Tags: IBM, Lotus Connections, Connections, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities, Innovation, iPhone, Gizmodo, Nokia, N95, Ed Brill, Stuart McIntyre, WJS, William Bulkeley, Blog Central, Dogear, Profiles
Oh my … what a day! Again, one of those where you wake up in the morning, freshen up a bit, make a nice cup of coffee, get down to work and your agenda is completely packed with text from various different meetings and conference calls that you cannot see anything else at all! Goodness! How did that happen? I am glad that tomorrow I have got an easier day than today, to be honest, because otherwise it would be a killer. Anyway, here I am again, writing this weblog post, where I want to share with you some incredibly good news on a couple of announcements from several various offerings that I have been following up for a while and which I would want to share with you.
In the past you have seen how I have been covering both IBM‘s Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr several times, right? How all along I have been talking about them sharing some further thoughts on what they are, how they work and what they are trying to achieve within the social computing space for the enterprise; and how IBM has been making use of some of its components for several years. You would remember as well how I have been commenting that both products would be seeing the light of a gold release very shortly out there in the market as fully available offerings for customers to check out further, right?
Well, wait no more! The time has arrived! Today! Two days earlier than expected, and way before the entire blogosphere is taken down by storm with one of the major announcements ever! – which, after watching the last 30 seconds of this review and also the extensive, and very educational, review from Gizmodo on what it doesn’t have and known problems, is something that I will be seeing passing along not worrying too much about not having it. After all, I am still pretty ecstatic about the N95 which keeps exceeding my expectations amazingly day in day out!
Anyway, let’s not get distracted and move on. Right, like I was saying, the waiting time is now over! Both Ed Brill and Stuart McIntyre have mentioned earlier on their weblogs how both Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr are now gold! Fantastic! The time has come where these particular social computing offerings would have to prove their own value in the real business world, like a whole bunch of other social software tools available out there are already doing at the moment. What a bunch of interesting times ahead of us, indeed! I am surely looking forward to them, for certain!
Why am I so excited about the availability of such tools in the social computing realm? Well, amongst many other things, because I will be looking forward to checking out how they would start to finally pave out their own bumpy roads and find their own space within the social software for the enterprise space. See if they would be up to for the competition or not. See if they would meet the requirements and needs from the resourceful and insightful knowledge worker 2.0 in the current workplace and how they may be able to shake the collaboration space both for large and small businesses. Or not. Yes, indeed, interesting times!
I have been looking forward to this for a while now, since I would be able to share with you all some further insights on how IBM has been using some of the different components from each of these offerings behind the firewall to help shake the ground of how other fellow colleagues share their knowledge and collaborate with others. As I have mentioned in the past, some of the different components from applications like Connections have been available inside IBM for years, so it would be intriguing to see how other folks get to make use of such components and perhaps check if there would be substantial differences in the way they would be adopted outside the firewall. I bet there would be plenty of things we could all be able to learn.
Take, for instance, the recent article from the WSJ titled Playing Well With Others – How IBM’s employees have taken social networking to an unusual level by William Bulkeley where you would be able to read and get a glimpse of how IBM has been making use of these social software tools for a while and how they have been impacting the workplace of such a large corporation. Lots of different details in there that would help you figure out how some of us have been able to make use of some of those Lotus Connections components, like Blog Central (To maintain our blogs), Dogear (To store our social bookmarks behind the firewall), Profiles (As a powerful expertise locator), etc. etc. Perhaps one of the most representative articles available out there, in my opinion. No doubt.
Finally, you may be wondering if I am going to continue sharing some further insights about Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr, and perhaps some other social software tools that IBM is putting together, right? Well, the quick and short answer is that Yes! I surely will. But with a twist. In a week where a whole bunch of announcements have been made on various different subjects, I have got one of my own that I am very very excited about, although I cannot comment much on it at the moment. In its due time, I will be sharing a weblog post on it over here and I am sure that a few of you would be finding it as exciting as I am at the moment. But more on that at a later time…
It is now time to go and do some extensive reading on what is happening around all of these announcements and as time goes by I will surely be sharing some more insights on those articles that I may bump into and which I feel would be worth while sharing with you. So … let’s get the fun going!
