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.

I was a little behind in installing Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) – the technical guys did it within 30 seconds of getting access to the server but it too me a couple of weeks to get round to it. But I’m glad I did.

The key word here is ‘unified’. It’s very rare to ask a customer what they have in terms of telephony and get an answer that includes just one vendor. The answer is usually “a bit of everything”. Different locations, different business units, sometimes different departments (like the customer service centre) often have heterogeneous (impressive big word) telephony solutions. Users shouldn’t have to care, or even know, about this – they just need a set of telephony functions, and it shouldn’t matter that Bob in Glasgow is connected to a vendor’s PBX which is different to Brian in Cardiff or Kim in Florida.

That aside, SUT does some really cool things – these features have tremendous business value, but they’re also pretty cool:

1. I can use my computer as a phone
2. I can click on someone in Sametime, or in a Notes e-mail or application, and call them… and…
3. SUT dials the right number (office, mobile, home or computer) depending on their status and location – I don’t have to worry about where they are and which number they’re on
4. I could be using my home phone for a call, but then need to leave for an appointment – using SUT I can transfer the call to my mobile phone without an interruption
5. I can call someone and then turn it into a conference call by dragging and dropping people onto the call window (admit it, who knows how to conference other people in using their desk phone?)
6. I can divert an incoming call to my office, home or mobile phone… or to voice-mail
7. I can set up my own rules so that a particular phone rings depending on my location and / or status
8. I can see when my colleagues are on the phone (and they can see when I am)

Something I always mention in talking to customers is point #5. All-to-often we use an external tele-conference provider to facilitate conference calls between internal staff members – do you know how expensive that is? Eradicating or even reducing that practise would save a lot of money, and this is just one of the ways that SUT can reduce costs.

During my first couple of weeks as an SUT user I utilised an old Labtec headset – this worked fine until a couple of weeks ago. I mentioned to Mrs A that it had no sound coming out of it, and then she admitted to sucking the cable up in the vacuum cleaner.

This was a good excuse to set up a wireless headset (the CS60) that the guys from Plantronics gave to me on permanent loan just before LCTY. It took about 5 minutes to install, a couple of hours for the initial charge, and was available for SUT to use without doing anything else. The sound quality is amazing, and it allows you to roam from your desk – I walked downstairs and into the kitchen without Pete Hampton hearing any difference in the sound quality. As David Angel from Plantronics said, the final three feet of the solution is incredibly important… why spend thousands of dollars on a telephony solution and then compromise it with a poor-quality headset?

Over here in IBM-land we’re big users of instant messaging. The Sametime solution has a daily average concurrent connection statistic that is bigger than most companies and even some small nations… 170,000 people logged on.

Yesterday my frolleague Mark Holmes and I had a telephone conversation… imagine that. Yes, we do use the phone sometimes and actually many Sametime conversations consist of “hi, can I call you?”. This one started off with “can you talk?” which I responded to predictably with “yes, I’ve been able to since I was two”. Most amusing of course, and as we enjoyed the joke we took a temporary diversion onto the subject of instant messaging etiquette. I don’t recall IBM ever publishing guidelines on usage of instant messaging – maybe there is somewhere, but I pledged to have a quick dip into the world of the Interweb to see what advice was out there.

The first best practise I came across was entitled ‘knock before you enter’ and suggested that instant messaging conversations should start with “can you chat?” or “are you available?” – yes, let’s all be nice. So, first one I found and I 90% disagree with it… and actually I told some colleagues about this one earlier in the week. I suggested that people shouldn’t Sametime me with “hi Darren” and then wait for me to reply before they carry on – if you have a question, just get on with it. The main reason was that I was on a conference call for an hour – and was ignoring Sametime – twelve Sametime messages arrived and over half just said “hi” or “hi Darren”. The others I was able to deal with quickly, but for those who’d said “hi” I had to respond to say I was now available and then wait for them to type in the question… which causes delays.

Some other suggestions on that page are “be brief” and “watch what you write”. Not unlike e-mails then. And finally this one… “don’t use the instant messaging program to spy on your friends by going online under a secret screen name”. I think I’d put this one down as a reason to use an enterprise-grade real-time collaboration solution rather than the public networks.

Further down the search results I came across the hallowed pages of renowned blogger Stowe Boyd, who advises “never check whether a person has time to chat.. if he’s online and reachable, he’s all yours”. Yes, I agree. But by the time I reached “send large files without asking whether it’s okay… you know better than anyone what people need… don’t have any qualms about using up other people’s download bandwidth and hard drive space” I got the impression this wasn’t altogether serious, and looking back at the top of the page noticed that it was a tongue-in-cheek list lifted from How to Annoy People Using Instant Messaging.

The search ran out of steam quickly – loads of results but they all basically said the same obvious things. I think my favourite has to be “if you’re going to ask questions at least make some attempt to find the answers for yourself first”. Oh yes, oohhhh yes. But this also applies to e-mails or phone calls.

I’ll end with my pet peeves…

1. Don’t start your instant message with “I know you’re busy but…”. Whether you acknowledge I’m busy or not, you’re still going to interupt me and ask a question, so let’s dispense with the false empathy. Get on with the issue.
2. Someone asks a question and I say “hang on a minute, let me look for something” – so I leave switch to a browser or Notes and start looking, and then see the instant message window flashing because the other person has said something else. So now I break off from searching to go back to look at what they’ve said. And 99% of the time it’s “thanks”.

Despite venting a little anger, I love Sametime – you have to balance up the occasional interuptions with the incredible productivity benefits of being able to quickly reach people around the globe – they may be working from home, logged on via a mobile device or even out of hours. And of course, you can always go into Do Not Disturb mode.

Firstly, let me say thanks to my brother Steve, his wife Zoe and the kids Tom and Melissa for putting me up (or putting up with me) for a couple of days. The Chunky Monkey was already in the freezer when I got there and we had bacon rolls for breakfast. Oh, and I enjoyed the time spent with you too.

I got to Orlando on Sunday afternoon, checked in, registered at the Lotusphere desk and then headed to some top secret internal Lotus sales training on LotusLive. Okay, it was top secret then, but wasn’t after the opening session (more on that in a second). Sunday night for the time for the opening party, and it was considerably warmer than last year.

I’ve already covered the opening session, so no need to go over that again. And I was going to focus on the announcements rather than Tuesday-night karaoke. I thought my renditions of ‘Sweet Caroline’ (accompanied by Lewis) and ‘Daydream Believer’ (accompanied by Chris) were rather good.

Anyway, the important stuff. I mentioned in another post that there were very few announcements about Notes / Domino, but there were lots of sessions and aspects of the product as such XPages, DAOS and ‘Alloy’ (the Notes / SAP integration) caused a lot of buzz. The reason for few Notes / Domimo announcements is simple… we’ve just shipped 8.5 and it’s too early to focus on version 9. Come to Lotusphere 2010 and it’ll be a different story.

So what were the big announcements? There was a lot of focus on Sametime, both the forthcoming version 8.5 and Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT). Version 8.5′s big focus is meetings – a new rich client, a new browser experience which loads in seconds and a new approach to meetings using always-available and favourite rooms. Add to that a new browser-based client, iPhone support and new contact list views and it’s quite an update.

SUT also received a lot of airtime, with demonstrations of a huge array of features (call management, routing rules, call transfer, conference calls, and a lot more). Expect it “mid-year”.

Connections 2.5 was the other big news. Despite the 0.5 version increment there’s a lot of new stuff… more display options for home pages, a ‘wall’ for profiles, and (I think the most significant) collaborative file sharing. This file sharing is also planned for inclusion in Quickr later in the year, so either product (Quickr or Connections) will give you that capability.

As I mentioned in the opening session overview, RIM’s Jim Balsillie joined Bob Picciano on stage to announce more Lotus / BlackBerry integration… mobile access to Open Document Format documents (spreadsheets and presentations to come at a later date), support for Quickr, and a new Connections client supporting Activities, Blogs, and Communities in order to augment the access already available to Profiles and Dogear. He also announced integration with Domino Designer and XPages in order to make Domino-based applications more accessible on a BlackBerry device.

And finally (although there was a lot more) the announcement that all things hosted or software-as-a-service would be branded as LotusLive. This includes Bluehouse which becomes LotusLive Engage, Sametime Unyte which becomes LotusLive Meetings and hosted Notes which becomes LotusLive Notes. The acquisition of OutBlaze’s messaging solution was also discussed with more details to come after the acquisition is finalised.

That’s all for now… although I’ll be speaking at various Lotusphere Comes To You events for the next three months.

Cursed as I am with a pedantic nature, I often over-analyse things or get irritated by things that wouldn’t bother most people. Stuff like using “your” when you should use “you’re”, and vice-versa. I wouldn’t dream of using the abbreviation commonly used for “laugh out loud” and never have done.

In recent years I’ve been irritated by the use of the word ‘leverage’ as a verb. Leverage is something you have, not something you do. Dictionary.com now disagrees with me, listing leverage as a noun and a verb, but I think this is a result of leverage now being accepted as a verb because too many people have misused it. Chambers Dictionary on-line lists leverage only as a noun. Interestly, Thesaurus.com (run by the same people as Dictionary.com) also lists it as a noun only… as does AskOxford which incorporates the Oxford English Dictionary.

Anyway, onto the actual subject… the word ‘ping’. Having worked in the IT industry for most of my working life, and having done some technical stuff in the past, I know the word ‘ping’ by Wikipedia’s definition…

…a computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network

However, these days I see it more and more in Sametime conversations. Just yesterday I was in a meeting – someone asked me if I could talk, and as usual I responded with “yes, I’ve been able to since I was two”. Naturally they found this retort very amusing (I think they did) and asked me to ping them when I was available.

On previous occasions when people have asked me to ping them I’ve then asked for their IP address. The problem with doing this is that the reply is usually “???” and then I have to explain their mistake in asking me to ping them. It’s a gag that works better with technical people.

A colleague suggested that the use of ‘ping’ comes from the noise that Sametime makes when a new line of text arrives. I disagree, it’s more of a ‘ding’ than a ‘ping’. This week I also heard someone tell someone else to “ping a note across to me”. God knows how that will work. I’ve been through all the parameters for the ping command and none of them seem to satisfy that objective.

Something we almost take for granted within IBM is Sametime’s location awareness (also plugged into Notes 8.x of course). In IBM we have access to the extended functionality which ships with IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced (adhering to brand guidelines there, thankyou) – this not only keeps a record of locations you’ve been to yourself but will also present those locations to other users who arrive there.

Location awareness is tremendously useful for a number of reasons, especially in a highly-mobile organisation such as our own. Being aware of where someone is provides some simple benefits like knowing the best phone number to contact them on, or knowing whether it’s worth getting up from your office chair to walk round to where they normally sit. If someone is travelling, they may be in a different time zone and therefore may not be in ‘work mode’ when you are. They may even be in bed when they wouldn’t normally be. In short it gives you important information about how you can collaborate with them.

In the last thirty or so hours I’ve switched location several times and Sametime has got them all right. Yesterday I arrived at our Portsmouth office and the location switched to ‘North Harbour’. Back home, it switched to ‘Camberley’. When I arrived in Staines this morning it switched to ‘Lotus Park’. I then headed for the airport, and once seated in the bmi business lounge I connected to BT Openzone… the location automatically (no intervention from me) switched to ‘Heathrow T1′.

This evening I arrived at the rather nice Park Plaza Tyrrelstown hotel in Dublin. Clearly someone from IBM has already been here (no big surprise, it’s very near our Ballycoolin and Mulhuddart offices) because the location automatically switched to ‘Tyrrelstown’ when I plugged into the free broadband. Take note, English hotels… “free broadband”.