Today was day one of the annual gathering of IBM Premium Support Customers in Boston.  The event brings together customers, their premium support managers, and members of the support and field service organizations.  In many ways this is a mini Lotusphere of sorts (a lot smaller, and significantly less walking).  The seminar kicked off with a keynote address delivered by Bob Picciano, this was my first opportunity to hear him speak since he took over the General Manager role from Mike Rhodin.  In speaking with Bob after the address I discovered he was a Yankee fan, real shame I didn’t have a Met hat on me, another time I will have to continue this fine tradition. Today was filled with sessions, and a lively “Ask the Developers” session to end the day.  This evening before dinner I had the opportunity to see some early designs of potential features in Quickr and Connections in future releases and there is some pretty good stuff on the drawing board. Since I don’t feel like another post, couple of miscellaneous points thrown in here. Tomorrow is the day for Notes 8.0.2, it  should be available for download on Passport in a few hours. Finally a new experience this evening, I am staying at the Westin Copley Place, this evening when I stopped in my room before heading out to dinner the phone in my room was blinking.  Having  no idea who could have possibly called my room I checked the voice mail to find that the hotel is now leaving recorded advertisements for restaurants on voicemail.  Please stop this, telemarketers are bad enough at home, do I need to register my hotel room on the Do Not Call list?

IBM released their five predictions for Unified Communications which were delivered during Mike Rhodins keynote address at VoiceCon

1.The Virtual Workplace will become the rule. No need to leave the office. Just bring it along. Desk phones and desktop computers will gradually disappear, replaced by mobile devices, including laptops, that take on traditional office capabilities. Social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling on being there in-person. Work models will be changed by expanded globalization and green business initiatives that reduce travel and encourage work at home. 2.Instant Messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail. Just as e-mail became a business necessity, a new generation of workers has a new expectation for instant messaging (IM) as the preferred method of business interaction. This will fuel more rapid adoption of unified communications as traditional IM becomes the core extension point for multi-modal communications. 3.Beyond Phone Calls to Collaborative Business Processes. Companies will go beyond the initial capabilities of IM, like click-to-call and online presence, to deep integration with business processes and line-of-business applications, where they can realize the greatest benefit. 4.Interoperability and Open Standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. Corporate demand for interoperability and maturing of industry standards will force unified communications providers to embrace interoperability. Converged, aggregated, and rich presence will allow businesses and individuals to better find and reach the appropriate resources, removing inefficiencies from business processes and daily lives. 5.New meeting models will emerge. Hang up on routine, calendared conference calls. The definition of “meetings” will radically transform and become increasingly adhoc and instantaneous based on context and need. 3-D virtual world and gaming technologies will significantly influence online corporate meeting experiences to deliver more life-like experiences demanded by the next generation workers who will operate more efficiently in this familiar environment.

I think we can already see the first four starting to happen, number five is interesting, but I think it will take a little more time before 3-D virtual worlds become the standard.  While the technology is certainly rapidly maturing, it is going to take more time for people to adopt,  and for companies to provision hardware to the desktop, and bandwidth to support these technologies. IBM Predicts Five Future Trends That Will Drive Unified Communications  

Yesterday I was in Boston for the day where I was invited to speak at an internal IBM meeting  of the IBM Quality Software Engineering team.  I was asked to present from a customers point of view on what IBM does well, and where improvement is needed in the quality of the products shipping from IBM.  I spent about an hour presenting an overview of my companies IT strategy, and then focused on 3 main areas, Integration of IBM products (or the lack of in some cases), Configuration, mainly focused on client configuration issues, and Serviceability of the product once it has been deployed. While much of presentation was not on specific issues, I did choose a few areas to highlight that needed attention including – Quickr should honor name changes made via the AdminP process – Sametime and Quickr should support be supported on servers configured with Internet Site Documents – Integration for Notes, Sametime and Quickr Calendars In addition to presenting I had the opportunity to meet with members of the Quality teams, and Executives in smaller groups to discuss more specific issues.  While I can’t tell you the items mentioned above or some of the others I discussed will happen right away, I can tell you it is obvious from the questions I received and the number of people who wanted to talk to me when I am done, that IBM is listening and trying to meet the customers needs. This was my third trip on the Acela in the last 2 months, but this time I had my brand new Verizon Wirless broadband card, giving me internet access for the 4 hour train ride.  Over the entire trip there were only two spots where the network disconnected, one was a drop and immediate reconnect, the other was about a three minute stretch with no coverage, overall pretty impressive coverage, and decent speed. The entire trip was done without my Blackberry, Notes Traveler has been doing a good job for me so far, though the device itself is very different and takes some getting used to.

I have tried Second Life and I just don’t get, maybe it was the computer I was using at the time that lacked the proper resources, maybe it is just a lack of time to play with it, but it has not kept my attention.  I caught this article today, IBM and Second Life have announced plans to work together to open up virtual worlds so you can take a persona created in one world and use it in another.

Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages.

I am not sure how fast the web will be replaced by virtual worlds, but who knows, since Social computing has now grown up and entered the enterprise maybe the online virtual office is next, and it would be nice to be able to have one persona, and be able to leave the virtual office for a virtual meeting  I am still not sold on the whole thing,  I think for now I will just focus on building the Lotus Connections environment.  Second Life, IBM in open borders for virtual worlds

IBM announced “gizmos” for developerWorks which are widgets and gadgets to extend developerWorks content in to applications, browsers, mashups, and an interface for the iPhone.  This is not enough to make me want to run out and get an iphone, but I will have to check out some of the other gadets. Full Story developerWorks gizmo page