PlanetNTF

Socialsphere. Cloudsphere. Lotusphere? This Lotusphere was about “Social Business”. I do not like that term very much. I used to talk about Enterprise 2.0. But as IBM spreads the word now, we will use it in the future anyway.

It was my 12th Lotusphere, and for sure this was an historic Lotusphere. Not only for seeing “Lotus” disapearing slowly, but for the fact, that we talked about so many interesting things over the last few days – but less about Lotus Notes than ever. Lotus Notes is still there, it is mature, it is a big pile of software code which still grows from time to time. So while we were talking about Activity Streams, Followers, Share Buttons, Embedded Experiences I asked myself. What does that mean for Lotus Notes?

Perhaps it is now the time to de-assemble the whole client? Break it up into browser based components? Componentize, like I wrote back in 2005? I have my doubts. The last years we saw the client grow and grow, thanks to Eclipse. Was it really a good idea to wire things in the frontend to multiply problems by thousands which would be there only one time if you integrate at the backend?

Of course future versions of Lotus Notes will integrate seamless into hybrid- and on-premise-components in the backend. People will not care anymore if this is a Websphere, Lotus Domino or another backend. IBM will tell customers to migrate the services / applications to LotusLive. And if the pricing and service quality good, customers will follow IBM. So what stays? A really fat Notes Client which renders basically HTML-Code from XPage enabled Notes Databases? Will Lotus Notes get social by replacing the good old inbox to an “social inbox” aka Activity Stream?

I am not sure. It will be long way for german customers to understand the message. I talked to several companies from Germany. Most of them run test environmens with Lotus Connections. Some are in stealth mode by making the service public to employees – but they better don´t talk about this with the CFO.

As I read the postings from the analysts (Gartner, Forrester) I see they liked the message. Maybe because IBM followed the analysts message.

So we all are on our way to the top right of Gartner´s Magic Quadrant.

So this is the kind of session you will like at Lotusphere.

Lotusphere 2011 is about a thing that is called social business. It is about adopting technologies from social software tools we use in private life every day for business. It is about redesigning our traditional software tools for commmunication and collaboration into a new set of tools that meet the needs of todays employees. Working together the Facebook way.

After several session about social software, Enterprise 2.0 and our fast changing world of communication I try to put together the pieces I learned.

First there are many important buzzwords:

Activity Streams. No, these is not Activity Explorer Next, it the Facebook way of presenting the “river of news”. The news may come from everywhere. Your mail file, your Notes application, your Siebel system, SAP or the feeds of external sources you are subscribed too.

Embedded Experience. You will live in your activity stream of information, to dos, e-mails, videos, documents – and you will stay there. A click on a report will show you the embbed view of the – of course – Cognos charts. Think of the way Twitter presents links or pictures when clicking in the river of news. Its everything right there in your browser window.

To sort this all out, you need Analytics. On facebook you have to deal with all that content that put your friends in your stream. Funny links, new youtube videos – it really doesn´t matter if you miss something. But you should not miss important things that are related to your work. So this is why IBM says “analytics, analytics, analytics”. The system will decide whats important – based on your settings, but also based on some kind central intelligence service in your company. The analytics engine will constantly make recommendations for a better decision making process. This means: You will only see whats important for your work and for the quality of your decisions. And management will analyze all the streams outside (think of brand awareness on twitter, etc) and – if corporate and legal policies let them do – the streams inside the organization.

Sharing. Share everything. With a Facebook like sharebutton. Right within the information flow, from your activity stream. Ad content, no matter what it is. Videos, documents, or just a short twitterific note – in this case with more than 140 chars.

And finally Content Management. The things you share have to be stored somewhere. So this is why Content Management from IBM is now social.

Mobile? Well. In my opinion there will be no separation anymore. Mobile or not? It simply does not matter. IBM will deliver the Activity Stream to every device. Notebook with all kinds of browsers, iPhone, Android, Blackberry or iPad and Playbook. It – does -not – matter.

This is the vision as far as I understand it. And I think this vision of working together the very good approach to our brave new workplace. It is not about building a robust, scalable, secure, IBM version of Facebook. It is about learning from social networks how people want to communicate, collaborate – and to coordinate the business processes.

So the pieces fit together. I can see clearer now, what they tried to explain monday morning.

Where does that leave Lotus products? Thoughts about this a little bit later.