How Fascinating!

The last day of Lotusphere dawned, and I for one spent most of my time comparing notes with other CPG customers and also browbeating the developers on my pet Lotus Notes peeves...

So a fairly quiet day with not too much to report ... until the closing session by Benjamin Zander about leadership, which I thought was fantastic.

Rather than blather on about it here, I found two of his earlier sessions online that formed part of the hour long session. I highly recommend them! Go here (20 mins) and here (15 mins) to watch - they will help you understand "how fascinating!" and why we all keep saying it!

That's all from me on Lotusphere 2009. Many thanks to my co-bloggers for their excellent posts - I feel like I've been to all the sessions this year (yes, my head hurts!) I hope you enjoyed our coverage too!

Directory Independence

I get all the best topics! I attended a session today about some future functionality in Domino. The idea is to provide an option to store all the person documents in an external LDAP directory, such as Active Directory. This is different to the secondary directory I talked about before (already in the product).

Initially user groups are likely to stay in the Notes NAB, but as with all early development, details are scarce and the plans are hazy. The presenters took us through some early code and it looks like the mechanisms to find the external directory servers are fairly primitive so far (basically there is a single DNS entry that defines a specific directory server), so it will be a while before this is robust and business ready. Great direction though - and if we can remove yet another directory from our environment we can start to think about less complex (and cheaper!) directory synchronisation tools

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...

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 video

Insight 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...

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)

Domino & Sharepoint Coexistence

I got talking to the nice chaps over at CASAHL today about how to make Domino applications and Sharepoint applications available to disparate sets of users. They have some really interesting tools that could allow us to 'replicate' the content of Notes/Sharepoint/Other applications onto different platforms (so we wouldn't need to license everyone for everything!).

In theory we could replicate all the WWY Sharepoint systems onto the Mars Domino platform, while also replicating most of the Mars Domino Applications to a WWY Sharepoint platform. We'll need to do some work to see if the theory would hold for our environment though!

What really got me thinking was their recent work with 3M, who apparently had 350,000 Notes applications (no, that's not a typo!) Apparently 60% of those applications were no longer used, and of the remaining apps 'only' 15,000 were actually unique templates!

We're not so bad after all ;-)

Lotusphere Keynote Announcements

We had the traditional keynote speech this morning with the Blue Man Group performing the start/finish (and randomly helping with a demo in the middle), and Dan Akroyd as the special guest talking about collaboration as part of a film crew.

Lotus announced strong growth (12,236 new customers since launch of Notes 8, and 16 consecutive quarters of revenue growth), so they must be doing something right!

I definitely don't have space here to cover all the technologies, demonstrations and customer testimonials that Lotus went through, so here is a quick review of the bigger announcements:

Lotus have been working with RIM to deliver Connections, Sametime and Domino apps (through X Pages) on Blackberry devices. IBM have also worked on making those apps accessible on other popular mobile devices. Bluehouse has been renamed and expanded and is now called LotusLive (and yes, it includes the email piece that Karoona is so smug about). The SAP integration project (Atlantic) is now a product that will ship in March under the brand name "Alloy". Connections 2.5 is due in Q3 2009 and we are promised it will "continue to make the competition pale in comparison". Sametime Unified Telephony will ship mid 2009.

Notes on Linux! ... Again!

My last session of the day was a showcase of Notes & Domino on Linux. I've been running the Notes 8.5 Beta client on ubuntu for a while so the step by step install was old news, but the tools and tips on running the server on SLES 10 are certainly welcome.

Assuming we consolidate our Notes environment (whether tactically or strategically) having a supported build on Linux would make our Processing colleagues very happy that we weren't cluttering up the datacenter with lots of Windows servers, and we'd probably get deeper technical support from them on the Linux platform.

As you can run several domino partitions on a single linux box, it would probably be cheaper too!

As an aside, it was interesting to see the presenter using Virtual Box (a free product from Sun) to virtualise an XP operating system. It allows a 'seamless mode' similar to Citrix where the virtualised OS is hidden but the application window appears to be running natively on the Linux OS. Microsoft announced something similar that we blogged about from the MMS conference but I have my doubts that it will be free! I'll be having a play when I finally get back to the UK and undoubtedly Malc will now tell me that he's been using it for years, but I can think of some great innovation work around this functionality!

Mobile Everything

The Lotus Mobility Portfolio session covered a lot of old ground that we've already blogged about at the LoLa conference last year, but there were a couple of interesting nuggets to make the 2 hours worthwhile...

There was an amusing* 6 minute clip that explains Lotus Mobile Connect better than anything I can write here. View it here

Also some good tools that the presenter uses that we should look at as we start to get more serious about mobile devices (is Col reading this?)

• www.testiphone.com - allows simulation and testing of many different devices
• www.mymobiler.com - iPhone simulator
• www.useragent.org - useful when developing websites that may be displayed on many different devices

One area that we haven't spent much time thinking about is that last one on the list. Let's take a real world example - www.MyMMs.com. Right now the site is optimised for 'standard' browsers on traditional deskops and laptops, and works great. But what if you're out and about? If someone suggests that it would make a great valentine gift? Try it on your phone now! You might buy if you can use the site right then and there, but if it's a frustrating experience would you always get onto a 'real' PC and follow though?

With the enormous growth of mobile devices and netbooks, are we missing out on impulse sales just because the site is inaccessible to mobile browsers? If this isn't a problem for us now I'm willing to bet that it will be - and surprisingly soon.

IBM has a solution for this, and I'm sure others do too. What's even better though is that tools exist to measure the number of site hits that don't result in a sale, and also to measure the browser configurations being used to access the site. But is anyone looking?

* this is the special definition of "amusing" that only applies after 2 hours of Security presentation

Lotus Domino & Notes Security A-Z

Well that was different! First presentation I've been to where the two presenters seemed to publically disagree about the content - and there was a lot of content!

Beyond giving me just enough knowledge to be dangerous (you have been warned), there was good coverage of some of the new features in versions 7, 8 and 8.5 that not only improve security but also improve the end user experience and ease some administrative burdens.

The ID Vault is still probably the biggest win, allowing us to remove some custom scripting and simplifying the initial configuration of the Notes client, but there was also information on setting up Active Directory as a "secondary directory" which we will need to look into soon.

There was also some good information on standard events that should be monitored to ensure security, and coverage of best practice configurations for all the new policies that can be configured.

One point that we will have to review is that apparently the Notes 8 client 'breaks' the roaming configuration we use at Mars (H: drive), but Notes 8.5 has the roaming ability built-in, again allowing us to remove more custom scripting

Something that was only briefly mentioned but triggered some thoughts was around categorisation of each database by Privacy and Security ratings, based on factors such as 'does the database contain consumer information' etc. We should make sure we do something around this in the upcoming database discovery work. I'm sure Jean-Marc will be thrilled!

I'll leave you with a telling comment from security professionals :

"Security is a trade-off between what users will put up with and what you need to protect your environment"

If our security colleagues are representing the side of "protecting our environment" in this trade-off, who is representing "what the users will put up with"? I don't think we have a clear answer on this yet, but i wouldn't be surprised if EUE are in the frame under the guise of the "Usability Centered Design" initiative. Expect to hear more about this!

I'll arrange for all the Lotusphere slides to be hosted internally so interested parties can view all the slides directly.

Lotusphere 2009

Almost all here! Greg & Mike arrived a couple of days ago and have been settling in. Karoona and I arrived yesterday on a very uneventful flight, and we'll be joined by Dai this afternoon to round out the EUT presence at Lotusphere this year.

So far we've had a couple of requests from the rest of the team to make sure we cover Email Archiving, Future of Quickplace, Sustainability and of course get the latest hints and tips in running our environment. Add a comment on this post to let us know if there is anything else you'd like us to make sure we cover.

With the upcoming Wrigley integration work we will also be putting special focus on tools and partners we can use to help make our two environments work seamlessly together and we will be investigating any offerings that we can use to cost effectively simplify our overall environment.

We have a full working Sunday ahead of us - unfortunately I drew the short straw so I get to start my day with "The A-Z of IBM Lotus Domino Security Features". I hope you're all as excited as I am ;-)

Quickr Next

The last session on Tuesday was a demo/feedback session for some provisional new features of Quickr. The single most interesting new feature is the "Personal Place" - think of it as a web based replacement of the trusty H: drive. It also enables seamless transfer of documents into team spaces, and from there into enterprise content management systems.

The connector for windows file explorer allows familiar access to the documents, but the true power is the ability for users to work on any of those documents with others, including full versiong and editing control.

It will be interesting to see how the MS products compare...

SameTime Unified Telephony (SUT)

It's been a year since I last looked at SUT, and it's moved on leaps and bounds since then (it's actually a product rather than flash mock-ups!)

For those that don't know, SUT is the main Lotus play for the telephony integration which sits on top of SameTime, the Lotus Unified Communications platform.

The main idea behind SUT is that the user controls how they want to be contacted (Softphone, Deskphone, Cellphone, Voicemail etc) along with 'rules' for how to route their calls depending on things like their online status, location, time of day etc. What this means in practice is that you don't need to 'guess' where the person is or worry about calling them at an inconvenient time. It's all integrated right into the SameTime client, which then includes additional rich presence (i.e. it shows you whether I am currently on a call)

The product is now up and running, and while there are still some issues to work out with the network vendors around billing and call control, the product direction is now very focussed and it's looking really slick. It is clearly targetted purely at large enterprises, and I'll be talking with Steve next week to see how we can lay our hands on some early kit!

Productivity Tools for the Mobile Worker

A more detailed look today at some of the new/improved products in the mobility area.

The two most interesting products are Lotus Traveller - version 8.5 adds a lot more security features such as device wiping and device security compliance checking/enforcing, and Lotus Mobile Connect, which effectively is a native client-less VPN gateway for Lotus Notes - this is the product that enables the Ultra-Lite iNotes that is optimised for the iPhone.

What is really handy is that the products can operate in a 'proxy mode' within the DMZ (similar to our BES environment), and only the gateway servers need to be at the new version of Notes (8.5). This solution also handily delivers email to internet based users, which I vaguely recall was of interest to some of our users...

The backend email servers need to be at least up to 7.02

Finally, the last item worthy of note is the IBM Websphere Everyplace Mobile Portal (you've got to love those snappy product names), which is a bolt-on product to websphere which automatically adjusts the website to best fit your mobile device. Check out the IBM home site from different devices to see how/whether it works!

Simplifying Notes ID Management

My first session today was a (far too) detailed look at the new identity vault mechanism that will be delivered as part of Notes 8.5

The basic mechanic seems to be that all the id files are stored in an identity vault (a specialised notes database), and allows specific functionality for the user to download their id file as required.

As the id file is now accessible centrally, this enables some 'forgotten password' type functionality which sounds good, but unfortunately is not compatible with the "Notes Shared Login" which is the functionality that allows single sign-on integration with the Windows account.

Strangely enough, when people were commenting that this "didn't seem very sensible or aligned with the rest of the Lotus vision", the response was that the best solution was to integrate everything direct with Active Directory!

Ho Hum, and I had such high hopes too...

Lotus Leadership Alliance 2008

I'm here, and as Karoona already mentioned my Starwood hotel membership thing paid off with a nice room overlooking the ocean. A bit wierd looking down at passing helictopers though!

I've just finished the sessions of the first day, which have been about the Lotus strategy in 5 areas :

• Notes & Domino Roadmap
• Ultimate Web Experience
  
• Unified Communication & Collaboration
  
• Social Software
• Online Collaboration

I won't go into the specific details of each session, but the key message I took away was one of strong product interoperability and stability.

In other news, there were some nice tasters on mobile device integration across Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices - it looks like we will finally be able to retire OneBridge!

There is an interesting product called Foundations Start which is an appliance type model for small businesses or branch offices. In theory it covers both Messaging & Collaboration as well as Client Architecture. Possibly a solution for "Office on a Box"

Lots more to say but I will save it for the detailed sessions over the next two days.

The last session of the day was a surprise guest speaker, which turned about to be Chris Gardner who wrote the autobiography "The pursuit of happyness" which you may have read/seen. He is a hugely motivating speaker, although I did notice that some of the audience were reduced to tears ;-) If you get the chance to hear him tell his story then I'd encourage you to take the opportunity!

Asset Inventory Service

I've seen a couple of sessions on this now so I shall summarise my thoughts.

Right now I'd say that this solution has only one place where we would consider it's use, and that's Royal Canin. Given the lack of network routing between the sites, this is a solution that would be able to deliver value very quickly (the installation would still need to be managed on a subsidiary by subsidiary basis though).

Microsoft have big plans for this product though, and some of the areas of interest are the software catalogue, which will be automatically referenced in Systems Center R2. To become a fully fledged service though, user authentication needs to be standards-based (I don't think the MS passport is an identity standard yet, but I'm sure Doug will correct me if I'm wrong) and the database will need to be accessible to enterprise business intelligence tools.

So apart from RC, I think this is one to look at again no earlier than version 2 (likely to be announced at Tech Ed later this year)

Application Virtualisation & Streaming

I've attended a whole bunch of sessions covering different aspects of this topic, so I'll try to summarise my thoughts now we're done.

Firstly, the App Virtualisation product finally gives the Microsoft management suite proper user-targetting for software distribution, which it has always lacked. The main business benefit of the product is reducing the need for regression testing of different applications (i.e. conflict solver no longer required!). There is a secondary benefit in allowing previously incompatible applications co-exist, thus increasing flexibility/agility. This would be a great solution for COMPASS running Office 2007 alongside previous versions of Office.

The streaming aspect might be useful to deploy to users with limited connectivity, and there is clear potential to use this deployment mode to enable centralisation along with NGN V2. Lots more work to do here but also some big opportunities.

In summary App Virtualisation is something that should definitely be on our roadmap, but it's not going be a solution for everything.

Virtual Desktops

A quick update on the Virtual Desktop session, which was presented by Pete Downing of Citrix. The solution is fairly similar to the VDI (Remote SDS) solution that is under development internally, with a couple of noteable exceptions.

The Citrix solution (demonstrated on top of Windows Sever 2008 running Hyper-V) uses a very shiny looking web interface for the end user, and the network transport between the client and the virtual machine is ICA rather than the RDP protocol that most other solutions use. Citrix claim a 15x performance improvement over RDP (maybe it should have read 1.5x) but given our experience with Remote SDS on RDP at Doane, where performance is not comparable to the existing Citrix terminal server solution (ICA transport again), maybe we should be looking at this solution more carefully.

Other nice parts of the solution include the automatic virtual machine provisioning which includes some scripting for personalisation, but until we can get to a stateless PC image I think we'll continue to struggle with deployment. At least it's given me something to think about!