A last minute trip to Europe for some Sametime and Sametime Gateway work means watching people at the airports using Notes and so far one Notes 8 user.  I asked if he liked it and he replied:

It is not sanctioned by my company yet, but I wanted to get the cool new stuff

  Can't blame him can we?

The guest speakers didn't make much sense at all to me for Social Software for the enterprise outside of 1

• Janine Popick, CEO of Vertical Response
• John Landau, CEO of Customer Experience at Huddle.net (UK company)
• Mike Walsh, CEO of Leverage Software

Matt Anderson of Radicati was the speaker.  After 5 slides it went to Q&A with the panelists.

• Vendors that they listed included Lotus and a slew of others I did not know offered such solutions.
• The suites are what Lotus Connections offers with some added parts like Business Intelligence
• They then have specialists that work on each part of the software itself
• The market drivers were just what you know now.  Make some teams and share some info then find people around them
• The market barriers are what you expect but easily overcome.  Compliance (US issues), deploying new technologies

Q&A section

1. What does your offering provide to set it apart from other offerings

John Landau - Current enterprise software is inside the firewall focused and Huddle is trying to get externally focused as well.  Pushing for the MySpace generation and use of social networking is growing and businesses are banning such site access to MySpace.  The Huddle tools are aimed at business users.  The low cost of Huddle was their other point of their offering
Mike Walsh - They are trying to making it easier for the business person to make and find relationships.  Taking some of the Web 2.0 items , with security and making it easier for the business worker to share information in a collaborative environment within and outside the company.

2.   What was the initial pain point that caused them to look for a social networking solution for their enterprise?
Janine Popick - They have 30K small business customers with only a small number (50) of employees.  So they are the customer experience side.  They let the customer

3. How has business social software changed how employees share information between themselves and with customers?
Janine Popick - They have an award winning blog.  Employees post more content to give them exposure.  They use Leverage as their social software choice it was said.  They also started a Facebook group with about 200 members giving product feedback.  There is a wiki in place to post documents and share information.

4.  What are some of the key factors when vendors go up against Microsoft Sharepoint in this space?
Mike Walsh - Everything is based on the needs of the users.  It varies across prospects.  He said Sharepoint, which is a great product, and Lotus Connections, which he was not familiar with, helps them find the right people for a specific person to assist with a project or prospect.  he said Sharepoint seems to be for internal collaboration behind the firewall.  he does not look as them as a competitor, but as augmentation.
Jon Landau - They are often compared to Sharepoint.  The perception he finds is that is a free tool but the TCO is incredibly high for a business.  It does well for internal collaboration.  But the idea is to bring external clients together with the inside groups and becomes costly with Sharepoint.  Kingfield is a customer of theirs, and they were looking at Sharepoint until he brought Huddle to them.

5.  What were some of the critical features that your business looked for in a social software package?
Janine Popick - They found that their customers that used their service needed different feedback.  So small groups of customer types are forming.  They are also able to push focused product release information.  Finding users "like me" on a people map and then reaching out is helping the company since they already compile a large amount of data from each customer.  Live chats are helping get feedback on what features of their product are most important.

Questions from the audience....
1.  What are the real benefits, like ROI.  These seem like a solution looking for a problem.
Janine Popick - One of the things they did when deploying was hire someone to manage the deployment.  Without someone to drive and manage this can fail.  This person also participates in the social network by watching and even generating conversations.  On a hard ROI front they know they are saving time on email and feedback processing.  Vocal people in the communities help promote what is needed without them sending out constant user surveys.
John Landau - Huddle offers the ability to share documents and work together internally and with external partners gives a tangible ROI.  If that was done by email instead, You end with multiple people looking at different versions and chasing information.  Huddle has the centralized upload, sharing and work area to set approvals and tasks, etc.
Mike Walsh - They were out as a social network platform before Facebook caught on and now everyone is clamoring for this type of application.  They work with 300 companies with different goals and needs.  ROI might be decreasing support, increasing upsell, increasing customer loyalty, getting products to market faster by getting feedback.  Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Salesforce, Time Warner, NY Times are all sample customers.  Some need projects done faster and others are using it to find hidden talent in the company.

2. Were are a small software startup with 400 partners/resellers, can you describe the benefits of utilizing the software?
Mike Walsh - They do work with smaller companies to share best practices.  Relationship building through the social network is a huge benefit.
John Landau - You are able to bring all these partners and resellers into one social network so you can all chat, talk working group and share information with branding and customization.

3. How does voice and real-time collaboration overlap with services such as the social networking vendors?  Will you follow?
John Landau - Huddle is in a position in the next few weeks to offer integrate single sign-on ability.  Web conferencing tools are also being built into the product offering.
Mike Walsh - Open architecture through widgets allows you to add features and functions even without their help.  They are partnering with companies like Webex and SalesForce, or even pulling in a Skype or Webex widget.  Also a GoToMeeting widget as they used in this conference.

4. Is there a listing comparing what these vendors offer in their social network offerings? (my question)
They will have a listing in the Radicati report

5. How do you deal with issues around compliance. (yada yada yada) ?
Janine Popick - She does have compliance issue it seems.  They use a wiki for a lot of collaboration but will be tightening up how the information is controlled.
John Walsh - needed the question repeated.  The data can be exported so it depends on the requirements of the organization.  One feature they do not have is document check-in and checkout.  Their solution has revisioning and tagging.  How it is completed and found is up to the client, such as Wells Fargo.
John Landau - The document management system saves every version of the document as it is worked on.  Their solution is geared towards compliance.  You can see date and time stamps for all edits, updates, changes and new items.

6. What is the cost for trials of these softwares?
They will send that out later or go to the websites and get some free trials.  Huddle and Leverage offer free trials.

Sara Radicati wrapped it up with not much fanfare but look for their report, of course

A short article playing on the fact of Lotus entering the office software space full force.  One part of a paragraph stood out to me

He then equates Google to the latter-day Lotus, painting a scenario where Google smugly laughs off a bloated but feature-rich (imaginary) NewSDK from a bratty startup, only to then get disrupted by this SDK when browser capabilities improve. Of course, part of the analogy breaks down because Microsoft was hardly a bratty startup when it succeeded where Lotus failed.

This article goes after the older Lotus office entry with SmartSuite I believe and not the current Symphony part Deux.  I have not said much about Symphony, there is plenty out there.  I used the Productivity Tools during Collaboration University as well as OpenOffice.  I found issues in both.  I use Microsoft Office most of the time because that is where the masses were right?  But will Symphony part Deux take over a huge slice of the MS Office world?  Not in a large percentage.  Can it assist in the SMB space that uses Lotus already?  Maybe not if they move to 8 and use the built in Productivity Tools.  So the press is behind the announcements, IBM is pushing the newswires with the announcements, people are downloading to check it out.  So how fast will Lotus update the software to match and exceed what is out there now is what remains to be seen.

It has been a while since I had wandered over to the plug-in catalog site so it was time to see what new things partners had added.  There now seems to be only 25 entries into the catalog.  A bunch of new VoIP type plug-ins are there but they require additional services to function, like servers that fit into your existing VoIP or POTS systems.  Interestingly enough, there is now quite a few alternative meeting plug-ins or add-ons for the Sametime meeting services.  I find that interesting.  Does it imply that the current Sametime meeting offering is not functional enough?

I would also have imagined that the catalog would have grown in leaps with over 100 million users out there.  I know IBM has a bunch internally that are not loose in the wild, those are the kinds of samples that help sell the product.  We need more plug-ins to show what the product can do.  Widgets are being developed across Yahoo and other IM's at a record pace, I am hoping the same shows for Sametime soon from a bunch of handy developers.

I ran across this site and pinged Carl to jump in and see what we could make of it.  There is the good and the bad.  No the bad is not this following screenshot.


So we were being silly to play around with the features.  Headsets on backwards and others.  When you use the chat room it takes a snapshot of just how you are when you click send.  So the pictures are resized too small for you to see, but Carl and missing pants is bad all around.

Good
Free video conferencing is good no matter how you slice it if it works well.  This one seemed to do just fine.  Now, we didn't get 8 people in the room, but that is next on the list.  You had the choice between hands free audio and push-to-talk type.  Both seemed to function fine.

Creating a room for the conference did not even require registration at this time.  Simply name a room and click invite and it copied the link to the clipboard.  It then uses the Flash connection for your video and audio.  No problem, worked right away for both of us.  No fuss, no mess, no firewall issues, no downloads.  The chat was, well chat.

Bad
It seemed there was a way to record but I couldn't find the button.  Chat worked fine, but needs a bit more ability.  Attaching or sending a file would be nice so everyone could talk.  It still is not a 1.0 release so I imagine more is coming.  I am curious about the bandwidth as this grows, but let's see how it plays out.

So overall, did I say it was free with no firewall issue in the tests?  No tunneling and numerous ports for AV like I got asked yesterday for Sametime

I received a ping from a Sametime admin/company/user with a question regarding the limit in the number of slides per set you can upload to 7.5.1.  Apparently after 100 it would not allow the slides to be uploaded.  So some hunting around came up with this little bit of info for all of you to try out in case you are having 7 hour meetings with hundreds of slides.  Oh the pain of that type of meeting...

You can work around this issue by either creating a presentation of fewer than 100 slides or by not selecting the Master Slide option in PowerPoint.

We have seen the failed attempts for BumbleBee and even a follow-up Sametime meeting option.  Well today I read the press release from the Collaboration Summit and enjoyed the part on the Productivity Tools Symphony.  Even with the nice icons and the word free

Then came the part that really caught my eye:

Applications on Demand for Lotus Notes - making Lotus Notes 8 as a service enterprise level application hosting.

Available now, IBM's Application on Demand service provides customers with the benefits of the Lotus suite without having to invest in computing assets or skills.  This new offering provides Lotus collaboration customers with a hosted and managed environment for their mail and collaborative applications, helping improve the performance of their messaging environments while enhancing efficiencies and productivity.....  (yada yada here).  Applications on Demand for Lotus Notes currently support Lotus Sametime and Lotus Quickr, and will be extended to other Lotus collaboration products over time.

There is a slew of issues with this:

• One of which is the direct competition with the few business partners that offer this service on the Lotus arena
• Secondly is the whole architecture on how they intend to do this by license costs.  Where partners would pass license costs along in this type of model, Lotus seems to be undercutting that also since they of course have no license costs in essence.
• Third, how do you fit into the giant certification tree and also with the need for multiple client access.  The previous attempt in R5 for the ASP model, was not successful.  Where has the back-end Domino code changed to allow the proper provisioning and billing controls?  Does everyone get their own root level certifier?
• How are they going to offer multi-tenant Sametime services?
• Wow, this might just be a web access type offering with the new DWA faster (DWA-r) coming in that same press release

I need to read more on how this will be bundled but I did not see that information released yet.

In 2006, spam size increased at a dramatic rate caused by an increase in image spam. By February of 2007, spam size peaked at over 400% of what it had been in January of 2006. After the February 2007 peak, a decline in image spam caused a decline in the spam size growth. However, the summer has reversed that trend with an increase of spam with pdf and xls attachments. During the three days between August 6-8, 2007, we experienced another upsurge in total spam size, up 67% (in the peak of the three day period) from August 1. This was primarily due to a massive pump and dump scam that used a pdf file attachment.

Viruses also had an increase with the largest outbreak in over 2 years just happening in August 2007.

You can find it right here..

Sean Burgess and I are working on a top secret project together, ok that is strong but it will be fun, and we created a new Domino blank database.  I created it with a Notes 8 Standard client on a Domino 8 server.  He accessed the server with a Notes 8 Designer client.  Now the weird part.

I couldn't remember, and didn't bother checking, what hierarchical name he used in his id so I simply entered Sean Burgess as unspecified into the ACL.  He could not get in the database.  I changed it to type person and added his O certifier and he got in fine.  Wondering what gives here as this might have other implications for us in multi-tenant cross-certified environments.

It might just be me, but is that a test to show off DWA8 to users that may not have seen it or to provide a new email address?  How long will data be kept?  Is there a max quota?  Is this a hint to come of what we will see again at Lotusphere 2008?  Inquiring minds wanna know..

Dear Lotus Greenhouse members, we are excited to announce Lotus Greenhouse will have an entirely new look and feel, improved user experience and additional functionality. We will be upgrading Lotus Greenhouse over this weekend with a new and improved user experience, we invite you to come and see what we've added.  https://greenhouse.lotus.com

Also coming soon will be the addition of Lotus Domino Web Access 8.  You will soon be able to send and receive email experiencing the features of DWA via Lotus Greenhouse,
Lotus Greenhouse Team

https://greenhouse.lotus.com

I decided to do this podcast in video as a screen capture of me working through the Glance.net site and how it compares to Sametime.  Plus, what else I think is wrong with it. I really don't even want to link them.....

You can play the file (without iTunes download) from right here

Palo Alto, CA - September 12, 2007 - The Radicati Group, Inc.'s latest study, "Corporate IT Survey - Messaging and Collaboration, 2007-2008," finds that Security, Reducing downtime and Compliance are the top priorities for businesses in 2007.

Reducing downtime was another strong priority, indicating that products still have a way to go to meet mission-critical business requirements.

While most organizations still deploy insourced email solutions, the study shows that hosted e-mail made up one-third of messaging system deployments surveyed, as 29% of survey respondents outsourced at least part of their messaging system in 2007.

We hope this hosted and outsourced management keeps rolling.  We take care of both the downtime concerns, management, backup, network, administration, well the whole thing.

So yesterday I covered the basics but today it is time to point something else out.  The directory source you use is built from a local text file.  You do not point to a live LDAP source and there is no option but to use the local Cloudscape data store for the pilot install.  This means that it is truly meant as a test pilot.  It does generate some questions at this point in the game.  In my podcast (Episode 38) the Connections product managers and myself covered the fact that there was a migration ability of data to full production.

• But what about the document created under the test names?
• Who has access to the past data when the user accounts change?
• How do I change access from a test account to a production account?
• How do I map the profiles to the live users?

Here is the format for the user scripts.


Humorously they only place 8 test digits in the mobile field.  Not sure how many of you have something other than 7 or 10 in the US, but 8 is a nice number too.

Right before vacation, I did the pilot install for Lotus Connections 1.0.1.  It ran a few hours, with a few simple clicks.  It ate up about 4GB of diskspace overall when the install was complete.  They did make it a single "cd" install, which was nice.  I didn't tweak any properties files, any text changes or have to do a raindance of any kind.

They did make some of the normal mistakes that I saw in the Sametime Gateway with the path choices.  You can pick and choose if you want all 5 of the Connections parts installed or the whole thing.  I went for the whole thing

 Here is the screenshot showing what gets installed with the single cd pilot option.


Overall, impressive.

I see some of the guest bloggers were scared or forgot.  No matter, plenty to cover.

I interview the two Lotus Connections product managers, Suzanne Minassian and Ted Stanton, on the new version 1.0.1 plus what is coming in 1.0.2. Suzanne gives us two case studies to see how enterprises are utilizing Lotus Connections

Today's podcast brought to you by The View's Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Upgrade Seminar - early bird saving expire soon

Links for today's shownotes:

• Lotus Connections homepage
• Ted Stanton's blog on Developerworks
• Lotus Greenhouse

Music today is Beat Under Control from Stockholm, Sweden via Magnatune

Hello all-
Iread with much interest all comments about DDM, in response to my (previously published) article.  I can only say that I fully agree with all these comments and I hope that this post will make things even clearer.

DDM is for sure an improvement and IBM kept improving the monitoring of Domino since version 4.  Some DDM features are very useful and a few of them cannot be provided by any other product, including ours.

My article is actually not only regarding the benefits of DDM, Admins can judge by themselves about its value.  What I can hardly understand is the marketing made by IBM around DDM.  Was there so little to say about new features in Notes 7 that IBM chose to present DDM as a revolutionery product ?  I do not question the value of DDM but all Admins having worked with Notes since R4 know that DDM is mainly a revamp of existing features.
I'm also surprised by IBM's plans of releasing a major release yearly.  In my opinion, a major release must provide significant enhancements and new features.  Fixing such deadlines leads to a very strange situation where 4 different versions of  Notes are maintained, including the version 6.5 which nobody knows whether it can be considered as a major version or not.

The ones having discussed with me know that I'm a strong advocate of Notes for many years. However, I agree with Philip's comment about IBM competing with it's partners and I'll add that I'm puzzled by the lack of long term strategy in this company.   I'd prefer that IBM spends its energy fighting with its competitors, not its partners.  OK, I'll stop now before IBM people get mad at me once again.

Back to DDM, I don't like the design of this product:
1)  It bypasses some standard Notes concepts, which is unacceptable to me:
- automated replication
- relies on Notes when it's supposed to monitor it
2) almost all information is not real time (unacceptable for a monitoring product)
3) it's mainly server based with all related drawbacks:
- resources taken from servers and possible crashes
- problems with heterogeneous environments (versions of monitoring code and servers)
4) real useful features are in my opinion reserved to skilled users

Comparing to Monitor:
1) Monitor doesn't have any of the drawbacks listed above
2) Monitor provides major additional features and supports other platforms (clusters, Sametime, BlackBerry, etc ... and soon Exchange)

In conclusion, I agree with someone's comment that DDM can be useful as a entry level monitoring tool but falls short for monitoring large (or critical) environments.  As far as being a revolution in the Notes world ... let's be serious a minute, it's not.  The real revolution happened about 20 years ago when the concepts of replication, UNID, certificates and views were put together to create Notes.

BTW - nice to see that quite a few people also use our products :-)

Kind regards
Philippe

Philippe Schlier
CITS - EMEAI
E-mail : pschlier@gsx.net
__________________________
GSX Groupware Solutions
Web site : http://www.gsx.net

So be warned that the postings made this week are not necessarily those of the blog owner... I hold no responsibility for what they might say or topic they might raise...  and if you wish to engage them in friendly banter, please do so.