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 | blogtwitter | 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)