Mwwwwhahahahaha. All I need now are 3 servers to get started with an installation and I’ll have a beta environment setup that will mean saying ttfn to Roller @ work (before it even gets anywhere).
Tags: connections, lotus, released
There are 5 themes in the Lotus Connections product suite:
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
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
OK, this is a bit of a cheap post here with a slice-n-dice of the official Press Release, but I’m busy using the product here. I’ll post some more in a little while.
Lotus Connections has five Web 2.0-based components — Activities, Communities, Dogear, Profiles and Blogs — that help business people quickly connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs. These components help users save time by making information previously qualified by others easily accessible. The pace of learning increases as users easily find and exchange ideas with experts across their organization. Since they have access to the experience of others, users can avoid making mistakes and duplicating tasks, saving time and improving the quality of their work.
Tags: Activities, blogs, connections, Dogear, lotusphere2007, profiles