Want to Get Rid of Email? Use Enterprise 2.0 Software!

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Were you on vacation last week? That's fine. But I wanted to bring you up to speed on something very exciting that happened last week.

One of my IBM colleagues at IBM, Luis Suarez, made it to the Mashable home page in an article called: A World Without E-mail: One Man's Vision of a Social Workplace. The article has been tweeted 2300+ times, shared on Facebook 600+ times and talked about in Google Buzz 275 times!

The key to getting rid of email? Use Enterprise 2.0 software (or social software behind the firewall). Leo Laporte also invited Luis to join him in his net@night podcast. In the podcast, Luis talks about how he uses his favorite Enterprise 2.0 platform, IBM's Connections, to get rid of email. Here's a video of the podcast. Listen in at 18:00 and at 28:00.

Very inspiring, right? I have personally been motivated by Luis and I can say that his methods do work. In fact, recently I blogged about how I was away from work for 3 weeks and I only got 53 emails! That works out to 3.5 emails per day! Isn't that amazing? Just 2.5 years ago I was getting 100+ emails a day! W00t!!

CEMEX deploys Lotus Connections - Nominated for Forrester Groundswell Award

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Two years ago I told you about a visit I made to México to pitch the business value of social software and talk about the adoption of social software inside the enterprise.

That trip was for CEMEX, the world's largest building materials supplier. Not only I'm excited to hear how successful they've been, I'm also excited because they've been nominated for a Forrester Groundswell Award.

As I read their nomination for the award, I noticed a screenshot of the homepage of their internal social collaboration platform, codenamed Shift. And as I looked at the screenshot I noticed how it's all built on Lotus Connections. So what is Shift? Here's how CEMEX describes it:

The core elements of Shift as a collaboration platform are: messaging (calendaring and scheduling, and contacts), team collaboration (file synchronization, discussion forums, ideas and notes in form of a wiki, task management, full-text search, brainstorming sessions), real-time collaboration and communication (e.g., presence, instant messaging, Web conferencing, application/desktop sharing, voice, audio and video conferencing), Social Computing tools (e.g., profile status posts to see what employees are working on, networking, blogs, wikis, tags, RSS, shared bookmarks and videos).

Shift has been deployed to 20 countries worldwide and there are currently 200 communities to address challenges such as product improvement, government regulation, and even discuss strategic topics such as Low Carbon Sustainable strategy. This quote also grabbed my attention:

The implementation of Shift has reshaped the entire organization and is changing CEMEX's corporate culture towards more openness and authenticity in the way employees interact with each other.

I think they key to CEMEX's success with deploying social software inside of their enterprise is that they've made the platform a central and essential place for collaboration. It's not a silo where employees are asked to go to for certain interactions, it's where everything happens!

So congratulations to CEMEX for their nomination into Forrester's Groundswell Awards. To vote for them and learn more about their use of social tools in the enterprise, go here.

Update (10/18/10): CEMEX has created a page on their homepage to describe Shift.

   

This Week In Lotus: IBM is Market Leader in Enterprise 2.0 Platforms

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Shortly before I left on paternity leave a great podcast kicked off for all things Lotus. I'm currently returning from a trip to New Jersey and catching up on this wonderful podcast: This Week In Lotus. One of the things that I've come to like about the podcast is the interaction from the participants **and** the actual participants. Each episode has representation from IBM, business partners and even customers for a complete 360 degree perspective.

I'm currently listening to episode 8, where the crew discusses the IDC report where IBM is named the Market Leader in Enterprise 2.0 Platforms. I highly recommend this episode to anyone interested in evaluating Enterprise 2.0 platforms and those interested in IBM's Enterprise 2.0 offerings. In this episode you will hear:

• IBM's response to IDC's report
• Lotus Connections vs Microsoft Sharepoint (which IDC doesn't consider a social platform)
• Adoption of Lotus Connections
• Business Partners offerings along Lotus Connections
• A preview of new things to come in the next release of Lotus Connections

Another thing I like about this podcast is how each episode ends with a random tip from each of the participants.

For more information on this podcast click here and to subscribe in iTunes click here.

Moving Lotus Connections to New Hardware

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Recently, I was asked what it would take to move a Lotus Connections deployment to new hardware. Not sure if this is valuable to anyone else, but I figured I would document it here just in case anyone else needs it.

Note: The awesome people at ISSL put this together, and with their permission, I'm including here.

The estimated duration will depend on several factors. Regardless, you will have to perform a full install of an empty system in the new environment to prepare for the migration. Other estimates are dependent on how the different environments are configured:

Pilot Version to Production Version: If the source environment is Lotus Connections Pilot Version, you will need to follow the detailed instructions in the information center to perform the data migration: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ltscnnct/v2r0/topic/com.ibm.connections.25.help/c_pilot_migrate_overview.html

I have done this migration with one customer - it took about a day or two to complete, then there were a couple of days of setting up administration/product configuration specific to the new environment

Production Version to Production Version, same DB type, same LDAP: This is the simplest migration possible, which basically involved copying the shared file system and performing a native DB restore of the Connections databases, which should take a few hours. if there are any administrative or product configuration differences, they may take a couple of days to complete.

Production Version to Production Version, different DB type, same LDAP: A bit of a blend of the two migrations listed above - instead of using native database restored, you would either use the DB Wizard or manual scripts and migration utilities to move from the source DB type (ex.: Oracle) to the destination DB type (ex.: DB2). This type of database migration ay add a couple of days to the overall effort - and you have to be especially careful to validate that the scripts/utilities complete successfully

Production Version to Production Version, same DB type, different LDAP: This is a very complex migration if there is pre-existing data. There is no supported way to migrate data from one LDAP type to another and retain all of the non-Profiles user data. If they want to take this approach, it could take several weeks to design, develop and test the raw SQL scripts to perform the data conversion

Moving On To A New Job

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Effective September 1st, I've started to transition to a new job. While I won't take the new job until October 1st, I've started the transition to get used to my new responsibilities.

When I first joined IBM more than 8 years ago, I joined as a developer in the Lotus Development organization. 2.5 years ago, I left Lotus Development to become one of the evangelists for social software and Enterprise 2.0 at IBM. That was a very rewarding experience and I truly enjoyed working with so many customers and helping them be successful with their Enterprise 2.0 deployment.

In the past 2.5 years, I've gotten to learn a lot about the industry, our competitors, the needs from our customers, how they use our products, how they would like to use our products, and more. When possible, I've created solutions and got my hands "dirty" to ensure the success of our customers. I've also collaborated heavily with many business partners. It's been a blast!

I still have to figure out, with my new manager, what blogging activity will be acceptable, but I hope I can continue to engage with you virtually as I've been doing in the past.

So with that, I'm hoping that I can take everything that I've learned and apply it in my new job because I'm re-joining the Lotus Development organization again, this time as a Product Manager for Social Software at IBM.