Episode 20, recorded Friday 1st October 2010, discussing the IBM’s reputation for social software, contacting IBM employees via Sametime and more…
Hosts
Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)
Guests
Luis Benitez (blog | twitter) is one of the Social Software Product Managers for IBM effective today. Prior to this new role Luis was the Lotus Social Software evangelist for the Americas and leads the internal Lotus Social Software community with over 2000 members.
Matt Simpson (blog/podcast | twitter | company | profile) is an Initiative Leader in the IBM CIO Organization, responsible for Sametime deployments in IBM. His background is socio-technical, especially focusing on collaboration and knowledge management.
Topics
IBM could be bigger than Facebook – Luis Benitez post
- Fast Company article ‘Fathoming a new product from IBM via a launch event is like trying to understand the ocean by watching a wave. Nonetheless that was my task, swimming through the presentations and ultimately landing an interview with Jeffrey Schick, IBM’s VP of Social Software. Drenched in the vision Schick shared for the IBM Customer Experience Suite, it occurred to me that IBM could end up being more important to the business use and monetization of social media than Facebook.’
- ‘Long before Mark Zuckerberg aggregated his Harvard friends online, IBM’ers could find their colleagues in a similar manner. According to Schick, “at IBM 15 years ago, we had a way to look up people to create a globally connected enterprise.” “Today we have approximately 500,000 people within IBM and we do about 6 million look ups a day on pages that look strikingly similar to other social network profile pages with features like blogging and photo posting,” added Schick.’
- What does the article mean? Is IBM cool now? 😉
- From Headshift to be North IOT Sales lead for Portal, Connections etc.
- First notable name to rejoin IBM/Lotus after lots of folks have left (Alan Lepofsky, Gia Lyons, Rocky Oliver, Bob Balaban etc)
- Does IBM need to hire more big industry names?
Luis also has a new role – moving into product management
- What prompted the change?
- What did you learn from doing it in the real world that will now help in product management?
- There’s a few IBM social software product managers, where will you fit?
Sametime ExtST service
- What is it? http://ibm.com/collaboration is a site on ibm.com through which people can access many ways to collaborate with IBMers. Within that service, there is a pilot of a way to Sametime with IBMers. Today, it is an as-is service with minimal support. Soon, it will be upgraded with refreshed hardware and software as well as full-production support.
- Some history…
- So what’s IBM doing about it? In Q3, we recognized the priority for this service and included it into our Fall Plan for 2010 funding. This year, we have launched a project to upgrade the service. We have developed an environment with the latest Sametime 8.5.1 software, and plan to deploy it in Q4.
- What’s been done so far? For several years, a pilot / as-is best-effort service has been in place. Priority to deploy a production service was established in late 2009. A project has kicked off in 2010 to deploy the new service by end of year.
- What’s planned? When will it be launched? A new service will be online in Q4 2010 which will include a help desk and the ability to use the latest Sametime clients.
- What does this mean for customers and BPs? Once deployed, this means that BPs will be able to use the latest code to Sametime with IBMers.
- Lotus Notes Traveler the “fastest-growing business mobile email platform”- Ed Brill
Lotus Symphony 3 beta 4 pimped on BNET – Ed Brill
- Where’s Oracle?
- How will the forking affect this?
- What’s next Symphony IdeaJam launched
- Looking forward to a TWiL episode focused on Symphony 3 launch
Lotusphere Registration has opened
- When will abstracts open? (Today as it turned out!)
- Lotusphere Blog is back, also Lotusphere Community on LinkedIn
ILoveLotusNotes.net launch
Tips
Darren: TriStateLUG (October 11, New York City, Keven Cavanaugh doing keynote)
Luis: Lotus Connections Plug-ins for Symphony: (Org Chart generator, wiki editor, LotusLive Files connector.. and readily available for Symphony 3)
Matthew: Lotus Connections Status Alerts Plug-In for Lotus Notes, available from the Lotus Catalog.
Stuart: Self-registration database for Lotus Quickr and Connections. Enables the request, provision, authorisation and management of accounts for external users of on-premise deployments of IBM Social tools.
