This threw me off as Gabriella and I were talking today.  I wanted to screenshare something for her in Lotus Foundations and was about to fire up a Sametime meeting when I said, I wonder what Skype has?  Well low and behold it has Sametime Unyte in it.  For free I say.

Arthur Fontaine gets on the phone to discuss one of the big Lotusphere 2008 announcements:

• Lotus Protector
• The Gartner announcement

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I posted this at my alter blog but it sure consolidates a lot of my efforts quite nicely.  It is lighter than Trillian Astra, at this point, which is a nice touch also.  Take a peek and grab the beta.

For all of you looking for a provider for Lotus Foundations, I have the person for you that is one of the first IBM Lotus Foundations partners.  So yes you can buy and wrap your own services/installation or simply point them over for purchases.  Drop me a comment here or email if you need immediate info until their press release goes out today. (I just got the ok to say it first!).  I am happy to be working with them in this new SMB opportunity

Here is the IBM quote of the acquisition IBM completed for Foundations:

IBM has completed the acquisition of Net Integration Technologies Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based, privately held company that offers a complete business server software solution for small businesses that is simple and easy to maintain. IBM will launch a new line of products and solutions for small to medium-businesses called IBM Lotus Foundations that incorporates both Net Integration and IBM technology. Added to the IBM Lotus Software family, IBM Lotus Foundations will provide an all-in-one collaboration platform including e-mail, file management, directory services, firewall, backup and recovery and office productivity tools. Through IBM Lotus Foundations, businesses can also access "Bluehouse," a new software-as-a-service offering from IBM that links companies together in a virtual enterprise to help them gain the scale and strength of larger organizations.

You can catch the posting from their own site here, but the following image shows what they offer

Interesting since it was a workstation...  with an upgrade happening  ..from Notes 8.0

Well this turned out to be a posting that generated a slew of pings, Skype hits, a phone call and then some more Skype calls.  We should all thank Gabriella as she upgraded a server and got the catalog alive even with a firewall failure.

So navigate a connection document to the following: (note some of you have this already due to the Lotusphere Sessions database)

Tranquility/TurtlePublic
lotusphere.turtleweb.com   or download.turtleweb.com

You will find the database on the root.  We started playing around by adding a couple, even with about 20 I have now.  But let's get to building and please fill out as much info as you can.

NEWS: I don't know how much I am supposed to say now but the widget catalog is about to grow in other ways.  Picture not just widgets, but plug-ins also.  Take all that and wrap it with some things you saw announced at Lotusphere, replicate it to numerous mirrors, shake well and give a slamming UI to it for web as well as Notes access.  Bam!  You have a super-duper public catalog.  All without the headache of IBM legal seeing over everything in their current on-line catalogs.  Which isn't bad, it just means we can grow this fast!

Well there is not much surprise I hope.  Using a little hobby of mine with some RFID books and kits, I was able to pull apart the RFID tags from Lotusphere and see what they stored.  You know most of the stuff as you supplied it right to them.  Anything you put on the registration was on the tag:

• badge id number
• name
• address
• title
• phone number
• email address
• primary industry
• job level
• number of employees
• company need
• attendee type

So then it all gets put into a database when we walk through the scanner.  If you poked in and out of a session, it grabbed you both times.  I can't quite see how Lotus could tell when someone was leaving versus coming in during that time of change between sessions, so there must be some form of cutoff.  So have no fear, I am watching you  :-)

Working with the wonderful Gabriella at Turtle Partnership, we decided to publish the widget catalog since everyone seems excited.  It is public access so everyone can go crazy to get widgets.  We will work on a way to add them in there shortly.  Just email them over for now.

The connection record you need is for download.turtleweb.com which contains the Widget Catalog shortly.  This will be a great way to start sharing all the great widgets we find and create.

Chris & Gab

From Twitter to weather to LiveTV gadgets from Google, we are dead...

If you follow my Lotus Support Mega RSS Feed that I created for all of you (including widgets) then you would have caught this.  If not...  here

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 (including Lotus Domino Web Access and Lotus Notes Traveler) are now available to address issues and provide new features. The following document contains important resources to assist you with your upgrade to Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1.

I managed to get a couple more in to the podcast stream from the unauthenticated Lotusphere podcasts.  I am trying to add one or two a day until done, but there is a lot.  See yesterday's posting for the iTunes link or the widgets

UPDATE: I added a few more (so they might all get there eventually with help)
Had Lotus done this right, then this is how it would have looked and worked. I don't have the time to finish the whole thing, but read and see the following:


You simply click this link if you have iTunes --->   click me

you click this link if you don't - -->  click me

Here it is in all it's glory.. now to see what they recorded, quick before this goes away!

Bruce made a posting on this and I had a commented that I hesitated making a full blog posting until the site grew in usage some.  But today I received another email from IBM that they were shutting down the site today and to hurry over.  Well I hurried over, to see only 44 postings total in the site.

So I jumped back a page to get the push of what the site was supposed to do.  Ahh, create topics for work between IBM and the Business Partners.  There was an interesting amount of topics around IBM and green initiatives in there.  The rest were scattered.  So my thought it that IBM had this set for a fixed time to build up some quick ideas and then work on those.  Only 7 of the ideas had a catalyst take them on as a project.  Here, this screenshot describes it better.


So I say the idea to have the idea exchange was valiant, but not enough people knew of it or took part to make any difference.  Forcing it out of existence this quick also stops ideas from growing.  This was not a brainstorm site, a discussion board can't live one week like that unless everyone is spending each day in there.  If you have an IBM partner id then go take a look.

Without breaking any form of NDA, I am looking at the homepage, so everyone breathe.  I mentioned this before, when you have a brand image, you try and never change the image in an amazingly different way.  Look at Pepsi, Coke, Kleenex.  They all look the same over the test of time.  So notice how Bluehouse refers to Sametime in the image below.  That isn't your 8 icon staring you in the face.

Adam, Carl and some others have posted on the new videos for installing the Sametime Gateway.  I went through the first 5 videos here at lunch and already see a couple errors and omissions.  Careful...

No, I am not going to clarify them here on the blog.  Maybe I am in a bad mood today but after much hard work on the book and then the hands-on and BP sessions at Lotusphere, having something like this come out with errors gets to me some.

A good business move in my eyes and thought.  The announcement first:

WebMessenger, Inc., an enterprise mobile messaging software and services company, today announced they have opened up free downloads of their market proven WebMessenger Mobile IM clients as well as free business-class IM service for mobile professionals who use BlackBerry, MS Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm PDAs and smartphones. The free IM service provides single client access to AIM, Google, MSN, Skype, and Yahoo.

So why is this good?  There is only a couple consolidated IM clients for the Blackberry and none were free that worked well.  Sure, each IM provider made their own, but having an all in one makes perfect sense.  Then they get you to move up and pay for the Alerts program and other parts for Sametime and Jabber.  Business move at it's finest.

Without us even talking this weekend, Carl beat me to the posting in how he is handling Facebook activity. I think some of our too reasons are different, but the end result is the same.

With all the different place to update, it could be time consuming.  Many of you that are listed as friends on Facebook notice I have moved to having other feeds update Facebook.  I do get on and still accept friends when requested, but past that there is no value that exists there that I haven't already built on other networks.  The idea of Facebook moves along of developers making applications to keep you in there more without providing business benefit.  Sure, sure, find business contacts and create some groups.  I will make you a list of sites doing it.  Discover old classmates.  Have you been to your high school reunion?  Right.

So please feel free to keep adding me as a friend on there, I will gladly accept.  Many of you find that is the place you want to get all your updates.  I accept that and feed right into it from many sites as you can see.


Then all of the status updates are fed from multiple sources so I can post once , feed all.  Feedburner handles a mega feed from Jaiku that has most all my feeds wrapped into one.  Data ownership plays a huge roll in this and there is some good news coming from that shortly.

Thoughts from anyone?  I am not exiting Facebook, just providing alternate ways that it gets updated.

Here is a quick animated gif cutout of another social networking site that has an alternative way (outside of searching) to add friends and create groups and relationships.  I just like this approach for users to gain interest and also use the idea of face recognition as well as profile information if necessary.

I created a Google gadget of this also but I am piping my LotusChannels Jaiku feed into Dapper to make some widgets and gadgets. Then we can toss this into the Notes 8.0.1 widget sidebar and viola!
Note that you select which technote you want and click the twisty to have it slide open to see more of the entry

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Mike Rhodin sits down with the bloggers soon after the Opening General Session at Lotusphere 2008 to cover a wide array of topics that each blogger got to ask on the fly with no questions known in advance by Mike in this second annual edition (to catch last year's visit IdoNotes Episode 26):

• Lotus Connections
• What Mike finds disruptive in the workplace (and you might find this one interesting)
• Mike highlights a couple items they could not fit into the Opening General Session
• Lotus and it's attempt to enter the hosted world with Bluehouse. At 13:20 (or so) Mike states that Bluehouse has a long way to go, jump in and listen with Everyzing on my podcast tab.
• How do we push Lotus education courses into the local tech colleges and schools?
• Mike made his Superbowl XLII pick, see if he was correct
• Where are the "Add to Lotus" toolbars on the web?
• How did Lotus fare against the competitors this year?
• When will Lotus update and give away a set of killer templates?
• Another Bluehouse followup and SAAS within Lotus
• How will Lotus leverage the social aspect of the community?

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Looks like I will be in the greater NJ/NY area with Tue night open for a geek dinner.  I will be staying toward Secacus, NJ and don't want to stray far with the work I have to get done, so let me know if anyone is interested in a comment here, Twitter or better yet email.