IBM Professional Technical Leadership Exchange – Paris – May 2007

Tags: IBM, Technical Leadership Exchange, TLE, PLTE, Paris, France, Web 2.0, Social Computing, Social Networking, Communities, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Virtual Networks, Social Networks, Blog Central, Wiki Central, Confluence, Atlassian, Fringe, Ziki, Dogear, w3 Media Library, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Webconference, Sametime 7.5.1, Lotus Connections, Connections

If over the last couple of days, I have been weblogging about different conference events that rather I would be attending or that I would be interested in attending. Well, here is a third follow up weblog post on another event that I will be making it to and that I am surely going to enjoy quite a bit, since I am already very familiar with it as I attended it last year as well. Yes, I am talking about IBM’s Professional Technical Leadership Exchange, which is going to take place this year in Paris during the course of 21st till 24th of May and which will host several thousand IBM technical and delivery leaders coming from all over the place.

I am really excited about this year’s event for multiple reasons, as I will have the opportunity to present again on a topic that I hope folks would enjoy as well (More on that in a minute), then because I will have the great opportunity to spend a few days in lovely Paris and third because I am hoping to be able to meet up with folks over there who I have been wanting to know for quite some time now. I have already been in touch with them and there is a great chance that I will be able to meet them. Way cool!

So what am I am going to be talking about during the conference event, you may be wondering, right? Well, the title of the presentation I will be delivering is as follows: "7 Ways to Effectively Improve Your Virtual Technical Network Using Social Computing". And in it I will be covering some of the basic key concepts behind Web 2.0 or social computing, for those folks who may still not be familiar with them; then I will be placing a special focus on how communities are continuing to provide lots of value add in order to get the most out of that social networking experience. So much so that they are becoming essential, both inside and outside of the enterprise, to provide some additional business value to social computing.

After creating that connection between social networking and communities, I suspect we would go into the fun part of the presentation, as I will be spending some time covering seven IBM social software related tools and sharing with everyone in the room five different tips per tool on how to get the most out of them, and, most importantly, how to get started with all of them in case folks may not have been exposed to them just yet. Or, at least, present different scenarios on how they can make the most of each of them for their day to day jobs. Yes, a bit of showing everyone how easy it is to bring social computing into your daily workload and use it as just another business related tool.

And what social software tools those may well be? Well, I have been talking about them quite a few times already over here, but here you have got the list of tools I am planning to reference: Weblogs (Blog Central), Wikis (Wiki Central running the fine piece of software called Confluence, from Atlassian), Fringe (What you would call a People Portal, pretty much along the same lines as the wonderful Ziki), Social Bookmarks (Dogear), w3 Media Library (For all sorts of rich content media, like podcasts, videocasts, etc.), IBM Lotus Webconference 7.5.1 and IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1. And from there onwards how they may all integrate with one another with the upcoming Lotus Connections.

As you can imagine, it is going to be a pretty packed up presentation, since I am hoping to be able to share as well some of my own experiences from being exposed to different social software tools and for having used them for a number of years. I am hoping that with this particular session I will be able to open things up a bit more and help other fellow IBMers start making use of different social software tools in order to perhaps help them improve the way they share knowledge and collaborate with others.

This time around I am not sure I would be able to make the presentation available over here as some of the different screen shots from the slide deck are a bit sensitive, so I would have to look into them, see if I can sanitise them and then make them available after getting the heads up. Either way, at least, you would be able to see from the above text what I will be talking about.

Finally, two of the other items I am really looking forward to are as well, of course, Paris, where I haven’t been there for the last few years, so it will be good again to catch up with it and see what is happening over there and spring time sounds like the perfect time to be there. And then the possibility of being able to meet up people who may be around and who would want to get together for a drink or two. I know that a couple of folks who regularly read this weblog would be around, so I am really excited about meeting up with them. And whoever else who may want to get together, the usual thing: drop a comment over here or contact me offline and I am sure we will be able to set up something.