Five years ago, IBM introduced something with the potential to be quite revolutionary, but they saw that potential could not be realized on its own. They melded activity-centric collaboration into their Connections offering in order to tie a revolutionary concept into a larger framework of social collaboration first and foremost, and only secondarily tied it to Notes and Domino, and I think the reason for this is now quite obvious: IBM realized that the people who really see the value in changing the way collaboration happens in their organization were looking at the wide variety of social software offerings, and at all of the innovation happening in that space, and that's where those key trend-setting customers saw the future. My interpretation of Project Vulcan, based on what I've seen so far, is that it is targeting that advanced vision of the future in away that brings the full Lotus customer base along for the ride.

Vulcan fulfills what IBM wanted to do with activity-centric collaboration by presenting users with a FaceBook-like home page drawing on a full-range of social software technologies, aggregating both the explicit activities and information streams that users already know they need to know about along with the ones that they don't know about yet but probably should be aware of. It's the social analytics-driven aggregation that was the missing element in activity-centric collaboration, so that's where I get the idea that Vulcan is the logical continuation of activity-centric collaboration. It is an evolutionary step toward completion of a revolutionary idea that IBM showed us half a decade ago.

And that's what smooth sailing and full speed ahead are all about: being confident that the course you're on is the right one even in a rapidly changing marketplace, confident enough to embrace others' innovations that have found broad acceptance in the market, while continuing to advance your own revolutionary ideas even when customers need change to be evolutionary.

Recent Blog Posts

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Lotusphere Comes to You St Louis, Tuesday Thu, Mar 18th 2010 9:01p Ed Brill After four international trips, it will be nice to finally be going a short hop within the same time zone for Tuesday, at Lotusphere Comes to You in St. Louis. I will be delivering the keynote as well as the Notes/Domino strategy presentation, and yes, I'll remember to do it in English this time. Looking ahead into April, I will be doing the same pair of presentations at the LCTY in Toronto on April 22nd. There are many more dates and cities out there for LCTY in North America, and my tea [read] Keywords: domino ibm lotus lotusphere notes blogging

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Viewers of this profile also viewed... Wed, Mar 17th 2010 4:40p Ed Brill There has to be at least one joke in here. [read] Keywords: linkedin profile

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Techworld: Home grown eMed app gets Web 2.0 refresh Tue, Mar 16th 2010 7:54a Ed Brill A story that will surprise from down under...The University of NSW Faculty of Medicine has developed an in-house student management system, dubbed eMed, which has remained cost competitive with commercial software for seven years and is now being extended into the Web 2.0 paradigm. As the core internal undergraduate application for some 1500 students across six years, eMed has iterated through several major releases. IT manager Luc Betbeder said there was nothing that "spoke our language [read] Keywords: admin domino ibm lotus notes application development dojo eclipse google java javascript web 2.0

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Upcoming Lotus Education online training webinars: XPages, composite apps, upgrading Sun, Mar 14th 2010 10:50p Ed Brill Lotus Education is trying something new -- in-depth, detailed training classes delivered as live online webinars. The cost to attend is fairly inexpensive, yet the benefit is direct access to the experts and practitioners from across IBM Lotus to capture their real-world experiences. Four such webinars are scheduled, follow the links for details: STM01 -- Demystifying Sametime 8.5 Webinar 
When : Thursday March 25th, 11am -- 2:30pm EST 
Speakers : Wes Morgan, Michael Herring, [read] Keywords: domino ibm lotus notes sametime xpages application applications

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Chad Scott: LotusScript and Java functions can return The collection has become invalid...(The Erik Brooks bug) Sun, Mar 14th 2010 11:03a Ed Brill OK, one last update on the issue that Erik Brooks brought up a couple of weeks ago. Chad Scott, who has worked this issue diligently in Lotus Support, reports:A new Technote has been released to document the history and fix for the issue Erik Brooks blogged about last week. In short, there was a regression caused by a fix in recent releases that could cause existing code to return an error where it previously did not. With the new fix, this no longer occurs and the fix for the original problem [read] Keywords: ibm lotus lotusnotes lotusscript notesdomino bleedyellow bleedyellow.com bug java

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My week in Spain for LCTY Sat, Mar 13th 2010 6:52p Ed Brill It's all over but the frequent flyer mile posting -- I'm back from a very quick tour of Lotusphere Comes to You in Madrid and Barcelona. Family commitments drove me to rush right back from Barcelona, one of my favorite cities in the world, but it was still a great week and only makes me want to return sooner rather than later. The IBM Spain team put together two excellent LCTY events this past week. Both were well-organized, professionally-run, and had great food and venues. More important [read] Keywords: collaboration ibm lotus lotusphere community twitter

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Check out a new developerWorks article about Notes Traveler 8.5.1 performance Sat, Mar 13th 2010 6:46p Ed Brill Some useful tips on configuring Lotus Notes Traveler in your 8.5.1 environment, and how well it works...This article reports IBM® Lotus® Notes® Traveler 8.5.1 performance results for Microsoft® Windows® 64-bit operating systems. In addition, it compares the performances of Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5 (64-bit) server and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 (64-bit) server. Link: ibm.com developerWorks: IBM Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 performance > (Thanks, Jan) [read] Keywords: ibm lotus lotusnotes notes notesdomino traveler microsoft server

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Chad Scott: LotusScript and Java functions can return The collection has become invalid...(The Erik Brooks bug) Sat, Mar 13th 2010 6:45p Ed Brill OK, one last update on the issue that Erik Brooks brought up a couple of weeks ago. Chad Scott, who has worked this issue diligently in Lotus Support, reports:A new Technote has been released to document the history and fix for the issue Erik Brooks blogged about last week. In short, there was a regression caused by a fix in recent releases that could cause existing code to return an error where it previously did not. With the new fix, this no longer occurs and the fix for the original problem [read] Keywords: ibm lotus lotusnotes lotusscript notesdomino bleedyellow bleedyellow.com bug java

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Smart Collaboration at Lotusphere Comes to You, Madrid Tue, Mar 9th 2010 12:30p Ed Brill OK, mark another one off the bucket list. Today at Lotusphere Comes to You here in Madrid, I delivered an entire 45 minute presentation en español. The presentation, "Smart Collaboration", was essentially a slightly higher-level version of the keynote Kevin Cavanaugh and I delivered at Lotusphere. In fact, it was the comfort of knowing that this was my presentation, my words, that gave me the confidence to deliver those words in a different language. The times when I stumbled were mainly [read] Keywords: collaboration connections ibm lotus lotusphere notes application consulting facebook linkedin mac social software twitter

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Alistair Rennie podcast on LotusUserGroup.org Mon, Mar 8th 2010 4:30p Ed Brill Alistair Rennie has been the general manager of Lotus software for about sixty days. In this podcast, recorded last week, Alistair debriefs on Lotusphere, talks about Project Vulcan, and looks ahead in the collaboration and productivity market. Well worth a 20 minute listen.LotusUserGroup.org caught up with Alistair Rennie, General Manager of Lotus Software at IBM, and we recorded the whole conversation for you to hear. Listen in to hear what he finds matters most in his new position and what [read] Keywords: collaboration ibm lotus lotusphere enterprise lotususergroup.org mobile podcast