Eric Mack On-Line

Notes from presentation: (Typing quickly)
Lots of pressure in three areas:
How to embrace changes in the business climate?
How to maximize business effectiveness in the workplace?
How do we promote innovation?

IBM's response:
Deliver richest continuum of communication and collaboration tools (including digital community tools)
Enable collaboration in context
Integration of both of these tools (above) in various contexts (anywhere/anytime access)
Embrace openness, inclusiveness, and extensibility.

I. Continuum of communication and collaboration tools
We are now in an integrated high performance work environment. E-mail alone won't cut it. We need UC, Collaborative  content, RSS, Composite applications, etc.. We are no longer constrained to Notes, we can, using Eclipse, develop composite applications. Open office support/ODF support removes ties to specific vendor tools. Users want to view a document without opening another window. Quick Demo of composite applications in R8. Impressive.  Quick discussion of SameTime 7.5 and how Eclipse enabled mashups around IM and presence.  In-line file transfer, screen capture, sharing, etc. Neat, but I've been using that for sometime. Voice chat apparently uses same codecs as Skype. UC squared: Unified communication and collaboration tools integrated into the user experience. e.g. IM chat escalates into voice call escalates into web meeting or multipoint video - all seamless.

Quick review of Lotus Quickr for content libraries and workflow, team calendar, check-in/check-out (will work on all Office versions) and more. Lotus Connectors to integrated desktop apps into this environment. Document sharing and collaboration with within SameTime. The real value is the linked value of these capabilities. Oh, and Quickr components are accessible from within Notes (as is anything else).

Content repositories: Quickr supports multiple repositories (via standard Ajax client). Domino NSF is one. JSR170 another, and FileNet for Content Management and federation. And, if you are already a Notes user, you can one-click deploy shared spaces and libraries. neat.

Lotus Connections (Ships next week) this productizes social software tech: profiles, bookmarks, tagging, Activities, Communities, etc.. Profiles look interesting as a way to do company knowledge look-ups.  Communities (created  by users) allow for quick and focused socialization . Easy to move from tool to tool. Dogear feature allows for shared bookmarks . Leverages community screening (closed tagging and KM awareness) linked into corp directory. Tag cloud support. Great people locator. Also provides for high-quality hits on knowledge searches. Activities (from IBM research) solves the stove-pipe problem to the way people work and makes their information more activity centric units of work rather than tool specific. Good demo of activity centric workspace. Would need to play with this more myself to form an opinion. Adding someone to an activity automagically gives them access to all files, documents, and other information (e.g. comm tools) that make up the activity space.
...

Visualization of social networks. Neat.
good overview of people finding tools and credibility ranking systems. Might be useful in my PKM research. Action item.

I'm concerned that Ken has many more slides to share but we only have 4 min left., Hope he makes it.


Key things to remember:
Bookmarks
Personal Profiles
Communities
IM
Activities

All of these make up IBM's social software initiative.,

Embrace openness and heterogeneity (He's running out of time)

Looks like the Lotus (IBM) Mantra is now Content, Communication, Collaboration

Comment from audience (that I agree with): It's refreshing to see real live product demos rather than Photoshop or PowerPoint pages.

Time's up.