So who doesn’t love a good demo………or two…….or three. IBM highlighted a lot of new and upcoming features that supports the Social Business Theme. Here are some highlights:
Notes
Lotus Notes is incorporating the whole idea of doing more work from within the client. You can view video, approve tasks from a workflow engine or web content management system. It includes:
- A new shared calendar that lets any person change an invite, not just the chair
- Incorporates the activity stream so all those events and information that was originally in Connections 3 can now be seen in Notes and you can then act on them.
- Incorporates Coremetrics data. Web Analytics is really hot right now. If it’s on a web site, someone want to know what’s happening on that site and act on it.
Mobile
OK, so IBM is pushing hard into Mobile. Here’s a short list of what’s happening with them
- Android is now supported for Lotus Traveller, IBM’s email and calendar client
- The sametime client allows you to send photos
- The client pull various messages and let you centralize them and act on them. This includes the Activity stream
- You can see shared files in the activity stream
- XPages, the domino development tool, supports developers creating mobile apps including native apps.
- The new Plantronics bluetooth headset has a sametime plugin so it changes your availability and routing of calls when you put it on your ear.
- Nokia has a new E7 phone platform which IBM will fully support with all their products, email, messaging, connections, etc.
- File under really cool, the phone actually has hdmi and dolby output so imaging using your phone for a web conference……or just watch a movie.
LotusLive
LotusLive is the cloud for the Lotus brand. You can get hosted email, web conferencing, instant messaging, and the whole host of social networking services. In addition, they have a host of partners like Silanis for e-signatures. They have grown this hosted platform 300% in 2010 and have a lot of new features and services:
- Now supports a hybrid approach where some of your services may remain on premise
- Now supports putting Domino apps on the cloud with a pay as you go, bring your own license, or developer license models
- Supports LotusLive Symphone with some really cool shared editing and assigning model. (Google Apps but a little more complicated because you can assign sections of a doc to people)
- Fully supported API to share services to other apps or to incorporate services into LotusLive
- By 2011 2H, all the features of Lotus Connections 3 will be online
Lotus Connections
This is where IBM has the most released functionality. It also forms the core of the social business where things like Activity Stream and Sharebox start here. These key items form the core of the social business framework. I’ll blog on that later but it’s key because in this heterogeneous world, you can’t say, “I have my social tool and it’s good”. What about the blogging tool your marketing guys use? What about the analytics tool that kicks off a new report? What about that workflow app that demands a response from someone. If it’s all funneled to a person’s stream and they can stay on top of it all. Cool idea, I reserve the the right to change my mind when I see a real implementation.
New in Connection
- New Activity Streams that pull data and events from multiple locations. This is where IBM support for a variety of standards really starts to pay off.
- preview docs in an activity stream
- approve a piece of web content in an activity stream
- look at a social app from it
- Email client access that can be combined with the activity stream. This supports Notes and Exchange
- Pull in a calendar into the same page as email, activity stream.
- New share button that lets you take whatever you are viewing and share it in a variety of ways
- Much expanded community support with idea blogs, sub-communities, etc
- Profiles meet social analytics and now you get recommendations on content, people you should know, etc.
- New standalone forum
- API’s to push these services into other applications
Connections Next
- More integrated social mail
- full support for OpenSocial, CMIS, ATOM, HTML5, and OpenAjax
- Available in the second half of 2011
Sametime
- Audio and video come to web based meetings, no client needed.
- New bandwidth management tools will let you define what and how much to allocate on the network
- Better security model for meetings
- New mobile clients for sametime
- a really big push into unified telephony.
Portal and Web Experience
As a fairly mature platform, what I’m seeing isn’t a new feature like the ability to create a virtual site. Now it’s about making it really easy to get business users to manage the site. 3/4 of what IBM showed today was a vision for the future but the vision was really cool and went much further down the web experience and ease of use route than I’ve seen before.
- Better impersonation will allow you to target and test different types of users
- Preview of content becomes much easier and in context.
- Entire site versioning lets you see what a site was like two months ago
- WCM inline info for content authors and publishers. (e.g. I recognize you and here’s when it was published, who approved it, and other key information as a hover over tag)
- Incorporate portal events into the activity stream. Please preview and approve this content, view site analytics, etc.
- Chalk this up to really cool, Brian demoed conversion of a presentation slide to a banner image through simple drag and drop
- He then did the same thing with a set of friends pictures from facebook
- The object pallet will provide more than just portlets and will provide full type ahead search
- Incorporate twitter and other feeds into the portal
- Push results from a campaign to a CRM system like SugarCRM in real time.
- The beta for Portal Next will become available later in the second half of 2011
Overall, the vision is great. I really liked what I saw with the simplification of portal or at least the simplification from and end user perspective. I also agree with the continuing theme of everyone having to live together. That’s what a portal is for after all so it should work well.
