Comments on: Lotus Connections (formally “Project Ventura”)

By: People Over Process » Blog Archive » Google Apps Premium: $50/seat/year to put fire on vendor’s feet

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:56:08 +0000

[...] On a more conservative note, there are still people using WordPerfect 5.1 for all their damn ^K combos. Word processors have been an incredibly generational piece of software, and I’m not sure that’s going to change. That means that The Kids may take to Google Apps and other Enterprise 2.0 applications quickly, but I suspect we’ll have to wait for a rash of retirement parties before there’s any chance of seeing any sort of exodus from Word and, even more so, Excel. See my comments on cultural wet-ware in the context of Lotus Connections for more discussion along these lines. [...]

By: James Governor’s Monkchips » On Enterprise Social Analytics: hat tip John Simonds

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 13:05:33 +0000

[...] John is a smart guy, and in this post, Social Computing In The Enterprise, he briefly mentions what is going to be a key market over the next few years. It just doesn’t have a name yet. In describing IBM’s new enterprise social software (that last one’s a bonus link from Burton’s Mike Gotta) tooling John makes a comparison against the del.icio.us, MySpace and Flickrs of this world: It is easy to download the social tools, but with easy usually comes limited functionality or single purpose. For example, while you can share your del.icio.us links as many do publicly, the trends across a selected group(s) such as an organization are not trendable. Analysis of trends or the combination of information gathering within a company can help in identifying information and interests. [...]

By: James Governor’s Monkchips » IBM: the world’s biggest enterprise social software rollout

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:09:26 +0000

[...] RedMonk tends to agitate for IBM to hurry up and gets its new social software out from behind the firewall, which its finally doing as per our recent Lotus coverage here, here, and here. But there is another way of looking at this, which James Snell talks to. Its fashionable for the blogerati to laugh at “enterprisey” but funnily enough most enterprises don’t. IBM seems to have a lead over its enterprise competitors, including Microsoft (Sharepoint is not the answer to all social software questions, as Burton Group and RedMonk agree), for the simple reason that IBM’s social software project was so big, and so managed (in terms of audit trails, identity, directory expertise management and so on. IBM’s social software is about managed, rather than unmanaged spaces, and that makes it powerful). I still don’t know why Sun doesn’t want to make money from Roller, but if IBM want to wear the t-shirt… This is from snellspace. Today IBM has what may very well be the largest corporate social networking environment in the world. We don’t know that for sure because there’s not a lot of great information out there about how many folks are actually using these technologies within the firewall. Here are some numbers: Our BlogCentral environment supports 25k+ registered users with over 3k+ “active” blogs. There are over 100k posts and comments with over 10k+ unique tags. Our dogear server has over 200k+ distinct bookmarks to resources both inside and outside the firewall and is generally more reliable at providing quick access to important resources than our Intranet search servers. Our activities server has over 11k activities with 69k+ entries and has 35k+ registered users. Generally impressive statistics, especially if you consider that use of the blogs, bookmarks and activities servers is entirely optional and there is no corporate mandate that Thou Shalt Blog or Thou Shalt Bookmark. Instead, a small group of people heard about it and started using it; they told some others about it and they started using ti; then they told some others about it and they started using it… and it evolved from there. And it’s not just bookmarking, blogging, activities, and so on. We’re also podcasting, collaborating through wikis, tagging pretty much everything in sight, participating in internal “open source” projects, organizing “hackdays” and generally just having a lot of fun. Thing is, I’m not sure that anyone has really figured out a way of measuring the tangible impact the use of these technologies has on our bottom line. What we do know is that the employees who are making use of them have generally found them to be far more useful than anything that’s come before and that there is genuine excitement about the new tools. [...]

By: cote

cote — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:28:34 +0000

Ed: Indeed. Those things will only be fully addressed after everyone can “poke” at Connections. Interestingly, the fact that they’re different products than Notes and Workplace might help there. I say “interestingly” because dividing up the portfolio further by adding in Connections and Quickr (and, in a way, the SameTime universe) seems a bit troubling long term to me. That said, IBM is of such a scale that it might be able to pull it of…hmmm…this deserves a post.

Nigel: your daughter has her own laptop? Man! That’s awesome. I’ll have to remember that. What type of laptop is it? If it’s not too personal, you outta write-up a post on “family IT for The Kids.” For example, do kids need a ToughBook, or do they treat laptops and computers with enough care?

By: Nigel James

Nigel James — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:13:23 +0000

Kids having it all together? Right on. My daughter (4) can already turn on her laptop (my old one passed on to her), start up a browser and her choose favorite games from favorites. Click before you can read. The future is bright and they will be very savvy.
She still can’t fix the wireless though - she calls tech support (Dad) for that.

Cheers,
Nigel

By: Ed Gibbs

Ed Gibbs — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 05:45:34 +0000

Two small things that make me skeptical:

- Most IBM Enterprise products are nasty complex beasts when you actually get around to using them in an organization. See the crazy Websphere stack for an example.

- Lotus? They have the absolute worst email client I’ve ever seen and it simply never seems to get better.

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:31:00 +0000

I love the image of you poking some funny-looking piece of goo with a stick… “what is it? will it hurt us? is it poisonous? how’d it get here anyway?” Kind of like a scene from the original Star Trek series.