Interested in IBM Mail Next? Want a voice in shaping the product? Nominate yourself to participate in the Design Advisory Program for Mail Next.
You need to be an IBM SmartCloud Notes Customer, or a Business Partner with a SmartCloud Demo Account to participate.
Kramer Reeves:Â IBM Mail Next – Design Advisory Program – Open for Nominations!
IBM Design Advisory Program for IBM Mail Next – Nomination Form
Last week the 2014 IBM Champions for Collaboration Solutions were announced. Â I am honored to have been selected again along with 86 other deserving champions.
Thank you to anyone who might have nominated me and to the selection committee.
Now would also be a good time to welcome Oliver Heinz who was recently appointed as the new ICS community Manager.
Today and tomorrow I will be attending the IBM NYC Accelerated Value Seminar. The IBM Accelerated Value Seminar is held for customers participating in the IBM Accelerated Value Program (formerly known as the Premium Support Program).
Speakers include Jason Dumont, presenting on the Notes & Domino roadmap, Rob Ingram presenting a mobile strategy update, Jason Moore presenting on Connections. Other topics include Connections & Sametime Monitoring, ID Vault, DAOS, and Domino Configuration Tuner.
The sessions themselves do not contain anywhere near as many buzzwords as you might expect given the event name, there is actually a lot of excellent technical content being presented here.
IBM is hosting an event in NYC today titled “Reinventing Relationships” and while it sounds like a form of couples therapy, I don’t think it is (well at least I hope not). The Agenda includes presentations by Alistair Rennie (General Manager: Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal), Larry Bowden (Vice President Portal and Web Software), Jeff Schick (Vice President Social Software) and others you can see the agenda here. The hashtag for the event is #ibmexperience and IBM is also running their own Social Aggregator for the event. The event begins today at 1:30 PM EDT as long as there is WiFi or Verizon has coverage in the IAC Building I will be live blogging from the event here so tune in and join me. Want to catch the actual event live, there is a livestream available.
Bloggers change the plan! Bob Picciano Jeff Schick Bruce Morse Sean Poulley Doug Heintzman Kristen Lauria Allistair Rennie Kevin Cavanaugh Bruce Elgort, complemented the video from the OGS. Kristen – been filming customer stories since Sunday to be on You Tube, and a media plan around it. Will it be in Europe too? 14 customers from Germany and the plan is to replicate the setup to tape customers at LCTY Events. Jack Dausman Marketing been impressive, Skype, Linked In, MacWorld… will we see more of this throughout the year, Sean Poulley – many more partnerships in the pipeline. Meeting expectations well, announcing and delivering not just creating pressware. Is the economy part of why customers are coming to you now? Companies are looking to cut costs, and disparate pieces are being put together to optimize people. Bruce morse, for 12 months again significant portion of new ST customers are not Notes Shops. Nathan, at this event last year engineers talked about being blocked from releases by legal, you were suprosed, twice this year you made cracks about legal. Allistair…. My sister is a lawyer.I remember the convesation, we seem to be making progress in that area, and legal is adapting to the dev cycle. Legal is getting better at an Agile clearance process. John Head – came with a checklist of things he wants to hear…. how are you going to compete in 2009 with Sharepoint, he sees alot of sharepoint integration with Office etc… not neccasarily doing well, but doing cheap. Jeff Shick…. Deep Breath… Substaintial improvrements in Qucikr capability, and ECM.. Pricing aggressively, while not giving away. Kevin…. xPages plays heavily in this space. Allistair we know we have to do better in that space. Building towards common components in Qucikr and Connections, Open NTF…. way of getting code out their faster trying to get licensing changes in a way that large organizations can adopt Duffbert….. HAving to implement Sharepoint……needs the cover. Kevin, we didn’t wait for the spoiler last week, we got out there Kevin… we consciously….. sometimes you do things stupid consciously re foundatons and lack of banch office solution which will be in 1.1 foundation
Have you noticed there is a new Ideaspace on Ideajam? The Lotus Technical Content team is now using IdeaJam as a way of soliciting suggestions and feedback on providing better content and documentation. As further background last week, myself, Handly Cameron, Stuart McIntyre, Jon Mell, and Luis Benitez, as a result of a conversation that started on Twitter, on gaps in the Lotus Connections Infocenter, had a nice call with the team at IBM responsible for that documentation. We had a great call and lots of great ideas were put out there. Now the forum has been opened to everyone, so if you have some ideas to make Lotus documentation and other technical content better, head on over to Ideajam, vote for ideas out there or post your own in the Lotus Technical Information Ideaspace.
This afternoon LoLA wrapped up, what was really an incredible few days here in South Florida. While there were a couple of sessions this morning the main focus of the day was continuing to work on the presentation of the “Top 10 must do” list, as well as some other feedback. After lunch was the closing session which mainly consisted of the four work groups presenting their findings to IBM and the rest of the attendees. One thing people learned from my top 10 list is that apparently I can’t count since I had more then ten items :). It was great to see all of the GCPC members in person, many of them I had met previously, while some I met for the first time, the GCPC is made of an amazing bunch of people, who are doing some great stuff with Lotus products. We spend quite a bit of time interacting with each other, but really only gather twice a year, at our annual face to face meeting and Lotusphere, so it is always good to connect in person and catch up. The Lotus Leadership team, as well as the product and development management teams were on site all week, and readily available to the attendees, whether it was a coffee break, lunch, dinner, or just passing in the hallway it really didn’t matter they were always ready to listen, ask questions, and make sure they understood the concerns and issues being raised. Over the course of the week I somehow managed to finalize and submit Lotusphere abstracts before the Friday 12 PM EST deadline (though there may still be one more in the works). Time to pack my suitcase and get ready to fly home tomorrow morning.
The morning began with a town hall style meeting with all of Monday’s presenters on stage to take questions from the audience. There was a moment which really clarified what this week is about, with a couple of minutes left in the session the moderator asked Bob Picciano if he wanted to make any closing remarks, which he declined to do as he felt the time was better spent taking additional questions. The IBM team is really here to listen. Following the town hall meeting, I attended a meeting with IBM, SAP, and other customers on project “Atlantic“, where I learned quite a bit about the integration between SAP and Notes that will be delivered later this year. I then let the Connections User Experience team pick my brain for another hour (they seem to think there is still something they haven’t gotten out of me yet). After lunch I attended the Archiving Roundtable a very interactive discussion on the future of Archiving, and that was followed by “Working Together: IBM and RIM Collaborate to enhance Domino and the Blackberry experience. Every year the GCPC Members break up in to workgroups covering the different product areas, where the members work to come up with a top 10 “must do” list. Myself and another steering committee member are facilitating the session focused on Connections and Quickr. This afternoon we focused primarily on Quickr, tomorrow we will tackle Connections, and finalize our presentation which we will present later in the day. More tomorrow on the final day of LoLA
The first full day of LoLA is finally wrapping up for me at almost midnight. Today’s schedule had one session for all attendees in what felt like an all day Opening General Session, Bob Picciano started the day off with an overview of the Lotus Strategy, followed by Alistair Rennie delivering a report card on the status of Lotusphere 2008 announcements (since LS08 ND 8.0.1, ND 8.0.2, Quickr 8.1, Connections 2.0, Lotus Mashups, Symphony, Sametime 8.0,and Sametime Advanced have all shipped, with Samtime Unified Telephony, Atlantic, and ND 8.5 still to come before LS09). Charlie Hill then followed with a glimpse in to the future of the products. While many of the concepts and ideas he showed might not be in products for a year or so, one thing clear is that Lotus is hearing the message loud and clear that across the portfolio products must integrate seamlessly, and provide a consistent experience for the end user. Following the overall strategy each product group presented their strategy and roadmap, each segment was followed by a brief customer interview conducted live, to get a customers perspective on how the products are used. As Ed and Mary Beth twittered, I was on stage interviewed in the Social Software segment. It was a good opportunity to highlight for other customers some of the successes that I have had with Lotus products, as well as provide the Lotus team with some very candid feedback on where improvement is needed. The day wrapped up with guest speaker Chris Gardner whose story was told in the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness, he delivered a very entertaining, and compelling story about his life, family, and how his life was turned in to a movie, I definitely need to check out the book or movie. Tomorrow the day begins with a town hall style meeting to allow the audience to comment or ask questions on today’s presentations, followed by breakout sessions for the remainder of the day (so now would probably be a good time for me to figure out which sessions I am attending tomorrow. More from LoLA tomorrow.