What does the world think of Lotus Connections?

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In my personal Twitter home page I recently learned of a cool feature. Not only can you follow (subscribe) others within Twitter, you can of course follow them using RSS.

Then there's a new service out there called Summize. With it, you can search what's going on today in Twitter. And just like Dogear, you can subscribe to search results!

So if you are interested in seeing what the world is twittering about Lotus Connections, subscribe to these search results! I, for example, have already learned about customers who are deploying Lotus Connections v2 Beta 2. I also learned about editors who were writing stories about Lotus Connections. I, of course, now follow them within Twitter and, thus, get to expand my social network outside of the firewall!

"So, Luis, when do you work?"

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(This used to be a very long blog but I decided to divide it in two parts. One to share a funny anectdote [this one] and another to share the experiences from the day.).

Anyway, as I discussed Blogging and my success stories the customer asked me "So, when do you work?". This was a good question, for which I didn't have an immediate answer. They had gotten the impression that I spent my entire time social networking through Lotus Connections.

At first, I said that writing a blog takes me about 30 mins and I spent an additional 1hr - 1.5 hr a day reading blogs and networking. At this point, they looked at me weird. I could see it in their faces. "Doesn't IBM care that you are 'wasting' so much time?" To which I didn't say anything, but it got me thinking... am I really wasting my time?

The answer is a resounding NO! In fact, it is MY JOB (according to my business goals) to blog (well, the goals state something about sharing knowledge) AND to read blogs (in this case, the goals say something about growing my sales and technical skills). So there... that's what I'm going to say next time I run into this question.

What are your thoughts? Have you faced this question before from your peers/customers?

Success after all day Lotus Connections workshop!

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(This used to be a very long blog but I decided to divide it in two parts. One to share a funny anectdote and another to share the experiences from the day. [this one]).

On Friday, I was in an all-day meeting with a customer in Monterrey, Mexico. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about Social Software, the business drivers, personal benefits, and user adoption practices. I was joined by

Palma Bickford and Brian Pearson.

Brian first gave a demo on our entire social software and collaboration suite showing Quickr integration with the Desktop, Sharepoint integration with Portal, Sametime integration with Connections, etc. The customer loved this part because they got to see the user experience (UX).

From there I went through the Business Overview presentation of Lotus Connections. I, unfortunately, only had enough time to go through the first part (discussing the 3 business drivers). The customer later gave us feedback that they would have liked to see use cases for each of the 5 Lotus Connections services and then how Lotus Connections helps solve those problems -- which is the 2nd part of the presentation ... oh well!

Next, we discussed the Best Practices for User Adoption. This was a great discussion and we really drove the point home that integration is a huge part of user adoption (and of course showed how Lotus Connections integrates with everything!).

Next, we talked about their in-house applications. They currently have a portal (Tibco?) and they wanted to provide SSO between their portal and Lotus Connections. I found out that this portal runs on WebSphere. "Great!", I thought. Easy. Now, all they have to do is export the LTPA key from their Portal and import it into the Connections server -- a 10 minute process! They are also planning on using Sun Access Manager (our competitor to Tivoli Access Manager) for SSO. That's not officially supported, but in theory it should work (more on this later).

At the end of day, the customer said that they are planning a pilot which will start in July 1 and they haven't seen any competitors yet for social software. The pilot will involve Lotus Connections, Quickr and Sametime Advanced! They are also looking at Sharepoint for team collaboration, but they didn't stop saying how frustrated they are with that product

. Oh, and of course, throughout the entire day I kept repeating how Sharepoint only competes with Quickr and not with Connections!

Implementar software social en las empresas

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Estuve en Monterrey, México para hacer una presentación de social software para las empresas. Este tema está super interesante. Todo el mundo sabe el éxito que ha tenido Facebook y MySpace.

Por mi parte, a mi me gusta mucho mas Facebook y encuentro que es tremenda herramienta para mantenerse al tanto con amigos y familiares. En resumen, es una tremenda herramienta para 'networking'. Como saben, ya este blog cumplió dos años, aunque tengo que admitir que no he publicado mucho en el porque me estoy concentrando mas en bloguear ADENTRO de mi compañía.

Eso es asi, mi compañía lleva promocionando el uso de Blogs adentro desde hace ya como 6-8 años. Ustedes se pueden preguntar: "pero la gente no va a usar eso para perder su tiempo y procrastinar?" "Eso no va a bajar el nivel de productividad de la compañía?"

Al contrario, a mi me fascinan los blogs! Como autor de un blog he aprendido muchísimo. Y ahora se que es lo que están pensando: "pero... de los blogs uno aprende al leerlos, como es que vas a aprender al escribir un blog?" Pues es todo gracias al networking y colaboración que ocurre dentro de blogs a través de los comentarios.

Uno de mis ejemplos favoritos de esto ocurrió hace como 1 año. Yo estaba trabajando en Detroit con un cliente que quería integrar nuestro producto de social software con Microsoft Sharepoint. Sharepoint es probablemente el producto mas difícil de integrar por lo que lo hace una mala herramienta de colaboración.

Anyway, pues dentro de mi compañía yo escribí un blog sobre lo que yo estaba tratando de hacer y de mis frustraciones con Sharepoint. Pues dentro de unas horas, una persona me escribió un comentario diciendo que él sabía exactamente como hacer lo que yo quería hacer. Yo pensé "PERFECTO". Al otro día, cuando llego al cliente me conecto a mi Instant Messenger y unas cuantas horas mas tarde la persona me manda un mensaje: "Estoy aquí". Y yo estaba como que "WHAT??" Y me dijo, "si estoy aquí para ayudarte con eso. Veo que estas en el piso 27 y yo estoy en el 25, bajo ahora ok?"

Obviamente, le dije que si! Gracias a un blog que yo escribí, yo aprendí a como hacer algo con Sharepoint gracias a alguien que yo nunca había conocido. Y asi como este ejemplo, tengo muchísimos otros! Me fascinan los blogs!

Up and running in 1 week with Lotus Connections

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A lot of people ask me how long do we need to get Lotus Connections deployed and up and running.  Here's the summary that was created by the customer for their business unit based on work that Chris Biega, Carla Gillespie and myself did while on-site for 5 days (isn't it great when the customer does the work for you???

).

Anyway,  can you get this much done with other products in 5 days???

Lotus Connections rocks!!

Success Criteria	Feature / Value Demonstrated
Successfully install core elements to support Connections Beta 2 in a timely manner. Server 1 to include: WAS with appropriate fix packs, IIS, Tivoli Directory Integrator Server 2 to include: MS SQL Server 2005 (already installed) Server 3 to include: MS Active Directory 2003 (already installed)	Complete
Successfully install Lotus Connections Beta 2 on Server 1	Complete
Integrate Lotus Connections with AD LDAP for basic authentication using Lotus Connections security.  All users will be required to authenticate and no one will be able to blog or contribute content anonymously.	Complete
Perform a one time load of LDAP information into the Lotus Connections Profiles database.  Profiles will be configured so each user can update all sections of their profile.  However, these updates will not be propagated back to the LDAP (or other) source.	Complete
Integrate with OCS to show presence awareness	Complete. Integration with OCS is via the IM profile field.  (recommended the integration of OCS also be made available via the person card for final release)
Integrate the Person card with Outlook and Confluence	The person card has been integrated into Confluence.  The person card could not be successfully integrated with Outlook (integrated via the Outlook plugin) .
Integrate with Confluence Wiki (pending availability of Confluence plug-in for Connections v2 beta 2)	A wiki cannot be created within the Connections interface due to a bug with the plugin.  A fix will be available in a week or two.
Configure Connections to point Telligent Blogs (or leave Connections Blogs as default)	The integration within Telligent blogs to connections will be done via the person card.  Since the look/feel of Community Server 2008 has not been decided, we did not integrate the person card.  However, we do have the code that needs to be added to Community Server for the person card (~2 lines of code).  As for the integration of Community Server within Connections, we have opted to have the only integration be through the BLOG editable url in the profile.  Updating the blog url in one's profile will update the blog link in the person card.
Configure Homepage with iWidgets and RSS Feeds	There were no RSS Feeds on intranet site.  As for the iWidgets - google widgets were added to connections.  There is a bug with the iWidgets where they are not persistent when added to the homepage.
Google Search integration. Requires Search Team to enable Google Search Appliance to either crawl the Connections web application or SQL database.	WIP.  Google was able to successfully crawl the Activities db.  Testing of successful crawls of profiles, communities, blogs, and dogear still needs to be done.  The google team has high confidence in successful crawls.  However, due to prioritization of other projects was not able to fully test.
MOSS Integration with Connections	Integration is via the person card.  There is a link in the person card to ‚'My Site'
SSO with Connections	We achieved 95% of SSO with the Windows desktop. However, we decided to disable SSO with Connections since specific functionality within connections breaks when SSO is enabled.  These bugs should be resolved by final release.
Outlook/Connections integration	Outlook plugin can be successfully installed to integrate with connections.  The only feature of the plugin that does not work is the person card because of our Exchange configuration.

Note: This was a PoC install and as such it doesn't have clustering, backups, tuning, or any other thing you would do in a real production environment.