KnowledgeForward

I’m done with my Lotusphere postings for now.  I posted my notes from days 1, 2, and 3 in this blog and described what I saw in the Innovation Lab and my overall impressions at the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

Make sure you also check out the personal blogs from my teammates Guy Creese, Mike Gotta, and Karen Hobert who also had good posts on Lotusphere.

I’ll leave you with this final shot of the orchestra onstage playing Kashmir for the opening session.

I’m headed to the airport now (so no day 4+ postings from me), but here’s what I heard at the Social Computing Keynote before leaving Lotusphere.

Social Computing Keynote

I’ve noticed that Web 2.0 zealots often distinguish themselves by their evangelical zeal, tying broad sweeps of history to the fundamental nature of man; characterizing social software not as just something you should do, but something that people inherently yearn for, like democracy.  Look through these Web 2.0 binoculars and you can see coming a tidal wave of Facebooking, twittering young millenials that will crash upon the shores of the Enterprise, destroying existing siloed structures and washing old, unprepared, beached whales away.

I consider myself a Web 2.0 advocate, although not a zealot.  Learning how to apply these principles to existing structures will be the key to successful adoption for organizations that are not able to blow up what they have and start again.  This keynote on social computing worried me a bit at first by starting way up in the clouds (more like in the stratosphere), but then got closer to reality, and eventually poked a little fun at empty rhetoric and brought it down safely to Earth.

But first, Jeff Schick started out at the stratospheric level.  Phrases washed over me such as “Collaboration is how we hunted and raised villages” … “we collaborate better than any other animal” (actually I think ants may have us beat and they don’t complain as much) … “the forward march of civilization” … “epic sagas helped us to transmit knowledge over time” … “we transcend time and distance as we work together”

Whew!  But just when the oxygen was getting a little thin up there he started bringing it closer to Earth.  He talked about the need to have a common repository across content management and collaboration, alluding to some upcoming integration with FileNET. 

Next he brought up a set of customers to bring the higher level goals down to real life with good examples of how pilot programs for Notes, Quickr, and Connections can make a real difference. These are new products, so it’s hard to establish a track record quite yet, but these were useful examples including Teach for America, Bank of New York Mellon, Rheinmetal, and Colgate-Palmolive.

Then came Innovation Idol.  It was a cute way to give a few over the top humorous examples of social computing followed by some real demos of business-relevant functionality. 

I think that since Microsoft stumbled with KN, Lotus really has a point they can hammer home about actual, delivering social computing products.  They did a good job of this at the conference and in this keynote, spanning the high-level guru talk that some people still need to hear and the practical applications that others now need.

Here’s what I heard through the filter of what was interesting (or lovably quirky) to me:

General Session

They started out by seriously overestimating the degree of stimulation I am accustomed to at 7:45am. There was a full (about 35+ piece) orchestra plus 7 piece rock band blaring away at songs like Kashmir (Led Zeppelin). They were very good and high energy, but it was a bit too early for me to appreciate that.

Bob Costas

• Used sports (steroids in baseball, Chinese Olympics) to make his point about finding knowledge in the data, getting past information overload by finding the pertinent information

Mike Rhodin

• Mike spoke for the first minute in front of an enormous asterisked phrase stating legalize about “product plans are subject to change …”
• Talked about the types of collaboration as document, people-centric, and community-centric. He then proceeded to play a winning game of buzzword bingo. In fact, the whole morning was buzzword compliant (innovation, composite application, web 2.0, knowledge management, attention management, etc.). I can’t complain though - I use those buzzwords too and he did a good job describing them and putting them in an IBM context (oh yeah, “context” - another favorite buzzword of the morning)
• Mike got applause when talking about going beyond search to discovery. As Mike said, search tells you what you knew to ask for; discovery tells you what you didn’t know
• Announced an IBM+RIM partnership

Dr. Vishal Sikka

• Dr. Sikka is the CTO of SAP and he came out to announce SAP business suite integration with Notes (project Atlantic)
• This replaces the templates that were available since 6.5. Cons: this costs $$$. Pros: supports newest versions of Notes and ERP and it’s supported

Alistair Rennie

• Talked about Notes being ported to Ubuntu and Mac (the public beta begins “now”)
• Domino 8.5 enhancements will include:
• ID management in a server vault
• Opening Domino directory layer
• An attachment store that eliminates redundant files (as 3rd party vendors have been providing up until now)
• Lotus protector for e-mail security (an appliance that does anti-spam)
• Domino designer 8.5 based on Eclipse and Xpeditor
• A class browser in Domino Designer (this got whoops and yahoo’s from the audience)

Kevin Cavenaugh

• Described Lotus Symphony as important because it lets a company move from supporting commodity software to letting it spend on innovation
• Beta 4 in February of Symphony will add programmability
• Brazillian vendor Totvs, which works with Notes to provide ERP, includes Symphony so now their users don’t even need Windows

Bruce Morse

• In 2008 they will add Sametime advanced (expertise location, which he called “skill tap”) and unified telephony (demoed calling to a single number that can be forwarded)
• Sametime persistent chat and file sharing will be added, blurring the line with collaborative workspaces

Larry Bowden

• Claims to have #1 portal marketshare (IDC and Gartner say so). I’ve found marketshare numbers for portal to be increasingly sketchy as it’s uncertain how to count free and bundled licenses (like Oracle Portal and Windows SharePoint Server). I don’t doubt it though - they’ve done very well with WebSphere Portal Server (WPS)
• Talked about the seven accelerators they’ve added to WPS
• Completed integration of Google gadgets
• Today announcing integration with Cognos, Business Objects, and Hyperion
• Next (2q this year) will be mashups and Total Forms
• Demoed Ajax capabilities (instant open comment field, drag and drop) and dashboard framework with drilldowns

Jeff Schick

• Jeff had the most guru-like speech, starting out by talking about the movement of collaboraiton from smoke signals to Usenet to Prodigy
• IBM will deliver combined enterprise content management (ECM) + collaboration. Filenet P8 and IBM CM8
• V2 will include attention management, which seemed to include creating a personalized homepage. Irene Grief is an IBM’er that I interviewed in the research for my attention management document. I found her very knowledgeable and she seems to have had a positive impact. It’s tough to address a concept so broad in a product suite, so I’ll be interested in getting more details
• Did a demo that showed where to focus attention across a social network. Also showed Atlas, which analyzes your social network (like the now-dormant Microsoft Knowledge Network)
• Talked about mashups as a way to easily create desktop apps, bring functionality the last mile, and implied end-user personalization with saying the “P” word
• Announced Lotus Mashups, a browser based mashup tool
• Demoed dragging organization feed onto an org map. Added salary data layer. Also showed connecting 2 wdigets by name so that clicking in one changes the data in the other.

Mike Rhodin

• To the strains of the symphony playing “Fanfare for the Common Man” by Copeland, Mike announced the Lotus Foundations for SMB. Interesting choice of music - not sure if SMB’s see themselves as the common man versus Rocky or rising stars. The Net Integration Technologies acquisition fits in here.
• He also referred to Steve Jobs’ reveal of the new Mac when pulling out an appliance-like server for Domino
• He ended by announcing an extranet SaaS product called Bluehouse for smaller businesses with less than 500 employees

Websphere Portal Technical Overview

Stefan Liesche

• WebSphere Portal 6.1 beta has been out since Sept. 29th and in December was refreshed to beta 2. A few more betas to go before release
• Gave great description of what a portal is. I still hear so many batty definitions that it’s nice to hear it described properly
• Listed Mashups among the things that portals consume. Interesting - I see them as more complementary composite application creation mechanisms rather than something to be consumed by a portal
• He used the “e” word: ecosystem. This is a term many vendors are using now to talk about the set of things around the product itself that enable its success (in the market or for the implementer) such as 3rd party vendors, community, systems integrators, etc.
• Enhanced openness: Access to web, mobile devices, expeditor, and REST (as a service such as one that could describe navigation in a portal, or to a feed reader)
• Briefly talked about the accelerators for WebSphere Portal: self-service, industry, collaboration, content, dashboard, learning, enterprise suite, process
• Lotus connections portlets, Quickr (blogs, wikis, forums), development through composite apps and drag&drop, standards support (AJAX, REST, ATOM, DOJO), semantic tags for dynamic menus
• Client side aggregation is about breaking apart the single page at a time model. Using web 2.0 technologies WPS can enable pages that go beyond single page delivery so you don’t, for example, have to wait for all portlets to render before seeing the page
• WPS now has support for microformats (understanding the nature of certain types of information such as currency or stock symbols and knowing how to provide more detail)
• He talked about integration that can be implemented via Javascript to integrate an external web app into the portal service, but inherit navigation and styles
• I (this is Craig, not Stefan talking) have found it interesting to watch how the concept of mashup gets described and leveraged by vendors. Stefan basically divided into strategic (portal) versus tactical/opportunistic (mashup). That’s pretty reasonable, but the problem with the division between low end and high end tools is that the path to go from low to high end has always been rocky and so many projects that seem quick at first wind up needing enterprise features and scale later
• His definition: “a mashup is a lightweight web app that combined data from more than one source into an integrated and new, useful experience.”
• You can assign a URL fragment to a page to allow for simpler URLs
• Virtual portals can now be identified by the hostname or a path segment
• They now support multiple language versions of the same page and portal server automatically picks the right version based on profile. It uses markup in the HTML to do this
• Talked about business process integration for portal using Business Process Integration.
• The WCM now supports something they are calling paging where it can split documents into pages
• Search has been extended so you can federate other search products in WebSphere Portal Search Center page. While his example integrated with “Dingdong Search” I think he really meant Google
• A quick JSR 286 update: Reference implementation will be provided at Apache Pluto 2.0 with the final version available at the end of 2007
• There were long lists of management, development, and content management features and and APIs that are too big to list here. The slides will be posted up to the Lotusphere site for all the nitty gritty details

Well, I’m packing my bags for sunny (I hope) Orlando to attend Lotusphere. IBM puts on a very good, well organized event so I’m looking forward to going. I also look forward to seeing my teammates, new and old. Everyone from the Collaboration and Content Strategies service will be there. When you work on a distributed team it means a lot when you get the chance to hang out in person.

The team came away from Lotusphere pretty jazzed last year (I wasn’t able to go to the main event, but caught up with one of the “Lotusphere Comes to You” events). But during the year the good set of products didn’t seem to get the energy we thought they would, at least from our clients. I don’t know too much about the email side of things, although Ed Brill says they made some minor gains even though pundits were expecting losses. On the collaboration side, which I follow more closely, I didn’t notice any compete strategy against Microsoft SharePoint even though there are parts of the Lotus portfolio that could compete quite well.

My teammates have posted up some summaries of what they are looking for from Lotusphere (see Karen Hobert and Mike Gotta).

I’m just looking for 2 things:

• Does IBM have an aggressive compete strategy against Microsoft SharePoint for Quickr and Connections? I’m sold on the products having some great features and addressing a pain point in organizations. But without a good compete strategy - particularly for non-Lotus shops - I can see success in some measures (adoption into the existing client base, a handful of competitive wins in non-Lotus shops, and absolute dollars/seats), but failure in terms of turning the ship around (getting on the path of consistent, long-term Lotus marketshare growth) and halting the momentum of Microsoft in the collaboration space.
• How is WebSphere Portal adapting to the morphing of the portal market into composite applications? This isn’t really a WebSphere conference so I don’t expect to get a lot on their portal here, but there are some presentations on it that I expect to see.

I look forward to seeing you there. And make sure to see Karen and Mike’s presentation!

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

I ran a breakfast roundtable here at the SharedInsights Portal, Collaboration, and Content conference this morning and found it to be quite enjoyable and enlightening (despite the hotel dragging away the coffee and tea service too quickly…). The table had about a dozen attendees, mostly architects, and was a good cross section of portal implementations. A large food franchise, a few large government agencies, a major retailer, a vendor (not a portal vendor), a real estate firm, and an international utility were represented.

The primary issue they were all faced turned out to be integrating service oriented architecture (SOA) concepts into their portal environments. Point goes to Plumtree a few years ago who dedicated themselves to the “enterprise service bus” concept. Portals were originally created as “Swiss army knives” that could connect and adapt to all sorts of identity management, security, content management, and application products. It seems that need is still prevalent. Unfortunately, the vendors have been slipping into the mode of integrating the portals into their infrastructure stacks and playing favorites by connecting to their own infrastructure first and then allowing a standards based connector to everything else (blaming it on the other vendors if they can’t take advantage of JSR 170, JSR 168, LDAP, etc.).

It was interesting that while the momentum is certainly in favor of Microsoft and IBM right now, none of the people at the table reported using them as their main portal. Instead it was BEA, Vignette, and a few Oracle. One was interested in open source as well. The table felt that the reason is that legacy environments are not going away, particularly for content management and portal. While many vendors can show a nice, unified stack now, that doesn’t help the practical reality that organizations face with the large amount of built up legacy infrastructure. Governance is a key success factor then in getting each part of the organization to agree to corporate standards even if it is a little less useful for them. Optimizing enterprise-wide sometimes means a sub-optimal environment for those that heavily use another app that offers a portal.

Workflow was also important to the attendees. A few had workflow/BPM tools they wanted to hook up to the portal such as TIBCO and Ultimus, while others were interested in the more simple capabilities you get out of a portal itself.

In part one of this posting I gave my overall impression that IBM Lotus has done a good job of bringing some excitement to the Notes/Domino camp. Here are some thoughts I had from the presentations and my conversation with IBM VP John Allesio.

On the SOA front I was pleased by the way in which the new services (Quickr and Connections) have been architected for consumption. The usefulness of collaboration is enhanced when it can be used in context with applications, data, or content it is referring to. This contextual collaboration requires being able to blend the collaboration services into existing applications and interfaces rather than forcing the user to switch to a dedicated interface. The connectors built into Quickr (for accessing RSS, blogs, content libraries, etc.) are a good example of building services meant to be consumed. This is still an issue I have with SharePoint, which is currently marketed and demoed as the center of its collaboration universe rather than a participant in other non-Microsoft applications.

WebSphere Portal 6.0 was also discussed, but it seems like sideshow at a Lotus conference. While WPS is becoming increasingly important to Notes/Domino customers, it still appeals to a different set of customers. WPS seems to me to be an incremental update and technology refresh, including features such as a template library, fly out menus and navigation, drag and drop, a portlet palette, and look and feel enhancements. But there was a bit of marketing spin mentioned twice that rubbed me the wrong way: “Integration at the glass”. If all I want is to integrate at the glass I’ll get an open source portal like JBoss Portal. If you’re just looking for web UI stitching with some personalization and an implementation of the standards, then open source is a lot cheaper than WebSphere Portal. But most large corporations need a full size portal product (or whatever similar technology is embedded in their superplatform). The value you get out of the full size portal product is the back-end integration into enterprise applications and infrstructure services, which are not “at the glass”. But enough ranting on that …

My teammates have commented quite a bit on the collaboration and social software additions in Connections and Quickr, so I’ll save a few calories by not retyping what they said. But I’d encourage you to see the blogs of Mike Gotta (multiple postings), Peter O’Kelly (multiple postings), and Karen Hobert for some great insight.

I am interested to see how the strategy for Quickr evolves in regards to being a SharePoint competitor. IBM was ready with a list of things Quickr can do that SharePoint can’t (DB2 data stores, works on more platforms and through more access mechanisms, etc.), but there was no comment on whether that list is supposed to explain why it is a different product category than SharePoint (apples and oranges as it were), or a better product in the same category (a better and shinier apple). The pricing (which hasn’t been announced yet) will be a big clue into how directly they wish to compete against Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Hey, I’m a capitalist - I enjoy competition and think the end users of Quickr and SharePoint would both benefit from direct competition. But my prediction is that any direct comparisons will be played down and a safer - if less fun - path will prevail.

I was disappointed to miss the “real” Lotusphere in Orlando this year, especially after my teammates chimed in on the blogosphere with a flurry of postings [see Mike Gotta (multiple postings), Peter O'Kelly (multiple postings), and Karen Hobert].

Luckily, IBM does a series of mini-Lotuspheres and I was able to catch up with one during a visit to Minneapolis. The event is smaller, my posting will be smaller, but the overall impression is the same: this is the first Lotusphere in quite a while that provides a clear path forward for IBM and Notes/Domino customers. There can always be diversions on the path, but I think the direction is good.

John Allesio started with a slide that said “How do we embrace change in the business climate?” He was talking about questions their customers would ask, but I think it fits just as well to hear IBM Lotus asking itself that question. IBM Lotus has always had difficulty with clinging to the Lotus faithful while trying to address all the changes that had taken place in collaboration, social software, SOA, standard development languages, and UI design. IBM has done a better job lately of embracing this change with Quickr, Connections, and rejuvenated user interfaces.

Gia Lyons, IBM’s social software evangelist, had some interesting quotes from an Institute for Business Value study of CEOs in 2006. She said 75% of CEOs say collaboration is important for innovation. Not surprising, but always nice to hear them say it! She added that 19% of administrators and managers will retire in 5 years. The implication is that not giving the new entrants Web 2.0 tools is like not giving a phone to an information worker today. The analogy of the phone as something that businesses obviously depend on, can’t live without, and can’t prove the exact value of is often used when talking about newer forms of communication and collaboration technology.

Well, I’ve got a lot of emails to sort through and notes to process, but I’ll post some more specific thoughts in part two.