The Strawberry Project

There are 5 themes in the Lotus Connections product suite:

• Profiles
• Communities
• Dogear
• Activities
• Blog

All of which are customisable, and all - in the spirit of Creature Comforts - very turn off and onable. We know this because only the invited great and good have access to the Blog component on the special Lotusphere pre-beta we’ve been invited to use. This is partly because I suspect that setting up a pre-beta for 7500 users has potential issues for the folks having to admin the temporary Domino and Connections servers down here in Orlando.

Profiles

OK, we’ve been talking about this at work for some time and have a project underway at the moment that is looking to provide something similar for a partial coverage of our staff. We’ve hung back from developing significant applications to deliver and drive the profiles precisely becuase we were expecting something along the lines of the profiles module to be delivered sometime soon. IBM have made considerable noise about their own internal use of ‘Blue Pages’ as a ‘People Finder’ on steroids.

Communities

Communities alows folks tocreate ad-hoc groups based around subjects they are interested in. All taggable - just like Facebook / Bebo Groups etc., but for grown-ups

Dogear

I’ve talked about Dogear previously, when it was standalone as an internal alphaworks product at Watson Research Lab, and refered to by the ACM. Dogear is basically del.icio.us for the Enterprise, but is well embedded with the other areas of Connections, particularly with…

Activities

Right, now this *is* new (well, sort of - you could argue that it’s an extension of a Task List paradigm, but that would be doing a particular disservice to this piece of functionality).

The one issue I need to get to the bottom of here with some of the Lotus folk is where Activities fits with Websphere Process Server.

…

OK. had a chat with them, and it seems that we are talking ad-hoc activities here, not formal business methods. I think I can find a way of differentiating between the two when we need to present this out to people.

Blogs

Shouldn’t really need any explanation really.

So the potential of Connections is pretty huge for businesses prepared to invest in the improved Notes / Domino / Connections environment. We’ve seen countless demos of how seamlessly they all integrate and can be used to organise work. It all looks good.

Tags: ACM, beta, blog, connections, domino, facebook, lotusphere2007, people_finder, profiles, watson_research, websphere

Happened upon some research out of the IBM China on visualising social communities. Nothing spectacular in the fact that there was visualisation work around social networks, as sit’s something we’ve seen elsewhere before from IBM at Hursley (in fact I think it may well be referred to on one of the Hursley developer blogs). What was of particular interest in this instance was the data being mapped. For this example the lead developer had chosen Academic Publications, Journals and Conferences.

The system on show provided different ways of slicing and dicing the research output metrics, but it was the instant appeal of looking at the marked differences in co-author networks that struck home. Nothing more complex than looking at big fat author icons with very few connections and tiny collaborators (mainly PIs with direct report postgrads) versus even bigger, fatter icons with lots of connections of similar sizes (potentially more collegiate and co-operative researchers).

A different view showed the importance of papers as reference sources for citation and derivative works, mapped across the source of publication. A further twist is provided with the addition of a timeline sldier so you can animate the progress of a piece of work over time :).

Great tool - pity it isn’t a product (yet), as I can see a market potential in proving performance metrics in Research. All credit to Wang Tian-Shu for a great piece of work.

Two other pieces of work of note that I’ve walked through today are Many Eyes (presented by Fernanda Viegas), and LiveBook (Real-Time Collaboration and Editing for the Web). More on that later

Tags: academic_publications, lotusphere2007, performance_metrics, research_output, social_networks, visualisation

Just in the WCM Deep Dive session, on the back of talking with the development team this morning. It would seem that the 6.0 release isn’t quite as good at handling recursive security settings as we would probably need long term, but this is being addressed with the 6.02 release later in the year.

Good conversation with them around the type of Use Cases we would have at work, complete with the level of complexity possibly expected in the different areas of the site. JSP extensibility of WCM looks good, but with the usual caveats around performance and stability.

Have to leg it across the resort now for the follow on session. Somebody is having a good laugh at the expense of the delegates today - there is no spatial dependency in the themes being talked about today. Grr.

Tags: lotusphere2007, wcm

Talked to the developers for Activities and Quickr this morning about where Activities end and Quickr Project Tasks / WS Processes begin. It looks like we will need to talk through Activities as an extension of personal tasks or at the most unstructured group activities. There is no linakge from Activities to WS Process Server as things stand. Neither are there any dependencies or finish-to-start / start-to-finish dependencies in Activities - just linking unstructured tasks together.

I guess we are really talking about work that takes place to fulfill part of a process or project plan.

Tags: connections, lotusphere2007, personal_tasks, process_server, project_tasks

OK. The current session I’m in is on extending the use of the social software platform (Lotus Connections) to use the services in your own applications. This is really where we will be putting in some major development effort in th enear future as far as I can see.

Lotus are betting the farm on this social computing strategy as the key differentiator between them and their nearest competitor. All the apps on offer are now tightly integrated through Sametime and the Connections server. For once what they’re offering actually starts to make sense from a User Experience perspective, but the impacts on our project are probably more profound than we were perhaps expecting.

This is particularly true where Activities are concerned. I think that we will have to work through some fairly fundamental decisions on how we implement WS Process Server and the rigidity of the formality of that approach, against the backdrop of ‘have it your way’ approach to organising information around Activities. They could complement each other well, but I suspect there is bound to be a degree of cloudiness around how an Activity differs to a Process.

Tags: connections, lotusphere2007, process_server, sametime, social_computing