The Strawberry Project

This post has been sat in draft for the past two weeks with only the title going for it - hardly an auspicious start to providing some meaningful prose related to the ‘way ahead’ for Domino Apps and the new Lotus applications heading our way.

Still, it’s here now, so I can start to fill out a bit more detail and make use of the whole two words typed whilst I was away.

IBM® Lotus® Expeditor is IBM’s universal managed client software to extend composite applications to laptops, desktops, kiosks and mobile devices and is the follow-on release of IBM WebSphere® Everyplace® Deployment. It can be used to extend your IBM Lotus, IBM WebSphere, IBM® Workplace™ or Eclipse™ infrastructures to a managed client environment. An alternative to Microsoft®.NET client software, Lotus Expeditor provides the flexibility that comes from service oriented architecture (SOA) and open standards based on Eclipse.

Why is this of particular interest to us? Well - this is how we are going to be expected to implement our offline portal delivery in the future.

With Lotus Expeditor software, WebSphere Portal installations can deliver composite applications that can operate in connected or occasionally connected environments—on a desktop, laptop, kiosk or tablet computer. This is ideal for mobile workers or for environments where an Internet connection is expensive, unreliable or simply not available, such as places where consumers use kiosks.

How does Lotus Expeditor software provide this support? It enables local portlet support on the client with a toolkit to help you transform JavaTM Specification Request (JSR) 168 portlets into rich client applications running on Microsoft® Windows® or Linux® platforms. And with the Lotus Expeditor network client installer, portal administrators can use WebSphere Portal software to remotely deploy and manage these applications based upon user roles, helping to reduce administration costs.

It was all a lot more interesting in the flesh, so to speak. Bottom line is that it’s actually something else that we will need to develop and not really a setup.exe for us to run.

Tags: eclipse, expeditor, ibm_websphere, jsr_168, kiosks, lotusphere2007, lotus_software, mobile_workers, service_oriented_architecture, websphere

Well, I’ve finally dragged myself across to Gartner to see what they made of Lotusphere, and so here are their pearls of wisdom for your digestion.

Significant updates to Lotus Notes and Quickplace, as well as the introduction of some compelling new products, were the reason that IBM’s Lotusphere 2007 was buzzing with positive feedback from IBM customers and partners.

Perhaps the best news coming from Lotusphere is the near-disappearance of the bewildering “Workplace” name. The folding of Workplace into WebSphere Portal has helped to reduce the confusion regarding its strategy, messaging and products. While Workplace was, in Gartner’s view, a failed marketing effort, its underlying concepts embracing the Web have provided a critical foundation for Notes 8, Quickr, Connections and Sametime — which are all built on Eclipse with the Expeditor tool. Combined with the recently added representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces, Atom syndication capabilities and “mashability,” these concepts serve as a strategic architecture for all future Lotus products.

IBM hopes Lotusphere 2007 will launch an updated, more competitive and appealing Lotus. The demonstrations and product sessions have been successful among the Lotus users who come to these events. However, several challenges persist. The relationship of Quickr to existing products like Domino Document Manager, DB2 Content Manager and new document-oriented clients remains murky. While the mashups and possibilities of social software are promising, the lack of consumer-focused or Web 2.0 software-as-a-service offerings limits penetration.

Fairly-dos then. Not entirely sure that IBM have offered ‘consumer-focused’ software for a considerable length of time now. They tend to leave that to Apple and Microsoft, but there you go.

Tags: expeditor, gartner, lotusphere2007, mashups, notes, quickplace, sametime, 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

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