B's Blog

Hey there, did anyone attend the Lotus Mashups online webinar today? I'm not sure what to really think about the new Lotus Mashups, it seems like a cool idea but still a little to complicated for the average business user. Also, I think there may be a concern around opening up backend information for users to access. It seems to me that everything would have to be locked down and read-only for Mashups to be truly accepted by IT organizations, yet part of the reason that Mashups could be very powerful would be the ability to interface and change the data that is stored in systems such as SAP. It's a toss up to me as to how useful Mashups will actually be without changing backend data, but in the same respect how many IT organizations will actually trust their business users to access and change this data? I guess we'll see how it all plays out in the next year or so.

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B

Hey everyone, sorry it's been so long but between my 1st and 2nd jobs as well as the passing of my first anniversary, it's been awhile since I've really even had time to think about blogging. But anyway, there are a lot of exciting things happening with the proof of value we've been doing at work, our Product Development crew is really taking to these tools, so it will be exciting to see what develops from that. Our team has had a chance to just sit back and watch this develop, but we've also been looking for tools to add to the suite of tools, which includes RSS and other such tools. So we will see how this all plays out, and for those who are currently using Connections 2.0, I'm jealous.....

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B

 I don't understand why it is so difficult for a vendor to make their software interact with other software they create! Why can't they integrate their software so that it is easier for people to install and configure? We are trying to install the Sametime plug-in to interact with our Connections install so that people can just go straight to Connections from Sametime. But for some reason, either the Connection server isn't setup or properly or an LDAP config isn't in place because all that gets returned to sametime is "CN - A profile does not exist for this person." All I know, is that when I go to Connections a profile definitely exists for the person, so I'm not sure why this is so difficult. Anyone else use this plug-in and see similar issues, or better yet, has anyone seen the issue and resolved it?

 

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B

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!

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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.

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B

So yesterday was the first time that I did I live blog from an event, and I have to admit that it was quite exciting to do. IBM was putting on a workshop for Connections to key advocates in our business units, and I had a running blog going on the different business initiatives that could benefit from social software. It was really very interesting to see the different business units declare their use cases, and actually there was a lot of overlap between many of the business units, including Marketing and IS as well as Product Development and IS.

It will be very exciting to see the social software develop over the POV, and into the Pilot program.

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B

So in an interesting discovery today, I noticed a strangely coincidental correlation between clicks in Connections and massive spikes in CPU usage, ranging from a 10% to an 80% spike. It was rather strange to see my clicks correlate 90% of the time with the spikes that showed on the CPU meter. Now granted we're running Connections on a single core at 3.33 Ghz and 3.75 mb of ram on a VM, but nonetheless, I would have expected a little bit better performance out of the beast. The thing that concerns me the most, is that I was the only one clicking anything on the entire site! We haven't even started the POV yet, so I'm a little concerned that the load may be too much for this little VM. We will see I suppose......

On a related note, don't try to start all the Connections services via a script at once, it looks painful to see the CPU spiked at 100% for so long and to see the page file sit at 3.80 GB.......kind of crazy. Anyway, time to go workout, I'm done with Connections for now......

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B 

Hey everyone, it's been awhile since I last blogged, but a lot has been happening. We have been researching a lot of different things, including Enterprise Search with IBM's OmniFind tool, blogging front ends to link to multiple blogs, and finishing the branding of Connections. Given that we aren't a Notes shop (I know, I know....) we were going to try and use Microsoft Word to post blogs. Unfortunately, even though it's setup using the MetaWeblog API, it still for some reason does not want to connect via that API......has anyone else run into this issue?

After visiting Lotusphere, I've come to the conclusion that if this were a perfect world, then everything would be able to integrate with one another and people would be able choose whether they like the Notes interface or the Outlook interface. The office interface or the symphony interface. Why is it so dang hard to get things to work with another? Is it for the same reason that it's difficult to get certain people to work with one another? Hmmm.......a never-ending battle for teamwork.....BTW, has anyone successfully gotten the integration between Outlook and Sametime to work??? It really likes to crash on the two systems we've been testing with...Oh well......maybe Sametime 8.0 will resolve the issue...

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B

Hey everyone, been a little while since I have had the chance to actually blog. So finally, after much fuss, we figured out that we had to manually add the Sametime server to a config file within Connections in order for the Sametime presence awareness to actually work. At least I believe that was what needed to be done, so much stuff happened over a short period of time that it is difficult to remember all the changes that needed to be made to make it happen. But beyond that, after the Sametime presence stuff was taken care of, I got around to beginning the branding, which is a very fun aspect to setting up Connections. Lucky for me, Chris from Lotus911 made this site look so fantastic that I was able to get in contact with him for some advice with the branding (thanks Chris!). Anyway, the branding is going in nicely, a few quirks here and there but overall starting to look good. I like that everything is just CSS, it makes things much easier.

In other (personal) news, my band is playing at the Rave in Milwaukee on March 7th, so if any of you Milwaukee Bleeders want to come see a bunch of rock/metal bands play in the Supernova battle of the bands, hit me up and I can get you tix! Other than that, just the same old same old, looking forward to getting the show done and getting the chance to actually finish up season 3 of Lost with my wife. That's about it for now.

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B

So something I'm starting to realize, tagging should be included in everything that can be tagged. It's such an important part of not only searching for relevant anything, it's a part of self expression. It doesn't distinguish between documentation and people, and I think that is often an important (and overlooked) detail about searching for information. Not only do you want to search for relevant documentation on the subject that you are looking for, but it does ya one better! It finds the people who are related to that information, whether it be the person who wrote the documentation or someone else who is an expert in the area!

How many of you struggle with Expertise location in your business? Do you have a central repository where all your documentation is located, or is it scattered all over your virtual environment? I know we struggle with that on a daily basis. Thank God that someone is doing something to at least start in the direction of expertise/knowledge location. Enter Lotus Connections (*clap*clap*clap*). Now for tight integration with a wiki (hopefully soon), so we can search tags across both Connections and Wikis.

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B

So we are evaluating different Wiki software for integration with our Connections suite. Up until this point, we had been using DekiWiki, but we want something that is an officially supported integration point for Connections. Has anyone been using these either of these in conjunction with a Connections install? If so, what features do you like about your specific scenario? Which one is harder to get up and running and which offers a more rich feature set? I know these are pretty vague questions, but any insight into these two software options would be very helpful and extremely appreciated.

I do have to say though, we are very excited about the potential behind Connections in conjunction with both a wiki as well as a forum software. Offering a suite of tools gives users so much flexibility in regards to creativity that it will help them to come up with ever more imaginative ways to innovate. Or at least that's the hope anyway

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B

So we have all 5 Connections installed and running, but.........the fun is yet to come. We are trying to get the presence awareness to work in the Profiles section of 1.0.2, but it loves to hate us!!!! Some of IBM's best are working to resolve the issues we are running into, but it's definitely tough going right now. I do have to say though, I'm really looking forward branding this Connections install. I do have a question though.

HAS ANYONE GOTTEN CONNECTIONS AND SAMETIME TO ACTUALLY PLAY NICE?!!?!?!!?

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B

Getting ramped up here at the end of the week, next week we will be installing our first 1.0.2 version of Connections for R&D in the Harley-Davidson environment. This is a pretty exciting prospect given the rather conservative way that Harley-Davidson has always done things. Thanks to Chris W., I have a place to start with the branding and color scheming, which will be very fascinating to work with. I look forward to having a solid installation to work with on about Wed. of next week, and we will see where it goes from there.

Some of the features that we are most excited about:

Profiles - finally having a place to have expertise location as defined by the individual!!!!!
Dogear - no more losing bookmarks after a profile rebuild, and finally a place that everyone can share bookmarks!
Sametime Integration - Presence awareness will be a very, very nice feature
Profile Cards - I can't wait to experiment with placing the profile card in all the other internal systems!!!

Anyway, those are a few of the things that our group is the most excited about, other than the 2.0 version of Connections!!!

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B

I'm loving what I'm seeing at Lotusphere 2008 down here in Orlando, and it's only Monday. I'm in the keynote right now, but I love being able to still write a blog while watching Maureen demo Domino designer!! We've already had jumpstart sessions for Connections as well as Sametime and the information that we've gained has caused me to want to go back to my hotel room and work on our systems!!! Loving what you're doing Lotus!! Thanks Lotus 911 for this awesome website, Bleed Yellow rocks!!!

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B