Episode 43, recorded Thursday 17th March 2011, discussing Business Intelligence and Collaboration integration, free LotusLive for Japan relief, Sametime for Android and iOS and more…
Hosts
Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)
Guests
| Andy Piper (blog | twitter | company) is WebSphere Messaging Community Lead at IBM, and is also widely known online as a “social bridgebuilder”. He has been with IBM for 10 years, was working for an IBM customer for 4 years before that, and whilst he works within the WebSphere brand of Software Group, he is a “friend of Lotus”, being extremely active in internal and external social networks (one of IBM’s early internal blogging community, and a “BlueIQ Ambassador”). Andy is a regular speaker on both technical topics related to application integration as well as on bringing social dimensions to business. He is also a co-presenter of the weekly Dogear Nation podcast… which is about to hit its 200th episode…. he is also very good at teaching TWiL people about how to more effectively use Google Docs… 😛 |
| Lars-Olof Allerhed (blog | twitter | company) is Social Evangelist in the World Wide Tiger Team for IBM Collaboration Solutions, He has worked for IBM for a bit over 10 years in various senior technical positions, was originally hired in to Lotus when it was a subsidiary of IBM and since 1st of January is back in “Lotus”again working for IBM Collaboration Solution (ICS) in IBM Software Group. Focus in my current role is to evangelise about how to use ICS products an solutions especially focusing on emerging technologies and Mobile, he has developed a speciality skill in delivering First of a Kind projects (FOK) successfully and is frequently requested form different parts of IBM to lead FOK projects. Has been blogging externally since the early dot com days and was one of the first jump on Jaiku. |
 | Tina Groves (twitter | company) recently re-joined the Cognos product management team to lead the collaborative decision making area, leveraging her 25 years experience in analysis, event processing and information-driven applications. She is best known by Cognos customers for her popular conference sessions on report design and advanced charting. |
Topics
Collaborative Business Intelligence with Cognos BI and Lotus Connections
- What is BI?
- Cognos Business Intelligence was started back in the mid-nineties with reporting and interactive analysis delivered by Impromptu and PowerPlay. Over the past decade, Cognos products evolved to a suite of reporting and analytical capabilities to delivering a complete platform which included metrics and financial performance management to today where it’s a system of business analytics.
- Why and who uses BI?
- Organizations use Businesss Analytics in order gain insights into their business interactions, develop strategy and manage financial forecasts. People use Business Analytics to answer questions like how are we doing, why and what should we be doing.
- Why Collaboration and Business Intelligence?
- People today use Facebook, Twitter and other social media to connect with friends in their personal lives. People are wanting to use these means to find people within their organization and find relevant information in their environment to assist their decision making.
- What does a customer get when they buy Cognos 10? Are there any restrictions on how they use Connections?
- Cognos customers have full use of Connections with Cognos BI v10. Users require enhanced consumer role or higher to have entitlement to the Collaboration capabilities from the Business Insight Workspace (yes, fully un-crippled!)
- What happens if Connections takes off and they want to get more licenses?
- Then, a corporate-wide license can be purchased for the employees who do not have a Cognos license. The Cognos 10 application can be configured to use the corporate-wide Connections application.
- Examples and screen captures can be seen in Tina’s guest entry on synch.rono.us
- What’s next for Cognos/Connections?
- More and more integration! Cognos is also interested in expanding the BI value to other collaboration tools such as instant messaging and to further the integration on platforms such as mobile and cloud. Stay tuned!
- Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center
IBM offers LotusLive free of charge to agencies in Japan
- Salvation Army planning to use Lotus and LotusLive technology to manage their efforts
- Not the first time this year IBM Lotus technologies have helped in a disaster, Mark Bennett (a TWIL devotee and all around good guy) of the New Zealand Salvation Army developed RAD Notes apps to assist in the NZ earth quake
Speaking of cloud, Microsoft to offer free BES Hosting with BPOS
- Supported and hosted by RIM
- Does this pressure IBM to do the same? I know we’ve heard $15/user/mo is the “market norm”, has that now changed?
- Is LotusLive really aimed at the < 300 user markets (the minimum number of users required for LL BES)?
QuipIM –First Sametime Client for iPhone and Android released
- Available for Android, coming soon for iOS.
Twitter tells developers not to build clients anymore – what happened?!
- Twitter grew on its own multichannel, multipurpose nature – clampdown seems counterproductive?
- Is it all about control and advertising? (chart)
- third-party dev backlash
- How does Twitter make money? It doesn’t. There is your reason why they are doing this
Tips
Darren | xDesk v1.1 from Chris Connor on OpenNTF. And fine example of an XPages helpdesk and issue tracking database….with mobile access for iShiny and other webkit browsers! So good I’m actually using it. This month it is also the featured OpenNTF Project of Month. | |
Andy | Lanyrd – can’t remember if this has been covered on TWiL already? I see no evidence of it on the blog and it’s very relevant to a collaboration / social audience. And I’ve blogged about it. It’s a social conferencing site which also has some extremely cool features for speakers, enables persistent aggregation of information around point-in-time events, uses Twitter, now has a browser plugin for enhancing Twitter profile pages, etc etc. | |
Lars | Collabracam – an iphone ipad application to shoot multi camera videos with up to 4 iphones (iTunes link) | |
Tina | If you want to learn more about how Cognos and Connections deliver social business to organizations, join this webinar on Mar 23rd, with demonstrations on Collaborative BI, Social Analytics and Consumer and Corporate Sentiment. | |
Stuart | Dragon Dictation for the iPad/iPhone – Free app, works great, not so good in noisy environments, but with headset it really rocks. Helps iOS catch up with Android in some regards. |
