobile.
Now, because the ST server is brokering the call, that means I can now seamlessly transfer the call between my mobile, desk phone, hotel phone, IP softphone, etc without hanging up the call, and the other party would never know.
The main strength of SUT over OCS is that the end user has full control over their personal call rules.
I know I have added no pictures ...
... but I promise I will next time. Please don't remove my access Mat with the God Rights ; )
What's new in the Notes 8.5 client
Many of the new features in the Notes 8.5 client were presented as upcoming in last year's LoLA conference and we had already blogged about them but in a nutshell the most memorable ones are :
- The inbox has been re-designed to contain fewer icons - for example, unread emails still have the sender's presence icon on the left but unread emails don't have any presence icons next to them. The assumption, and I agree, is that if it's been read, it's been dealt with.
- The calendar has been redesigned and can now import even more public cals & icals can be imported. For example, you can now choose to have your Google Cal - or other favourite personal cal - overlying your Work Cal and available offline once imported too. You can toggle this additional Calendar on and off as you please. Replication conflicts between the technologies have been addressed and we're assured now works like a dream.
- You can now put Tasks in an email and these tasks can be assigned to your favourite people from the address book directly in the email. Perfect for taking minutes and even better, when the email goes out, the recipient opens the email and if a Task was assigned to him, the Task gets added to his Task List automatically (previously known as the To-Do list).
- Drag and drop an email from your inbox into a slot in your calendar and this creates a calendar entry automatically with the recipients/senders of the email in the To field.
There were a few other useful features which would be good to show you and the best way to do this is probably to add it to Mat's showcase list ... Also worthy of mention is that the Notes 8.5 client's UI is also, like all its counterparts in the Lotus suite, uber slick!
- The inbox has been re-designed to contain fewer icons - for example, unread emails still have the sender's presence icon on the left but unread emails don't have any presence icons next to them. The assumption, and I agree, is that if it's been read, it's been dealt with.
- The calendar has been redesigned and can now import even more public cals & icals can be imported. For example, you can now choose to have your Google Cal - or other favourite personal cal - overlying your Work Cal and available offline once imported too. You can toggle this additional Calendar on and off as you please. Replication conflicts between the technologies have been addressed and we're assured now works like a dream.
- You can now put Tasks in an email and these tasks can be assigned to your favourite people from the address book directly in the email. Perfect for taking minutes and even better, when the email goes out, the recipient opens the email and if a Task was assigned to him, the Task gets added to his Task List automatically (previously known as the To-Do list).
- Drag and drop an email from your inbox into a slot in your calendar and this creates a calendar entry automatically with the recipients/senders of the email in the To field.
There were a few other useful features which would be good to show you and the best way to do this is probably to add it to Mat's showcase list ... Also worthy of mention is that the Notes 8.5 client's UI is also, like all its counterparts in the Lotus suite, uber slick!
Web-based Email ... and IM, Calendar and everything else!
First it was iNotes, then DWA, and now iNotes again. The web front end to Lotus Notes, iNotes has come a long long way from the version we know and ... tolerate.iNotes 8.5 is very very slick. There are 3 'modes' - Full, Lite and Ultralite.
The full web client is almost indistinguishable from the standard Notes 8 client - integrated Sametime, Widgets, SideShelf and all. It's fast (or 'snappy' as the devs prefer to call it) and totally useable. It has the integrated Quickr connector that Karoona talked about in the previous post, so the user experience (and the behaviour changes that this drives) are consistent. Give me this web client and I'll uninstall Notes from my machine!
Lite mode looks the same as full mode, but removes the integrated sametime, widgets and sideshelf to optimise bandwidth. Still very usable, but I might still need my Notes client...Ultralite mode does what it says on the tin. The interface is reminiscent of an iPhone, mostly because it is designed to work on an iPhone! You can also use this mode for very low bandwidth connections on traditional PC browsers which works well if you just need email and calendar.
Of course, to actually remove the Notes client we still have some 7000 notes applications to address. Now I'm sure Greg was wittering on about some Xpage thing that might be handy here...
Not only does the current iNotes product offer a superior user experience than Microsoft's OWA (which I should confess I use at home), it is equally at home on IE, Firefox AND Safari (James, you may now rejoice). The devs wanted to know if we'd also like it on Chrome or Opera...
Lotus QuickR : winner of Karoona's Most Impressive Product Award 2009 !
QuickR as you probably already know is an environment where people can create "places" to collaborate. These places are created from templates and are made up of different components - picture tabs on a page - such as wikis, blogs, document libraries, group calendars, mashups etc. Users can have temporary or team spaces but also personal spaces which they can choose to share. So what's new, you'll ask.
First and foremost, QuickR looks super shiny and glossy. The UI is slick, the tool is very user friendly. Not exactly a business case to implement QuickR, but the reason I mention this is because as an end user myself, this is a tool that I would actually want to use and promote within my team to support collaboration.
Second, and more importantly, what IBM have achieved with QuickR is to make it easy & natural to move content to a collaborative environment, which will support the change in mindset we need to make happen in our environment. Let's face it, today, if an end user has to share any information with his team, he'll send it in an email regardless of how big the information is or what its format is. We all do it. Our user community is used to staying put and ping-ponging their information around which results in large amounts of redundancy of information, version "anxiety", storage problems, da-di-dah. What we really need is for the information to stay put in one place, and for the users to access the information as required. This however will only happen if users are able to find and access whatever information they need readily, quickly and easily - ie more readily, quickly and easily than they can today in their endless stocks of email history.
Getting information in and out of QuickR is where IBM have hit gold. QuickR is accessible via its connectors from the rest of the IBM suite & also from other applications, eg.
First and foremost, QuickR looks super shiny and glossy. The UI is slick, the tool is very user friendly. Not exactly a business case to implement QuickR, but the reason I mention this is because as an end user myself, this is a tool that I would actually want to use and promote within my team to support collaboration.
Second, and more importantly, what IBM have achieved with QuickR is to make it easy & natural to move content to a collaborative environment, which will support the change in mindset we need to make happen in our environment. Let's face it, today, if an end user has to share any information with his team, he'll send it in an email regardless of how big the information is or what its format is. We all do it. Our user community is used to staying put and ping-ponging their information around which results in large amounts of redundancy of information, version "anxiety", storage problems, da-di-dah. What we really need is for the information to stay put in one place, and for the users to access the information as required. This however will only happen if users are able to find and access whatever information they need readily, quickly and easily - ie more readily, quickly and easily than they can today in their endless stocks of email history.
Getting information in and out of QuickR is where IBM have hit gold. QuickR is accessible via its connectors from the rest of the IBM suite & also from other applications, eg.
# from the sidebar of the Notes client for people to move attachments in and out of their inbox. As soon as the user has dragged an attachment (directly from their email) to the QuickR sidebar, that attachment gets replaced automatically with a link to the uploaded document in the email. Useful eh? Also, when a user is sending out an email, if there is an attachment in the email, Notes will pop up a window to offer them the ability to move that document to QuickR.
# from iNotes (aka DWA, aka web-based Notes). Works in the same way as in the rich client.
# from Sametime. Integration with the Sametime client I found particularly exciting - users can righclick on a document in their QuickR connector in ST, start a multichat with a group of users based on that document and work together on that document real-time, all at the click of a button.
# Lotus Symphony, MS Office, MS Sharepoint, Windows Explorer, MS Outlook and more is on the way.
From the end user's perspective, all QuickR is is another folder which they can share with the people they want. Checking documents in and out of QuickR is very easy for the end user. In fact, the seamlessness with which QuickR integrates with all the other applications from an end user perspective is what I think will sell.
Overall, fantastic product. If money was no object, I would have loved to roll it out to our users next month ; ) ... o and have a medieval castle in the South of France.
Centralising our infrastructure
Last year we started doing very high level work on the feasibility of centralising our Notes infrastructure with our current network. In summary, if we go central, Notes replication traffic - which represents a large part of our network traffic in Mars - will be drastically reduced. However, on the downside, Notes interactive traffic as users access their databases across the WAN would then go up - but by how much? We know the size of our pipes, we know how much bandwidth Notes takes up today. What we do not know is how much traffic would be generated once our thousands of databases have been centralised.
I spoke today to an IBM business partner, Trust Factory, who have developed an algorithm that will calculate based on #user sessions on each server, length of the user sessions & data consumption, how much traffic would be generated if that server was accessed across the WAN. This piece of analysis coupled with the information we already have on our network topology should give us some solid factual information about the feasibility of centralising our infrastructure.
Their customer list was shiny - Philips, Daimler, etc. etc., their demoes were impressive, their pitch just right. If we do decide to do anything along these lines this year, I guess I'll be talking to them.
I spoke today to an IBM business partner, Trust Factory, who have developed an algorithm that will calculate based on #user sessions on each server, length of the user sessions & data consumption, how much traffic would be generated if that server was accessed across the WAN. This piece of analysis coupled with the information we already have on our network topology should give us some solid factual information about the feasibility of centralising our infrastructure.
Their customer list was shiny - Philips, Daimler, etc. etc., their demoes were impressive, their pitch just right. If we do decide to do anything along these lines this year, I guess I'll be talking to them.
Extending the Innovation Team
I promised to post on the IBM Center for Social Software. This is a relatively recent specialisation within IBM's long standing Research Labs, and as the name suggests it is totally focussed on Social Software.Unlike other IBM research labs, this Center uses a methodology called 'Venture Research' which basically means they experiment directly both on the internet and on IBMs internal network - giving them access to huge numbers of users. Google have been doing something similar for a while (although I don't know how they analyse and collect data from their experiments yet), so it is good to see IBM stepping up, and will be interesting to see how they balance consumer vs enterprise social software...
One very interesting offering that I've not heard before is the "residency program" from the IBM Center for Social Software. Basically it would enable specific associates to work with IBM researchers on tough design or strategy problems related to social software. IBM bring their expertise in social software, design and data visualisation - as well as experience and platforms to support the research effort. We provide people that understand the corporation and the problem to be solved.
It's not cheap, but it might be a cost effective way to address some of our 'architecture of participation' strategy questions...
Video Collaboration
Why can't we capture our video conferences / web conferences? The storage and bandwidth issues are getting easier to address with modern compression. One real reason is that a recorded video file will rarely be used to collaborate because (a) it takes too long to find the right video and (b) then find the right bit of the videoInsight is another research project within the IBM Center for Social Software. It's similar to YouTube, but allows more granular text and comment markups, and also allows you to link to specific sections of a video. Comments and any captions are all searchable too, so if you needed to find that bit of the CFOs speech where he talked about 'focus', you would get straight there.
You can also imagine our marketing teams using this kind of functionality when working on TV adverts to very easily and remotely collaborate with the advertisement agencies on new campaigns.
I know that our Web CC colleagues are very interested in video. At the moment this tool is only available internally on the IBM network, but if this is of interest we've been offered a full onsite demonstration. I guess I'll be talking to James...
Connecting with Lotus Connections
I heard this software described as 'the Facebook for enterprise' however that could not be further from the whole picture. The new version of Connections, version 2.5, is set to be released; this session focused on the tools added to the connections portfolio.
Some features already available are: Profiles, which are similar to facebook profiles, however they act like associate search linking people in an organisational chart. People link themselves with Blogs, Communities, Activities from there profile.
The key point to make here is that all the services are integrated; profiles can have several related blogs, blogs can be incorporated into communities, communities can containing activities to organise work. Yet even with the integration the services act in a standalone way.
A scenario within Mars could be to have a EUT Innovation Blog (to capture ideas); this is associated with the EUT innovation ‘Community’ which links the team together. Good innovations are assigned to people as activities to complete, the output from completed innovation activities could be documented in the innovation Wiki (Wikis are available in version 2.5). This is a shared Wiki between all the innovation communities within Mars IS. All of these standalone technologies could be integrated using Lotus Connections.
Even if Connections is not feasible for Mars; it could still be good to see how the different social technologies could be integrated in a similar way.
Some features already available are: Profiles, which are similar to facebook profiles, however they act like associate search linking people in an organisational chart. People link themselves with Blogs, Communities, Activities from there profile.
The key point to make here is that all the services are integrated; profiles can have several related blogs, blogs can be incorporated into communities, communities can containing activities to organise work. Yet even with the integration the services act in a standalone way.
A scenario within Mars could be to have a EUT Innovation Blog (to capture ideas); this is associated with the EUT innovation ‘Community’ which links the team together. Good innovations are assigned to people as activities to complete, the output from completed innovation activities could be documented in the innovation Wiki (Wikis are available in version 2.5). This is a shared Wiki between all the innovation communities within Mars IS. All of these standalone technologies could be integrated using Lotus Connections.
Even if Connections is not feasible for Mars; it could still be good to see how the different social technologies could be integrated in a similar way.
The Top 10 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure
I've just come out of a session about Project Management in IT. There was not much new to learn for us Prince2 Practitioners ;-) but the presenters gave it a quirky twist by talking about what NOT to do rather than giving out the Top 10 tips.
Here we go - The 10 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure.
1. Believing the hype.
ie believing everything your suppliers (internal and external) tell you. Trust, but verify. Eg. if they say Akonix will work with Sametime like a dream, very good, but check. If possible, get the hype in writing. Of course, from experience we know that sometimes you get the hype in writing and still it's not accurate ;-)
2. Solving the wrong problem.
... or solving a problem that doesn't exist! Understanding and validating the why behind every project is crucial. In other words, a business case should lead to a project, not the other way round.
3. Using the wrong people.
More often than not, Project Managers have to work with the army they have rather than the army they want. Which makes learning how to tap into individuals' strengths and synergies in the project team a pre-requisite for the team manager. If you can, put finding the right people on your project's critical path.
4. Measuring the wrong things.
10% budget spent =/= 10% project finished !
5. Hope as a Risk Management Strategy (that was my favourite one!)
6. Round is a shape (not keeping fit!)
Train your people and have them practise project management hands-on. As the presenter put it, "watching somebody else exercise can be momentarily invigorating but doesn't work the beer belly" ;-)
7. Ignorance as a Defence.
If you don't know, ask. Do not assume.
8. Ostrichism
"I've made up my mind, don't confuse me with the facts."
9. Giving perception sway.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Don't leave room for people to assume. And if it's ugly, don't decorate, manage it! :-)
10. A hero behind every tree. (Somebody please explain the choice of words to me!)
Plan for regular humans, not superheroes - although I wouldn't mind having Batman on my project team ;-) Good planning and project management should save you from bringing in Professor Xavier and his team of X-men at the last minute for that last all arms out weekend.
Nothing ground-breakingly fresh in this list but if you ever needed to see it all in one place. Onto the next session now!
... this felt a bit like writing a self-help book :D
Here we go - The 10 Ways to Guarantee Project Failure.
1. Believing the hype.
ie believing everything your suppliers (internal and external) tell you. Trust, but verify. Eg. if they say Akonix will work with Sametime like a dream, very good, but check. If possible, get the hype in writing. Of course, from experience we know that sometimes you get the hype in writing and still it's not accurate ;-)
2. Solving the wrong problem.
... or solving a problem that doesn't exist! Understanding and validating the why behind every project is crucial. In other words, a business case should lead to a project, not the other way round.
3. Using the wrong people.
More often than not, Project Managers have to work with the army they have rather than the army they want. Which makes learning how to tap into individuals' strengths and synergies in the project team a pre-requisite for the team manager. If you can, put finding the right people on your project's critical path.
4. Measuring the wrong things.
10% budget spent =/= 10% project finished !
5. Hope as a Risk Management Strategy (that was my favourite one!)
6. Round is a shape (not keeping fit!)
Train your people and have them practise project management hands-on. As the presenter put it, "watching somebody else exercise can be momentarily invigorating but doesn't work the beer belly" ;-)
7. Ignorance as a Defence.
If you don't know, ask. Do not assume.
8. Ostrichism
"I've made up my mind, don't confuse me with the facts."
9. Giving perception sway.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Don't leave room for people to assume. And if it's ugly, don't decorate, manage it! :-)
10. A hero behind every tree. (Somebody please explain the choice of words to me!)
Plan for regular humans, not superheroes - although I wouldn't mind having Batman on my project team ;-) Good planning and project management should save you from bringing in Professor Xavier and his team of X-men at the last minute for that last all arms out weekend.
Nothing ground-breakingly fresh in this list but if you ever needed to see it all in one place. Onto the next session now!
... this felt a bit like writing a self-help book :D
Travel Socially!
This morning I was at the 'glimpse of the future' session by the IBM research center. I'll cover the center in another post - here I want to discuss one specific research project - Project Sojourn. This was a 6 week project to research how corporate travel could be improved through the use of social software. The result is an application mockup and some storyboards on how everything would work.
For those familiar with TripIt, there are a lot of parallels (if you're not familiar then go have a play!), but the IBM solution is much more geared towards enterprises, allowing users to see things like corporate rates and leveraging internal sources of information such as whereabouts, calendars, units DB, user profiles etc. Other nice enterprise features include automatic notification of other people attending the meeting if you are delayed, real-time update of travel plans etc. I can't really do it justice here so will make sure the slides get posted when I'm back in an office.
As a frequent traveller myself, I want this tool yesterday! On the other hand we do already have some parts of this functionality, such as the 'who is visiting site x' in the whereabouts DB (Christophe can now be smug as he was way ahead with this idea!)
My personal prediction? Expect to see this as a linked-value* offering with Lotus Connections v3.
*I had no idea what all these IBMers meant by 'linked value' either, so I asked! Basically it refers to anything you get when you are using multiple Lotus products. In this case you would probably get the full functionality through a combination of Sametime (to be able to seamlessly contact fellow travellers), Connections (to mine for people potentially travelling to the same events) and Lotus Notes (for the Calendar)
AD204 - XPages 101
This session was a primer on XPages, which is IBM's new method of writing web front ends to Notes databases.
It can provide a Web 2.0 style interface, and under the hood provides a full XML, AJAX, javascript and JSF (Java Server Faces) programming through the Eclipsed based development environment.
There's definitely a lot of power here, and basic UIs can be developed very rapidly. But, like anything, to do a thorough job will take time and planning, no matter what tools you use.
Depending on the future strategies, GSM and WebCC should take a look.
It can provide a Web 2.0 style interface, and under the hood provides a full XML, AJAX, javascript and JSF (Java Server Faces) programming through the Eclipsed based development environment.
There's definitely a lot of power here, and basic UIs can be developed very rapidly. But, like anything, to do a thorough job will take time and planning, no matter what tools you use.
Depending on the future strategies, GSM and WebCC should take a look.
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