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First the bad news… Adam Gartenberg, formerly the Offering Manager for IBM Lotus Sametime, has moved on to a new role in IBM’s Data Management business. Bad news for you because Adam was a very active blogger and kept everyone up-to-date with Sametime info. Bad news for me because he was always very responsive to crucial Sametime questions. Adam, thanks for all you did for Sametime. In 2007, more that a third of new Sametime customers were Microsoft Exchange customers (which must say something about Sametime, that they picked the Lotus solution over the more obvious choice provided by Microsoft). I reckon that Adam can take a slice of the credit there.

And now the good news - other members of the Sametime team are contributing to the Sametime blog. I note that it’s taken a whole army of bloggers to attempt to match Adam’s output, but I’m sure they’ll do fine. A notable addition to the team last year was Rob Ingram, formerly the Domino Product Manager and the engine behind the Domino blog. So the Sametime blog is in good hands, and if you’re that way inclined and understand the alphabet soup I’d suggest adding it to your RSS feed reader right now.

Over the past couple of years there have been a number of what I call ‘eureka moments’… that moment when the usually-invisible light bulb above your head switches on and you either “get it” or something resonates. One such moment was a couple of years ago when I saw Charlie Hill (now an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Technology Officer of Lotus software) talking about and demonstrating ‘Activities’, which have since become part of IBM Lotus Connections.

Activities are a simple premise. People work on business activities (duh, yeah) and these business activities are comprised of lots of different pieces of information and content which often derive from and live in different places - for example e-mails, calendar appointments, documents, tasks, web pages, instant messaging chat transcripts, and so on. So an activity is a ‘place’ for bringing the team together and sharing the content. You may ask why that can’t be done in a TeamRoom, Quickr place or some other collaborative solution. Well, it can. The point here is that an activity is something which is quick and easy to set up, to add members to, and is suitable for the smallest of tasks right up to something which is more involved and longer in duration. You might set up an activity just to review a document or plan one meeting. You might set up an activity to plan an entire event (as we have done with Lotusphere Comes To You). If however your project is going to last for a year you might be better off with a Quickr place.

A more recent eureka moment came when the feature set of Lotus Sametime Advanced was announced. Some of the features (i.e. the broadcast suite) were already familiar to IBM folk since they had been available internally as the IBM Community Tools. The big new feature as far as I was concerned was chat rooms. For me to explain this fully, you need some background, and that background concerns e-mail.

Ask anyone what their major issues are where e-mail is concerned and they’ll generally say two things… the first is the sheer volume they receive, and the second is the number of file attachments. Dig a bit deeper and you’ll actually discover a more fundamental set of problems… people are hooked on e-mail, they spend a lot of time watching their inbox, and they are very reactive to what comes in. To quote the Butler Group, the overloaded inbox creates a “false sense of panic”. People forget their business priorities and focus on making sure they keep their inbox in check, even if they’re dealing with trivial, less pressing items to do so. Where companies impose size quotas people have the added worry about their total mail box size going over the limit, so they spend time ensuring the size is kept in check rather than focusing on their job.

Some people on the other hand just give up. I’ve seen people with over 2,000 unread e-mails in their inbox. In a way this could be quite liberating - you’ve lost control, so why not just delete them all… a bit like being £5 million in debt, what does it matter if you blow £10,000 this weekend?

Even more interesting, ask someone what the solution to the overblown mail box problem is. If they say “archiving” that’s the wrong answer. That’s a solution to a symptom, not a cure for the disease. One of my favourite slides at the moment is entitled “What? How can I be over my mail quota again?” - and contains a screenshot, a real screenshot, of my inbox with over 40 mb of file attachments received in one day. How can this happen in IBM? There’s some interesting facts about these e-mails. The attention indicators (Notes 7 and 8 feature) tell me that none of these e-mails were sent to me only or even a list of less than five people including me. None of the e-mails came from the Lotus UK team. We have a very strong practise of sharing information via Quickr or Activities. But clearly there some people with bad habits. It’s not that we don’t have the technology… I actually think we have too much. As well as Quickr and Activities there are various other ways to share documents including some un-productised research projects. This goes to prove what we’ve always known, that collaboration is cultural - you can put the technology in place, but people have to realise the pain and then see the value. Either that or you stand behind them with a large piece of wood with a nail sticking out the end of it.

So, having solutions like Quickr (with it’s Connectors for Notes and now Outlook) and Activities can help to cut down the volume of file attachments. But what about the number of e-mails? Think about this… every e-mail you send has the potential to spawn several more over the next few days and maybe weeks. Reply-with-history seems to be a default (minus file attachments of course), so you get the same e-mail again (and again, and again) with a extra dollop of text each time.

This returns us very nicely to the subject of Sametime Advanced chat rooms. I’m not suggesting for one minute that chat rooms will replace e-mail, but I suggest that they can replace e-mails for selected business activities. Along with all of the other items that you gather, you can associate a chat room (or rooms) with a business activity and define that as the place to communicate. Everyone can see the transcript, no-one has to ask for the history (not even late joiners). No-one has to repeat anything as the transcript exists as one continuous persistent dialogue, even if you step out of the dialogue for several days or perhaps weeks. The chat can be real-time, or can be asynchronous as you can catch up on the discussion later. And through a rather neat capability which plugs into the Sametime client you can be alerted to activity going on inside the chat room so that you join in.

E-mail is here for the duration, but you need to be ready for the day it gets side-lined and overtaken by more effective methods of communication and collaboration. To quote an old marketing campaign, I use Lotus solutions and I AM ready for that day.

Both Alan Lepofsky and Ed Brill have posted articles about extending Notes 8 through plug-ins and composite applications… but I thought I’d share this one with you, a great example of something being rolled out within IBM. Chris Freestone of the Lotus Technical Sales team here in the UK has developed a plug-in which provides members of the Financial Services business unit with a quick reference guide to who in Technical Sales (across the five IBM software brands) has expertise in which products.

The data source at the back-end is a good ol’ Domino database, but it could be anything (just a matter of Chris telling the Eclipse plug-in what to read). And you can see from the screenshot here that the names are made live by the wonders of Sametime… double-clicking starts a conversation with the person you’re looking for (even if they’re on a mobile device).

This is version 1.0, and I know that Chris already has some enhancements planned for the next upgrade (actually this should be version 1.0.1 because he did a small tweak to make it automatically collapsed when opened).

So, it’s a great example of quickly and easily extending Notes’ functionality, addresses a business requirement (quickly finding and connecting with people), and also demonstrates integration with other plugged-in solutions (i.e. Sametime). Nice one Chris. Try doing this with Outlook.

I’ve been dreading this, but actually I don’t think it’s turned out too bad. A few weeks ago our Marketing team asked my frolleague Brendan Tutt and me to record some videos for ZDNet, and we had to choose four pertinent subjects. The tricky thing was we couldn’t mention any product names… just speak on that hot topic.

The first of mine hit the web today, so you can see me talking about Unified Communications and Collaboration. I wasn’t allowed to mention IBM Lotus Sametime or IBM Lotus Notes 8, but obviously a lot of what I talk about pertains to these two products.

I optimistically thought the recording session was going to be easy - after all, the videos were supposed to be just 3 - 4 minutes long. I do so many presentations and stand-up routines that I don’t usually think about it, I just stand up, open my mouth and some sort of verbal auto-pilot takes over. This was a different kettle of aquatic life - I wonder if writing a script that I tried to stick to hampered me rather than helping me. But with a bit of editing it worked out okay.

Anyway, see what you think… and stay tuned for the other three which will be just as much fun.

I won’t go into all the details, but I’ve had a Blackberry Pearl sitting in my desk drawer since my friends at RIM gave me the beautiful device in December. Last week the process of getting it connected to e-mail and the world-at-large suddenly gathered pace, and then today my SIM was updated and I got the news that I was registered on the Blackberry Enterprise Server. An e-mail followed containing my enterprise activation password.

Having been a Palm user for a number of years (and briefly, I’m sorry to say, a Pocket PC user), I had an expectation that getting the Blackberry to receive e-mail and connect to Sametime was going to take a few configuration steps. How wrong I was… it couldn’t have been easier. I clicked on the enterprise activation icon, I entered my e-mail address and the supplied password, I selected ‘Activate’ from the menu… and that was it. The Blackberry told me it was going through the necessary steps, and when it reached 100% there was my e-mail (identical to what I could see sitting in my Notes 8 inbox) and there was my fully up-to-date calendar. It was too easy - having a technical background I could almost say I’d rather go through some pain to set things up because that’s how you learn how things work. But imagine supplying Blackberries to hundreds of users and it being that simple (because it has to be).

Now for Sametime 7.5.1 Mobile Edition… I used the Blackberry’s browser to visit the ‘OverTheAir’ install page, selected the right install option, and off it went. When the install finished I entered my Sametime user name and password, and my Sametime contact list appeared (same as the one that’s now integrated into Notes 8). Again, too easy… which is fine, businesses like easy because it saves them money and improves productivity (that sounds a bit marketing-like, but it’s true).