Overall the feedback I have been hearing
from people around Lotusphere 2012 has been very positive, they liked the
OGS and felt very positive afterwards. What I personally took from
the OGS was this, having no panels will score you big points with the attendees,
saying Notes or Domino will get you the largest cheers in the OGS. Mike
Rhodin's speech basically bored me to tears, it's the same sentences as
his section at every other Lotusphere, just in a slightly different order,
if you're playing buzzword bingo, you only need to pay attention during
his and Sandy Carter's bit. Michael J Fox was inspirational and made
me feel sad at the same time. I don't feel sad for Michael J Fox,
but I do feel sad that someone so young is slowly being taken over by a
disease he has no control over, that makes me sad. The way he is
handling it though, and the efforts he is making to raise money are inspirational.
It also brings guilt, here I am with a body that does react to my
commands (well apart from the jump high one) and I'm taking it for granted.
So a great opening speaker, but lots of different emotions. I
think along with panels, OGS is seen as positive if you don't say anything
bad towards Notes/Domino, so as long as you don't say Notes/Domino is dead
you're in good shape, but honestly, all the new stuff IBM is heavily pushing
is WAS based, the web experience WAS, Connections WAS, Social Mail WAS.
OK so now onto some of the things shown
and what I think the future holds. So this is my gut feel of what
we can expect to see in the future based upon things seen and heard around
Lotusphere 2012. None of this is based upon any factual information,
or from back room chats, or information from old friends, this is
just my gut feel for how things are going to go after watching what was
shown at Lotusphere. So let me begin with IBM Docs.
I think I blogged at the time when IBM
Symphony was the wrong move, IBM Docs is where IBM should have been all
along. Symphony is not a game changer, IBM Docs is. IBM Symphony
is now part of Apache, IBM will tell you that IBM is committed to Symphony,
but I personally think the move to Apache is the first step of many where
IBM will be able to start reducing the effort that is placed in Symphony.
IBM has a dirty secret, Lotus SmartSuite makes more revenue for IBM
that Symphony, yep IBM still sells SmartSuite, did you know that? They
still have some customers on maintenance, amazing isn't it. Symphony
doesn't have revenue, and I can't think of any product at IBM that makes
zero revenue that stays around, after a few reorgs and someone new comes
in that wasn't involved, they will always ask why do we have product x
that makes 0$ ? So I expect in the coming years, you will see less
and less in the way of Symphony updates unless they are from developers
working at home for free (kind of like Lotus focused redbooks). Don't
get me wrong, I think Symphony was an interesting idea, it was just more
than 10 years late of when it was needed. As I said, none of this
is based in fact, just my gut feel on what we'll see.
Biggest cheer of the OGS, the Notes
plug-in for browsers. Details are sketchy right now, but basically
you'll have the equivalent of 90% of the Notes Basic client able to run
inside a windows browser. So how do I think this will be used? My
gut is this will be used as a migration tool for folks moving away from
Notes. Sure there will be some that use it on their path migrating
to Xpage apps, but my gut is that most will use this as a tool to help
their migration away from Notes. Now here's the thing, if that is
the case it won't be reflected in Notes CAL sales very quickly, I imagine
this is going to require a Notes CAL to be used, which means that customers
before which were moving just stopped paying maintenance will now stay
on maintenance to get the plugin. I think what IBM hopes will happen,
is this will speed up the adoption of XPage apps, personally I think the
opposite will happen, I think maybe companies that were considering moving
some Notes apps to Xpages, will now just say, you know what, we can save
a tonne of money by just giving people the notes app in the browser instead
of rewriting it, and any net new apps will be done on some other platform.
I can imagine there being companies that even expose some of their
"Legacy" (not my choice of phrase but IBM now use it) Notes apps
inside Sharepoint via the plugin.
Sametime - with IBM shipping Sametime
8.5.2 IFR1 late last year, there wasn't really any Sametime news this year,
well no announcement anyway. Most interesting thing I saw though
was a session given by Bill Quin and Rob Fox, AD206 The upcoming IBM Sametime
Meetings Server Remote Client SDK. This SDK looks like it has some
really exciting potential, so keep an eye on it. Not Sametime related
directly, but I did attend a demonstration in the Dolby suite at the Dolphin.
Dolby were showing how they can improve the effectiveness of online
audio calls through some of their magical jiggery pokery. If you
imagine a regular audio call with lets say 6 people, if everyone is speaking
at the same time, you just kind of hear blugh and it's hard to differentiate
between people. What Dolby have done, is taken those different audio
input streams, and make it sound like the people in the call are sitting
around you in different places. So just as if you were in a real
room with people chatting around you and you can tune in to hear the different
people quite easily, you can do the same with the Dolby system. This
isn't a solution that Dolby is selling for customers, it's a technology
that vendors could include in their solutions, kind of the way, SONY could
include Dolby support back in the Walkman days. It wouldn't surprise
me if sometime in the not too distant feature you see a audio conferencing
company as promoting their conferencing software with Dolby inside. For
best results it does require a stereo headset in order to simulate the
spacial awareness. Definitely something to keep an eye on.
Social Mail - For me my eyes kind of
glazed over at this point. Basically for email I need only a couple
of things, my All Documents view and full text index, that's where I spend
99% of my time when in mail. The idea of my mail and everything else
being in a stream just doesn't work for me, and for a company the size
of Epilio (think the same size as those 6 million other small businesses
in the US), the number of servers required to get Social Mail just isn't
going to fly for us. From what I could see it basically looked like
a web page running inside a Notes client, I may be wrong, but that's how
it looked. For large companies this may be the best thing since the
fax machine, I'm taking a wait and see attitude on this one. I think
it could struggle though, with the same thing Notes has struggled with
against Outlook. "We like Outlook as it's just mail" but
wait "Social mail is more than mail, it's streaming connections, files,
you can act of things, it's cool, you want more than mail surely?"
as I said, I'll wait and see.
The Closing General Session - Lessons
learned here for IBM I think are if you're going to have someone that isn't
known around the world they better be inspirational, Zander was known by
less people that Bob Costas, but he went down really well as he was inspirational.
Lotusphere attendees don't like me me me type personalities. We're
really separated from the food we eat, someone chopping up a clam on stage
really upset some people, the same people that a few minutes before had
quite happily eaten a meat sandwich, apologies to those of you that are
Vegetarian, you have reason to be upset. Personally, I do watch the
guys show so I didn't find it that bad. I would have loved to have
seen a situation with 5 Lotusphere attendees up there where a kind of mini
fear factor with food was done. Other takeaway IBM VPs will eat something
fishy that looks like a penis in front of hundreds if it means looking
good in front of their boss. As for me, you could have been chopping
brocoli up on stage, I still wouldn't eat it. So I didn't mind the
CGS at all, but others hated it with a passion.
I did get told by a few folks that they
didn't feel there was enough technical content and the pendulum had
swung too far towards MBA type sessions, where basically you could say
anything you wanted as long as it fitted within IBMs message.
There you go, a poorly laid out ramble.
As I said not based on facts, purely my gut feel.
Another one speaking at IamLUG
Tue, Apr 30th 2013 8:50a Carl Tyler Like many others I will be in St. Louis
next week, speaking at IamLUG, and Epilio
are sponsoring the Monday night drinks. I decided not to do any really
tough presentations on Sametime, but am instead doing an updated version
of a presentation I first did at UKLUG "25 Years of Lotus and Still
Going Strong" which contains lots of demos of old Lotus products.
As usual, I'll probably have some old freebies to give away.
If you've not already registered yourself,
you better get o [read] Keywords: lotus
sametime
153
Fat man walking...all for a good cause.
Mon, Feb 11th 2013 1:40p Carl Tyler It's time for you to reach into your pockets
and sponsor me. Perhaps you've used our free plug-ins, perhaps you've
used our free Sametime admin tools, it's time to pay up. Now it's
not like that crazy sponsorship thing where all I had to do was shave my
head and paint my face blue, this one actually involves some serious preparation
and training. We managed to raise close to $3,000 dollars for the head
shave, so really hoping people will delve deep for this effort to smash
that amo [read] Keywords: admin
domino
sametime
IBM Connect 2013 Slides and flying
Wed, Feb 6th 2013 8:20a Carl Tyler Here are the slides that William Holmes
and I presented at IBM Connect 2013 for session AD109.
AD109 -
Using the IBM Sametime Proxy SDK: WebSphere Portal, IBM Connections - and
Beyond from Carl Tyler and William Holmes
This is the sample file I showed for
having a button appear if a user, or number of users are online or offline.
Other Connect 2013 stuff.
As many know, I decided to fly myself
down to Orlando this year. So I left with a temperature of -5F/-20C
a [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
sametime
css
dojo
javascript
server
websphere
websphere portal
widgets
162
IBM Connect 2013 a.k.a. Lotusphere 2013
Wed, Jan 16th 2013 11:50a Carl Tyler OK, it's not called Lotusphere anymore,
it's called IBM Connect 2013, and looking at the exhibitor list it's becoming
a combo HR/formerly Lotus stuff/Social IBM trade show. I really don't
have a problem with the name, and honestly, I have so much yellow s*&t
around the house I'll be glad to see the back of it. I also don't
have a problem with the show evolving and changing into something else.
If it didn't it would just keep dying. I will be there, looking to
embrace the new [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
lotus
lotusphere
sametime
email
websphere
websphere portal
159
A slightly different review of 2012
Wed, Jan 2nd 2013 10:10a Carl Tyler Sure, I could blog about how my blog posts
are down, but Facebook posts are up, but who cares about that, here it
is, all my 2012 flying videos in chronological order...
Taking off
from Alton Bay Ice Runway (B18) from Carl
Tyler on Vimeo.
Piper Cherokee
departing Oswego, NY from Carl
Tyler on Vimeo.
Niagara Falls
- May 2012 from Carl
Tyler on Vimeo.
Flying in
Formation behind Glen Salmon [read] Keywords: facebook
136
A word of warning to those thinking of leaving IBM
Mon, Dec 10th 2012 9:00a Carl Tyler Late on Friday night I got a call from
a distraught friend, their daughter had been playing with their mobile
phone, and whilst the child was playing with the phone, the device had
prompted for a password, after their 5th attempt at entering a password
the device reset itself to Factory settings. So what had happened?
Well about 3 months ago this person
was let got by IBM, prior to that, they had been using their own iPhone
as their business phone, you know all that we're so tight s [read] Keywords: ibm
iphone
laptop
mobile
password
security
96
Add some Bling to Sametime on your iOS device.
Mon, Oct 8th 2012 11:40a Carl Tyler Use Sametime on your iOS device? Want
to add some bling to your messages?
No problem, just install Emoji as an
additional keyboard and you can send messages that contain all sorts of
coloured emoticons. If the person on the receiving end is using a
Windows device, they'll see them as black and white Emoji (Windows doesn't
have coloured fonts), Mac devices will see the full colour. Why do
this instead of using emoticons? Well with these you're not sending jpgs
around your organi [read] Keywords: sametime
mac
mobile
