Social Business strategist, podcaster, blogger, founder of Social Connections and conference speaker
I’ve always passionately argued that the content from these global and regional conferences should be shared openly and widely – not just the decks themselves, but also audio and (preferably) video recordings. JiveWorld17 is a fantastic example of this being delivered.
If you’re primarily focused on IBM-based solutions, you may not be aware that I have a Jive-focused blog over at Jive.news.
This is particularly relevant this week as it is JiveWorld, Jive’s annual worldwide conference in Las Vegas. I’m blogging as much of the news as I can from the conference, including today’s posts on yesterday’s key announcements and Jive’s roadmap for 2017 and 2018. Do subscribe to the blog there if you want to receive my Jive posts in the future.
The APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center) are hosting an interesting webinar in a couple of week’s time, looking at how to manage a successful ESN…
Engage is probably the best IBM Collaboration user group anywhere in the world, and the 2017 edition is looking like it will be the best yet!
IBM Connect 2017 takes place later this month in San Francisco, and the last-minute push to increase attendance is already underway. I’m a big fan of the new venue, and the shift from Florida to California, and so really hope that the event is a huge success.
One of the interesting aspects of the registration push has been the unveiling of some information that previously being kept relatively quiet – if not under NDA, certainly out of the limelight
Unfortunately I’ve just missed the actual anniversary, but I thought it worth celebrating that this week marks a decade since the announcement (on 22nd January 2007) of two products that have had an immense impact on my working life, Lotus IBM Connections and Lotus Quickr.
Sorry for the late notice on this, but CMAD 2017 is today! RSVP and join the webathon now.
IBM has released a series of videos featuring Inhi Cho Suh, inviting us all to IBM Connect 2017. Will you be attending IBM Connect this year?
Jive Software bring’s its ‘Power of Connection’ event world tour to London on 1st November, featuring some excellent UK-based customer speakers. Will you attend?
I always feel a frisson of excitement when arriving at an airport ready for an international flight, and the anticipation is even more evident when it’s a long haul trip. And so it is today, sat in the BA lounge overlooking the tarmac of Heathrow’s eastern runway and T5 apron.
On this occasion I am delighted that it is Austin in Texas that’s the destination, and the purpose of the whirlwind 72 hour trip is to attend MWLUG for the first time. I first visited Austin back in 1998 to attend an IBM study tour, truly loved the vibe that the city has, and so I’m delighted to return once again almost two decades later.
So what is MWLUG I hear (some of) you cry? The Mid West Lotus User Group.
Of course, Lotus as a brand is long gone, but the community and culture that surrounds the ICS products and collaborative vision definitely remain. MWLUG is a great example of the role and importance of the user groups in fostering and maintaining the community beyond the efforts of the vendor itself. From afar, I’ve always been left impressed by the efforts of Richard Moy and his team of volunteers in putting on such a professional event, as well as having the drive and determination to continue to look for new venues across the US – the scope has definitely widened far beyond the Mid West at this point!
This is my first user group event since leaving Jive, so I’m looking forward to meeting up with so many long-time friends after a couple of years away.
I’m also delighted to be presenting tomorrow afternoon at 5:45pm in session BP107, entitled ‘The Anatomy of the Perfect Collaboration Use Case’. This is a deck that I presented last Autumn at Social Connections 9 in Germany, but has been significantly enhanced based on the projects I’ve delivered since, as well as refocusing on the options available to IBM customers. Here’s the abstract:
Build it and they will come? By now, surely we should all be aware this is not the case.
Social and collaboration platforms need to provide demonstrable value, whether in productivity terms for the individual users, or in business value to the organisations involved. Therefore it is imperative that users know why they and how they should come together to use the platform in a strategic manner, to achieve a defined goal.
Join this session to hear why this means that platform owners and community managers must develop a roadmap of clearly defined and understood ‘use cases’, the factors and challenges that you need to consider, and how best to support the use cases within your deployment and launch strategy.
So if you’re at the event, please join me, or at least make sure you say Hi in the corridors of the Four Seasons, Austin. I always love to meet new community folks, particularly to hear how and why you’re deploying social collaboration technology to aid your business and support new ways of enabling your employees to connect and communicate.
Firstly, two extremely well-respected IBM ISVs are forming a strategic alliance:
Specialists from all over the world are preparing themselves for Social Connections 10 – the core event for the IBM Connections community. So did Infoware and panagenda, both sponsors at the event, and formed a strategic alliance to jointly market both parties solutions.
The solutions Infoware DomainPatrol Social for content and user management and panagenda ConnectionsExpert for monitoring, adoption and analytics complement each other perfectly.
I’ve been a strong advocate for Infoware‘s Domain Patrol Social product for a number of years,
feeling that it fills a much-needed hole in a Connections community manager’s toolkit – managing communities, profiles and files in a way that the product itself does not allow.
I have also heard great things about panagenda‘s upcoming ConnectionsExpert product, which is about to be launched at Social Connections 10. This will offer metrics, analytics, realtime monitoring and adoption measurement all in one package. Given Panagenda’s network of partners and their own strong consultancy team (including Femke and Christoph), this is sure to do well.
As the press releases state, these products should prove to be highly complementary, and knowing the two organisations as I do, I think they’ll work tremendously well together.
Secondly, a social collaboration company that I’ve followed for a very long time, nooQ, is now partnering with IBM on adding visualisation features to IBM solutions, including IBM Connections:
We are excited to announce we have entered into a partnership with IBM.
Since we won product awards at Socialnow we have been speaking to IBM on working together. The next logical step for that was to apply for IBM partnership status, which has been approved.
nooQ will work with IBM their customers using IBM Connections to apply our intelligent, machine learning algorithms and visualisation to sit on top of existing IBM Connections data.
There are a lot of features in the IBM product that are not in nooQ such as blogs and wiki’s but now IBM customers will have the added benefit of an alternative interface to surface personalised content. They will be able to use our volume controls to filter and display visually what is important to them.
We will be focussing on IBM’s next generation Social Business products such as IBM Connections and also excited to see what powerful combinations we can complement and improve including their other next generation social business products with machine learning such as IBM Verse, IBM Watson, and Toscana.
I watched nooQ’s presentation at Social Now and it was fascinating to see the response from the audience in terms of being wowed by the potential of their solution, and could almost hear the cogs whirring in terms of the potential for the visualisation techniques and insight to be layered on top of other collaboration platforms – including Connections and Jive. It’s impressive to see that IBM and nooQ have moved so quickly, and I look forward to hearing more about the partnership and roadmap.
Both alliances will be in action next week at Social Connections 10 in Toronto, so if you have the opportunity to attend, you really should! There are still tickets available so register ASAP!
Back in January I stepped away from the Social Connections team due to my commitments with Jive, after 9 events and 4.5 years of helping to grow what is an incredible IBM Social Business user group community.
Whilst I’ve been away, Wannes and the team have organised a fantastic 10th event, which takes place in just 11 days time.
Once again, Social Connections has headed back across the Atlantic to North America, and this time the event takes place in yet another new country (10 in 10 so far!), Canada!
Toronto is the carefully selected destination, with an exciting high-rise venue overlooking the city.
As usual, this independent community event mixes four key themes:
The very full two-day agenda for this event is looking to be probably the best the team has ever put together, with the keynotes looking particularly exciting:
As usual, there is a strong thread of social events running through the agenda, culminating in the gala reception to be held at the Hockey Hall of Fame. There are also plenty of returning favourites, such as Speedsponsoring, Pardon The Interruption, Ask IBM and the Design track. There’s even an optional Masterclass with Luis Suarez.
Social Connections 10 costs just CA$349 to attend, and there are a few spaces left if you’d like to join the party.
There really is no better way to get up to speed with IBM Social Business solutions, understand the product roadmaps, get the lowdown on deployment and strategy, or to build valuable relationships with the community. Don’t miss it!
Imagine being asked to speak at TED. Not the independent TEDx conferences, but as Tim Urban explains…
The thing I was asked to speak at was the big Vancouver one. I say this not only to brag, but also to explain why this whole thing had me freaking out so much. The same thing that made it extra extra scary also made it extra extra not turn-downable.
So I accepted.
What follows is the very scary yet utterly compelling story of how Tim prepared and delivered his session. Really great reading, and some super advice on what you should do, and probably will fail to do, next time you present at an event…
The Lotus IBM Collaboration Solutions space is an incredible demonstration of what online communities can become through the truly altruistic efforts of its members. I’ve always known that, but stepping away somewhat over the past year has allowed me to observe the relationships, events and online activities through a new and less obscured lens. A little distance and independence has done nothing but confirm the wonderfully inclusive family-like nature of this community.
Looking all the way back to the nascent days of groupware created by the Lotus company itself, through the glory years of Notes and Domino, and onto the current focus around Connections, so many of the technologists that took to these products were also the ones that truly understood the nature of online community. Perhaps that should not have been a surprise to anyone (as the products were nothing without connected and committed individuals to utilise them) but it has always been remarkable that the ever-changing and dynamic group of individuals that met at Lotusphere each January, then stayed in touch via personal websites/blogs, forums and IM chats, bonded in a way that never seemed to happen with the same compelling force around other products.
As I’ve taken my own steps into the wider digital transformation space over the past 8 years or so, and thus connected with hundreds of thought leaders and change agents around the world, it has become evident to me that a significant majority of movers and shakers in this industry have Lotus products in their backgrounds. Given how widely Notes and Domino were used in large enterprises back in the late 90s and early 2000s, perhaps this is inevitable, but I personally believe that there is a deeper and more powerful reason – that the potential of collaboration unleashed by these products lit the spark within so many of us.
What makes this even more remarkable is that the support for the community from the vendor whose products we advocate has been somewhat inconsistent over the years. This isn’t meant to be a dig at IBM, it is a commercial organisation for whom quarterly sales results and ‘shareholder value’ are at the core of all that it does. For some, the effort of sustaining the community-facing support has been too much, whereas for others, the occasional raging fire that needed to be extinguished was simply too controversial and difficult to defend. That said, many of those IBMers that have been at the coalface over the years have absolutely understood the nature of the community, and the value it offers to IBM itself, to partners and most of all, to customers – amongst many others, I’m looking at Mary-Beth, Alan, Ed, Louis, Niklas, Suzie, Luis, Debora, Joyce, Colleen, Susan, Wes, Oli, Amanda and Mat.
What those remarkable individuals have understood is that the community has a tone, culture and internal organisation all of its own.
Whilst ’the Yellowverse’ has been (mostly) loyal to IBM and its technology over all these years, it is fiercely independent, cares deeply about its members and wants to do its absolute best for the wider community of customer organisations and those that build and use the products. That passion and commitment has most vividly shone through the independent user groups that have sprung up over the past decade or more. A few years ago, these were typically named using a acronym that included ‘LUG’ (Lotus User Group), and now tend toward verbs such as Inform and Engage! However, whatever the name, the user groups were typically inspired by one or more deeply committed individuals, most commonly self-employed or working for independent business partners. From small monthly afternoon gatherings in a defined geography, through to vast multi-national multi-day events that boast internationally renown speakers, these user groups have in my opinion been the engine that has enabled the IBM collaboration community to remain a force over so many years, even as the success of the products has ebbed and flowed.
I have been honoured to be one of those that felt called to start a user group.
Back in 2011, it was clear that social software (and specifically Connections) was one of the significant bright spots in the Lotus product set, and yet the majority of the user groups were still very Notes/Domino-focused. Two good friends (Sharon and Simon) and I chatted about this and how the lack of regular in-person Connections-focused events was hindering the growth of the community, and thus how prospective customers might be scared by the lack of case studies from customers that had delivered successful projects and initiates on the platform. From this spark, we founded Social Connections, and to cut a very long story just a little shorter, we’ve just hosted our 9th major international event, each held in a different nation and on both sides of the Atlantic. Well over 1000 individuals have attended (many have been at multiple events), and our awesome speakers have delivered more than 300 sessions. Amazing stats!
As with most of the other user groups, the growth of Social Connections was built on my own initial investment in the idea, and then bankrolled through a combination of support from IBM, amazing ISV and business partner sponsors, and then more lately, via tickets sold to attendees. There have been times when we’ve turned a small profit, and others when we’ve made a big loss. I now know far far more than I ever wanted to learn about international tax, insurance and data protection laws! All of this was managed through my own small company, and we’ve been blessed to have made it so far.
One of the most significant reasons why Social Connections has been a success has been the incredible willingness of community members to step up and to join the volunteer organisation team. Members have come and gone as their own circumstances have changed, but we’ve never wanted for individuals that have been willing to give their time and resources to plan and deliver the events. This shouldn’t be taken lightly, as I’d estimate that each team member gives up at least 100 hours free-of-charge to make an event happen. That’s a massive commitment alongside their own careers and family lives. I owe a great debt to Simon, Sharon, Lisa, Femke, Janneke, Brian, Sandra, Luis, Martin, Jan, Wannes, Maria, Lars, Doug and Christoph (and of course to their companies and their families).
As members of the team have given up their own time and resources, so the event has also taken a toll on my own situation. Finances, risk, admin and accounting, the events themselves. All of this has eaten into my own time, or more accurately my time with my beautiful family. In effect, I’ve used my own holiday allocation every year plus many evenings and weekends to run these events. At the same time, what little direct benefit to my own career as been reduced as I’ve moved away from direct involvement with IBM Connections.
Running Social Connections has been tremendously rewarding from a personal perspective – hosting and speaking at the events, plus the social side has been hugely enjoyable. That said, it has slowly dawned on me that this does not justify the cost involved.
Something had to give, and I’m determined that it shouldn’t be my family.
Following many discussions amongst the team during 2015, we’ve taken a series of steps to ensure the future of Social Connections without my direct involvement. The details have been shared over on the Social Connections site, but be reassured that the organisation is now in a stronger position than ever to deliver bigger and better events in 2016 and beyond.
With this in mind, as of 31st December 2015, I have resigned from the Social Connections team, and handed over my responsibilities to Wannes, Simon and the rest of the team. There are a few loose ends to tie up, but I am delighted that planning for the next event is already well underway, and that the team are doing this independently of my own input.
I will of course stay in touch, and will always be proud of what we achieved, but at the same time I am so sure that the time is right to hand over the reins.
Thank you to everyone that has helped with Social Connections over the past 5 years – whether you have organised, spoken, sponsored, attended or supported the event in any way. It has truly been a ball, some of the absolute highlights of my professional life, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way…
I know that Social Connections will continue to thrive, and in fact, will likely be larger and more successful without my own time constraints.
Go well, team!
We’ve had the bootleg, now here’s the real McCoy…
Jeff Schick introduces the IBM ConnectED 2015 opening general session, featuring Scott Souder and Luis Benitez:
From January 25-28, 2015 IBM hosted ConnectED. During the conference, digital experience customers and the business partner community heard the latest in successful business strategies and use cases, solution roadmaps, and participated in valuable sessions covering best practices in Cloud, Mobile and Social.
On Monday, January 26, the conference started with the Opening General Session. Some highlights included opening remarks from IBM General Manager Jeff Schick, an IBM Verse demo from Senior Product Manager Scott Souder, an IBM Connections demo from Senior Product Manager Luis Benitez, and several customer success stories.
Sadly guest speaker Philippe Petit is not included in the recording
Timings are approximately as follows:
01:26 Jeff Schick Intro & Agenda
03:52 2014 A year of Big Bets – The year in review
05:34 Notes 25years, IBM Verse
09:17 Gary Dolsen – IBM Digital Experience: Cloud, Mobile & Persuasive content
14:27 Scott Souder – IBM Verse Demo
34:48 Jeff Schick – What’s coming – IBM Verse, IBM Connections, IBM Bluemix
37:40 Luis Benitez – IBM Connections Next Demo
48:25 Jeff Schick – Summarizing
50:08 Rob & Nicole – Digital Experience tool – Demo
1:02:00 Gary – Summarizing the previous demo
1:03:30 Jeff Schick finishing
Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJiHkzl5xQo
So glad this was recorded – I had my doubts for a while there!
For the first time in 7 years, I’m missing the annual IBM ‘collaboration and social business’ conference in Orlando.
Sadly this has also coincided with the conference being ‘down-sized’ somewhat and thus being deprived of the live video-streaming and playback support that it has had for the past 3-5 years. I’ve therefore been watching the event through the somewhat murky and confusing lenses of Twitter and PlanetLotus. This has most likely led me to more than a few misconceptions or confusions on the content shared over 4,000 miles away.
However, that said, here are my thoughts so far:
However, when one plans a conference around one audience size and you get 1.5x that number arrive, it obviously puts pressure on the arrangements and compromises that were made for the original plan. It sounds as though the TechnOasis is very tight for space, the welcome party was somewhat under-catered and that there have been a few issues getting into packed sessions. These are understandable issues and I’m sure that most attendees (and sponsors) would trade some minor inconvenience in these areas for having a vibrant, well-attended conference.
News summaries of the key OGS announcements – I made this point last year. ICS misses Ed Brill most of all during the week of this event. If you were to trawl back through the archives of his blog, you’ll see that January always saw upwards of 50+ blog posts, mostly during and soon after Lotusphere week. As a blogger attending the event, I could always be sure that immediately following the OGS we’d have a handful of insightful pre-written posts detailing what was shown, what would be delivered and how it would impact users of the software. In the past couple of years, we’ve come away from the OGS thinking, yeah that was exciting and well-produced, but with little in terms of real details, dates or feature lists. I know that this will likely come in the breakout sessions at the event, but not everyone onsite can attend all these sessions, and of course those that aren’t there have even less to go on.
I still have some concerns about Verse, primarily that IBM’s ‘New Way to Work’ message risks over-promising and under-delivering on what is effectively a new UI for iNotes. I do think that a ‘New Way to Work’ is absolutely needed, but don’t think that this means email, in any form. That’s not to say that I don’t think it will be a mighty fine mail client and productivity tool, but I think that that are other vendors out there that are making similar strides forward on mail management (thinking about Google Inbox and Dropbox’s MailBox app in particular). At the end of the day, it is still email, and my position is that whilst any improvement in the management of ones email load is important, we need to be shifting away from email at a personal and organisational level.
My other small concern is that I find ‘web mail’ in whatever format really difficult to manage – particularly when shifting from web research to mail or and back again. I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday and the advice was to use pinned browser tabs or even a separate browser altogether. However, I find that what works best for me (and for many users I meet) is a separate app for email/calendar/to-dos (that’s currently Mailbox/BusyCal/Todoist in my world, but could be Notes or Outlook), even if this is just a lightweight container that renders the web views (think of MailPlane for GMail). I’d love to hear how IBM plans to deal with this for its own internal users – will all 300,000+ IBM mail users be expected to have a browser tab open all day for them to access their mail?
One of the major stories of the past year has been the rise and rise of Slack and it’s contemporaries in the Social Communications space. These lightweight mobile chat platforms have rapidly grown in scope and popularity, and it’s now very unusual for me to meet a customer that doesn’t have at least one of these tools in use in a department or job function around the business. It’s not just Slack either – think of Hipchat (from Atlassian), Flowdock and Hall, all of which are doing well. Also, Cisco has launched Webex Project Squared, and Jive is working on Chime, both of which will compete in this area. All have dynamic mobile apps and most have lightweight desktop apps for OS X and Windows. I’m seeing these platforms compete with (and beat) solutions in both the ESN and IM categories.As I stated at the top, all of the above has been gleaned from following the social media coverage and from speaking to trusted friends. What do you think? Do I have it right, or have I misjudged the conference as far as you’re concerned? I’d love to hear from you…
https://twitter.com/woowar/status/559071898667986944
It's called Lotusphere. Deal with it. #ls15 #ConnectEd #socbiz @IBMSocialBiz pic.twitter.com/Rsg6tL4frQ
— ALan LepofskY 🇨🇦 🇺🇸 ✡️ (@alanlepo) January 25, 2015
(I’d buy that shirt in an instant…)
Thanks to all at the conference that are sharing photos, tweets and posts. It’s making like much more bearable for those of us at home!
It’s about this time of year that thoughts in the IBM/Lotus community traditionally turn to Orlando, to the Dolphin & Swan hotels, and to IBM’s major collaboration and social business event of the year.
From Lotusphere to IBM Connect to this year’s IBM ConnectED, the name hasn’t mattered too much (I still think of it as the ‘Sphere), it was the technology and the people that made the event what it is. Thousands of geeks and business folks alike, flocking to the same space every year to meet, greet, debate and innovate on topics near and dear to their hearts.
For me personally, it’s been an almost career-long fixture that has led from a couple of hops to Berlin for Lotusphere Europe, through to more than a decade of crossing the pond to Orlando for the real thing. I was telling someone just last week that I’ve missed only two events since 2004. The first was in 2006 when I’d temporarily left the Lotus space to venture into other technologies. It was partly reading the news from the event whilst trying to get my head around HP OpenView systems management products that made me jump back into the Lotus partner space within a few months! Then in 2008, my employer decided at the last moment to cancel my ticket – the last straw in a long debate about the importance of collaboration technologies to their business. Having handed in my notice, Lotusphere 2008 coincided with my first week of running my own business.
The Sphere is where I’ve met huge numbers of IBMers, colleagues and peers. Folks that started as business contacts bumped into in some corridor in the Dolphin, whom I now consider very very close friends – a significant part of the narrative of my adult life.
So why this post?
As most of you will be aware, IBM ConnectED takes place next week in the Swan Hotel. More technical, more intimate, smaller and less glamorous this time, but still part of the two-decade long history of this great gathering. It will have a different feel for sure, but I have no doubt that enough of the familiar events, locations, features and faces will be present to make it a hugely fun and informative week.
Sadly, it will also likely be the final ‘Sphere event. The IBM contract is up at the Dolphin and Swan, and as I’ve previously blogged, IBM’s focus seems to be on very large consolidated events in Las Vegas for the future. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing by the way, just that it will be different.
So, it’s the last ‘Sphere, I’ll be there, right? Nope. Not this time.
There’s a few reasons while I’ll be missing it:
So, for all those that do congregate in Orlando next week, I wish you the very very best time!
Enjoy the beach soccer, the Mai Tais, BALD on the Boardwalk, the ESPN, the Dolphin bar, karaoke in Kimonos, homebrews by the pool, Mat Newman hugs, the pretzel cookies, all of it. Party like it’s still 1999 and there’s almost 10,000 people there. Raise a glass to all those that have been a part of ‘Sphere tradition.
Most of all, just for me, please close out the ‘Sphere at 4am in the Dolphin Rotunda with the style that it is accustomed to (you could even record a podcast to commemorate the moment)!
I’ll miss you, Lotusphere.
I’m just back from a very pleasant week’s vacation in Madrid with my family, and have stepped back into the maelstrom that is last minute planning for Social Connections VII!
Whilst I was away, the tremendous team (Brian, Martin, Wannes, Maria, Lars and Jan) have been pulling out all the stops to dot the Is and cross the Ts on details such as the event catering, prizes for speed sponsoring, late changes to the agenda, the two evening receptions and much more. As you’d expect, after doing six of these events in the past, we’re pretty adept at knowing what needs to be done and when, but there are always new challenges that crop up each time – not least as we’re working in a city that most of us have never visited, at a venue we’ve never seen, and in a language that we don’t speak! Thanks to local knowledge from a couple of our team, we’re making it through! In fact, better that that, we know this will be our most polished event yet…
So, we’ve got just 9 days left to wrap up the planning, pack the boxes and head to the airport. Oh and write a presentation or two as well!
The only question that remains is ‘will you be there?’. If you haven’t considered attending yet – you really only have a few days to make the commitment, register for your ticket and book your hotel. We can promise two days of great Social Business content, access to some of the finest speakers in the community, wonderful social experiences in a beautiful city and tonnes of fun too. What are you waiting for?
Our Full Conference pricing structure is easy and all-inclusive-the earlier you register, the more you save. The price for this conference pass includes four conference days, with breakfast and lunch Monday through Wednesday, and no add-on fees for anything other than certification testing.
Now until October 3rd, the fee is $1,595 USD. The early bird gets the best price! On October 4th, the fee will increase to $1,795 USD.
As you may have heard by now, we took the significant step of recording every single session at Social Connections VI back in June. As the videos have been processed and uploaded, the team have been publishing them on our Vimeo channel as well as highlighting some of the most popular sessions on the Social Connections blog – it’s worth checking them out if you haven’t already.
I’m pleased to say that my own session is now online. Here’s the abstract:
“I’m too busy” “My work is confidential” “I’m never in the office” “My position depends on me being the only source of my knowledge” We’ve all heard objections like these – reasons why key individuals cannot spare the time to share knowledge or to collaborate with others. Whatever the role, be it as executives, consultants, sales people or any other part of your organization, for social business to truly revolutionize your organization’s culture and productivity, these objections must be overcome. In this session, you’ll hear about driving adoption in organizations around the world. Find out how to make the benefits of social business irresistible for all your staff, no matter how immovable they might appear!
I’ve embedded the recording here, or you can watch it on the Vimeo site. The deck is available on Slideshare (I appreciate it is difficult to see in the video – apologies for that!).
I’d love to hear any feedback you have…
More good news from IBM’s Paul Godby – this time discussing a new self-paced workshop, explicitly for IBM Connections 5.0:
[titled_box title = “IBM Connections 5.0 workshop”]In the IBM Connections 5.0 Workshop, you will learn about the new and existing capabilities of IBM Connections and IBM Connections Mobile. You will learn how to implement external collaboration in your environments and gain an understanding of both the internal and external user experiences in these deployments. If you are an administrator or a developer, you will also learn about the following topics: UI Customization, Mobile UI Customization, iWidget Development for Profiles, and Activity Streams Integration using the Social Business Toolkit SDK.[/titled_box]
The course is written for the Connections 5.0 Softlayer device that will be available soon, but could be run against a Linux-based self-hosted server if required.
Here’s the full course detail:
[titled_box title = “IBM Connections 5.0 workshop detail”]Description
New capabilities in IBM Connections V5.0 make it easier for a company’s employees to work with customers and business partners on projects. Enhancements throughout IBM Connections V5.0 make relevant content more accessible, encourage brainstorming on new ideas, and organize the content that is shared in communities.
IBM Connections V5.0 adds new capabilities that make it easier for a company’s employees to collaborate with customers and business partners on projects and share relevant information. With IBM Connections V5.0, external users, such as customers and business partners, can be invited to a shared file and an IBM Connections community. Communities that have been opened to external users are identified as such to the members of the community.
Event highlights
Prerequisites
Last week I ruminated on the future of IBM Connect, and mentioned that a number of the IBM software conferences had been consolidated for 2015…
IBM seems to be consolidating its software conferences across brands. We have seen Impact (the Websphere conference), Innovate (Rational) and Pulse (Tivoli) all announce that they will merge for 2015 for a very large conference in Las Vegas:
Mark your calendar for February 22 – 26, 2015. We’ll meet at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino and the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Next year’s expanded conference, with 20,000 attendees, will deliver even more compelling sessions, deeper insights from industry thought leaders, more meaningful networking opportunities and our biggest EXPO ever!
Since then, IBM has announced the new name for this consolidated conference:
So IBM InterConnect is the new brand for this 20,000 attendee Las Vegas conference, thus aligning with the name used for the consolidated event that took place in Singapore in October 2013.
I guess it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine that eventually the equation for the Las Vegas event might be:
Innovate + Impact + Pulse + Connect = InterConnect?
Time will tell!
Disclaimer – I have no insider knowledge on this topic, these are just my personal thoughts
There has been a fair bit of discussion regarding what might happen to IBM Connect (the conference previously known as ‘Lotusphere’) in the near future…
IBM announced in 2008 that they had signed a contract with the Swan and Dolphin hotels to host the conference in Orlando until 2015, and as far as has been publicly stated, no extension has been signed. Therefore the consensus seems to be that there will need to be a decision made by IBM as to what they might do with the conference beyond the next event. Here’s my thoughts on what might happen next…
1) At Connect 2014, IBM announced that Connect 2015 will take place from 25-29 January 2015. Given that this was such a public proclamation, I cannot believe that IBM would change this plan now. Therefore we are looking at what might happen post-January 2015.
2) The audience for IBM Connect is clearly shrinking over time. Efforts such as the rename from Lotusphere and the consolidation with Kenexa World haven’t made a significant difference to this trend, at least as far as I can see. In broad and probably over-simplistic terms, as new business-level attendees have been added, loyal technical-level folks have departed. That’s not to criticise any decision that’s been made, it’s just the state of the union – whether as a result of changes in the product lines, competitive positioning, loss of market share, marketing focus, cost of travel etc, the sad fact is that Connect doesn’t sell 10,000 tickets as it once did.
3) Let’s look at other similar IBM conferences:
a) IBM seems to be consolidating its software conferences across brands. We have seen Impact (the Websphere conference), Innovate (Rational) and Pulse (Tivoli) all announce that they will merge for 2015 for a very large conference in Las Vegas:
Mark your calendar for February 22 – 26, 2015. We’ll meet at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino and the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Next year’s expanded conference, with 20,000 attendees, will deliver even more compelling sessions, deeper insights from industry thought leaders, more meaningful networking opportunities and our biggest EXPO ever!
b) Amongst the SWG ‘pillars’ (to use an old phrase), just IBM Insight (the DB2/Information On Demand conference) still stands alone, though it is also based in Las Vegas. It is scheduled for 26-30 October 2014.
c) Also, IBM Edge (Enterprise Infrastructure) is based in Las Vegas, scheduled for 11-15 May 2015. The IBM Partnerworld Leadership Conference is lined up for February 9-12 in Las Vegas.
d) Given the above, the primary location for all large IBM global conferences is clearly now Las Vegas, and in many cases, bigger is better.
4) The Lotus IBM Collaboration Solutions brand no longer exists as a standalone entity. Under Craig Hayman it was made part of Software-as-a-service and Industry Solutions (or Industry and Cloud Solutions to keep the ICS moniker), but with Craig departing, there are suggestions that this will change once again. Either way, when was the last time we saw specific marketing for the collaboration product line from IBM? This means that the distinct brand and following are no longer reasons to have a separate conference with all the effort and cost that this entails.
5) The shift to the cloud. IBM’s ‘cloud first’ policy and the general direction in the marketplace is toward pre-packaged software-as-a-service offerings rather than on-premise ‘middleware’. This changes both the audience and the technical content of conferences as a result – I would posit that attendees are more likely to be line-of-business rather than IT-focused, and the emphasis will be on solutions and ISVs that can plumb multiple SaaS offerings together rather than the nuts and bolts of installation or application development. In the future, it could be suggested that there will be more commonality between say SoftLayer, IBM SmartCloud Connections and a Tivoli product for SaaS monitoring than there is between multiple ICS solutions today. Therefore larger conferences that bridge the gaps between the different brands that exist right now makes sense as we go forward.
Given all the above, it is relatively easy to predict that IBM Connect as we know it (January in the Swan and Dolphin in Florida) will no longer exist after the previously announced event in 2015.
This would be deeply sad in a lot of ways – so many of us have returned there on a regular basis over the last couple of decades, built business relationships, been exposed to new technologies, gained knowledge that has helped us build careers and perhaps more importantly, we’ve made and spent time with true friends around the world.
However, it would also bring to a natural close the process that started perhaps five years ago, with the shift away from the Lotus brand. The name has gone, many of the people have moved on, the products and technologies have changed, and really the only physical thing that remains of the ‘glory days’ is the conference date and location. Shifting to Las Vegas as part of a packed global conference would be different for sure, but could offer real opportunities to customers and partners to make connections and gain knowledge and insight way beyond the traditional confines of the Connect event.
Once again, I don’t know what IBM will do – I have no inside track. However, as I gaze into my virtual crystal ball, that’s what I expect will happen.
However, I do have one major concern. All that I hear from the IBM financial results suggests that the USA is at best a static market for IBM – all the growth is taking place in Asia Pacific and in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Therefore I wonder why all the major conferences look as though they will be located in one USA city. Surely as a global brand operating worldwide, it seems odd (to me at least) that customers and partners in all areas of the world should be asked to pay to travel to a bizarrely located party-city in the Mojave desert to collaborate and associate with their peers. I do realise that many of the key IBMers that would attend are US-based, but even then, many of the R&D and support teams are being shifted to locations in other areas of the world. It would make more sense for these global conferences to be either located in Asia on a full time basis, or ideally, to be shifted around the world so that other sets of customers get the chance to attend.
So that’s my 2c – IBM Connect 2015 will be the grand goodbye to Orlando, and we’ll be invited to attend a new conference in Las Vegas.
However, what do you think? Is this the plan as you see it? Will you be sad to say goodbye to the memories made at the Swan and Dolphin in the past? Or will you look forward to new opportunities at a different event in the future? Might you change your plans and attend just to be at the last one? I’d love to hear from you!
On occasion, IBM runs an excellent two day Social Business Application Development workshop, which takes users through the Social Business Toolkit SDK, and how it can be used to create applications that leverage IBM Connections content.
Sadly these workshops have not been scheduled yet in 2014. However, the course materials are available for free download from the IBM Greenhouse to be used on a self-paced basis:
The Social Business Toolkit (SBT) SDK is a set of extensible tools and resources for developers who want to incorporate social capabilities into their applications and business processes. Social capabilities include features and functionality that tap into the power of social interactions, business networks, community-based problem solving, and more.
This two day workshop will demonstrate how to use the capabilities of the SBT SDK to integrate social data (from IBM Connections) into existing applications. In this workshop, you will learn how to install, configure, and begin using the SBT SDK. The development exercises in this workshop will cover topics such as the SBT SDK JavaScript and Java APIs, and how to build and deploy a SBT SDK J2EE application on WebSphere Application Server. You will also learn how to integrate into the IBM Connections Activity Stream and develop iWidgets.
Event highlights
Materials: Social Business Application Development
This course is recommended for any developers that wish to utilise the SBT or bring social content into their own applications. Kudos to IBM for making this available to all…