The Strawberry Project

Flock is currently at 0.9.0.2 for the Mac and weighs in at around 20Mb to download, so it’s not exactly hefty.  I’m sick of Firefox giving me grief at the moment, so I’ve decided to let it have a rest.

First test for Flock was checking to make sure that Websphere Portal performed as well as it ought to, and it has - no problems.  I’m going to put it through the wringer this week at work, and report how things go.

Minor plus - this post is being written direct from Flock without browsing to the blog.  Hardly earth shattering, but saves me typing all those extra characters…

technorati tags:flock, firefox, loveliness

Tags: beta, firefox, flock, memory leak

A little /dev/random this evening, as I’ve decided to give the Dashcode Beta a try out. This is mainly because I’d like a little desktop widget to show me the current snow conditions around Zermatt, and it should be easy to cycle through the cameras available at sites around the glaciers.

You can grab the Beta release of Dashcode from the Apple Developer Connection. The code is set to time out on July 17th 2007. For all the Mac rumour-mongers out there, perhaps there’s a good pointer there for when Leopard will get released — or not, as the case now is <sigh>

Tags: beta, dashcode, OS X

I thought the Beta for Joost was open for all.  Turns out it isn’t - well at least not yet.  Anyway, I’ve got a bundle of invites to use if anyone wants to get on with trying it out.  Just drop a comment on this post and I’ll sign you up.

Tags: beta, intel, invites, joost, OS X

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