94: Educating Connections

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:47 — 53.9MB)

Recorded on Friday 23rd March 2012.  Simon Vaughan, Mac Guidera and Baan Slavens join Darren and I to talk Connections – roll out of a new release at Cardiff University, futures for the mobile apps, fix pack one for 3.0.1 and even Windows Explorer access to your Connections files.

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Mac Guidera (blog | twitter) is a Project Manager on IBM’s Social Software Team.

Simon Vaughan

Simon Vaughan (twitter) is Deputy IT Director at Cardiff University and an IBM champion

Baan Slavens (twitter) is a Project Manager on the IBM Social Software Team and is responsible for social mobile solutions.

Topics

Cardiff just upgraded to Connections 3.0.1

  • What’s Connections being used for?
  • Will it be rolled out to students as well as staff?
  • Is mobile access in demand?  Are Cardiff allowing users to access from mobile?
  • Connections mobile clients

What has the take up been like so far?

  • What’s coming next?
  • Multiple server access
  • Profiles integration with address books
  • Customisation of apps to fit organisation changes
  • Native files access

Connections as a platform for development

  • As Social Business develops, do we see Connections as becoming more of a development platform?
  • Developers need to understand OpenSocial
  • Will we see Connections competing with Portal as an integration point for multiple applications

Connections 3.0.1.1 released

  • What’s included?
    • Fixes
    • New features
    • MS IE 9 and Firefox 9 support
    • Redhat Linux 6.1 support
    • Sametime 8.5.2 Proxy support
    • Issue with Chrome duplicate headers also fixed 🙂
  • Forums/Posts configuration etc
  • Was the ‘Super Community admin view’feature incorporated in this release?
  • How is it installed?
  • New Update Installer required
  • Should all customers upgrade?

Connections plugin for Windows Explorer released

  • What does it do?
  • How is it installed/deployed?
  • How does it compare with the Notes plugin for Files?
  • Can you upload multiple files?
  • Does it obey quotas etc?
  • Can you have multiple Connections servers configured?
  • drag and drop of files into Connections files
  • Video by Luis Benitez

Connections 4 was previewed at Lotusphere 2012

  • What are the highlights?
  • When will it be available?
  • Which features are you most excited about?

Tips

Darren:

  • Veeam. Best virtual backup and replication solution on the market. And sold by STS 🙂

Baan:

  • Open documents in Connections app on the iOS platform by pressing and holding attachments.

Mac:

  • Mac users, use the files plug-in for Notes to drag and share files from your machine to Connections.

Simon:

Stuart:

92: The XXX Episode

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:48 — 49.3MB)

Episode 92 recorded on Friday 9th March 2012.  Mike McGarel joins Darren and Stuart to discuss the XWork Server offering  6 months on, the new OpenNTF XPages development contest, a new and improved xpages.info site and community efforts to improve IBM Connections documentation.

[The XXX Episode – That’s XWork, XPages contest and xpages.info, hope that still proves arousing ?]

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Mike McGarel

Mike McGarel (blog | Twitter) , As a Collaborative Solutions Developer for Czarnowski Display Services, “XPages marks the spot”in my career right now. All of our new development efforts have been XPages-focused for over a year.  I am Vice President of GRANITE, the Chicago-based ICS user group. I also help out with various community get-togethers such as the Blogger Open at Lotusphere and the annual Midwest Lotus User Group conference.

Topics

XWork Server Update – TNG

  • Ed asks what next for the newest member of the Domino family
  • “Social Business Databases”?
  • ISV chicken and the egg issues?
  • “. . . awareness is lower than we expected at this point in time.”Proof that it needs its own marketing campaign?

Third OpenNTF Development Content

  • Sponsored by We4IT
  • Deadline: June 3rd, 2012
  • Two categories (Controls and Applications). Each category will have 2 winners. The Control category winners will receive $800.00 each, the Application category winners will receive $1600.00 each. The winners can choose between Amazon vouchers or payment via Paypal.

“New look”of http://xpages.info

  • Fantastic work by Bruce and the team

Connections Community Documentation

iPad Fever

  • Stresses the need to get up to speed on mobile development. If you’re company is still thinking about mobilizing your apps, it time to stop thinking and start doing.
  • So how many iPad 3’s will Stuart be buying? 😉

MWLUG 2012

  • Dates: August 15th – 17th
  • Location: Pittsburgh, PA at the Omni William Penn Hotel.
  • 5 Tracks: Administration, Application Development, Business Cases and Strategy, New Technology and Integration, and Social Business
  • YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/mwlug (videos from 2009-2011)
  • Website: new XPages-based site plans to debut at the end of March
  • Call for abstracts:  Planned for mid-April 2012

Tips

Darren:

  • Notepad++. Notepad they way it should have been. One of the first things I install on a new machine. Excellent light weight editor.

Mike:

  • In the grand tradition of developers stealing borrowing from one other, I saw this site mentioned within a Planet Lotus blog post from Mark Roden: http://jsbeautifier.org/. It makes JavaScript code more readable by adding indents and line breaks.

Stuart:

  • Chrome with IBM Connections Files issue workaround. Great job, Sjaak!

89: Lotuslive becomes SmartCloud for Social Business

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:13 — 57.0MB)

Episode 89 recorded on Thursday 16th February 2012.    We meet with Dave Durazzano of IBM and Elaine Murray from Applicable to discuss the planned rename of Lotuslive, announcements from Lotusphere 2012 and plans for new bundles to clear up a few confusing names…

[Full title: Lotuslive becomes SmartCloud for Social Business. Longer name but less confusion?]

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

dave durrazano

Dave Durazzano (twitter) is Program Director for IBM SmartCloud for Social Business.  David joined Lotus in 1994 as a technical support analyst, he then went on to co-founded a Lotus Business Partner consulting company and later started a cloud computing services company.  David rejoined IBM in 1999 where he has held several technical leadership roles on the Lotus Notes/Domino, Workplace & Greenhouse teams before shifting his focus in 2007 to contribute to the IBM on-line collaborative SaaS business previously called LotusLive.<br>

Elaine Murray

Elaine Murray (twitter) is IBM/Microsoft Messaging & Social Collaboration enthusiast at Applicable. A Marketing Manager with a passion to promote powerful collaboration.

Topics

SmartCloud for Social Business

  • For those new to the community, what is Smart Cloud for Social Business?
  • IBM SmartCloud portfolio
  • Formerly LotusLive
    • New brands to be established in Q1 (next few weeks)
    • SmartCloud Engage to be key brand, various levels within that
    • What happens to customers that have LotusLive contracts?
  • New URL in Q2 – http://ibmcloud.com/social
    • What is the proposition that SCSB represents?
  • Many would see Office 365 and Google Apps as the main competitors
    • What are IBM’s advantages?
  • Will the iNotes and Connections brand confusion be cleared up?
    • Yes!
  • Whats coming in 2012?
    • Will the newly named IBM Docs be part of SmartCloud too?
      • Yes, 2H12

Applicable

  • What does winning the Lotus Award mean for your business?

Tips

Darren:

Dave: 

  • Start a 60 day trial of IBM SmartCloud for Social Business – See first hand how your business (any size) can leverage the cloud to collaborate with customers, partners, vendors today.   IBM SmartCloud for Social Business Toolkit – Found in IBM DeveloperWorks.  Access the IBM SmartCloud APIs for integration development!

Elaine: 

  • Knowledge is Power.. Keep up to date with the customers who visit your web pages and learn more about them and their areas of interest: http://www.trovus.co.uk/

Stuart: 

  • TweetBot v2.0 – fab new Twitter client for iPhone and iPad. Granular notification settings, no nasty panels, customisable buttons. It rocks.
  • UC Expo – effectively the biggest Social Business trade show in the UK – 6/7th March at Olympia.

88: UltraAJAXersize (featuring Jason Dumont)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:58 — 62.2MB)

Episode 88 recorded on Thursday 9th February 2012. Jason Dumont joins Darren and Stuart to discuss the roadmap for the Lotus clients – Notes, iNotes and Connections Mail – through 2012 including the exciting Social Edition release. He also fills us in on the details around ‘that plugin’ – the ability to render Notes applications in a browser as if in your Notes client.  

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Jason Dumont

Jason Dumont (twitter | linkedin) is currently the Program Director for Messaging & Collaboration Client Strategy at IBM. His responsibilities include strategy development and product planning for all of IBM’s messaging and collaboration clients within the Lotus brand, including our on premise and cloud based delivery options. He also leads a new strategic effort focused on the delivery of a more social messaging experience, which will first be represented as IBM Connections Mail. His team is located in the United States with an extended team around the globe.

Topics

Lotusphere announcements

  • Lotus Notes and Domino Social Edition
    • What is Notes/Domino Social Edition?
    • Is this the ‘Notes Foo’that has been discussed over the last year?
    • Why ‘Social Edition’?
    • When will it ship?
    • Is this the equivalent of Notes Next?
    • Lets break it down:
      • What will Domino Social Edition offer in terms of iNotes functionality?
      • How about Notes Social Edition?
  • What Social features will be available in the new release?
  • IBM Connections Mail (aka social mail)
    • This has been explained as ‘triage mail and calendar’, can you explain the use case?
      • ‘Picture in picture ’analogy
    • When will it be delivered? Need Connections Next and Domino 8.5.3+ or Exchange 2007 & 2010
    • Works with Domino and Exchange mail? 
    • Will it support cloud-based mail?
  • The Plug-in
    • What does it do?
    • What are the use cases you foresee?
    • What are the requirements? Which browsers (IE, FF both on Windows), which Domino release?
    • How big is the plugin?  Will it get cached?

‘State of the Union’

  • Are you excited about 2012?

Tips

Darren:

  • Workflow for XPages : OpenNTF project released by Phillipe Riand, Qian Liang and Niklas Heidloff. Fills a missing gap that has always existed in Domino.
  • Also in an XPages vein, the 3rd and latest XPages Development Contest is open. More prizes this time, again from the kind folks at We4IT!

Jason:

Stuart:

50: Managing IBM collaboration tools. ‘Does that mean Microsoft has it right all along?’

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:20:33 — 73.9MB)

Episode 50, recorded Thursday 5th May 2011, discussing backup/recovery/management of IBM Collaboration Solutions technologies, why IBM Connections is possibly a ‘non-specific item restorable product’ and more…

(Stuart here, I think this is a fascinating discussion – one of the best we’ve had on This Week in Lotus.  If you know someone in the Lotus product teams at IBM that should hear the points made in this episode, please please pass them the details.  If you are a customer that wants issues such as these resolved, again please tell your IBM contacts.  Thank you!)

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Sean BurgessSean Burgess (blog | twitter | company) is a Senior Certified Advanced Lotus Notes Developer skilled in development of applications including project tracking, workflow, change management, and information publishing in Notes and to the Intranet/Internet via Domino. Experienced with large scale administration and deployment of Notes including initial server setup/installation and remote access. Interfaces professionally with all levels of the organization from management, for project/capabilities presentations, to staff, for training and project management, to end users, for understanding needs and gathering requirements.
Chris WhisonantChris Whisonant (blog | twitter | company) is a Lotus Consultant with GROUP Business Software (GBS). Chris supports the broad suite of Lotus Software running on virtually every supported operating system. Chris has spoken at the Lotusphere and COMMON conferences and is the lead administrator of the BleedYellow services.
Sharon BellamySharon Bellamy (blog | twitter | company) is Lead IBM solutions specialist at City University London.Sharon supports all of the IBM / Lotus / Tivoli stack at City and will soon be taking on the Domino implementation at the Cass Business School.
Dave HayDave Hay ( blog | twitter | company ) is an Infrastructure Architect, specializing in Portal and Collaboration solutions, in the IBM Software Services for Lotus (ISSL) team, working mainly in the UK and Ireland. Dave has recently been involved with the delivery of an enterprise-wide collaboration solution for a large UK customer, based upon IBM Connections 3 and WebSphere Portal 7.

Topics

Backup and Recovery / Management of Lotus technology: 

  • Sean raised issue with recovering Connections community after deletion, replicated issue that Sharon had at City. Prompted thoughts and discussions about best practice for management of both traditional Domino/Notes and Websphere-based infrastructure

So let’s kick off with Domino. All of us on the call have been working with Domino for years 

  • What have we learnt about backup/recovery – how is it done best?
  • Foundations did it best. Bit level backups of safe replicas of the databases. No downtime and easy recovery.
  • What tools have we used?
  • How do you handle recovery of individual mailboxes/blogs/teamrooms/apps?
  • How about document-level recovery?

Now, many Lotus products are now WebSphere based – Sametime8.5, QuickrJ, Connections, Portal etc 

  • How do we go about backing these up, given three layer model?
  • What about restores? (how do we handle mixture of DB and file store?)
  • How do we handle document-level restores?
  • Should we be looking to IBM/Tivoli to resolve this or third parties?
  • How about soft-delete? Is that the way forward?

Other topics:

  • New short URLs for Lotus sites
  • Office 2010 vs the world
    • Symphony finishes 3rd
  • Not WES (aka BlackBerry World aka BBW) this week
  • (From Chris: Here is a link to the GROUP Learn event I talked about that has slides showing one how to enable a scheduled backup for DB2 databases)

Tips

DarrenTalking of backups, to backup PC’s or laptops I use Acronis. Very impressive product.
SeanJQuery – use it!
ChrisHAProxy – very easy to configure load balancer! Can do http but also other ports – e.g. running one HAProxy server to balance QuickrD, Sametime Chat, LDAP, iNotes. Only limitation is no https. Have a brief story about trying to setup Websphere Edge Components vs. HAProxy.
SharonSkype chats – there are a number of them set up now – Connections (and some portal), Quickr and a sametime one – brilliant for asking questions, confirming your sanity and sharing your knowledge.
DaveThe HTTPS Everywhere plugin for Firefox, as mentioned on the Guardian TechWeekly podcast a few weeks back, helps secure connectivity to websites such Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. “forcing”HTTPS rather than HTTP.
StuartUse the forums – a great way to self-help and find answers to your issues, e.g. with backup.  Even better, replicate them in your Notes client.  Instructions here.  Use them or lose them!

48 – Connections 3.0.1 and the app that could spread like wildfire

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:15:47 — 69.5MB)

Episode 48, recorded Thursday 21st April 2011, discussing the new IBM Connections 3.0.1 release, potential for a Connections ISV community, the deprecation of the Lotus brand and more…

(Sorry for the poor audio quality this week – Stuart was clearly still in holiday mode and forgot to check his Mic settings – amateur!)

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Adam BrownAdam Brown (blog | twitter | company ) is a Director at ISW, a focused IBM Premier Partner in Australia that operates across the full IBM Software Portfolio including Lotus, WebSphere, Rational, Tivoli, IM, and Business Analytics (Cognos). Adam is the Technical Director for the company and is responsible for helping our clients understand where IBM solutions can help them meet their business objectives. Specifically Adam is personally focused around Connections/Portal/Forms/Notes/Domino/TDI/TIM/TAM/Cognos
Joe RussoJoe Russo (blog | twitter | company ) is Senior Designer on Connections, focused primarily on Connections Communities. Joe works with user feedback in a variety of formats and groups of different development teams to continually improve and innovate social software at IBM.

Topics

Lotus Connections 3.0.1 

  • Announced on Tuesday 5th April, shipped on Thursday 7th April
  • So what’s new?
    • Ideation Blogs
    • Media Galleries in Communities
    • Community Moderation
    • Integration with ECM repositories (Content Manager and Filenet)
    • Closer integration with Sametime
  • Where did these requirements come from?
  • What was the reaction when the features were shown at Lotusphere?
  • Can you upgrade from 2.5 or do you have to go to 3.0 first?

How do we feel about Connections as a product now? 

  • Has it gained traction?
  • Integration with other IBM Products such as Rational Team Concert and Cognos 10.
  • ECM integration is first sign of Quickr-functionaility being migrated into Connections.  How do we see the Quickr product in the future?
  • Where are the ISVs? What’s stopping ISVs from developing for the platform?

More broadly 

  • As a designer for Connections, what are you principal influences?
  • Social Collaboration services are typically though to be intuitive and needing limited training
    • How do the design team make this a reality?
    • Is there more work to do?
  • Mobile access – web versus native apps
    • Connections has a pretty impressive mobile web UI, yet many users want and expect native apps for Android/iOS these days
    • What do we think about this? Is a Mobile web UI enough?
    • How about disconnected access to Connections and other Social Collaboration tools?
    • ISW has some exciting news here. Coming to an AppStore soon – iWildfire for Connections!

More on the Lotus rebranding 

Q1 numbers for IBM 

  • Lotus changes smidgen (+1%)
  • Vowe has an explanation as to why Lotus maybe constantly under-performing

Competition

Win a copy of Michael Sampson’s ‘User Adoption Strategies‘ book.  Simply blog about the This Week in Lotus podcast linking to our site.  We’ll pick one post at random, and send a copy of the book to the winner! 

Tips

DarrenInstall Lotus Sametime in your environment if you are entitled
Adam1) Look out for iWildfire for Connections on the Apple AppStore coming in May! First 20 people to message me with the hastag #iwildfire on Twitter can get a copy of the Beta!
2) Call out for AUSLUG and Lotus Week in Sydney – Monday August 22 – Friday August 26, 2011
Joe1) if you want to help direct and influence connections, come to http://synch.rono.us and be heard, we listen!
2) Integration with ECM repositories like FileNet and Content Manager have an added bonus – if you have the Quickr Connectors installed you get round trip editing.  This means that when you click on a document in the web browser it automatically opens with your preferred editor (PowerPoint, Word, Symphony, Notepad, etc). You can then edit the document and when you close it, it gets automatically saved and checked in to ECM
StuartStrongVPN – VPN client that allows you to set your location in 18 countries around the world. Allows services such as BBC iPlayer, Hulu and Boxee to be used wherever you are.  Plus a great VPN for using at airports etc.  Packages from $55 a year.

 

 

28: Transforming XPages performance

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:13:41 — 67.5MB)

Episode 28, recorded Friday 26th November 2010, discussing reasons to be thankful, Connections 3.0 GA, Transformer demo, ‘classic’ applications, XPages performance in the Notes client, the new XPages URL Shortner and more…

Please note: we have started to put times in the show notes for when we start to discuss each topic, in order to make it easier to fast-forward through the show to the topics that are of particular interest.  If you would like us to produce an enhanced podcast (AAC format) version of the show with multiple chapters to cover the individual chapters, please do let us know.

Also, we have made the decision to move to recording this show on Thursdays from this point forward, in order to allow additional time to get the podcast produced and still release on a Friday in time for the commute home (in Europe and America at least). Hope this meets with your approval!

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Tony McPhail (twitter) is IT Technical Manager with The Salvation Army, Southern Territory, responsible for Enterprise application and infrastructure, including CItrix, VMware and Lotus Domino portfolio. Domino, Notes and iNotes clients, sametime, quirck and connections.

Pim van Wetten (blog | twitter | lotuslive) has worked with Lotus related software for over 11 years. After finishing his studies in Management and Information Sciences in 1999, Pim van Wetten (1974) started working at e-office. e-office is a Dutch IBM Business Partner that consults organizations about the way they can use technologies to collaborate more efficiently independent of place or time. During the first six years of his career Pim has taken a deep dive in technology by programming in Lotus Notes, WebSphere and WebSphere Portal. Then, he broadened his activities with project management and consultancy. The last three years he specialized in enterprise social media consulting. Pim is a regular speaker on this topic and has hosted several Lotus Connections sessions at the Dutch Notes User Group (NLLUG).

Tim Clark (blog | twitter | lotuslive) is an IT Specialist working in IBM Lotus Technical Sales in the UK and Ireland. Tim has been working for Lotus since 1994 and still loves it. The last few years have seen Tim focus on XPages, but now that focus is shifting to help customers understand how they can improve their collaboration using Lotus Software products. Tim is also a founding member of the XCast, an XPages podcast, which will be re-launching for Lotusphere 2011 with new hosts.

Topics

Thanksgiving week – what is your ‘reason to be thankful’? (04:52)

Lotus Connections 3.0 GA (07:43) 

  • First available to customers, then partners – what were they thinking? 😉
  • Lots of useful resources, not least a checklist for the upgrade
  • Demo video
  • Several HowTo video’s
  • Installation worksheet (would this be appreciated for other Lotus products? Would it scare people off?)
  • Side-by-side upgrade – makes you realise how good Domino upgrades are
  • Wiki-based documentation – how do we feel about this? Should there still be a straightforward Infocenter?
  • CMIS demo of Luiz Benitez showing integration with Lotus Connections
  • Is there a pilot version of Lotus Connections 3.0?

Transformer demo on LotusUserGroup.org (28:41) 

  • What do we think?
  • Is automated process the way ahead?

“Classic”- phrase du jour (37:52) 

  • Developers are affecting the messaging side with this jihad to create a nomenclature to separate out XPages
  • Mail is still a Notes app (composite and all, people think it is just LS and forms)
  • Would you invest in a messaging platform dubbed as “classic”or “legacy” by the very people who’d sell it to you?

On a related note Jake Howlett’s “Are You A Domino Developer?”survey (41:06) 

XPages in the Notes Client Speed – Sean Cull (43:25) 

  • aka XPiNC
  • A 80 fold increase in data transmitted to the client over a regular Lotus Notes app

XPages URL Shortner (48:12) 

What happened to the XCast? (50:01)

Lotusphere 2011 only 65 days away (51:59) 

  • No sign of session confirmations yet
  • Who’s attending? Submitted abstracts?
  • What is the Lotusphere Solutions Developer Lab?

Traveler for Android out by the Holidays (58:01) 

Tips

(1:02:18)

TimKeep an eye out for the new book “Mastering XPages Development”(Amazon UK US) due out in time for Lotusphere 2011 and should be on the bookstall. Written by Martin Donnelly, Mark Wallace and Tony McGuckin with technical review by Maureen Leland and John Mackey.
PimMy tip is about social software. Focus on collaboration, on improving your daily activities. It’s about business value, not a social cool tool.
TonyUse Lotus Sametime.. awareness to see if people are available, send message to see if they can accept your interruption.
DarrenThis has been said before in TWiL, but Evernote is amazing. I’m using it to sync “notes”between several Windows laptops, my Galaxy S Android phone, my BlackBerry Tour and my Galaxy Tab Android Tablet. I store things like wifi passwords, etc and have them accessible no matter the device I’m one.
Stuarta) Need to know more about Social Collaboration (and specifically Lotus Connections)? Join the Collaboration Matters/Applicable webinar series, starting on December 6th.
b) SSDs rock.  Expensive but worth every penny/cent/dime etc

26: Connections 3 is Cool

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:11:42 — 65.7MB)

Episode 26, recorded Friday 12th November 2010, discussing the new Lotus Connections 3.0 release, notesiscool.com, IBM’s new Social Everywhere campaign, the Foundation appliance end-of-life and more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Suzanne Livingston (Connections team blog | personal blog | twitter) has, over the past 10 years, held a variety of roles within software development, including development, design, user research, and now product management. She is currently senior product manager for IBM Lotus Connections, a social software suite for businesses and organizations. In this role, Suzanne works to define the overall social software strategy, develop and drive product requirements with engineering and design, work with customers and partners to shape the product, and publicize the product through demonstrations and presentations at numerous industry events.

Mac Guidera (blog | twitter) is a Social Software product Manager at IBM. He joined IBM Software Services for Lotus 5 years ago after working as a business partner for many years. Focused on Lotus Domino web development, Mac helped his customers using cutting edge solutions around Java, DXL and Ajax technologies. After working in Services, he went on to become the Technical Team Lead on the Lotus Greenhouse team. The Lotus Greenhouse allows IBM customers and partners to try out the latest form Lotus in a single unifies environment. After working with that team, Mac joined the Lotus Connections team as a Product Manager and is currently working to drive IBM Social Software portfolio.

Darren Adams (blog | twitter | notesiscool) has been with the Lotus brand for 19 years, starting in Customer Support and moving to Sales as a Systems Engineer in 1994. More recently he has held the role of Lotus.Technical Sales Manager for the old North Region and then UKISA, and then headed up the Competitive SWAT team. After spending three years as the Messaging & Collaboration Business Unit Leader for UK & Ireland Darren moved on to be Business Unit Executive for Messaging & Collaboration in North East Europe, holding that role for a year before returning to a re-vamped version of his previous role in UKI.

Mark Dixon (blog | blog |  twitter | twitter | company) is Business and Technology Consultant at Applicable, and has 20 years of experience in Information Technology Management including 10 in Unified Collaboration and Communication consultancy. MBA specialising in Technology management.  Mark is currently leading the hosted Connections offering delivery at Applicable.

Topics

Connections 3.0 announced at Enterprise 2.0 

  • What was announced? When will it be available?
  • So what’s new?
  • Social Analytics, Mobile, Community, Forums
  • Overall UX enhancements, Compliance, Extensions
  • The new UI moves away from the OneUI we’re used to – will the other products move in this direction too?
  • How does this release set compare to the opposition?
  • Some new case studies (CEMEX, Bayer etc) announced. What benefits are they getting from Connections?
  • What are Applicable planning for Connections 3.0?

NotesIsCool.com

  • Where did idea come from?
  • Why are we seeing Notes ‘fan sites’springing up?
  • Whats the feedback been like, and what did IBM think of it?
  • How’s the site built? Why not Domino?

Lotusphere Social Aggregator now online 

  • OGS and other sessions to be streamed live for the first time
  • #ls11 is the hashtag to use

Social Everywhere 

  • New campaign from IBM
  • Seeing roots in Cognos, Rational etc.
  • New IBM product page at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/socialcollaboration/
  • Interesting to see the term ‘social collaboration’being used – Collaboration Matters has been using it since 2008 😉
  • With Project Vulcan in the future, is social collaboration where its at? Will the other products in the Lotus portfolio head towards this product segment?

Lotus Foundations withdrawn 

  • Discussed this last week, Ed Brill has now entered the conversation
  • Does it make the situation any more obvious?
  • Are there lessons to be learnt from Nitix experience generally, and this situation specifically?

Luis Suarez – Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist of the year. Congratulations!!!

Tips

DarrenD    THE Ed Brill will be presenting in Atlanta at ATLUG on Friday 19th, Nov, a change of day! Details on the blog. Also been doing traffic analysis on Domino servers, switches and routers and I am using MRTG aka Multi Router Traffic Grapher
SuzanneCheck out the new social everywhere series on Synch.rono.us
MacAs with anything.When using Social software, you don’t have to do it all at once…start small and eventually it will become part of your everyday.
DarrenAFeel free to e-mail me with content suggestions for notesiscool.com
MarkAnyone BUT IT should drive social computing initiatives
StuartSpeck case for Macbook Pros – transparent plastic clip on cases for MBP – beautiful and provide great protection. (Amazon US | Amazon UK)