Don’t worry, this won’t take long. I’ve seen a lot of links for ’10 things’ today, either for the year or the decade, and I really can’t be bothered to do my own. Anyway, most people will be out boozing tonight and nursing a hangover tomorrow, so there’s no point, no-one will be reading this.

I started the decade (i.e. January 2000) in my first management role, heading up a team within the larger Lotus Technical Sales team… the Technology Advocates were specialists (experts you could say). What a line-up… Rob ‘Choddo’ Hayden, Tony ‘Woody’ Cocks, Andrew ‘Thommo’ Thomas, Ed ‘Tedwardo’ Hollands and Mike (he didn’t have a nickname) Hayward. My c.v. says I had a team of eight, so if anyone could remind me of who the other three were I’d be grateful. I think the overall structure of Technical Sales was quite fluid in those days. Three of that original team eventually went to Microsoft, although only one remains there.

Sixteen months later, after watching my manager deal with the biggest pile of expenses I’d ever seen and then promptly leave (for Microsoft), I took over as Lotus Technical Sales Manager for North Region – which consisted of the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and, of course, South Africa. Don’t even try to understand it. I got the news of my promotion while I was in Prague for Choddo’s stag weekend. Blah blah blah, a couple of other things, current role.

dadams.co.uk started in 1999 so it was around for the whole of the decade, albeit not in it’s current form running on WordPress. There was a time when it boasted a synopsis of all South Park episodes from the first three seasons – I remain a huge fan and was glad that it got back on track following poor 4th and 5th seasons. My first post of the decade on dadams.co.uk discussed ‘The Millennium Bug’. Since then, the web site has undergone a series of face-lifts and a major upheaval in April 2007 when it was moved to WordPress rather than hand-written HTML using Dreamweaver.

On the personal side… the saddest event of the decade was the death of my dad (September 2006), and never being one to do things by halves he died less than a week before we moved house. I flew out to Florida on a Monday morning, attended his funeral the next day, arrived back home on Wednesday morning and we moved on the Thursday. Three years later I’ve painted every square inch of wall and ceiling (not including the bathrooms) and lived through a major kitchen re-fit.

Travel-wise, we made two trips to New York (we had to cancel the first one planned – September 2001), we went to Chicago for the first time ever, and I made four trips to Orlando for Lotusphere. The Adams clan went to Menorca every year of the decade, I went to South Africa a few times, and made debut trips to Denmark and Norway.

So that’s about it. Achievements? I’ve managed to keep us solvent despite Mrs A’s best attempt to spend every penny I’ve earned (only joking dearest… put that rolling pin down). And I’ve watched my lovely daughter Lauren (a.k.a. Lolli) grow from a cute toddler to a wonderful beautiful (not to mention clever and humorous) girl who plays the flute, has a huge array of gymnastic medals and an eye for fashion (that’ll cost me too), and regularly baffles her mother with her grasp of technology.

And finally, a new year resolution? Yes… 1920 x 1200.

Before I start talking about Lotusphere 2010 I just wanted to mention that today is the 18th anniversary of me joining what was, at the time, Lotus Development Corporation. I know what you’re thinking, I must have gone straight from junior school. I turned down an offer to join Borland and made the long journey from Shepperton to the far end of Staines, and took up a role in Customer Support. Later that week, when they found a spare computer for me, I installed Notes version 2.0a.

But that was last century, and now we’re looking forward to another decade of wonderful Lotus solutions. The perfect way to kick off a new decade is to attend Lotusphere 2010… a chance to immerse yourself in the latest technology, to find out how other business are benefiting from their investments, to meet new and existing contacts, to experience some weather that’s probably better than where you live, and to go to the mall to satisfy your wife’s shopping list (but perhaps that’s just me).

Although the details on the track sessions aren’t available yet, the main agenda is. For anyone who’s been to Lotusphere before, the agenda won’t be a huge surprise. Monday features the Opening General Session – I have no idea who the guest speaker will be, but I’m sure the William Shatner rumours will be surfacing again… and here’s a thought, the Lotusphere budget probably could accommodate Harry Hill. The rest of the week is the usual break-out sessions and labs, along with Lotusphere Idol, speed-geeking, customer panels and bird-of-a-feather sessions.

I note that this year the agenda states ‘continental breakfast’ – and I’m wondering which continent they’re referring to.

Anyway, I hope to see you there – I’ll be the guy with the black and yellow rucksack.

Check your diaries folks – on 16th October 2009 IBM Lotus and Canonical (the providers of the popular Ubuntu Linux platform) will join forces to deliver an event designed to help businesses understand and realise the benefits of open source collaborative solutions.

Adam Jollans, IBM’s Linux and Open Source Strategy Manager, will kick off with a session about open source solutions revolutionising the IT market. Then we have someone called Darren Adams (who is apparently very good) talking about Web 2.0 collaboration and the desktop of the future (today), followed by more information about Ubuntu and freeing yourself from the Microsoft Windows and Office lock-ins. After a free lunch, there’s a hands-on technology workshop which will allow delegates to experience the IBM Lotus collaboration suite running in a Ubuntu Linux environment.

With organisations continuing to look for ways to drive down costs, Ubuntu and solutions such as IBM Lotus Symphony offer the potential for cost savings – just ask the French Police. So why not invest a day to see how your business could benefit?

The event will take place at IBM South Bank. A page for registration will be available soon. In the meantime mark it in your diaries and check back here for a link in a couple of days.

Update: the link for registration is now available.

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.

Did you think I’d abandoned dadams.co.uk? May 2009 was the first zero-entry month since April 2007. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to write about – I did. Loads. IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 had been deployed internally (in April I think) but there’s so much in it to write about that I knew it was going to be a long job… so I didn’t get round to it (but I will). And then I became a Sametime Unified Telephony user, and at some point I’ll tell you about cool stuff like transferring from computer to mobile to home phone in the middle of a conference call with a few clicks in the Sametime client.

The other thing I was going to blog in May was my new job, but there were a few delays and it didn’t get formally announced until today. I’m not leaving IBM, I’m not leaving the Lotus brand, but I am spreading my wings a bit to lead the Messaging and Collaboration business in North-East Europe reporting to Vice President Aidan Troy… and thus I am officially ‘Messaging and Collaboration Business Unit Executive, North East Europe’. I may have to consider trimming that or getting an extra-long business card. In IBM-land, North East Europe consists of:

• UKI (that’s UK and Ireland)
• Nordics (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland… and Iceland too I think)
• Germany (that’s, well, Germany)
• Alps (Switzerland and Austria)

Admittedly, some of these are strange fits for ‘North East Europe’. Ireland and Iceland are the most westerly countries in Europe. The Netherlands is further North than both Switzerland and Austria, yet the Netherlands is classed as South West Europe. But it still makes more sense than South Africa being part of North East Europe, and it’s not any more.

Naturally, I’m irreplaceable, but the glutton for punishment who’s been elected to give it a whirl is Pete Hampton. Seriously, congratulations to Pete – he has a long history in the Lotus brand, full of successes and valuable experience, and from the moment he heard about the opportunity he pushed himself forward and proved his worth. Great news for Pete, and great news for me too as I have created a mail rule to forward anything that starts with “I was given your name by…” straight to him. He has agreed to leave it at least a month before he starts doing a better job than I ever did.

It’s late, I’ll keep it brief. A great day – over 260 attendees and the presentation delivered by Andy Ports Porter and me was well-attended. No doubt about the two highlights of the day – the first being the glowing customer testimonials delivered by the Salvation Army (Mark Calleran) and Moore Stephens (Michael Bruce).

And then our guest speaker Barry Cryer… I expected him to be great entertainment, but he exceeded expectations. For the entire half an hour he weaved stories and rattled off jokes at a pace and with a delivery that would shame any professional comedian (most of the jokes I’d never heard before and all were hilarious).

He then went the extra mile – enthusiastically shaking the hand of everyone who wanted to meet him, he talked and joked with them all, and posed for photos. When my colleagues and I left for our four hour car journey, Mr Cryer was still delighting the delegates. He could have just done his spot and left with his cash, but that was obviously not the nature of the man. Even before he’d taken to the stage he’d spoken to people attending the event, made a note of their names and said hello to them in his routine. I’m certain he added to his fan-base today, and I’ll include myself. In an earlier post I described him as a comedy legend, and I was absolutely right.

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.

As alluded to in an earlier post, a couple of weeks ago we recorded some videos at Lotus Park describing our Lotusphere Comes To You sessions. The videos are now on YouTube and will be posted onto the UK Lotusphere Comes To You page by the end of tomorrow.

Maybe I should have shaved the night before…

I’m also pleased to announce that Andy ‘Ports’ Porter and I finished preparing our content today (well, 90% done, just a few odd bits to do – just the 96 slides to finish off). Thanks also to Matt Newton and Chris Moore for their input. Yes, I was joking about the 96 slides… there’s only 87 really.

Just a quick one to say that the Lotusphere Comes To You event in Edinburgh (28th May 2009 at the Caledonian Hotel, Princes Street) is now open for registration. Thanks to Davinia who also posted a comment to that effect. See you there.

Very soon, there’ll be some videos added to the LCTY page – watch out for those. But while I was looking at the page I saw a link to some videos from last year – I’m featured – but I had no idea (until now) that these had been recorded and posted. I really must stop saying “errr” and “errrm” so much.