The Strawberry Project

OK, I’ve been a little slack on the posting front during the final quarter of 2007.  I think I was briefly distracted by the mass hypnosis generated by Facebook during the back end of summer, but events since then have left me feeling somewhat ambivalent towards the whole FB scene.

As my FB usage has declined, the converse has been true of Twitter.  I’ve found that Twitter has become my most-used asynchronous  messaging platform, replacing direct SMS and email in one go.   The only issue on the horizon seems to be the amount of downtime that the service has had in 2007, which has been increasing.

Anyway, I have a lot of retrospective writing/posting and some serious thought capturing to do right now, so I’d better crack on.

Happy New Year to all.

Tags: 2008, facebook, new, New Year, twitter

IBM have finally released the portlet for consuming Google Gadgets and services within Websphere that I mentioned way back at Lotusphere.

IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets is a JSR 168 portlet that allows enterprise portal users to integrate Google Gadgets for web pages with their portal pages. Google Gadgets for web pages are remotely accessible services that provide access to online content and applications designed to be aggregated into the context of a web page. These include language translators, maps, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia.

Using IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets with appropriate access rights, users can search and select a Google Gadget from the available set of thousands of Google Gadgets for their portal pages and modify the settings of the selected gadget as per their preferences. Additionally, users can specify the number of gadgets to be displayed per page while selecting a gadget.

Reasons we may want to use it in the near future:

User-owned integration of stuff like: Facebook; MySpace; Digg; Del.icio.us etc.

Might save reading the Facebook API documentation for a while.

Tags: facebook, gadgets, Google, jsr 168, saviour, websphere

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