Archive for March 2010

The power of open standards and public interfaces

22 March, 2010, 08:46 by Glen Salmon

picmain1 I hear a log about "open standards" as it pertains to technology and software. The fear of being "locked in" is great. For the most part, the discussion is greatest when it comes to acquiring new software – especially things that are considered "Web 2.0".

This is all well and this is all great but what could it mean to the non-programmer ?

I recently resolved to take better advantage of my company’s social network. We use Lotus Connections and like all self adopting technology, my usage has grown but mostly in the areas that were tactical to my day-to-day work. What I started to notice was that I was seeing information from colleagues – both current and past – posting status (micro-blogging) which I’d remember days later when I was working on something new. Had I not seen those updates, I’d have missed valuable details which were making my work go faster. I wanted more !

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Lotus Connections has a rich web experience for all of it’s capabilities. The problem for me is I like desktop software. I like things to seamlessly integrate into what I already do. The use of standards like ATOM and REST and the exposure of all aspects of Lotus Connections through APIs means different people can have different user experiences to the same set of services. I already knew about the tight integration to Lotus Notes and Sametime as well as seamless extensions to my Symphony, Windows PC, and Office products. Recenlty I also found a number of options for integrating Lotus Connections Status Updates – an internally developed plug-in for Sametime and Lotus Notes, a "hackday" project call Bluto, and Connections Glue, a great 3rd party app that gives the look and feel of TweetDeck.

Here’s my picks for favorite integration …

What tools do you use every day and where can social software extend your reach and productivity ?

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Get more reuse from your work by microblogging your status

9 March, 2010, 13:26 by Glen Salmon

Alan Lepofsky blogs over at LepoLand and recently wrote a great post of the value of publishing your status update within your organization …

This morning I signaled a status update [think twitter] "Generating a list of 2000 fake name, titles, phone numbers, and office locations for our new demo sandboxes."  … one of my colleagues Graham, read what I wrote and replied with "Once you’ve got that list, could you send me a copy?"

… Alan’s entire post is here.

I’ve been in this exact situation myself – building a demo and feeling the need to generate a bunch of sample data. I would be grateful to discover someone else was already ahead of me and just as grateful to see my work get reused. Odds are good there are lots of work items that are small enough that you "just do it" your self but are probably already out there or being done by others.

Deploying a microblogging capability inside your firewall – whether it be Lotus Connections, Socialtext, Jive, or a stand-alone open source option – provides the value of sharing work information while not exposing it to the internet at large. If you prefer the outsourced experience of status updates but still want the privacy of your information, then a cloud service may be your preferred channel.

But microblogging is not the only mechanism for sharing information and reducing duplicate work. A "Shared Files" capability has a similar value. Consider the example above. The producer of the sample dataset may be separated from the consumer by days or weeks. If the dataset is published to an internal file sharing service, it can be found by others, tagged, rated, and more. If the status updates and shared files are linked to the author’s profile, then adhoc expertise evolves and it becomes increasingly easy to find the people you need to work on any given activity.

What social networking software capabilities are you considering ?

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