The Strawberry Project

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, mashups, notes, quickplace, sametime, websphere

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, process_server, sametime, social_computing

Opening gambit - audience rocked to the core by slightly worrying popular beat combo, complete with glitzy light show. Actually, the quality of the broadcast graphics and lightshow is pretty good Think Top of The Pops.

Big surprise (not really) in the choice of Neil Armstrong, who is giving the keynote address. The audience is generally bewitched to have the self-confessed Installation Technician addressing them. A major coup played by Lotus Group on the choice of speaker? Perhaps not, according to seasoned hacks at the show - as the number of retired Astronauts doing the speech rounds in Florida is pretty high still.

Still, from a personal standpoint, it was a moment I would have never expected to have had and even though I prefer my unmanned exploration science to manned missions, I was quietly in awe.

Mike Rhodin gives his opening address. He seems a little impatient to ge the message across - perhaps becuase Lotus have turned a corner in terms of the products they are putting out to market - inspite of themselves. There seems to be a great deal of momentum around the company at the moment - a palpable sense of positivism from the staffers around in the Halls (even those with the 6AM start of day shifts).

A few product details coming up:

Sametime updates - confirmed update will include Video calling and addition of a Mac client. Expect that the Sametime platform will also be available to run on Linux back-end.

Demo of Sametime happening with Cisco’s softphones. A cocophony of ringtones happening. My ears are bleeding.

Other stuff:

• Integration with Office ribbons (tick)
• Integration with RIM & Blacberry - multiuser chat (tick)
• Convert to call feature for voice communication (big tick).

Ken Bisconti coming on stage.

Lotus Notes for SAP delivered. Converted 500 companies from other platforms. 92% of customers using 6.5 or 7. 7.2 : Notes on a stick etc. Notes shipment up 30% by q4. Hannover now officially Domino 8 / Notes 8.

It’s damn hot in this room.

Demo of Notes 8 happening. new interface is SOOOOOO much tidier than the existing client templates. Showing threaded views at the moment, so the Groupwise fanboys will be kept happy.

Intenal Browser and RSS feed reader being shown. Hope it’s better than the current one which throws javascript exceptions for accessing DWA etc.

Client includes all the IBM editors for PPT /Doc /Xls etc., and can export to PDF

Thumbnail view added to navigate through the open tabs.

Domino ‘Next’ beyond 8. 64-bit support, more authentication methods. Content Management integration.

New product announcements - Lotus Quickr content sharing. Store/share/search content and information. Personal document management. Bascially filesystem available through RSS or Atom Feed - therefore multi-platform support. Expecting to provide connectors for desktop applications (guess Office). Take content offline in an .nsf file. later this years very Notes user will get a personal edition at no additional charge.

Quickr standard edition - team workspace, DB2 content integration, content workflow, etc. Ok - so this is the replacement for Quickplace then. Thank goodness for that. Quickplace will be replaced automagically with Quickr Standard Edition. YAY! Anyone reading this at work - DOWN TOOLS NOW AND STOP FURTHER QUICKPLACE DEV.

Will support MS Sharepoint repositories.

And note, an hour in to this I have yet to see the Webtop paradigm. These guys are *ALL* using clients.

Hurrah! Nag box has just appeared in the demo to say do you really want to send that document, or just send a link to it.

Showing some of the templates. ‘My Ideas’ ‘Team Ideas’ and Ideas development. Built-in wiki templates with Quickr Standard.

Larry Bowden taken the stage. Now on to Websphere Portal. Good to see that the HeyDay site has been shown on one of the slides

Google gadgets in WS6.0. Hmm…MORE stock tickers available then WS Express will ship this month on Jan 30th. SMB / Department sized.

‘Web 2.0′ Portal. Oh dear. back to Google gadgets again. Do they not realise that if they continue to push GG they may as well give up on WS and just tell everyone to go and use Google’s personalised home instead

Single composite application development framework for all applications niw. Lotus Expeditor 6.1 - used to build Samteime Client/Notes 8 client. Take Portal 6.0 apps offline using Expeditor.

Moving on to overview of Domino Designer 8. Visual editor for WSDl. domino develoeprs can write apps for Portal without writing Java. Pity we don’t have any Domino developers

Composite Application Editor Demo.

Lasers everywhere. Here we go with Lotus Connections.

Dogear + Blog + Profiles (a la BluePages). Looks really good. Activities in there, but they’re not covering it in depth in this session. More on this in a bit.

Tags: connections, lotus, mac_client, neil_armstrong, quickr, sametime, softphones

Interesting issues today with Lotus Sametime on OS X in both Safari and Firefox. I’ve been testing the http access to one of our new development servers and have hit the sort of applet rendering problem I thought I’d seen the back of with the introduction of Java 5 on OS X. Sadly this is not the case, and I’ve had everything from a blank frame to an inability to enter text in a password field (so not able to login).

Another observation on Sametime, this time with Adium, is it always the case that your account is added automatically in to your own Buddy List? Whilst I may well agree with my own sentiments, there’s something mildly annoying about having your conversation echoed back at you through double posting. Aye Carumba!

Tags: adium, firefox, inability, OS_X, safari, sametime

Now that we have confirmation of the partneship with IBM we can look forward to the delivery of a raft of new technologies over the coming months. There’s definitely a fair bit to get our teeth into, both directly at the team level and more widely at the offices.

From our perspective, amongst other stuff, we can expect:

Websphere Portal Extend Edition
Websphere Application Server
Websphere Portlet Factory
Websphere Everyplace
Workplace Forms
Lotus Quickplace
Lotus Sametime
Lotus Domino
DB2 Content Manager
Omnifind

…and some rather pleasing bits of kit to run it all on.

Tags: db2, domino, quickplace, sametime, websphere, websphere_application_server