B's Blog

So I've read a couple things recently regarding the virtual workforce and I am very interested to see how this develops throughout the next 5 years. With the rising gas prices and "Go Green" movement that seems to be sweeping the nation, there is going to be a big push to cut down on the driving that occurs on a daily basis in the US. I believe that these are the reasons that businesses will be pushing towards virtualizing their workforces. Also, I believe that the business professionals themselves will push to be able to work from home. There are many benefits to working from home, both for users and for businesses. The first and most obvious benefit (in my opinion) is the reduced travel costs. The amount saved in gas costs alone will help boost the economy and give people a better sense of financial security. Another obvious benefit is time spent traveling. They say that in any city, you can get to anywhere in 20 minutes. Well, having lived in a city for the last 5 years, that's not exactly true. The average professional spends anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours everyday traveling to and from work. That is 40 minutes to 4 hours every single day that is wasted in the car! Boy, I can just imagine what I could do with an extra hour every day......the point is, virtualizing the workforce could be very beneficial to businesses, people and the environment. I'll definitely be the first in line to volunteer for that!

Signing off,
B

So I have some candid feedback on what I think Connections does great, and what I think is lacking. First I'll start with the things that it does great.

This software offers 5 different services all from the same sight. It's a combination of MySpace, Del.icio.us, and Blogger with a few extra features. Now granted it doesn't offer everything that the combination of those services has, but it does offer them the possibility of interacting together, which is really cool. The profiles may not be as customizable as a MySpace profile, but you can tag yourself and create your own content, which is more difficult to find in a profiling system than one might think. Dogear is pretty much the coolest thing since sliced bread, given that you can not only have your own personal dogears but you can also have dogears that are relevant to a specific group of people (aka a Community).

As far as the features that are not available in the Connections product (1.0.2, after having gone to Lotusphere '08 I know they are adding some of the features I'm about to list). One of the biggest drawbacks (for us personally), is the lack of an integrated wiki. We would like to have a Wiki that can be searched through Connections, not through the wiki's own search function. Also, the lack of a forum complete with the ability to poll is also a missing feature. Polling is a great way to get feedback, and unfortunately is not a feature of this release. It also seems that Communities in general is lacking much depth, the only thing you can really do as of right now is share bookmarks and feeds.

All in all, Lotus Connections offers up a great many services in one easy to use interface, I think that a few more versions of this will offer the features mentioned above and will definitely make IBM and Lotus the leader in the social software market.

Signing off,
B

So I'm doing a little a poll, and I'm looking to see what other companies are using in respect to app deployment. The major players out there right now seem to be Microsoft's SMS/Softgrid system as well as IBM's Tivoli Provisioning Manager software. Novell is also a key player is this realm. So, if any of you read this, please respond via comment or shoot me an email as I am curious to the different app deployment environments people are using. Please include:

• App Deployment Software
• Company Industry
• Company Size

Thanks for taking the time everyone!

Signing off,
B