<---click me

Ken promised only one marketing slide at the beginning to the obvious appease of all the attendees.  The business questions revolved around driving the effectiveness and responsiveness of the organization and workforce.  Composite applications are coming together, including in Notes Hannover using the Notes Rich Client platform through Eclipse.  Lotus Expeditor (need keyword to learn here) will become the framework builder in this scenario.  Enterprise content management has high end needs including very specific to departments and very general to everyone in the organization.  These include collaborative content services (Quickplace), ad-hoc and informal collaboration (Websphere Portal, Workplace Documents, Dom.Doc) all the way to structured team space services (non-IBM).  All of these are accessed with flexible UI interaction of Lotus Notes, Sametime, Portal and Microsoft Office.  Storage needs and repositories are the next logical need.  Creating such things as a Sametime plug-in to access these backend repositories are becoming a demanding need in enterprises.  Enhancements in Notes continue to help manage these storage needs.  Those are all 'traditional' access methods.

This moves us into real-time and instant ways of collaborating.  He covered the past 18 months of the Sametime path and growth into new levels.  This all leads the path to presence driven organizations.  The Sametime client is coming for Windows Mobile and Symbian to show the move into presence driven.  He also went on to say look for announcements on the RTC Gateway in a month or so.  He showed a high level architecture view of the RTC Gateway (which I will speak to later).

I can leave blogging a moment as he went into live Sametime 7.5 demos..

Ok we interrupt the demo to laugh as Ken initiates a voice chat with Mark Pagnier (IBM) and asks if Mark can hear him.  Mark answers yes...from the back of the room in the last row.  Ok, you get the humor here.

Now, how is Lotus moving from hierarchies (picture a Domino domain) to network hierarchies (picture spaghetti).  This includes virtual teams expert networks and knowledge communities.  There is a new initiative that has not been announced that is moving towards discovering the right information.  Of course, Dogear was shown to elaborate 'social bookmarking'.  Ken once used the (rhymes with 'hang high') word but I don't think I can type that anymore.

In closing, the IBM Workplace Strategy appeared on the screen including all Dynamic Workplace apps (Domino, Portal), Unified Communications (Sametime) and Collective Knowledge (upcoming).

• Walkers chips- Salt & Vinegar, Cheese & Onion, Prawn Cocktail.  While I know I like the salt and cheese option, the idea of small sea things on my chip makes me raise and eyebrow
• Hob Nobs- nice biscuits with chocolate.  Of course, they list energy on the can instead of the word calories
• Jaffa Cakes - once again sports enthusiasts seem to like the calories
• Nestle Quality Street - cool assortment of candies
• Bassett's Jelly Babies - soft jelly candies
• Hartley's Blackcurrant Jelly - cool, a new jelly (gelatin) for the kids
• Marmite - yes, spread very thin on toast and enjoy (I learned while in KC how to do it properly)
• Prince's Corned Beef - passing this one on as I don't eat beef but like the little can
• Robertson's Golden Shred - orange marmalade, darn right!
• Heinz Baked Beans and Cream of Tomato Soup - one with pop can lid and one without.  I like em both
• Cadbury huge milk chocolate bar - 250g worth.  Damn I love chocolate
• PG Tips pyramid bag teas.  This is a new "shape" in the US for teabags.  This will get well guarded and good use as I am a tea drinker
• Lastly, a comic book.  I needed some new reading as I finished off the book on the way over that I bought at the airport.

Programs That Reinvent The Wheel
This is mainly about Lotus Notes, but I think it's endemic to the Windows way of doing things. Programs are written under the assumption that there won't be a helping, friendly ecosystem to assist them when a function is called beyond their core values. As an example, Lotus 7 has an embedded version of Internet Explorer -- I can't figure out how to get it to launch an external browser (Thank God for Firefox!).  Some programs use the term Properties, others Preferences. There is no consistency across the line, and the big picture of a family of applications is not considered.

• find the administrator who has not set policies in place to control this
• learn how to use the client help file that explains this
• notice that Lotus did it right by not forcing you into some browser choices (alibi you could change it later) up front like IE, Firefox or whatever.

• Simple (if not almost automated) upgrade from version 7 to 8
• The features above from Wiliki are listed as native in 8.0 of Quickplace
• Better integration into Lotus and Microsoft
  • editing of QP content directly within Microsoft
  • Access QP from directly within Notes and Hannover
  • ODF support with integration from the IBM Productivity Tools
  • A Place Superuser access role
  • Better administrative reporting and dashboard control
  • Access content from within Sametime 7.5 chat , meeting or buddylist.  WOW
    • Transfer files from within QP right through Sametime
    • A Quickplace shelf (plug-in) for ST with even more capabilities in the screenshots
    • Subscriptions to key data like calendar, folders, what's new
    • My Places would move into folders in the inbox of your mailfile
      • Drag a mail thread right into Quickplace
      • Future mails in this thread get automatically pushed
      • A Quickplace Dashboard (we have to meet the Web 2.0 acronyms)
      • UI right click actions sensitive to users rights in the QP and context of usage
      
      Quickplace Next has even more changes in mind towards the second half of 2007
      • Backup and restore Team Spaces
      • Offline access with the rich client - Hannover
      • Desktop integration - Office and Windows Explorer
      • Solid document management capabilities
      • New blog and Feed Reader ability
      
      So how does that sum up announcements at Day 2?

• "Down to Earth" session with IBM.  Real talk, real input.  No 30,000 foot views
• live jazz from Albadeen for the welcoming reception
• "Operation Red Flag", go peek.  IMAX show of fighter pilots becoming part of a team
• The speaker introduction was funny as there was serious and then a 'little known fact' for each
• We got to see the video from the launch event happening in NYC right when we were starting the conference

• The focus is the second generation of real-time collaboration in his presentation
• IM as a vehicle for presence-driven lifestyle in organizations
• Mobile device support will be cool.  It will be extended to include as many Sametime 7.5 features as possible, like click-to-call
• He covered the RTC and how it fits into the future enterprise.  I have a whole slew of separate comments on the RTC.  Presence and voice chat are in the first release.  More functionality later, like video and file transfers
• That is where the first generation ends and we enter the second
• Open extensibility model, rich media and collaboration within and outside the organization
• David moved into a live demo of the future
• Knowing where people are is becoming just as important as knowing if they are online in this day of the mobile workforce
• Location services will move to the server side, but the client can decide to show where they are still
• Dogears was covered as Mike Rhodin has done in recent talks.  This becomes interesting in larger enterprises where the amount of data can be overwhelming.  Subscriptions to watch other's tags yields great power but can also get us into the RSS/blog issue of information overload
• Freejam, Skilltap and Broadcasting was addressed from the current ICT (IBM Community Tools) as how it will roll into the second generation

The district is involved in an ongoing process to transform its 55 high schools into small learning communities.

The 180 new tech students at Jordan High will work on project-based curriculum using computers and the Lotus Notes software.