Slightly delayed by Christmas and New years holidays, a snowy winter and general procrastination,, but also due to me wanting to gather a level of practical experience with the new workspace, here is part 2 of my "Evolution of the collaborative work environment" blog series. [insert
shark music from "Jaws" here] ;-)
We've been living in "The Living House" for 3 months now, and it's still a long way from feeling "homely". The little knacks that are expected in changes this size have almost all been ironed out and things are beginning to work as intended; the Wi-Fi is up for most users (except those of us who play around with our PCs a lot and therefore fail to comply with corporate standards), there's still no warm water on tap, and whiteboards are missing badly and very hard to make room for, since the walls are covered in special sound dampening material cleverly disguised as "art".
The good news is, it works. The sound dampening walls are almost unbelievably effective. What we feared would be a hellish noisy officespace is actually very quiet - almost too quiet, as the employees are also very focused on not being noisy.
And this brings us to the first "pain point" of "The Living House". We are not all the same. We don't work the same way. We don't even always
collaborate the same way. So how does this concept fit in with everybody?
As most probably would have expected, it's not all good. In fact, I have adopted a terminology from another form of "inter-personal relations" and have begun to categorize people as "Screamers" or "Moaners". This is not a matter of Good vs Evil or Right vs Wrong. It is just, that we are different.
Some people ... or perhaps rather some "roles" - the "Screamers" - are very active, mobile, vocal, engaging. We (I say "we", because I most definately belong to this category) roam around, engaging in random (or very targeted) dialogues with collegues. We brainstorm, we poll each other, we activate knowledge, we grow ideas, we "Jam". And it's loud. Sometimes _very_ loud. But it's fun, and it's enormously effective. In "The Living House", we have a lot of room for these activities (just too few whiteboards), and we are very well supported by the physical work environment.
Other people, or "roles" - the "moaners" - are very focused, often engaged in direct person-to-person communications, perhaps over the phone, even, or maybe they are in that "mental cocoon" that roles like software developers seem to be able to climb into, and just narrow the focus so effectively, that they are able to solve enormously complex tasks in their code. "The Living House" can be - and fairly often
is - torture to these people. They can't escape the "chatter". No matter how much sound dampening is used, people right next to them could be "screamers". And not just that, but the open officespace means that your field of vision is large, picking up movement all over the place, tugging at your attention, disturbing your focus. Even worse ... Some of these people are seated with their back to the open space, with people walking around just behind them all the time. Some feel that they are "on display", which is a very stressfull feeling. and it is probably no coincidence, that simply putting a person unprotected in the middle of a room, is a common form of psychological torture. Not everybody likes this, and we definately have employess that suffer.
Now, I'm not saying that they're being tortured - not in any way. I'm just saying that people are different and have different needes, which are often forgotten when implementing concepts like this. In our company, we need to stay attentive to this issue and try to arrange seating to accommodate this as best as possible. We need to be not only the "Living" but also the "Learning" house.
Enough about people for now. Back to the physical environment. Pain point #2 in open office spaces is "Where do we have our meetings?"
Our colleagues need us to keep the noise down at least a bit, and one thing is the ad-hoc meetings and cross-table talks, another thing completely is meetings with many participants. For this, we have several different options.
Under huge skylight windows in the center part of every building in the complex are "Ramblas". Rambla is spanish for "Promenade", and in our philosophy, it is intended as an area bustling with life and activities. The Ramblas hold kitchen facilities, coffee makers etc. and also numerous, diverse meeting-spaces from 2/3 person size café tables and couch-laden lounges to more traditional long-tables with room for 12-14 people.
This is where we have most of our meetings. In the public space. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Fundamentally, it demands a completely new attitude towards openness in communication. Other people can and
will hear what you are talking about, so you can forget about top secret strategy meetings and the like. Information is in the open by default, and if you
really need secrecy, you have to make specific choices to do so. This is a huge cultural shift from a world where the norm was, that nobody knew unless they were specifically informed. The philosophy being, of course, that knowledge belongs to everybody, and only if we have it readily available, will we be able to use it to everybody's benefit. Fundamental synergetic principles.
We do have a few more "formal" meeting spaces, but most of these are in an open environment too, some even side by side in the same physical room.
So ... Does it work?
YES!!! Personally, I have on several occasions "overhead" conversations or meetings that led me to comment and participate in the conversation, adding my knowledge to that of others.
I have also experienced the opposite situation, where I was in a meeting and "uninvited" (for lack of a better word) colleagues joined in.
And last but not least, I have experienced overhearing conversations that made me aware of initiatives in other places of the company, that was in conflict with strategic initiatives in our department, making it possible for the two initiatives to connect and avoid doing things twice and doing them wrong.
So, Yes! It definitely works.
Of course, every now and again, we DO need to have a private meeting, and for that we have a number of small rooms - dubbed "The Silent Rooms" because of the effective sound insulation - available.
These rooms are quite minimalistic, with just a whiteboard and a computer monitor available. You can't book these rooms. If they're free, you can use them, if not, too bad. We're struggling a bit to find the right balance of use. It's a work culture thing, as are so many other issues in this new concept. Some people use these rooms when on the phone. Others go to the Rambla for som "privacy", while some just talk in the open office spaces. Personally, I'd like to see them reserved for activities that incorporate more than one person. After all, the "personal office" privacy wasn't something we had before, so why should we have it now?
We have one more "traditional" room type: The video conference facilities. These are conventional closed off rooms with room for 6-10 people. These we use to link with our similar "Living House" in Bergen, Norway and the other locations in our nordic organization
The final space in our "Living House" is the amphitheater. This simple seating arrangement allows for the hosting of fairly large gatherings for product presentations or similar, more uni-directional communication.
All in all, "The Living House" caters for a multitude of communication and collaboratoin concepts. Now it's up to us, the "users", to challenge our traditional forms of interaction, adopt new styles and ways of working together, and harvest the intended benefits. From my point of view, this is already happening, the supertanker is in motion, but I have no doubt that we are only scraping the surface so far, and I'm sure that we can do a lot better if we make a concious effort to use the facilities as they are intended, even in situations where we can't really see a clear purpose.
What do
you think about "The Living House" as a concept, a work culture, a collaboration philosophy? Is this something you all have done for years? Can you not on your life imagine how you would be able to do your job in spaces as open as these? Let me know ... the comments are open for use!
Let's start living!! In the third - and probably final - part, I will talk about technology and some of the visions we have for IT in "The Living House". It'll be sometime soon ... ish ... Really, I promise! ;-)
Collaboration Det Levende Hus Domino Notes Quickr. Sametime The living house Workspace 
2 Comments
March 18th, 2010
This is SO "me". I finally think of something to blog, and it turns out to be a zillion-page novel. *sigh*. For those who bother, bear with me ... it could get interesting! .. This is part 1.
Over the last many months, the company I work for has been developing a new concept for the work environment. The concept is called "Det Levende Hus" (danish for "The Living House") and is meant to be more than just a change in the physical officespace, not just a changing arkitechture, but changing work culture, philosophy, organisation, competency, identity, technology, innovation and collaboration.
My first day in this new work environment was this monday, dec. 14th.
We're an insurance company. Yeah, yeah, I know ... right know you're all thinking "oh, my - I wish I was in insurance, it's soooo sexy", but you shouldn't worry. We struggle with the same challenges as less sexy industries: Brand management, Combined Ratios, Generation Y replacing Baby Boomers ... the list goes on. On top of that, we're in an industry, that has a fairly abstract product portfolio, that we need to keep relevant for a customer base that is evolving at the proverbial
speed of thought.
Traditionally, we have been an organisation of small, closed offices with 2,maybe 4, employees in each office, and managers on all levels, safely sheltered from the storm in each their own little office. In some parts of the organisations, i.e. call centers, IT-development and the like, larger, open officespace has been the norm for some time, but while it hasn't been cubicles, employees have had a tendency to "box themselves in", using shelves and noticeboards to build small confined areas resembling traditional offices.
Strangely enough (Doh!), such reclusive behavior is not beneficial for collaboration, does not help you share your knowledge, and for sure does not inspire innovation. In other words, it does very little to help the grey-suited, dusty insurance industry maximize its potentential.
Change was needed, and thus change was planned. Change, as such, can be many things. But change as fundamental as this, is in any case very expensive. So if you really want to make changes on this scale, you might as well go all-in, which was what our management concluded too. So they built a temporary officebuilding from what looked like shipping containers - prefabricated elements snapped together like Lego
tm - and moved a boatload of people into the (admittedly well equipped) containers, while Bob the Builder and his happy gang of handymen took a sledgehammer to the building the deported employees used to occupy.
Care had been given to the scope of the project. A vision had been formed, and with it a description of purpose and a mission, with targets to achieve
The new physical environment is created in a visual style that is intended to appeal to innovative thinking. From an architectural point, it is inspired by the organic structure of trees, the hallways being the trunk and the different "spaces" (offices, meeting areas etc), the branches leading to the fruits, which is supposedly our personal workspaces.
Do you ever get that feeling, that philosophy is all good and well, but things can get SO philisophical, that it disconnects from reality and become impossible and irrelevant? I fear that the above is such a thing, but perhaps the philosphy in details is not all that important. What
is important is, that the physical environment is one of movement, dynamics, energy, possibilities, instead of one of reclusiveness, quiet, static traditions and laissez faire!
The is no
laissez faire in "The Living House". None, Zero, Zip, Nada, Nichts. The way we used to work has been ripped up at the roots and replanted in a different universe. We must un-learn what we have learned (to quote Master Yoda), and learn to thrive under new norms and cultures.
So this is what our office looks like now. Open spaces with blocks of 4 desks and 12-16 desks in all in every workspace. In itself, no revolution, but there is more!
This concludes part 1.
In part 2, I'll show more of the elements surrounding these workspaces.
Part 3, will talk about ways to support the new ways of collaborating with new technology platforms.
Collaboration Det Levende Hus Domino Notes Quickr. Sametime The living house Workspace 2 Comments
December 17th, 2009
Right, right ... so the title of this post is not quite true of course. Having been part of the danish Lotus community since 1994, I have of course MET just about all the members of
DanNotes before, but I have never been a member and have thus been unable to participate at DanNotes seminars ... until now!
No, I'm still not a member (shame on me, really), but a colleague of mine won a ticket in a draw at the danish IBM Software Day conference earlier this year, and since he was more interested in learning about communities in general than learning about the DanNotes community in particular, he kindly offered his ticket to me.
So here I am ... wearing a conference badge aptly stamped "New" ... a rookie despite 15 years of experience.
Perhaps it's time to review my own thoughts about the community and the portfolio, and think ahead, more than settling into routines and past knowledge, and "do as I always do"?
In any case, I intend to make the absolute most of these two days in the company of top danish Lotus geeks, along with
Paul Mooney of
Blue Wave Tecnologies and
Darren Adams of
IBM Lotus .
So if you're here, and you're reading. Come on over and say hi! :-)
DanNotes Lotus Notes 1 Comments
November 3rd, 2009
I've been hesitating with this, but I think I'm just about ready to make the switch. I'm at a point where the "old way" of doing things have gotten REAL old and where I honestly think that change will be for the better.
So what am I talking about here?
Well ... In my flat, I have a room dedicated to being the "home office". At the moment, it holds TONS of old and outdated computers that are rarely used for anything serious anymore, simply because they are too old. All in all, they number SE7EN, none of them "capable" of modern day computing. They are part of an intricate setup of switches, cables, keyboards, mice and HUUUUUGE CRT Monitors, taking up all the desk-space and leaving the room cluttered and Feng Shitty!
I can't take it anymore! So I've made the decision to throw it all in the bin (minus the data of course) and replace it with something new ... or newer ... or fairly recent ... well, you get the picture.
And since my daytime job is full of IBM laptops running XP, my girlfriends home is litterede with (kids and) XP-based laptops, and my personal "location-shifting" unit - a Lenovo S10e netbook - also runs XP ...
I think I want a MAC! I DO however NEED it to run windows to some extent, and I would LIKE it to be able to run gOS, Ubuntu and allsorts of things that might pop up - albeit not necessarily natively of course.
I also need it to be able to control my Roland JX-305 keyboard through MIDI. Would Garageband be enough for that?
And of course, I want to run Notes 8.5.x :-)
What Mac do I want? iMac, Mac Pro, Macbook, Macbook Pro, Mac Mini? (Probably a Macbook)
What's included? Do I want/need iWork09? Aperture?
Help! If you're out there, and you have made a similar transition recently. Give me the heads up!
After all ... you're a fanboy ... you want me to become a fanboy too, don't you?! ;-)
Apple Macbook switch 10 Comments
September 24th, 2009
The other day,
John Turnbow blogged about this and also put up an idea on
IdeaJam. Where are the standard set of Domino web services?
Just about every other application framework has AT LEAST a set of basic services to build on, and some even have specialized services exposing core functionality to Service Oriented Architectures or even just to acommodate service based integration and development.
Since R7, the Domino server has been able to expose native web services, but no basic services were provided. With R8, Lotus (or IBM Lotus) has provided a client framework that is extendible, mashable, and able to be a client for advanced composite applications. It has been branded "The Desktop of the Future" and the IBM "Open Collaboration Client Solution", and on occasions has been touted the "Client for SOA".
But where IS "SOA" in the Notes/Domino philosphy? It seems that focus is all on the client and on the ability to
consume web services and wery little is on the provisioning and deployment of web services. But with no focus on providing and deploying web services, why would anybody select Domino as a service provider?
IBM has an extensive SOA strategy. Domino should as a minimum play well with that strategy, and ideally play well with SOA as an architecture style in general, not just geared towards the IBM ESB or other semi-proprietary platforms. But flipping through the slide decks from Lotusphere, the SOA message is at best vague. At worst, it is completely out of alignment with the rest of IBM's SOA message. I'm not even sure the definition of the term is consistent inside the branches of Big Blue.
I would like to see that fog being cleared, and a great way to start would be to provide a set of specialized Domino services as a part of any Domino server. Obvious candidates for services are simple PUT and GET operations, lookups and the like. Also directory services should be included as should the
ability to check credentials against the user's ID-file and carry them through to other services. After all, Domino
can take the role of the main corporate user directory!
There is great interest in Notes/Domino 8 and 8.5 at the moment, not diminshing as MS stops recommending upgrading to Exchange 2007, and being the "strategic fit" wouldn't make things worse, that much is certain.
I have often considered starting a project on OpenNTF with exactly this objective, but since I'm not a developer (or at least a very rusty one), I've held back so far. Also, I
honestly believe that this functionality should be
native to the platform and
supported by IBM Lotus.
But no matter what, John's idea is very, very valid and I heartily support it.
So could you, but promoting it at
IdeaJam.
(And this is where I would love to embed the IdeaJam plugin for John's idea, but being a complete idiot, I can't make that work, so PLEASE click through on the link above).
src="http://www.ideajam.net/IdeaJam/P/ij.nsf/ideajamblogthis.js">
Domino Lotus SOA Web services 4 Comments
June 7th, 2009
Very likely the best reason in the world to look utterly, utterly stupid!
Get your own red nose for just 1£ at
http://www.digitalrednose.com.
RedNose.jpg
Rednose charity Comic Relief 4 Comments
March 13th, 2009
Right, so Lotusphere has come and gone, and my chosen one has been put through it's paces for the first time. Time to write a more thorough review as promised.
Looks & Feel Three times during Lotusphere, the tiny Ideapad was taken for a Thinkpad X-series. Not because it is as big as an X-series Thinkpad, but because it looks the part.
It's as well built as the Thinkpad series, no creaks, no twisting. It's solid and sturdy and has that quality feel in every aspect.
Performance Perhaps my home PC is ancient. Maybe my work PC is sub-par. Maybe I'm just not used to the power of today, but I'm truly impressed.with the Atom processor. It's no slouch this thing, even if it might not be up for Vista.
With 2Gb of memory (don't accept claims that the Lenovo S10e only supports 1,5Gb - you CAN add a 2Gb block, it just won't address the last half gig), it had no problems running Domino 8.5 Server AND Domino 8.5 Designer client. Of course not for production purposes, but definately good enough to work on the road.
It also succesfully runs a virtual Windows 7 image without breaking a sweat. Of course, this was not on the lowest power-setting, but still.
Weight and Handling At 1,2 kilos, the S10e is definately no heavyweight and that makes it easy to carry with you. You can easily manage holding it in the grip of your hand for a longer period of time. If you have the 6-cell battery, I expect it will be even more comfortable to carry. Those present at the Lotusphere closing session might recall Ben Zander throwing a copy of his book "The Art of Possibilities" out into the audience. I did not catch it, but had no problem making a grab for it (and just tipping it onto the next row) while handling the Lenovo - in the middle of a blogpost - in the other hand. Handy indeed.
Screen The 10.1" screen is brilliant. The somewhat odd resolution of 1024x576 works fine, but of course puts some emphasis on how you manage your screen real-estate. As an example, I chose to stick with Google Chrome for browsing. It uses much less screen space than IE7 and Firefox3.
Screen quality is excellent. The picture is crisp and clear.
During Lotusphere, I was watching 2 episodes of LOST on the ABC netplayer. Had I had the bandwidth, I would have gone for the HiDef version. I also use it for "placeshifting" my TV when I'm at my girlfriends (I use Sony Locationfree technology, but am not religious about it. I'm sure Slingboxes rule), and the 10,1" wide-screen is an excellent TV-screen on the move.
Battery I only have the 3-cell battery which of course puts running time between charges under a bit of pressure. The S10e has profile-controlled battery-management software included for easy handling different usage scenarios. The profiles are customizable, and after a bit of fiddling, I have managed a running time of just over 3 hours, while using the wireless network adapter and bluetooth connection, and while surfing the internet and blogging.
The S10e returns quickly from hibernation state, making it no big difference between "Stand-By" and "Hibernate", which should encourage you to make use of hibernation and save battery power.
Splashtop The S10e comes with a quick-booting micro-linux implementation called
Splashtop from DeviceVM, giving you sublimely quick access to browsing, music player, photo manager, instant messaging and Skype. It is however fiddly to get to work, if you're running a fairly secure wireless network and private IP-addresses. Open networks and DHCP works like a charm.
The Bad Sure, there are compromises. They keyboard really
is cramped, and some keys have been relocated in such a way, that it will screw up your typing for a while, until you get used to it, at which point it will screw up your typing on any other PC. Some keys have been completely omitted and put as functions on other keys. This is actually less of a problem than the relocation, since the omitted keys are the ones you hardly ever use, anyway.
The trackpad is absurdly fast in Splashtop mode, and yes, the trackpad buttons are ridiculously hard to push and the click is very loud.
Conclusion Will it replace my T61? No! But it
will be a very fine travel companion, and I won't be carrying that huge T61 around much anymore. I'm very satisfied and recommend the S10e highly.
S10e 1 Comments
February 4th, 2009
4.38: Session is over, and so is Lotusphere 2009.
SEE YOU ALL NEXT YEAR !!! 4.35: Ben Zander ends by telling us a religious tale about monks. Good story. Sadly I didn't get where it was from. I rank Ben Zander as one of the best closing speakers ever.
4.34: "Possibility is ALWAYS only one sentence away!"
4.32: Beyond the "Fuck-It" (BTFI) we were brilliant! :-D
4.24: Again - but in "one-buttock" version. Excellent.
4.22: We will now sing Beethoven's Ninth (Ode to Joy) ... In German. I feel like Eric Cartman at Christmas.
4.20: The whole world's eyes were shining when Mandela got out of jail, when the wall fell in Germany ... and this week.
The new leader is the one that can enroll you into possibilities, not into downward spirals.
4.17: Just noticed Carl Tyler sitting in front and to the right of me ... no longer blue. Almost didn't recognize him. ;-)
4.15: "The rhythm of tranformation is lighter, brighter and more boyant."
"The only reason we have goals is to make our eyes shine."
4.14: Zander now skipping across stage. The energy in this guy is amazing.
4.11: Zander puts all the reality-TV into the 'downward spiral' category. Paris Hilton and the educational system too. Barack Obama thankfully in the 'possibilities' category.
4.09: Zander talks about playing this Chopin piece in Ireland to streetkids, and he got approached by a 19-year old who had cried, when Zander played that "Chopping-piece".
4.05: Ben Zander elaborates into talk about Nelson Mandela and dedication to the "Vision".
We must now think of a loved one who is no longer there, while listening to Chopin. Hi Grandma - love you!
Music was beautiful.
4.04: This guy is brilliant. Fantastic way to explain musical theory.
4.02: He has everybody singing in key - intuitively. "Nobody is tone-deaf", proven!
3.54: Experiment time. We shall now learn to appreciate classical music. Ben Zander will play a prelude by Chopin. We should imagine a 7-year old playing. He makes an excellent impersonation. :-)
He explains the difference between "one-buttock" and "two-buttock" music. Hilarious!
He plays the Chopin E-minor prelude. Or sort of ... it gets broken apart for a couple of good points.
3.52: Ben Zander starts by giving everybody an "A" then ask them to write who they would be to deserve that A by the end of the year. Brilliant!
3.47: "Angels fly because they take themselves lightly."
Next time you make a mistake, say "How FASCINATING"!
Rule #6: "Don't take yourself so seriously" (There are no rules 1-5)
3.40: Ben Zander tells us to choose between anger, resignation and possibility. In life in general, that is. Do you find that question hard?
"Who am I being, that my child's eyes are not shining"? A life question indeed.
He is very inspirational. Not at all what one would expect thinking about conductors and classical music ... how's that for predjudice? Bah, me! :-/
3.30-something: A poor lad named Eric is on stage. We're singing birthday songs for him. I can now claim to have song under the the conductor of the Boston Philharmonics. How many can say that ... oh, wait. Damn!! ;-)
3:26: Guest speaker is conductor of the Boston Philharmonics and author of "The Art of Possibilities"
Ben Zander.(who?)
The subject is leadership.
He talks of two paths - one is the downward spiral of frustration, the other the base for opportunity.
He is conducting the crowd ... well. Lots of humor and energy!
3.25: 5th fecking row, and I forget my camera. Poor cellphone pics to be added later.
3:20 Kristen Lauria - VP of sales and marketing takes the stage.
She shows video from the participants in the "Work Smarter Together" initiative she called out for in the OGS.
A lot of customers and partners share good stories.
3.19: 2010 Golden ticket winner is Marco Ramirez of Intercall, who will be back on the 17th of january 2010 for the 17th Lotusphere at the Dolphin and Swan hotels.
3.15: Lotusphere movement #1 - Ready Go!
Session starts with video of impressions from this year.
Bob Picciano takes the stage in front of a huge "lotusflower" logo.
The crowd congratulates Sandra Marcus who - one again - put a fabulous event together.
Graphs were shown of bandwidth use during tuesday. Collaboration ROCKS!
Lotusphere CGS 0 Comments
January 22nd, 2009
12.30: Rocky closes the session.
12.26: Lot of debate about the contact lists ending with recommendation to "Ask the developers" later on.
12.25: Question on Sametime extended product family. Chris Miller says that there is no getting around having to build a Websphere infrastructure.
12.23: "Are any gurus considering hiring laid-off MS people?" - Yes ... Lotus911 needs janitors! ;-)
12.21: Richard Schwarz (from the floor) asks for support to a question regarding the RedWikis that he intend to pose at the ask the developers session later.
12.20: Question from about the poor printing features returns a reply from Chris Miller that "Lotus has been the greenest product since it came out", due to nobody printing from it. ;-)
12.18: A question about smartcard integration leads to answers about Chris Linfoot's blog and also points question-poster to Planet Lotus.
12.15: Kevin Pettit asks for opinion on the OpenNTF announcement from the OGS. Nathan explains that IBM is driving the process to setup a non-profit foundation, just like Bruce Elgort and Nathan originally had hoped.
12.12: Question about what to do for code-management in the Notes/Domino environment. Teamstudio "Ciao" is recommended ... by Teamstudio. Bill Buchan remarks that "proper Eclipse-based tools" have been requested for a long time. Rocky has a question on DXL-roundtripping on Ideajam - go vote!
12.10: Chris Byrne asks if the IDOL winners have had a good time and if it has been worth it. "Fun Learning" is the best answer to that question EVER!
12.08: Gab asks the Lotusphere IDOL winners how they feel about the new generation moving into the Lotus-sphere (for lack of better word). As students they test all kinds of tools and just use what is best for them. Gab thinks that more college students should be invited to Lotusphere for free.
12.07: Mitch Cohen asks how many Gurus have been twittering while on stage. Good show of hands.
12.05: "Anybody running Lotus Protector?". Chris Miller has run it and explains that IBM has consolidated a lot of previously available tools into that product and it does play well. There is both an appliance version and a VMWare image.
12.00: IBM support for OpenNTF.org is hailed as a future help for source of information. Also the community itself is plugged as well as the DominoWiki. Discussion get heated. In the end, TRAINING is plugged. Everybody tries to skip over the training bit, but it is pretty essential for understanding the tools and in order to be able to 'perform' as developers. Where are the "Teach yourself Notes/Domino development"?
11.57: Richard Schwartz asks a question about the attendance statement at the OGS (Picciano said "customers" up 2% witch seems impossible - I thought I heard "attendance", but could well be wrong). Some gurus doubt the numbers but say it has "felt busy" this year.
11.55: A question from a customer migrating from Exchange to Notes fills the room with applause. BinaryTree recieves some praise. Question is about format mess-ups between Notes SMTP and Exchange SMTP. Balaban and Gab Davis speaks about email-fidelity tools.
11.53: The community as a whole is asked about what they think of LotusLive. John Head thinks "innovation is good". Bob Balaban (self-proclaimed Notes Treehugger) is fine with it, but confused since he found out that the entire "Bluehouse" concept wasn't on Domino. Balaban also thinks it's good to see IBM attack the markets of Microsoft and others without being 3 years late.
11.50: Andrew Pollack and Bob Balaban loses me completely in some Java-discussion. I love not being a developer. ;-)
11.45: The panel does a forced introduction. Mooney is Bill Buchan's son ... I'm starting to believe that, actually!
Question on ID-Vault, Chris Miller answers that it really works well, except cross-domain. Also a Nathan recommends some care regarding where to put replicas of the ID-vault.
11.40-ish: "Is the 8.5 Roaming feature ready for Prime-Time?" - Gab Davis thinks so!
11.35: Questions on Xpages and DAOS open the show. Paul Mooney really likes DAOS and plugs his own Show'n'Tell slides, which are really a picture by picture step through the entire process. Good slides (and a great Show'n'Tell). Lotus911 has a DAOS estimator out.
11.30: The entire cast of Disney is on stage for GURUpalooza ... no wait, it's some other guys. No Goofy here ... well, ok - maybe quite a lot of Goofies actually!
Kevin Pettit flipped the "Reserved signs on the first few rows" ... nobody noticed, and they're empty except for Kevin, Deb, Martine Leyrer and a few others.
Rocky Oliver does the introduction. He tells the Carl Tyler Blueman story, and Carl shows up as a blueman despite the charity fundraiser not reaching the intended amount.
Lotusphere guru 1 Comments
January 22nd, 2009
Well ... there you have it. Lotusphere has been properly kicked off.
The Workplace strategy is back - bigger than ever, but also more mature.
Not many words about the Domino platform. Websphere is all around! Is this goodbye?
10.42: Bob Picciano sums it all up and introduces the Blue Man Group to rock the finale!
10.40: IBM Smarter Planet video featuring Lotus software
10.38 Alistair Rennie introduces Kristen Lauria who talks about efforts to grow market demand. She presents a very agressive strategy and promises to give us all "Air Cover". Sounds good to me - thanks, Kristen!
10.30: Ron and Suzanne demos LotusLive.
Fully integrated with Notes Client and also fully supported on the Blackberry ... very cool!!
There is a special LotusLive keynote tuesday 8.30.
10.27: Lotuslive (
www.lotuslive.com) is wearing the Lotusflower as a logo. Major conceptual strategy from Lotus. Will provide large parts of the Lotus portfolio as online services. Cloud based collaboration. Integration with Salesforce.com, LinkedIn and Skype coming.
Lotus will join the 'cool crowd' and reach the awareness of a large number of people. Excellent.
10.26: Battery dies.
10.25: Alistair Rennie comes back to introduce Sean Poulley who will tell us more about LotusLive
10.24: The demos are taking it's toll on the audience.
Will there be more Blue Man Group?
10.20: Lotus Greenhouse users have created more than 3000 widgets and mashups.
Suzanne and Ron joins to demo.
10.15: Battery warning! ... The Lenovo is strugglingi to handle 2 hours of Live-blogging. That's not entirely good enough! Learning point - run low light on your screen
from the beginning.
10.12: Websphere portal and mashups on stage.
10.10: There's a bug in my blog-template. Posts apparently disappear from the front page (i.e.
The Lotusphere OGS part 1 post). I will look into that later - no time right now, sorry! :-(
10.05: Quickr now supporting ECM integration with FileNet and Content manager. Immensely scalable architecture and easy user interface!
9.55: It's Connections time.
Connections 2.5 is plugged hard. It contains new services that will also move into Quickr. Among them a standards compliant Wiki.
Lotusphere OGS 0 Comments
January 19th, 2009
