I have about 10 pages of notes from Lotusphere that I want to turn into blog entries. However, since Orlando I've been involved in project PDL, been working on some awesome upcoming Socialtext stuff, and had a family party this weekend that brought my siblings to town, so I've not had a spare moment. I don't even want to think about my laundry nor the pile of bills on my desk!
Anyway, I'm going to begin my Lotusphere posts with what I think is the most significant thing I heard at the show. Yes, it is about Project Vulcan, but it may not be what you think. While I'm excited about a potential new user experience for Notes, that is not it. It was the announcement that right from the very start of the beta program, the API would be available for developers. Contrast that to Lotus Notes, where after a decade of promises, there is still no C&S API.
One of the keys to Twitter's success is that from the very start, developers built applications around it. There are literally thousands of tools that enhance the Twitter experience, and the team at Twitter could not have made all of those things on their own. Ask 3 people which Twitter client they use, and you'll get at least 5 different answers.
For Vulcan to succeed, the same thing must occur. People should not rely on Lotus to do everything, especially not right at the start. Instead, developers should get their hands on the API, and start making Vulcan into what they want it to be.
So go forth developers, explore strange new worlds where IBM is open, seek out new integration points, and boldly go where Lotus has rarely allowed you to go before.
Enterprise Microblogging - Where Everyone Can Ask and Answer Questions
Fri, Mar 12th 2010 4:00a Alan Lepofsky In Star Trek, the crew of the USS Enterprise could get an answer to almost any question, simply by asking out loud. Each week viewers witnessed inquiries such as "Computer, how long will it take to get to Epsilon Vega at Warp 6?" or "Computer what is the average airspeed of an unladen swallow?" Back in the real world, we are not quite there yet, but we're pretty damn close. Via countless websites, search engines, and social networks we have almost unlimited information at our disposal. [read] Keywords: connections
email
enterprise
facebook
google
macbook
microsoft
networking
twitter
24
Sharing Status Updates Reduces Duplication Of Work
Tue, Mar 9th 2010 5:40p Alan Lepofsky Last week I wrote Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance, as the introductory post to a new series where I'm going to discuss how "Enterprise 2.0" tools provide benefits in the business world. I'm going to begin the series today by discussing the internal use of microblogging, which enables people to openly share short messages with their coworkers. For those of you unfamiliar with microblogging, the most widely known example is Twitter, where you enter "140-character or [read] Keywords: email
enterprise
instant messaging
office
social software
twitter
269
How Sharing Status Updates Can Help Your Colleagues
Mon, Mar 8th 2010 9:10p Alan Lepofsky Last week I wrote Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance, as the introductory post to a new series where I'm going to discuss how "Enterprise 2.0" tools provide benefits in the business world. I'm going to begin the series today by discussing the internal use of micro-blogging, which enables people to openly share short messages with their coworkers. For those of you unfamiliar with micro-blogging, the most widely known example is Twitter, where you enter "140-character o [read] Keywords: blogging
email
enterprise
instant messaging
office
social software
twitter
170
Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance
Fri, Mar 5th 2010 2:50p Alan Lepofsky One of the main themes of the "2.0" world is the shift to more open sharing of information. In our personal lives, that shift is fairly well understood and accepted. Pictures are shared on Flickr. Videos are shared on Youtube. We talk about our lives on our blogs. We say what we're doing on Twitter. We even tell people exactly where we are on Foursquare. Our lives are an open book, for friends, family, and sometimes even strangers to see. In the business world, many companies are just [read] Keywords: email
enterprise
social software
twitter
34
Socialtext Launches 4.0
Wed, Mar 3rd 2010 3:40p Alan Lepofsky Today we launched Socialtext 4.0, which makes it simple for people to form groups around common goals or areas of interest. Groups can share information, ideas, and status messages via microblogging with Socialtext Signals, and create wiki pages, spreadsheets, and blog entries in Socialtext Workspaces. "The focus of our enterprise social software has always been to accelerate business performance for our customers, by giving their people new ways to share knowledge and expertise," says Euge [read] Keywords: collaboration
application
enterprise
security
social software
twitter
wiki
55
How General Motors Uses Socialtext for Its RD
Mon, Mar 1st 2010 5:43p Alan Lepofsky At Lotusphere 2010, General Motors spoke about their use of Lotus technologies to enable internal collaboration. Some of you sitting around me heard me politely say "and Socialtext." What I found funny about the GM talk was how they emphasized the Volt, which is the result of the work of GM's Research division, which uses Socialtext. Of course big companies often use more than one vendor, so no big deal. "To address the difficulty in getting researchers to interact with each other at the s [read] Keywords: collaboration
lotus
lotusphere
community
office
276
Very cool new 3D History Browser Plugin For Notes
Mon, Mar 1st 2010 10:20a Alan Lepofsky As reported on Niklas Heidloff's blog, Hiroyuki Okamoto has created a very cool 3D history browser for Lotus Notes. It currently only works on Windows, so even though it emulates the carousel feature made popular by Apple, it does not yet work on Macs. I don't know anything about Eclipse plugin development, but I thought the point to moving to Eclipse was for cross platform support? What is it about certain plugins that cause them to not work across OSes? Also, is there anyway for the [read] Keywords: lotus
notes
apple
development
eclipse
openntf
262
Zen - This is the way all software should work
Mon, Feb 22nd 2010 11:50p Alan Lepofsky I don't promote products often, but after 5 minutes looking at Zen, I wanted to tell people about it. Zen is an online tool for project management that follows the Personal Kanban methodology. I'm just starting to learn about this, but I can see how it could really help me manage my tasks. Zen's UI is clean and gorgeous. It is so easy to use that there is no need for training or help. I found the selecting/highlighting of objects, collapse and expanding options, drag and drop, to al [read] Keywords:
127
Eugene Lee Talks About Enterprising Social Sharing
Mon, Feb 22nd 2010 9:20p Alan Lepofsky Some sound-bytes Enterprise 2.0 started with the adoption of web 2.0 technologies to meet enterprise requirements around security, privacy, etc. Initially a lot of the challenges customers focused on were: Where do I use it? How do I use it? How do I get adoption? At Socialtext we've always shifted that conversation to, How do you get business value from it? There will be ongoing pressure to provide integrated solutions, not point products Customer success and services will play a key part (b [read] Keywords: admin
collaboration
enterprise
javascript
security
web 2.0
282
Tom Brokaw Explains Canada To Americans
Sun, Feb 21st 2010 11:10a Alan Lepofsky There are some great little nuggets in this video: $1.5 billion is transacted between the US and Canada every day Canada is the second largest country in the world, with only 34 million people 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border Canada is the US's largest oil supplier If you're in a fight, you want the Canadians by your side On Sept 11/2001, 239 US bound flights with 33,000 passengers landed in Canada President John F. Kennedy to the Canadian parliament in 1961: "Geography [read] Keywords: application
