Especially the demos by Chris Crummey showed a lot about the great mobile offerings being available especially for Connections … and yes, one more time to realize that Connections is a central part of the IBM social business strategy. Like it or not - it’s a fact!
Being a huge fan of Zite I absolutely loved the magazine style dashboard Chris showed in the last part of this session!
After watching Ed Brills presentation at LS12 the roadmap became much clearer to me.
Like the name “Social Edition” or not but in my opinion it’s only the tool closing the gap from Notes/Domino 8.5.3 and Connection to an integrated 9.x “whatever-it-will-be-named” solution. But don’t be fooled - the social edition release is already half way to 9.0. So it’s not just a name change … there’s a lot of stuff under the hood and Notes/Domino 8.54 with Social Edition add-on will be much more than just a simple point release.
Honestly, that’s the “one more thing” I expected on OGS. And of course they mentioned it but unfortunately I wasn’t made as clear as it should be. So thanks to Ed Brill and his session to offer this “one more thing” moment to me today! :-)
I highly reccommend to watch that session as it really shows were IBM is heading:
Lotusphere is always something special … and not being at Lotusphere is always a bit sad. Unfortunately LS2006 was the last I attended in person in Orlando.
Whenever possible I followed the bloggers on-site through the week and especially the Opening General Session (OGS) … but of course it’s not the same as being there.
This time IBM offered a live stream of the OGS and it was a great experience. It eases the pain of not being there a little bit. And it was fun to interact with those being in Orlando as well as with some of the over 1,200 viewers of the livestream.
Sitting at a Munich Starbucks and being directly connected to a live event happening in Orlando … another example how small the world became today and what technologie can do nowadays.
Regarding the OGS itself I have mixed feeling. Michael J. Fox was a great speaker. Kudos for IBM’s choice this year. It was somewhat sad to see his current condition and what Parkinson had done with this great actor … but it was inspiring at the same time how he challenges himself. I’m not sure if I would be able to speak in front of several thousand people under that circumstances!
In regards of the products: IBM Connections Next looked very impressive. But for Notes / Domino it becomes clear that the product is alive and in good condition but without adding connections you definately are missing the cake. To get full value of what the next-family is offering Connections is a “must have”. And I am not sure if I am really happy about that.
The cat is out of the bag in terms of names: The next version of Notes/Domino will be called Notes / Domino Social Edition. I am fine with that “official” name but still curious what the “street name” will be. Still smells a bit like Buzzword Bingo added to a product name ;-)
But renaming “Lotus Live” into “IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business” is a bit weired. I agree with @EdBrill that “Smart Cloud Engage” isn’t that bad but why not sticking with “IBM Smart Cloud” for the product line. That’s what the people will call it anyway. Adding “Social Business” is just Buzzword Bingo, too!
I am sure the attendees of Lotusphere 2012 will explore a lot of great stuff … and also this was a good overall OGS I missed the “There’s one more thing” that’s really exciting.
Notes/Domino is far away from being dead or killed. I think it’s like the new black backpacks for the LS 2012 attendees. There may be only black outside … but there’s a lot of yellow inside ;-)
(backpack picture found at: http://noteshexe.de/blog/?p=2012)
I’m sitting here in Dublin after I busted out of my poker tournment. While I will write about the tournament itself (wich was again a great event) in a seperate entry … this is how they used social media - and unfortunately missed out on a great opportunity in my opinion.
For those who don’t know much about poker tournaments: In this one close to 1,400 people came together to eliminate their opponents over two days (lasting 12 hours each day). Due to the size of the field and the space in that venue there was one main room but also two smaller rooms nearby with poker tables.
If you look around you have (similar to a tech conference) a huge number of the participants using mobile devices and obviously updating frequently. Most of course send updates of their chipcounts or good or bad hands that happend recently. Add to this a number of relatives going out for seigtseeing here in Dublin, friends and relatives at home and even friends in the tournament itself (on far away tables) and you get a decent number of people interested in what’s happening.
Well, the organiser is up-to-date (in some kind): they use Twitter, Facebook and even offer a livestream. Cool? Yes … and no! Because unfortunately they missed the most important thing in social media activities: Connection!
As soon as the event began the Facebook event page wasn’t updated frequently anymore. I think that could be o.k. as you want to move to “faster” media during the runtime. But still updating from time to time wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
So how about their Twitter account? They had one called IPO2011. Good name as the event is called “International Poker Open”. But unfortunately this account was only used until the event had been started (mainly to inform people were and how to sign up). Then the news stream shifted to the Blog and Twitter account of the Online Poker Room who was the main sponsor.
Of course you can do this but you have to let people know in that case. Even worse, the sponsor Twitter account missed to use a proper hashtag like #ipo2011 in their tweets to get found. So all this neat information (including links to the livestreams, updateing of chipcounts, funny stories) got lost for a lot of people.
Sure, everyone who searched for it could find it. But - especially during a running event - the main goal must be to make information:
- easy to find … due to time and device restrictions
- centralized … having a single point of information that is well known
Failing here can kill your whole social media activities. Which is a real shame as they tried hard in general to offer some great stuff: having guest commentators for the twitter stream, live online video stream, offering free wireless in the whole venue area and so on.
So having a designated person to make proper plans on how to use social media for the event and have that person overlook the activties happening during that event would have been created a whole different experience for everybody. Just using the right tools (which they did) isn’t enough … you have to use them in the right way too!
If everything turns out like expected I will continue my blog here at Tumblr. Of course I won’t delete the old content. So just follow the link for posts from the old heavy-weight blog.
Maybe Tumblr is what I was looking for.
Blogging is fun … but blogging with heavy weights systems like Blogger or recently Wordpress started to get difficult for me. I don’t want to compile long articles after several days of travel anymore. I prefer to do smaller stuff shortly after it happend. Of course I need the abilty to post pictures and Videos. And yes, 140 characters is of way too short for any blogging.
So I will try how this will work out with Tumblr. I still cover the different areas Social Media, Lotus Notes, Poker & Dancing in that blog. So if you are interested just in certain parts of my blogging just use the Tags on the right (or bookmark the taglinks).
