Here’s a chance to register for some Lotus webcasts during June…
To register go to this page and then follow the links to the individual webcasts.
I was perusing PlanetLotus today and an interesting blog post from Vaughan Rivett caught my eye – what’s the worst email in-box that you have ever seen? Vaughan tells the tale of a user with a mail box weighing in at 11 gigabytes. This is what’s known in the trade as either a) hoarding or b) bad management. Mail boxes of that size could never be tolerated at IBM, because like so many companies we impose a mail quota – your mail box gets to a certain size, some things stop working, and the functionality isn’t given back to you until you’ve fixed the problem. But is that fair? After all, was it the mail box owner at fault?
I’m speaking as someone who recently had to concede that, after more than 10 years with a 150 mb mail box quota, I could no longer keep it within the limit every day – I was spending too much time managing the volume, so I had to apply to go up to the next level, 250 mb. Why, in an organisation with a rich collaborative infrastructure, was this necessary? I put it down purely to my change in role – suddenly I was communicating with many more people and there was an increase in data flying around. It reminded me of a slide I sometimes use on less serious occasions, such as the recent keynote at Collaboration University. Entitled ‘about me as an e-mail user’ it explains that I don’t like having a scroll bar in my inbox and I resent anyone who…
So in summary, just about anyone who sends me an e-mail.
A couple of years ago I did a small survey of some of our customers, not big enough or detailed enough to draw any great conclusions from, and asked the question…
In terms of e-mail efficiency what would benefit your organisation the most – improvement in user practises around e-mail, or operational improvements?
71% said user practises, 29% said both, but no-one (0%) said operational improvements alone. So the conclusion is that end users need to be given the tools in order to become more efficient with how they disseminate information, but they also need some clarity about the right tools to use and when.
I believe that we’ve added the right things to the Lotus portfolio to help end users to realise better collaboration and knowledge management – simple things that make a difference. Firstly, think how your typical e-mail user would share a spreadsheet, document or presentation with a colleague (or group)… we all know the right thing to do is to post it to a collaborative space (which hopefully supports the business activity associated with the content) and then notify people of the content via e-mail. However, most e-mail users have escaped from Utopia via a small hole in the fence, so they’re just going to shove that file attachment in the e-mail regardless of the storage or content revision issues.
That’s why I love the Quickr approach – because it supports the users’ long-ingrained behaviour (shove in the attachment) but at the point of sending it offers to place the file in a document repository. The recipient sees a set of links, and they click to navigate to the content. Simple. So collaboratively we’re doing the right thing, but we haven’t interrupted the user’s normal pattern of work (in my head I’m picturing people grunting like Cro Magnon man did when he spotted a bison wandering across the Paleolithic plains, but instead they’re saying “ugg, file attachment”). The added bonus with Quickr is that you can also take existing file attachments that Cro Magnon man sent to you in the past and offload them to a Quickr place – you can retain the e-mail with the link replacing the attachment.
The other thing I love telling people about is Connections Files. To fully embrace the idea of Connections Files you do have to discard the caveman instincts and post that file… no, not in an e-mail, in your Connections file-space. Yes, I know this goes against years of bad habits, so the important thing is for users to realise the benefits. The first benefit is to other people – you are not contributing to ruining their day by sending that quota-busting spreadsheet. Okay, so you don’t care about their quota, how about a benefit for yourself? Have you ever sent an e-mail with a file attachment and then later someone else wants the file? And then someone else a bit later? This used to happen to me all of the time, but not any more. Rather than having to repeat the process of create another e-mail, type in the subject, find the file attachment in a folder (hmmm, which folder), add an explanation – I just share the file. The file in question is posted in Connections Files and I add another name to the share list. An e-mail is automatically sent, and the recipient grabs the content but doesn’t have to worry about the volume of data. If the file is updated, I simply add the update as a new version and note the changes.
Another great way to share content, in the context of a business activity, is Lotus Connections Activities, but I’ve already covered that in an earlier post.
In a week where Lotus general manager Bob Picciano hit out at Microsoft for spreading “ridiculous and fabricated” information (go Bob), here in the UK we’ve seen some press coverage of Lotus Connections 2.5 in Computer Business Review and Computerworld UK.
No surprise to see Jeff Schick quoted, as he heads up the social collaboration business unit. But in Computerworld UK there’s Mr Picciano again…
We have been using it internally at IBM … especially at the end of the business quarter it is amazing how much value it is to me personally. I keep my finger on the pulse of the IBM organisation; who is meeting with who and how those meetings go. It is like having a stream of conscience throughout the organisation.
This is no hollow testimony of Connections’ capabilities. I’m in Mr Picciano’s Connections network, and I can promise you that he is an avid user of this technology. Here’s a senior IBM executive, quite a few rungs of the ladder above me, yet he’s sharing his activities and thoughts with his network throughout the day, and interacting with team members who comment and ask questions. Yes, Bob does understand and make use of the technology, and advocates it strongly. He goes on to say…
There is not an answer from Microsoft for these capabilities.
Bearing in mind that we gave Microsoft a pasting at last year’s Enterprise 2.0 event, they’ve shipped nothing since and now we’ve shipped Connections too, I think Mr Picciano is spot on.
Butler Group have published an in-depth report on IBM Lotus Connections. One important thing to note is that the report was based on Connections 2.0.1 so some of the comments are not up-to-date – for example, the lack of a wiki capability is cited as a weakness. With Connections 2.5 (shipping end of this week) that weakness is removed, and I’ll stand by my previous post and again say that the new version puts us even further ahead of the competition.
The report says good things about the activity-centric approach to collaboration and task management:
Unlike other offerings on the market, such as Microsoft SharePoint, Lotus Connections’ task management capabilities are organised around an activity-centric approach…
..and also states that Connections scores top marks for integration with Microsoft technology. The overall conclusion is that IBM Lotus is in the leadership position for enterprise-grade social collaboration:
Lotus Connections compares very favourable [sic] to other offerings on the market. IBM’s closest competitor, Microsoft, has its SharePoint-based offering, but this does not yet offer the features and level of integration displayed by Lotus Connections.
Lotus Connections puts IBM in a strong position in this increasingly important market.
All quotes are taken from Butler Group’s technology audit Lotus Connections version 2.0.1. The copyright of the report remains with Butler Group.
In September, the Lotus team in Sweden will be holding their Gold Club event – a meeting (with dinner thrown in) for their most valued customers. Our Swedish country manager Kristoffer invited me (in my new capacity) to come over and talk to the assembled audience about how Lotus solutions were helping customers to reduce costs and improve efficiency. “No problem” I said – Sweden is a nice place to visit and there’s nothing I like more than hearing my own voice talking about our wonderful portfolio of products. Well, actually there are a few things I like more, but let’s keep this work-related.
After a few minutes mulling this proposition, I had an idea… instead of just me talking about customer successes, why not actually get in a real breathing carbon-based life-form from our customer base to present to this group of Nordic captains of industry? It would have to be someone from an organisation who had a presence in Sweden and who was a willing advocate of Lotus solutions… I knew just the man. And so it was that I got in touch with Mark Calleran, CIO of The Salvation Army.
If you attended either the London or Manchester-based Lotusphere Comes To You events this year, you’ll have seen Mark present. His content was a mixture of what The Salvation Army do and then how they use Lotus technology – it actually gives me a good feeling when I hear about our solutions helping this wonderful organisation to provide relief around the world and generally do work to improve the life of millions of people. And comments afterwards are generally along the lines of “I never knew The Salvation Army did so many things”.
Fortunately Mark agreed, and now we come to the point of the blog post. Suddenly it wasn’t just Kristoffer and me collaborating on content and logistics, we had someone from outside of IBMland taking part in the process… someone without access to the IBM network and certainly no ability to login to our Connections infrastructure. This is where LotusLive Engage came to our rescue.
As IBMers, Kristoffer and I have LotusLive Engage accounts, and I was already connected to Mark. Kristoffer found Mark, connected with him and invited him to the newly-created activity. And since then it’s been as simple as that… we’ve used the activity to track the agenda, the synopses of our talks, biography information, and hotel and travel details. It was very easy to allow people from two (very different) organisations to collaborate.
Of course, I didn’t get away without a small task to take to Product Management – when can Mark have an activities plug-in for Notes 8.5 which allows a view of both his internal activities and those from LotusLive Engage? Hmmm… answer: in a forthcoming version, probably / maybe. In the meantime, I’m sure that we’ll be demonstrating our Pokens to an audience of esteemed Swedes.
Outside it’s August, even though the weather has been a bit September-ish, even October-ish, at times. But for collaboration guru Stuart McIntyre, today was like Christmas… although to be more accurate it should be Christmas next week as IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 will be released on 28th August. Like a small lad unwrapping presents, Stuart has been twittering and blogging about the new release during today – and like him I’m excited too.
Yes, I am excited, even though we’ve been using Connections 2.5 internally for a number of months. Our Connections deployment was upgraded half-way through the work on my Lotusphere Comes To You preparation – I should know, I had to re-record some of the presentation to incorporate the new features. So if you saw that presentation at one the three events, that was a preview of the new version. There’s two new major additions and heaps of improvements to the existing capabilities, so what follows is a quick tour.
Firstly, the major new additions are Files and Wikis. Files allows you to share files, either to everyone for public consumption or for targeted individuals. A file depositor has their own file space, they can tag the files, they see how many times a file has been downloaded, and also add them to ‘collections’ (something you’ll also find in LotusLive Engage). Collections are rather nifty as they allow you to package up a number of files to share with other people, and they can easily see the set of files rather than having to sift through the others to find them. Click on the Files image on the right to see a screenshot. Consumers of information can recommend files (nice for other people as they can see which have been downloaded and have been useful) and leave comments.
I may have mentioned it before, but I hate file attachments in e-mails – they clog up your inbox and constantly make you have to deal with your mail quota. It’s causes ME work when some thoughtless colleague dumps a huge attachment in an e-mail – their bad habit becomes my problem. This is why I love Files… more frequently now we’re uploading files and adding the URL to an e-mail, or letting the action of sharing notify the recipient. It’s better for the e-mail infrastructure and it’s better for co-ordination of content.
The new Wiki service really does what you’d expect it to – it allows you to create multi-page wikis, control the membership and editorship, and track changes in the versions created as the team works on the documents. Click on the Wiki image on the left to see a screenshot.
As well as these two new major components there are significant updates to some of the existing Connections components. The home page now has a number of interfaces to suit the preference and needs of the user – they can look at the Twitter-like update page, the ‘Discover’ page (which provides not just status updates but any public items updated within any of the Connections components), ‘Watchlist’ – updates from specific colleagues of your choosing – and also the updated ‘My page’ which provides customisation by dragging and dropping of widgets.
Profiles also display a Twitter-like status page and allow you to leave comments against the status of people in your network. The layout has been improved, and it’s easier to see your colleague’s communities, bookmarks, blogs, activities and files. Dogear has now been renamed to ‘Bookmarks’ – apparently Dogear wasn’t translating very well into non-English languages, and Bookmarks really does what it says and doesn’t need much explanation.
Personally I’m most fond of the improvements to Communities, and I think this is where the most useful improvements have surfaced. In version 2.0 a community was largely a list of people with some bookmarks, feeds and perhaps a discussion forum. In version 2.5 it’s fully embraced the concept of the ‘landing page’ – you land on this page and you can quickly see the important items for the community you’re a member of.
Click on the Community image (other there on the right) for a screenshot.
I run a community internally (Messaging & Collaboration Resources for NE Europe) and anyone coming to the community page can easily see the most recent blog entries (containing important news), the important files which I shared, the most important bookmarks and feeds, a discussion forum, and any wikis we’re using. I could also add an Activity for the entire community to participate in.
There’s loads of other improvements and additions, but I think that’ll do for an overview. So where does this put Connections in the market? Well, you may recall that at the Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston in June 2008, IBM Lotus wiped the floor with Microsoft – SharePoint didn’t stack up against Connections’ strong social collaboration capabilities. Analysts and press agreed that IBM Lotus were at least a year ahead. To my knowledge, SharePoint hasn’t boosted it’s social collaboration capabilities since, but here’s a major update to Connections… so I’d say that puts us a lot more than a year ahead of Microsoft.
Collaboration University – the education event for customers and Business Partners on the subjects of IBM Lotus Connections, Quickr and Sametime – takes place on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of September 2009 at IBM South Bank (London). This year there’s an added incentive to attend. As well as hearing from collaboration experts such as Rob Novak and his team from Snapps, Carl Tyler, Chris Miller, Gabriella Davis and Warren Elsmore (to name but a few), this year’s keynote speaker will be worth the registration fee alone… it’s me. Rob Novak blogs this historic announcement.
But seriously, I’m very honoured to be asked to speak at Collaboration University because the two events (the other is in Chicago) are among the most prestigious and valuable on the Lotus calendar. If you’re going to be implementing Lotus collaborative solutions, or simply want to discover the value they can bring to your organisation, I can highly recommend attending Collaboration University. Just don’t heckle the keynote speaker.
By the way, I know that’s not a good photo on Rob’s blog. I had to get a photo sent in a hurry for a press article, something in a suit rather than bearded and wearing a t-shirt, so the current Mrs Adams took that photo outside one evening. I since have a better photo, which I hope Rob will use rather than this one.
Earlier this week, the LotusLive home page received a face-lift, making it easier for visitors to understand the services of the LotusLive family. The new compare services page breaks down the services into components so that you can see what you get with each of them.
Later today, you’ll be able to sign up for a 30-day trial of the newest offering, LotusLive Connections. This service was announced at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference (the setting for Microsoft’s drubbing at the hands of Lotus Connections 2.0 last year). To quote the press release “as part of the unveiling, LotusLive was voted the winner of The Enterprise 2.0 Cloud Computing Technology Buyers’ Choice Award. IBM’s cloud services won in a side-by-side comparison with Google Apps, EMC and other vendors’ cloud technologies, as voted by the Enterprise 2.0 conference attendees”.
To summarise, the main difference between LotusLive Engage and Connections is the omission of web conferences, forms and charts. However, the good news is that the stream-lined set of core capabilities will be available at a lower cost than that of Engage. So many businesses are interested in the possibilities of enterprise-grade social collaboration – we have already provided this in the form of IBM Lotus Connections (available to deploy on-premise), but the LotusLive offering provides an easy way to get started with minimal investment and to start collaborating with your extended enterprise and external contacts.
Along with the speaker videos added earlier this week, the web marketing team have posted another treat to the UK Lotusphere Comes To You page. To put this latest addition into context, you need to know that this year’s events have been managed using the Activities module of IBM Lotus Connections.
Managing an event is a good example of an activity – it has an end date and an end goal, and will also require and produce a wide variety of ‘information artifacts’ – presentations, bookmarks, Notes links, documents, textual notes, comments, e-mails, contacts, tasks and even Sametime conversations.
An activity is a perfect place to gather all of these different types of information and share them with a team. No-one need ask where details of the latest registrations are – they’re in the activity. A link to the web page? In the activity. The agenda, a copy of the keynote presentation, templates, logistical information… all in the activity. Considering the amount of work and collaboration, there have been hardly any e-mails on the subject.
To illustrate this I put together a short narrated video and you can access this half-way down the page on the right-hand side (see ‘LCTY in the making’). Unfortunately you have to listen to my voice, but I hope you’ll find it an interesting insight into the delivery of the events using world-class collaboration technology.
If anyone desperately wants a copy of the original movie, please let me know.
A couple of interesting articles on the Beeb’s news site caught my eye this week, both of which had the same basic premise… that social networking sites are overtaking e-mail as a communication tool. A couple of years there was an interesting statistic (can’t remember the source, can’t be bothered to find it) that said that the volume of instant messages has already overtaken e-mails, so it’s interesting to see that yet another medium is pushing e-mail out of the way.
The first of the Beeb’s articles reported that 67% of web users were spending time at social sites and blogs, and that in the UK one minute of every six was spent on a social site. And get this – “the fastest growing segment of users turning up and using social sites over the last year was among 35-49 year olds” – oooh, I just squeaked into that age range. Indeed, I do Twitter, I am a Facebooker, and I login into LinkedIn every now and again. I get invitations to Plaxo, but it sounds like a mouth-wash and I think three social sites is enough.
The other article suggested that “Social networks ‘are new e-mail’” and says that people are using social sites rather than actually sending e-mails (which is sort of different to the mantra of the other article). This may apply to many people, personally I’d disagree. My personal (i.e. home use) e-mail habits haven’t changed over the past couple of years. My usage of Facebook hasn’t replaced the e-mails that I send, and I wouldn’t bank on Twitter or Facebook supplying information that I wanted to ensure someone would receive. However I can see that for some groups of people it could ring true.
Also worthy of note is the fact that over the weekend Facebook has changed it’s interface to become more ‘Twitter-like’.
In the workplace we’re seeing that social solutions are of great interest, but naturally businesses are concerned about the public sites being used by the workforce. However businesses want to capitalise on the enthusiasm and possibilities of this new way of working, not to mention that fact that people coming into the workplace are very familiar and comfortable with the concept – hence IBM Lotus Connections is a great way to provide the solution with some control and focus and without the distractions of the public sites.
I don’t think that e-mail will disappear, at least not in the next ten years. I firmly believe that activity-based working (see here and here) is the way forward, and unless you’ve experienced this way of working it’s hard to believe how productive Lotus Activities can be. Too many people are reactive to their inbox – this is the way to break out and focus on your crucial tasks and share information in a controlled manner. However, not every e-mail adheres to a particular business activity – many are ad-hoc – and an e-mail which is associated to an activity you’re working on may not apply to the sender (but that’s okay, even though you receive an e-mail you can drag it into the activity). Instant messaging too will trim down on the volume of e-mail (Gartner say 40% reduction, IBM say 38%). Today people run e-mail clients – the inbox is centre-stage. But I can see a day when e-mail is pushed to the periphery – if you’re a Notes user, think of it being in the side bar while your activities and social updates come to the fore-front. Of course, that’s what’s great about Notes – it’s evolving and can consume these new capabilities and ways of collaborating. If you have something which is just an e-mail client… where’s that going to go? Time will tell….