So... IBM or not IBM ?

I have just read through all the posts on the blog and overall, except for a few negative or doubtful comments here and there, most of the bloggers and commentators seem rather impressed with what IBM has to offer.

We are already an IBM shop, albeit an old rusty crumbly shack of a shop. Like it or not, Lotus Notes works for us and our much hated Notes databases are a pillar for many of our units. We are very heavily dependent on Sametime and many teams, specially in Mars IS, would not be able to function without it. Imagine trying to run an Atlas upgrade without Sametime.

Now with the emergence of Enterprise 2.0, we are investing a lot of effort into leveraging other types of collaboration software to help the business work better together. Social software, blogs, wikis, forums, you name it and we want it. And we want it not only for "traditional" Mars, but also for all the organisations that Mars has and will be acquiring. The tools are out there, the question is then, who do we get them from.

Do we go start from scratch and invest in an all Microsoft environment? Sounds like a lot of work & a lot of money. However future acquisitions of Mars are likely to be in the SME area and stats show that the majority of the organisations in this space (bingo!) are on a Microsoft platform rather than an IBM one. If we were to move to Microsoft, integration or even absorption of new acquisitions would become easier and much cheaper.

Do we do Best of Breed and invest in industry-strength integration to force these different best bits into continued seamless co-existence? Hmmm. Is there a need for Best of Breed in Mars ?

Or do we stick with IBM and tap into this fully integrated seamless solution we could just naturally expand into from our current Lotus base? IBM's offerings presentation slide is almost an exact copy of the Mars requirements presentation slide that has been circulating over the past year. Donald? ;-) IBM has everything we think we need. Sticking with IBM would allow us to then focus our attention on the more difficult task which is to bring about that culture shift that will encourage our users to use these tools that we are rolling out.

To be fair though, one argument I keep hearing in favour of IBM is that traditional Mars is 2 times bigger than non-traditional Mars and therefore moving away from the traditional IBM environment in Mars will cause more user disruption than the other option. This is not strictly true : regardless of which direction we move to, we will be upgrading part of our user base and migrating the rest. Either way, the whole user base will be hit with a round of training and some inevitable disruption while they get used to their new IW.

What it all boils down to is cost vs. benefits for each of the scenarios that are open to Mars in this area. An objective and fair evaluation of what Mars would need to invest with each vendor to achieve the 1-Mars vision should help us make the right decision for Mars. This work is currently underway ... watch the space.

Still, I agree with Gartner that the whole debate about IBM/Microsoft sort of misses the point. The time is to assess the viability of checking out the cloud. But this is another blog entry for another time!

It wasn't ALL hard work

(The EUT Development team, locked away in a back room, worked tirelessly to plan out the future strategy)

Some of the classic quotes that were heard:

Karoona: "Honestly, I haven't had very much to drunk."

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Dai: "It was amazing. Truly a touching moment that I don't think I'll never forget."
Mike: "What was?"
Dai: "The presidential inauguration"
Mike: "Oh.... I thought you meant SameTime."

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Greg: "Do we turn left or right here?"
Karoona: "Hmmm... I'm not sure. We might have to phone Dai"
Greg: "We're at the end of the driveway... How can we be lost already???"

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!

What were they thinking? When UX Design collides with Reality

This was an overall good insight into IBM's usability practices. We're told that in LS2008 IBM promised to deliver that Notes 8 would deliver a "world-class user experience" and dedicated a big team of user researchers, usability specialists, visual designers & interaction designers to the design of Notes 8 - and QuickR, Connections, Sametime 8, etc. etc. This team focuses on gathering feedback from various sources (forum, bleedyellow.com, GCPC, developers, customers, ...), prioritise and input that feedback into development.

What makes IBM's approach to usability interesting is the set of personas they have created to represent certain types of users. Meet Samantha, Mary, etc. each of whom have a very detailed profile and are taken really seriously by the IBM community. This I thought would be an approach that would work quite well for EUE, coupled with the user segmentation work that Paul Wickham's been doing - we could have our own Brad, Tom, Keanu etc ;)

Anyhow, the IBM Usability team is now focused on bringing consistency for Samantha and co. in the new technologies. We can already see elements of this in Quickr & Connections. The new Notes client and iNotes, as I believe Brian has already blogged previously, are very similar. This consistency in look-and-feel enhances seamlessness of usage for the end user, who can slide from Connections into QuickR for example without even noticing that he has done so. Very slick.

As a side note, it was good to see IBM's initiatives on gathering end user feedback and acting on it. If we do upgrade to Notes 8, we'll make sure we add to the cause!

Project Liberate :-S

Using the open office source code and the eclipse framework Lotus has created Symphony; which for basic text editing / presentations / spreadsheets works great. It’s completely free too, who can complain? The majority of Microsoft Office functionality lays unused so in this context it seems ridiculous to pay for that privilege.

By the end of the year it will be compatible with the latest version of office, and by 2010 will be aimed at more than just basic users with macros and other functionality being introduced.

The other side to this story is Project Liberate: “An IBM complementary Consulting Engagement to help customers understand alternatives when negotiating a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement”. A bold move when IBM openly admits Symphony is an inferior office product, but this is a long term strategy and at least they are contributing the developments back into the openoffice.org community.

Is the world going mobile??

This was an interesting session presented by a Blackberry user and a WMD user, split into two halves

• Demos of phones: Nokia, Android, Blackberry....

• The installation of a traveler (traveller :P) server.

At the beginning one presenter gave out his email address and requested people send him questions. Within an hour the Traveler server was set-up, a device configured and the mail could be read. Finally, the phone was remotely wiped completely. Simple but effective I thought, maybe it could be of value to associates with wi-fi phones. Traveler is bundled with domino licences too; Mobile Connect is a similar VPN solution.

LotusLive; Aka Bluehouse

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.