Carol Jones is a Distinguished Engineer in IBM's Software Group. She is the architect who led the startup of well-known products such as WebSphere Portal, IBM Workplace Services Express, WebSphere Studio, and WebSphere Application Server. Today, she is the lead architect for IBM Workplace. This blog is about what might be coming next in collaboration, social networking, and simple ways to make systems work together.

Lotusphere 2008

Whew, last week was a whirl-wind, because of all the action in Orlando at Lotusphere. Attendance was way up, to the point where we had to repeat the opening general session, in order to accommodate everyone.

I gave a talk about Web 2.0, drawing on examples of Web 2.0 software that you know and love as a consumer, and then showing how those principles could be applied to systems you use at work. As a simple example, think about the concept of "participation" that you see in virtually all internet retail sites. These days, we almost always consult reviews and ratings and customer feedback before we make major purchases. We want to know what other people think about the products, and whether or not they lived up to the promises. That same principle could easily apply to things like content management systems. It would help all of us find the best and most useful content related to our jobs.

There were lots of important announcements, here's a quick rundown:

• IBM Lotus Foundations is a server (think "appliance") for small businesses. It includes the Domino mail and collaboration server, file management, directory services, firewall, backup and recovery, and office productivity tools. It's ultra simple to set up and use.
  


• "Bluehouse", a code name for a new service intended for small businesses. It expands what we started with Sametime Unyte last year, but adds a lot more interesting capabilities such as sharing contacts, storing and sharing files and other kinds of content, and more.
  


• "Atlantic", a code-name for vastly expanded integration between Lotus Notes and SAP Business Suite.
  


• IBM Lotus Mashups, a new tool for combining "widgets" together on a page, in mash-up style. It makes use of feeds and iWidgets (a specification being developed in the Open Ajax Alliance.
  


• Lotus Symphony is about to enter its 4th beta release. Give it a try.
  

There were a few other announcements that I've missed, read Ed Brill's blog for more.

Notes 8 shipped!!

Notes 8 shipped this past Friday. It's an awesome release, and an awesome accomplishment by a very smart and dedicated team.

Find out what's new here.

Deploying Lotus Connections

With the recent release of Lotus Connections, IBM has shown that social software is ready for business. Companies are embracing social networking and social software as part of their daily routines as a means to easily network with colleagues and customers, share ideas, locate experts, and most importantly -- innovate and respond to new business challenges.

As part of a new article series published on IBM developerWorks, members of our technical team who have been instrumental in helping customers adopt social software solutions will be sharing tips and best practices around implementing Lotus Connections.

The six-part article series called Deploying IBM Lotus Connections has already been kicked off and the first three articles have been published.

• Part 1 - Planning and architecture considerations focuses on what to consider to ensure that your deployment is built properly.
  


• Part 2 - Post-installation tuning covers the common steps to follow after installing Lotus Connections and provides tips to ensure that your deployment is performing optimally.
  


• Part 3 - Maintenance covers system maintenance, backup/recovery strategies, and tips for protecting your environment from unexpected data loss or corruption.
  

Many Eyes

It has been exciting to watch the activity on Many Eyes. Many Eyes is a data visualization service, with the unique twist of engaging public discussion on the visualizations. Here's how it works:

1. You start off by uploading or pasting in your data set.


2. Then choose one of the many gorgeous and unique graph types


3. Refine it, say by drilling in on an interesting part of the data


4. Others can make comments to offer their insights and opinions. They can refine the data further and publish their own visualizations.

Each visualization lets you select areas of interest. Your selection is highlighted in a bright color, so that you can refer to those items in your comments. It's much easier to say "Look at the circled part of the graph" than "look at the spike a little right of the middle."

I hope you'll try it out.

Venus at Lotusphere

I just learned that part of the front page of Lotusphere Online is using Sam Ruby's "river of news" feed aggregator called Venus.

It takes feeds in various formats, converts them all to Atom 1.0, allows you to filter them, and then outputs XHTML that you can transform using XSLT.

You can read a few more comments over at Sam's blog.

Day Two of Lotusphere 2007

It's now day 2 of Lotusphere 2007. If you weren't here you missed an amazing day yesterday. We made lots of announcements concerning Unified Communications (Sametime), Notes and Domino 8, WebSphere Portal 6, Lotus Quickr, and of course Lotus Connections. We hosted the first Blogger Q&A session, which was fun except Mike answered all the questions, it was hard to get a word in :-)

We probably had 400 or so at the talk I gave along with Rob Yates (INV 102), which was an under-the-covers look at some of the Web 2.0 technologies and standards that we've used in Lotus Connections. Charlie Hill and Scott Prager gave an excellent session as well (INV 103).

Today there's a lot to see over at the Innovation Lab, and I'm also hoping to get by the User Experience Lab too.

Try out Lotus Connections here. Log on with your Lotusphere Online id, which is printed on your badge like this: 123456:abcdef (so 123456@ls2007online.net is your user id, and abcdef is your password)

Stamford, CT

For the past couple of days I've been at a conference, hosted by IBM, for software industry analysts. It was a very intense couple of days, where lots of IBM executives and technical experts give presentations and 1-1 interviews with the analysts, covering a very broad spectrum of what we are working on in IBM Software.

Naturally lots of people were blogging during the event. You can easily find their posts by the ibmanalystconf06 tag.

Beyond predictable workflows

Here's an article that I just published in the IBM Systems Journal, along with my colleagues Charlie Hill, Rob Yates, and Sandra Kogan. I hope you'll read it (as well as the other articles) and make some comments. Admittedly, the Systems Journal style is pretty formal, but we're writing about some very practical issues that we all deal with in the daily work that we do.

This had better be good

Well, it's been a shamefully long time since my last post. Here's the long-awaited last installment in my series of posts about Web 2.0.

So far I've mentioned communities, social bookmarks, activities, and in previous posts, the importance of tagging and syndication (Atom and Atom Publishing in particular). Today's topic is instant messaging, or real-time communication.

Typically IM is used for short interactions with people that you know, or at least people who have a really good reason to contact you directly. We have hello-how-are-you chats, this-is-really-funny chats, or can-you-send-me-the-file-you-promised chats. Personally I can't imagine how I could get my work done with out it.

But this is only scratching the surface, and not realizing the full potential that the chat medium has. If you read my post about communities, you'll remember that I described them as fluid, involving groups of people with a common interest or work objective. How can these communities use chat more effectively? What if a member of a community could reach out to the other members, without specifically targeting individuals by name? For example, I'd like to send a message to the "Blackberry Users" community, inviting them to a lecture that's taking place at lunchtime. Or maybe I'd like to get advice from the "Firefox Users" community about upgrading to the latest version. Think of these as broadcasts, rather than being targeted to a specific person.

On the surface this seems like a strange idea: I can send messages that randomly interrupt hundreds of people asking for help on my problem. But it actually works surprisingly well. As long as I'm not broadcasting stupid questions to the wrong communties, there is almost always someone who has the time and knowledge and willingness to help. Everyone else can just ignore the message. It's a great way to connect people and potentially form long-lasting connections.

Activity-based Computing

For quite a while now we've been working on activity-based Computing. This is about organizing work in terms of the activities that people do, rather than the tools they use. If the focus is on the work instead of the tools, it is possible to make semi-structured work patterns more productive than they currently are. Today we try our best to use team rooms, but we're not always disciplined enough to post everything there. Or, at the other extreme, we all have a lot of stuff scattered throughout our e-mail, on the file system, etc. with no organization at all. Sure, you can use search tools to find it, but it really shouldn't be the case that people have to work so hard at finding and organizing information.

If we expand the discussion beyond "things", it gets even worse when you consider work that involves a formal process or a very structured application. In a lot of transaction systems, the transaction is sometimes just a small part of the work. There might be a signficant amount of preparation that takes place beforehand, involving very loose steps. Think about the last time your department ordered hardware: somebody probably went around collecting up everyone's requirements, maybe in a spreadsheet or on paper, or maybe they wrote a quick-and-dirty application of some kind. Only after this was consolidated did the real ordering take place.

An activity is the collection of materials, communications, and processes that emerge when people work together. Examples might be driving a sales process to close, preparing for an important meeting, or writing a report for a client. At Lotusphere 2006, we show a lot about the Activity Dashboard we're working on, plus many new research projects that have spawned from the main product development work.

Basically what you can do with the Activities Dashboard is post links to things that you're working with. You don't actually need to visit the dashboard to do this, because the service integrates easily with a wide range of applications and tools. For example, while you're in your browser, you can click a bookmarklet to post the page you're currently looking at, into the Activity server. It's a similar story from your Notes client or Word, or other places.

This works because we use very lightweight integration methods. Data flows in and out over standard protocols/markups, with the most important ones being Atom and the Atom Publishing Protocol. Basically this means that you can post anything that has a URL associated with it -- which means just about anything these days. You can extend it to work with your tools, not just the ones we thought of.

I use Activites for work like writing papers, studying emerging technologies, and just plain-old document sharing. It's a nice simple way to share things, and it works beautifully in small groups. We have some activities that involve very large groups as well. Where is this is really going is more ambitious than my simple use cases though. We can take activities and distill patterns out of them, so that pattern is repeatable. A good example might be the steps that you go through when you hire a new employee. These steps are structured, but not necessarily rigidly structured. You need to talk to people, make sure you have funding, interview candidates, process HR paperwork, get equipment, etc. But some of the steps can be done out of order, and the exact details might change from time to time. They are familar enough that you don't need a fancy application to do it, but infrequent enough that you might not remember every step. An activity template is perfect for a situation like that.

Next: real-time business.

Communities and Stuff

Continuing from my last post, I want to describe more about communities and what they need to do.

What kind of work happens in communities? One obvious thing is that the members share stuff. For example, keeping bookmarks in a shared location helps others reuse research work. Keeping hints and tips in a common place enables support personnel resolve issues. What is different in the Web 2.0 world is that shared content systems aren't about locking and version control and management of the asset, but rather, they are about really sharing it and organizing it in new ways.

Think about systems for sharing bookmarks, with del.icio.us being the best known, or IBM's research project called Dogear. In these systems, users save their bookmarks on the web, rather than using the browser's built-in bookmark folders. When you save a bookmark, you get a chance to "tag" it, meaning that you type in a few keywords to say what the bookmark is about. These keywords can be anything that is meaningful to you -- any words that will help you find it again.

At first, I used Dogear just for myself, as a way to organize a large number of bookmarks and find them again. But what really got me hooked was seeing other people's bookmarks. Wow! I discovered all kinds of new information that I probably would not have found on my own. This is the “wisdom of crowds” in action, and it is a good example of the give-to-get principle that is the hallmark of effective social software.

However social bookmarking on public sites raises an important privacy issue for companies. Employees need to be able to tag and share links behind the firewall, without risk of publicly revealing trends or topics being investigated. For business use, it's also important for users to be accurately identified, because you want to contact people and build more lasting work connections with them.

It turn out that when enough people do this -- save bookmarks and tag them -- you wind up with a really interesting set of data. If you want to identify experts on topics, just follow the tag cloud, and you've got a pretty good clue as to who the experts are. You can watch trends develop by looking at which tags are most popular. You can even watch communities form by looking at clusters of people related to a tag, or people who follow each other's bookmarks.

In general tagging is about collaborative efforts to organize all kinds of information, not just bookmarks. Users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (“tags”), and the tags are displayed as a “cloud”, where more popular tags are drawn in larger text. This method of organization is most effective when the information is changing rapidly. I've written about this topic here, and contrasted it to formal taxonomy.

Next up: activity-based computing.

Web 2.0

People frequently ask me about IBM's strategy for "Web 2.0". (Yes, I know it is odd to combine the words "strategy" and "Web 2.0" in the same sentence.) Over the next few posts, I'll explain my views about this question.

First off, to state what is already completely obvious to everyone, we're not a trendy bunch, So we aren't going to start writing in pink type and spelling words with dots between the syllables. You won't ever confuse us with Jotspot or Flickr or del.icio.us -- all companies whose work I have great respect for. It's just that what we do is much different.

What we are about, and have always been about, is innovation, and how innovation helps businesses succeed. So getting back to Web 2.0, we're primarily interested in how we can help you apply the technologies of Web 2.0 to your business in a meaningful way.

Activity-based Computing

Sametime beta coming soon

Chickenfoot

go("google.com")
enter("chickenfoot")
click("google search")