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.

51: You don’t go far in a one legged race

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:39 — 51.1MB)

Episode 51, recorded Thursday 12th May 2011, discussing the LotusLive Spring 2011 release, Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype and more…

Hosts

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

Guests

David DurazzanoDavid Durazzano is IBM Senior Product Manager for LotusLive Services.  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 an on-line software/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 LotusLive.

Topics

New release of LotusLive 

  • What’s in the new release?
  • Seems that many of the features of IBM Connections are being brought into Engage – is the eventual goal to have full feature parity? Blogs/Wikis etc?
  • New levels of privacy give Extranet-type functionality
  • Which LotusLive features are affected?
    • Communities – now have sub communities, files and folders, add guest users to community, improved forums
    • Admin – announcements, hiding user profiles,
    • Files – folders
    • Meetings – now match standalone meeting experience
    • Sametime – up to 8.5
  • Has LL Connections been upgraded in the same way? Whats the difference between Engage and Connections?
  • LL Meetings?
  • When is LL Symphony Meetings going to be included?

Microsoft buys Skype 

  • $8.5bn – is this a fair price?
  • What’s the plan?
  • Is it a consumer or a corporate play?
  • How does the Skype acquisition fit in with Phone 7 and Nokia?
  • Is the merger of consumer and corporate IT inevitable?

Tips

DarrenCompletely off topic – In 17 days I’ve lost 10 lbs thanks to “The 17 Day Diet”. It works. No doubt it’ll be added on with all the fish ‘n chips at UKLUG
DaveRedLaser – iOS and Android app for scanning barcodes and comparing prices
StuartAbout.me – free site to create personal profiles, linking to other social sites.  E.g about.me/stuartmcintyre

45: Utility Server for LotusLive Notes – at least Stuart got that name right!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:36 — 49.2MB)

Episode 45, recorded Thursday 31st March 2011, discussing the new IBM Utility Server for LotusLive Notes offering, Connections 3.0.1 hitting the Greenhouse, WCM renamed yet again and more…

Hosts

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

Guests

Scott SouderScott Souder (twitter) is a Senior Product Manager at IBM, presently the Program Director and Offering Manager for IBM’s new “Software as a Service” product, “LotusLive Notes.” Scott also shares product management responsibilities for “Alloy by IBM and SAP. Scott began his career at Lotus in 1989 as part of the original team focused on developing and selling the Lotus Notes product.

Topics

Utility Server for LotusLive Notes launch – announcement, Ed’s blog post, Stuart’s blog post

  • What is it?
  • Who’s the offering for? Why limit it to LotusLive Notes customers?
  • Is this ‘private cloud’or ‘shared cloud’? Does it matter?
  • How is it licensed – PVUs? How is this calculated for Amazon etc?
  • A customer is likely to already have Domino Enterprise, CEO or Domino Collaboration Express licensing.  How do they transition to this offering?
  • How much control does a customer have over their apps? ACLs, signing, port access etc?
  • Is client access allowed?
  • As new releases of Domino (e.g. 8.5.3) ship, when will the service get upgraded?
    • What if the app needs to stay on an older version?
    • How does the customer test their app prior to upgrade?
  • Is pricing available yet? (New licence $205 US – tradeup $102.5 US)
  • What comes next?

Connections 3.0.1 on the Greenhouse

  • Available now
  • Lots of shiny new stuff – ideation blogs, photo and video sharing in communities, support for Oracle 11g and SQL Server 2008
  • Now called IBM Connections
  • Seems much faster loading than before on Greenhouse

Web Content Management (WCM) renamed again

  • Loses the Lotus tag, as does Connections when 3.0.1 ships
  • What should Notes Next be called?  IBM Streams? 😉

iNotes and FireFox 4

  • Gregg Eldred links to the “new”technote indicating a 8.5.2 FP2 targeted hotfix is coming
  • Should IBM be expected to support new browsers at browser release time?
  • Surely if anyone in the iNotes team had tested FF4 they would have seen the issue and headed off a bit of a YPR (Yellow Public Relations) dust up

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

DarrenDon’t buy a door smaller than the hole it is supposed to cover…now the real tip – if you’re rolling out Win7 or Win 2008 Service Pack 1 be sure to check out my blog to avoid making all your servers unbootable. Seen a couple of these this week, hence the post.
ScottConsultants are worth every penny – its amazing how having an external person in to chair a workshop can get internal teams talking.  Buy Michael Sampson’s ‘User Adoption Strategies‘ book – it is even better second time around.  Look out for new one in 2011 too, promises to be excellent.
StuartWatch out for OS X update 10.6.7, Java update causes problems with desktop sharing

 

 

21: LotusLive 1.3 goes live

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:48 — 59.4MB)

Episode 21, recorded Friday 8th 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

Martha Hoyt is a Senior Product Manager for LotusLive. She has recently turned her role slightly to focus on developing the LotusLive partner platform, working with the early and strategic partners. She started her IBM career in Lotus working for a number of years in the Lotus Notes an Domino world both from a product management and development perspective.

Richard Bye (LotusLive Profile, LinkedIn Profile, LotusLive Home Page, IBM Homepage) is the Business Unit Executive for the LotusLive portfolio in Northern Europe.  Richard has worked in the hosted messaging and collaboration space for nearly 13 years, having been part of the launch team of TTYL for Telenor in Norway, started the Hosted Messaging business for Critical Path in EMEA, and was part of the senior management team leading Outblaze Limited of Hong Kong to acquisition by IBM in April 2009.

Erik Vos (company | twitter | LotusLiveProfile | LinkedinProfile) is (founder of RealConnections in 2008, before I worked for Lotus BP in the Netherlands and before that I was working within IBM Software Group in the Netherlands – Director Software Sales. RealConnections is a Cloud Aggregator, we combine Cloud Services for customers – we are not technical ;-))

Topics

LotusLive 1.3 announced

  • What’s new?
  • What are the features of LotusLive Engage/Connections Communities – are they equivalent to Connections Communities?
  • What use cases are expected for the communities feature?
  • What about Wikis and Blogs?
  • IBM seems to be working hard to bring other vendors/services into LotusLive – have there been any additions to the list?
  • Lotuslive Meetings is a key part of the suite – what changes have taken place there?
  • What do you expect customers to make of these changes?

LotusLive Notes updated

  • This was only released a couple of months ago, so what’s changed?

LotusLive Labs Concord

  • Collaborative editing in the cloud – What’s the latest status?

Lotusphere abstracts opened, deadline extended to 15th October

  • New tracks
  • ‘Interesting’ announcement of abstracts process – could IBM have done this better?
  • Any sessions submitted so far?

Why giving Designer Client away doesn’t matter to college students (have tried to cover in previous episodes, but not had time)

  • Blog post by David Hablewitz
  • ‘While it is good that Lotus Notes Designer is free, what is the point if the people most likely to use it can’t?   That’s right, they can’t use it.  Why?  Because they have Macs.  Yes, at Bellevue College, right here in Microsoft land, at least 1/3 of the students working on a degree in web development own Macs.  These people like public domain software.  They use OpenOffice, iTunes, any browser except IE.  These are the same people who jump for any software that DOESN’T come from Microsoft.  Yes, so close, yet so far.’
  • Designer client on Mac? Essential or nice to have?
  • How about connectors?

LoLA just finished

  • Whole conference under NDA, but plenty of discussion on the Interwebs (blogs, tweets etc)

Number of useful 8.5.2 posts on the Notes Design Blog

Tips

Darren: I love my headset – Logitech ClearChat Pro USB – here’s the newer Logitech H530 USB Headset on Amazon UK and Amazon US (affiliate links).

Martha: Had to leave early ;-(

Erik: Add admin account in LotusLive (for free) to your customers LotusLive account to help your customer. for example helpdesk_for_collaborationmatters@realconnections.nl.   Also, update your company profile in LotusLive: searching within LotusLive will find you on the topic you want to be found for

Richard: LotusLive has changed the way that I work, and as a team, we are far more efficient and better organised using the tools that LotusLive.com provides

Stuart: TripIt Pro (I know, I’ve previously recommended TripIt standard…) Pro version has recently been updated, to now include ability to track flight refunds if delayed etc, and most importantly, includes free membership to Hertz Gold and Regus Gold. VIP car rental and access to 1,100 business lounges worldwide. ($660 value) Costs $49/year.   Also includes aggregated tracking of airmiles, loyalty programs etc.

12: LotusLive Notes and 8.5.2, we ask Ed the tough questions!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:40 — 63.9MB)

Episode 12, recorded Friday 13th August 2010, with a focus on this weeks announcements of LotusLive Notes and Notes/Domino 8.5.2.

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter) and Darren Duke (blog | twitter)

Guests

Ed Brill (blog | twitter) – is Director, Product Management, IBM Lotus software.  Ed’s focus is on growing and continuing IBM’s success in messaging and collaboration software, through working with customers, business partners, and IBM sales, marketing, and product development organizations.  Ed’s responsibilities in this role have included the market launches of Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5 and 8.5.1, the introduction of Alloy, the release of Lotus Symphony 1.3, and plans/development for LotusLive Notes, an IBM cloud offering for messaging and collaboration. A frequent speaker at IBM and industry events worldwide, Ed is well known for direct contributions to the many Lotus software-focused social media and virtual communities.

Tom Duff (blog | twitter) – is a software developer focusing on Lotus collaboration technologies in Portland Oregon. He started working with Lotus Notes in 1996 in version R3 and has written and maintained hundreds of applications in large enterprises through the years. He also holds Lotus principal development certifications starting at version 4 and going up to version 8, as well as Microsoft and Java certifications. Tom is a prolific writer, both in various industry publications and at his website, Duffbert’s Random Musings, at http://www.duffbert.com. He also is a frequent speaker at conferences and events focusing on Lotus technologies.

This podcast is 67MB and runs for 69 minutes at 128kps. Enjoy!

* Please note that all views expressed are the participants’ own and do not necessarily represent those of their employer(s).

Topics

LotusLive Notes

  • Announced on Tuesday, available from August 24th
  • What’s the announcement all about?
  • Why did IBM feel that putting Domino/Notes into the cloud was important?
  • Notes is now part of the overall LotusLive suite. Is that just branding, or is there real integration there?
  • Ed said in his post “Today’s announcement marks the clear establishment of LotusLive as the leader in cloud collaboration.”That’s a pretty bold statement to make, suggesting you feel very sure that the announcement takes Lotus beyond the capabilities that Microsoft and Google offer – is that the case?
  • There has been a lot of talk of ‘hybrid’SaaS and on-premise platforms for collaboration (‘click to cloud’etc.). Obviously a lot of target customers for LotusLive Notes will already have Domino infrastructure, how will go about shifting from on-premise to cloud, or even maintain a hybrid solution?
  • What about apps?
  • Is customisation allowed?
  • What will Lotus be doing to make both owning and managing hybrid infrastructures easier?
  • Instant Messaging – dedicated or shared?
  • What are the costs? How does a customer buy it?
  • Opening out:
    • Apart from Ed, we are Lotus business partners that have customers with on-premise environments, or work in customer on-premise environments
    • What does this offering add to the options that customers already have? Can we see it being a popular offering?
    • Will it help in fending off Microsoft and Google?
    • What does this mean for partners?

Lotus 8.5.2 announced

  • Announced on Tuesday, eGA scheduled for August 24th
  • What’s new? What will be the most popular new features?
  • What’s missing? Directory Independence etc.
  • Traveler enhancements?
  • Any licensing changes or additions?

That Gartner report!

Tom’s book on Sametime

Google Wave killed

Tips

Darren: TNT Screen Capture for Windows – Produce very nice screenshots and call-outs. It is what I use for the blog.

  • Tom: I’ve started to play with a new text replacement utility (for Windows) called PhraseExpress.  Enables me to create text replacement macros as well as nice chunks of pre-defined text templates to use.  Liking it a lot…  and it’s free for personal use.
  • Ed: Flipboard for iPad, great new paradigm tool for ipad.
  • Stuart: Reeder – the best RSS feed reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad $4.99 download, syncs with Google Reader, and hence with NetNewsWire etc. Awesome.