Hectic Eclectic

Having spent some time at LCTY2010 in Edinburgh...

At times reduced to a Barcode...

I may still just agree that Lotus Knows...

At the event there were some great speakers, for me the Highlights being (I've retitled)

Stuart McRae a Collaboration Evangelist - Connections plus with special sauce

John Schumacher a Director of Development at Lotus - It's the ROI stupid

and

Eliza Manningham-Buller, from the Bond movies - on being in MI5

So there was a lot to see...

Stuart's demo showcased a load of little 10second savers (widgets) being used in concert and in context within Lotus Connections and Domino (yes you could have used outlook for this bit).  Widget shown were either Business Partner e.g. Snapp, Big publically available stuff like linkedin and TrippIt and some internal IBM tools, or publically available stuff from the IBM Lotus Labs.

If you can save people 5mins every day through smarter working.  That is about 1% of a working day.  So with hundred staff you can have 100 staff doing the work of 101.  With a 1000 staff you are getting the work of 1010.  So for a 1000 employee business you save 10 average salaries... Think about you average company salary for a moment....  think you should be considering this stuff?  I do.

For a £20k average salary

1000 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a. 

For a £40k average salary

500 staff equates to savings of £200k p.a.

or

1000 staff equates to savings of £400k p.a.

Powerful stuff ... but who believes the 5mins right?  Well Stuart showed one example after another of how time could be saved.... if you couldn't easily find AT LEAST 5mins you are probably doing something mad.

Stuart McRae also touched on some of the stuff I've mentioned already about Blackberry and the iPhone but it was cool to see some iPad announces too and to hear reinforced that IBM's view is - you choose the device and we'll work with anyone.  Some really cool announces on how people are working well with Alloy by IBM & SAP (wee blog on that), Connections, Quickr and the rest on the Blackberry.

Amongst other things I was reminded by a colleague to check out Ed Brill's blog - where I hadn't been for a while, which led me to some Lotus Protector articles.  Zero false positives at 99% effective... not bad and ICSALabs certified.  If you don't know it much check out these videos with Arthur Fontaine

Glue - now I've only sniffed it - not had a full look yet

... but this look pretty interesting for folks going down the in house social software route... but perhaps looking to take it out to the network edge and (eventually) beyond.

The offering extends the functionality of Connections to include more of the Twitterlike ( @stuart-seric ) microblogging functionality.  Here's a wee demo from Youtube land

There's a 30 day trial available and I can see this being useful for at least a decent subset of staff in an fully online business and a smaller proportion in others.  No news/comments on whether mobile support will be offered or how this fits in on what Lotus are up to with RIM for Connections

Lotusphere Comes To You 2010 - Edinburgh Date Announced

This year's (Scottish) Lotusphere Comes to you Event has been announce and the word on the grapevine is it will be a corker, with even more great demos.  I know David Hood has been working on bringing the right people to the show.  We'll be there along with the usual suspects and of course hoping to see many more new folks along.  Why not tell a friend...

You can get updates and register (not quite yet) for the Edinburgh event at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/events/lcty2010/europe.html

If in the meantime you want to let your contacts know you're interested or are planning to attend I've created an event on Linkedin so you can let folk know you are going and get some of your own networking done at the event too.

Rational Requirements Composer 2.0.0.1 Released

RRC is on the next increment of v2 and integration capabilities with RQM an RTC are greatly enhanced with the respective v2 released of each of this cheeky triumvirate of the jazz.net fold.

I'm about 2 weeks late with the news here.... afterall you could have been downloading this Good Stuff for almost a fortnight (that's the time you spent being posted to a fort -2weeks- in the olden days) and you can get it here.

Ah yes, they are all shiney and new on v2...

Ed Brill: New Redbooks Wiki for Domino 8.5 web application development

Ed Brill.

ibm.com developerWorks: Redbooks Wiki for Domino 8.5 web application development

Some news for you iPhoners out there... though for now I still prefer Berries myself

Another one from Uncle StephenfromIBM - cool

You can see the Blackberry one here...

All the men who should have used Lotus Connections

A few people have ribbed me for plugging a product on my blog but I don't get their logic.  I like a fair chunk of IBM software, sure some of it is guff.  I never heard a band who didn't make at least one bum record ... and I don't think connections is a bum by any far stretch, hence the mention.  Anywho in my defence I thought I'd at least put some stuff out here properly to help folks make up their own mind and give me a fairer crack.

I've got below an overview - very corporate and features and then some scenarios StephenfromIBM posted on youtube late 2009 and I thought I'd collate them here.  All pretty short and sweet.

The Corp. Overview - useful but find makes more sense for people on a second listen once they have seen some of the practical scenarios below - otherwise it is too easy to see as IT buzzwords and corporate spin.

The Scenarios - THE MAN WHO SHOULD HAVE USED LOTUS CONNECTIONS...

....#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

Didn't post #6 - it was way too cheesy.

( I await your email abuse! )

Finding the best person... by making the right Connections

I've been speaking to a number of folks recently about their concerns of how to connect the right people within their organisations and we currently had a few people looking at Lotus Connections - Lotus' Social software.  I don't think IBM have quite figured out how to sell this stuff fully yet - though there are plenty of refereneces world wide but I think it is highly apposite for organisations going through classic VC acquisition plays where staff don't know who one another are, what they do or what their inherent value may actually be to one another.

 This lack of information or transparancy may be through ignorance, sheer geography, speed of acquisition or any combination thereof and more of the same.  For the guy who has an inbound call for X that he needs to route, for the guy who doesn't know what else he can promote to his exisiting accounts, for the answer to that question you know nothing about ... social software holds the key to making connections (geddit) and delivering the intrinsic value held within the staff to clients of the business.

IBM definitely have the lead in this area and do eat their own dog food to particularly good effect on this one but how they communicate the message to the market ... still not quite there.  That said, for organisations with issues like this - well worth an afternoon's time to find out if there is something in it for them.

 Oh, and for folks with End Point Data capture issues or for folks who want to have their reps dazzle clients with their connections into to the back end skills and knowhow to get those client queries answered in double quick time then recent releases on Blackberry AppWorld may also be of interest as announced recently on ZDNET.  You can find out more and see some flash demos for a number of apps on Blackberry site here.

New Domino 8.5 Testimonials

Domino 8.5 has been getting some great reviews by industry analysts and nice to see a video posted this month with some testimonials on there...

If you fancy finding out more about this stuff - drop me a line.  We have some good local (Sunny Scotland) references.