Just a quick one… on the 9th of September at 14:00 (UK time) I’ll be joining IDC for a webcast on Unified Communications. The core theme will be to discuss whether the adoption of Unified Communications requires a rip-and-replace (I can tell you now, the answer is ‘no’). Here’s an overview…

Last year one of the key concerns highlighted by delegates at IDC’s Unified Communications conference was whether UC requires significant investment in new communications equipment. With continuing pressure on budgets, many organisations do not have sufficient funds available for large scale capital investment but recognise the value a more cohesive communications strategy can offer the business.

If you’re interested in attending, here’s the link for registration.

I don’t have a ship date yet for IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5.1, but (no surprise) I’m already using it. A couple of weeks ago I installed the Sametime Connect 8.5.1 client on Ubuntu 10.04, and this week (while enjoying some conference calls) I installed the ‘embedded’ version of Sametime 8.5.1 into Lotus Notes 8.5.1.

As always with a point release there’s a few enhancements and a few bug fixes. But the really important thing about Sametime 8.5.1 in my humble opinion is that it supports all of  Sametime’s extra trimmings – so now in one client you can enjoy the Advanced features (chat rooms, the broadcast suite), Sametime 8.5 meeting rooms, and Sametime Unified Telephony.

Click on the small image to see the entire Sametime family installed into the Notes side-bar.

This was announced on Twitter today, but I wanted to provide some more information. Following nine months in the role of Messaging & Collaboration Business Unit Executive (North East Europe) I’m moving back to a role with Lotus UK & Ireland (UKI as it’s known). In the this new role I’ll be looking after the growth markets of Unified Communication & Collaboration and software-as-a-service. In other words, Sametime in all it’s flavours, Sametime Unified Telephony, and LotusLive.

Perceptions are interesting. I received a great many ‘congratulations’ messages today – thank you for those. I also received a few messages along the lines of “what happened?”, “was I happy about it?” and “was I pushed?”. I know the reasons for these questions – essentially the North East Europe role could be seen as senior to the UKI role. I’m returning to a role very similar to my previous role, albeit with different aspects of the portfolio.

To answer those questions… yes I am happy and no I wasn’t pushed. I instigated the move. I was asked to re-consider, and I received a great many internal e-mails citing disappointment (and best wishes) and an acknowledgement that I’d done a great job.

So why did I make the move back? I’m not going to discuss it fully here, but one of the main reasons was travel – multiple days away and arriving back late at night was not suiting me or the family. I know some people relish it and find the travel exciting, but I didn’t realise the impact it would have.

My new title will be something like ‘Portfolio Manager, Unified Communications and On-Line Collaboration Services’ – let’s see if that will squeeze onto a business card.

I’ve already blogged about IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 but IT Jungle have posted a good overview of all that’s new in this recently-released version. And actually, reading through the article, you realise just how much new stuff has been packed into this release.

If you want to take a look at Sametime 8.5 you can find some videos on YouTube, narrated by John Del Pizzo and presented in fabulous high definition.

‘The View from Forrester Research’ hosted on ZDNet has some very positive things to say about the forthcoming 8.5 release of Lotus Sametime. The new release has a host of new capabilities – iPhone support, improved video, new web APIs, an updated rich client and a new zero-download web client – but the big improvements are in the web conferencing capabilities. So why does the Forrester blog like Sametime 8.5?

Because it’s got the core elements of click-to-conference — not just instant messaging and presence — baked into it. And for ad-hoc collaboration, click-to-conference is a much richer and easier thing to do than loading up separate applications for instant messaging, video conferencing, and web conferencing.

Sametime 8.5 introduces new modes for meetings – it allows a user to create a new room on-the-fly for an instantaneous meeting, provides permanently open rooms, and also rooms which can be aligned to projects and business activities. Another great feature is the calendar integration which warns you of an upcoming meeting and provides an option for one-click access (see below).

The meeting room experience has been improved, the load time is mega-fast, and offers both rich client and browser access – the rich meeting client can be launched from both Lotus Notes and the Sametime client. To access from a browser, the meeting host can issue a URL or the delegate can navigate through the new Sametime 8.5 meeting centre.

So, Sametime Standard (and Sametime Advanced, recently mentioned on dadams.co.uk) offer a lot more value than the capabilities provided by the Sametime Entry entitlement that users get with Lotus Notes. With that in mind, over at the Sametime Blog, John Del Pizzo today announced that with the release of Sametime 8.5 we’ll be providing trade-ups from Sametime Entry to the Standard and Advanced offerings. That’s a great way to convert the superb entry-level functionality to the richer experience of ‘full Sametime’.

Sametime 8.5 will be available on 22nd December.

Back at the Forrester / ZDNet blog they haven’t finished with the compliments…

In case you haven’t noticed, IBM Lotus not only didn’t go away, it’s here with a vengeance. LotusLive.com claims 18 million users, the 8.5 release of Notes / Domino is a winner in storage savings, Lotus Connections beats other social software platforms on many dimensions, and Sametime’s pushing the envelope on real-time collaboration at global scale.

Here we are in the most exciting (or should I say “busiest”?) part of our 4th quarter, and the IBM Lotus team in Sweden have found a great use for some of the capabilities of IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced.

They’ve created a broadcast community and a chat room so that they can broadcast announcements of software transactions being booked and provide some further details.

Obviously I’m not going to share the full details of the conversations going on, but here’s a screenshot of the interface in IBM Lotus Sametime 8 – click on it for an expanded view.

This afternoon I was putting together some material for the Sametime Unified Telephony events that are taking place over the next two weeks. One of the slides covers how we used to work many years ago (i.e. you went to the office, really no other option) versus how we can work now given the improved and more accessible means of communication (the Internet playing a fairly big part) and the increased capabilities of technology solutions. To go with this slide, I needed an example of what this actually means and how it can manifest itself… and I only had to recall an example from earlier this week.

Regular readers of dadams.co.uk will know that I’ve been to Denmark this week. Every Wednesday at 17:00 UK time I have a call with some colleagues in the US and around Europe – normally not a problem, but this week I was handed a dilemma. 17:00 UK time equates to 18:00 in Denmark, so I was faced with the fact that the call wouldn’t end until 19:00. I didn’t know the implications of being in the Lyngby office at 19:00 – I could find myself locked in. Also, I’d been offered a lift back to the hotel at 17:00, thus avoiding another extortionate taxi fare. However, having a UK mobile phone in another country means an expensive international call.

But here’s where these converging aspects of communication and technology play their part. The hotel offered free Internet access. My laptop has Sametime Unified Telephony installed (and I had brought my Plantronics headset with me). So the simple solution was to use SUT to dial the US conference call number, thus being a local call for the SUT infrastructure… but as far as I was concerned I was just using the free Internet connection. And that’s it. SUT solved the problem. I said it was a simple story.

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.

IBM Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony (let’s say SUT to avoid the mouthful) is garnering a huge amount of interest from our customers and analysts. To provide an opportunity to hear more about the solution and how it can benefit your organisation, we’ve laid on two events during September – in Edinburgh on the 3rd and at IBM South Bank (London) on the 8th.

To register for the SUT events, please click here. I hope to see you there.

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.