Tag: ibm

Regarding the Future of the IBM Notes Client – Here It Is

 

They are the Champions: Part 1

Last week IBM announced a new class of champions for 2014. This blog post is the first in a series highlighting the great work of some of them. Here I go:

David Leedy

I first met David in New York City in October 2009 at the Tri-LUG user group meeting. While we had perviously met virtually, this was the first time we met in person. We shared a few beers and dinner and at that time he had given to Gayle and I an awesome set of all things Elguji branded coasters that he and his wife Becky made. It was truly an awesome gift. David and I have developed a very rewarding friendship. I can talk to David about anything and he is always there to listen.

As many of you may already know, David is the producer of the very successful NotesIn9 Screencast. Not only has David produced over 130 shows. While the screencast focusses primarily on IBM XPage technology, it also includes other topics including mobile app development, source control and much more.

David is also a strong and vocal advocate for IBM XPages technology. He is like no one else in this regard. David has published several versions of the XPages Cheatsheet.

David, thank you for all you do in this world. You are not only an IBM Champion but a personal hero of mine.

Julian Robichaux

It’s been a little over ten years since I first met Julian. We met at a blogger meet-up in Orland, Florida. I remember telling Julian I really liked the design of his NSF Tools website. The NSF Tools site was one of my favorite go-to reference site for advanced Notes and Domino code. It was truly a great privilege and honor to have met Julian. I felt as I was in the presence of one of the greatest coders I had ever known. This still holds true today.

It wasn’t until November of 2006 that I approached Julian to do a podcast. Thinking back, I had no idea why I approached Julian specifically to do this. Long story short, we started the Taking Notes podcast in 2006 and recorded 177 episodes. While we haven’t recorded any episodes since March 2013, the podcast is in temporary hiatus.

I am very grateful to call Julian a friend and to have had the honor of working with him on Taking Notes, several OpenNTF projects and application development projects for Elguji.

Thank you Joyce Davis

I wanted to take this opportunity to personally thank IBM’s Joyce Davis for her tenure as the IBM Collaboration Solutions Community Manager. I have learned so many things from Joyce over the years that it would be impossible to list them all however, the one thing that I have learned from her more than anything is to always look at the bright side of an issue or a person. Always focus on the overall good, rather than a moment of dissatisfaction.

Being a community manager can’t be an easy job. We the ICS Community have gone through several transitional times, both good, bad and even unfortunately ugly. Joyce has been there to ensure that the community as a whole remained even keeled. She provided us with the occasional “sanity check” that was sometimes needed. Joyce is “real” and she sometimes tells you things you didn’t want to hear.

All the best to Joyce in her new role in the IBM CIO’s office. You and the leadership you gave us will be missed.

CIO.com: IBM Will Beat Amazon Web Services Because Process Beats Product

With all of the AWS projects I have been involved with lately, I found this article quite interesting:

IBM will eventually beat Amazon Web Services, writes CIO.com columnist Rob Enderle, but not because AWS has an inferior product. In many ways, AWS is better than IBM’s cloud offering. But Big Blue’s experience with enterprise customers, not to mention the federal government, shows that great businesses processes often beat great products.

What are your thoughts on the IBM acquisition of SoftLayer and do you think IBM will win the “battle”?

More >

Jive: Partner Communities IdeaJam

jive_idea_jamI’m so glad that we named our product IdeaJam and also trademarked the name. Notice that Jive uses “Idea Jam” and not “IdeaJam”. Ninety percent or more of the prospects that Elguji sees lately think that IdeaJam is an IBM product. It’s actually quite fascinating and we are very blessed. Our event-based IdeaJam cloud services are booming.

A Book on IBM Connections: What’s Possible?

One of the major challenges with getting people in organizations to adopt new collaboration tools – or social business technologies – is helping them to understand what their work would look like if they were to shift to the new way of doing things. Often vendors talk about their products through the lens of features and functions, which is definitely helpful but not enough by itself.

As an independent collaboration strategist, one of the ways Michael Sampson works with clients is to help them understand what’s possible by developing scenarios of how work would be different. Michael’s first book, Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways (2008) took this approach for conveying how people could use Microsoft SharePoint for running a project. It starts with Roger who works at Fourth Coffee who is given a project to run, and is expected to use SharePoint 2007 for that. Michael’s most recent book, Doing Business with IBM Connections (2013), takes the same approach for IBM Connections 4.5, but covers ten different collaboration scenarios.

Those are:

  • Co-Authoring Documents
  • Managing Meetings
  • Holding Discussions
  • Distributing Team and Organizational Updates
  • Capturing Ideas for Innovation
  • Running a Project
  • Sharing Learning and Best Practice
  • Making Decisions
  • Finding Expertise
  • Achieving Individual Coherence

The book is set in a fictitious company called Albreto, and the adoption and use of IBM Connections starts in the Marketing Department and works its way out from there. Michael’s book is designed as an adoption resource, and is much more about the business and human things that need to work in each scenario rather than just focusing on where to click in Connections. For example, in the Document Co-Authoring scenario, there are specific steps given for how to co-author a document, but there is also reference made to the human dynamics of writing a first draft that allows scope for collaboration, and there’s an advanced concepts discussion at the end of that chapter on how early stage collaboration can reduce the quality of input. This style of approach is followed throughout Michael’s book.

If you are using IBM Connections, it would be a great resource to have available for your users. If you are not using IBM Connections, it would be a great resource to review for the approaches in each scenario. Those approaches are very transferable.

(With Thanksgiving just around the corner, Michael is running a special offer at the moment on his book. You can get 20% off the price of the paperback editions, or the corporate licensing fee for the e-book version. All the details are here – www.michaelsampson.net/thanksgiving.html)

Fill in the blank

The other day Voker Weber shared his thoughts about BlackBerry and he stated the following:

The sentiment. BlackBerry smells of old. People want new. iPhone. Maybe Android. Once people have made up their mind to divorce you, it’s a tough thing to turn around. It’s no longer good enough to be good enough. You have to be way better.

Now let me change the above to this:

The sentiment. ______________ smells of old. People want new. iPhone. Maybe Android. Once people have made up their mind to divorce you, it’s a tough thing to turn around. It’s no longer good enough to be good enough. You have to be way better.

Unfortunately, I can think of dozens of products and services that can be filled in the blank. The world has certainly changed over the last decade and sometimes no matter what a company and/or organization does, they can’t turn it around.

Shiny and new are the “new black”.