Communicat.us

Before I get into some of my comments on the 2010 edition of Lotusphere, let me first thank all of the Federal customers who took valuable time to attend and engage with us. I especially am thankful for everyone who made it to the IBM Federal User Group meeting on Wednesday. The Q&A was great and it was great to hear your feedback and questions.

To those whom I did not have the chance to connect, I and many from the team are available both here thru our blog as well as in person so don’t hesitate to “connect with us”!

So, how was Lotusphere 2010?

In a word, “extreme”! Even knowing much of what was announced at the conference, I still had a full time job getting the ins and outs from jump starts to deep dives.

What were the big take-aways?

I’d say that there were multiple big messages. On the environments side it was Cloud, first class mobile device support, and a biggy (pun warning) was Lotus Connections on Z-Linux is coming!

Back to the “cloud”, I’d say the message was blending on premise capabilities with capabilities in the cloud so you can balance the best of both. For many Federal customers, “private clouds” provide the higher security and governance needs.

Before I forget, mobile was everywhere I both is sessions and the hands of attendees. I saw more Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids than I did laptops. IBM gets it – “mobile is a primary interface now.” On a personal note, I wouldn’t say the iPhone out numbered Blackberries but they were definitely prevalent. I’ll following this closely.
Unified Communications was integrated into many sessions. It was all about controlling presence everywhere and to best suit the user, seamlessly integrating the office, VoIP, soft phone, cellphone and flowing between them without interruption – both at the user discretion and through user configurable routing rules. I’ve been using these capabilities for about 6 months and they make a big difference in both my flexibility and transparency.

Any other themes?

Another big message was modular components, capabilities and services. While a lot of sessions were in the scope of products, the content was about “capabilities” and how they are surfaced as portlets, widgets, an modular components. Further, those same user facing capabilities can be accessed with web 2.0 interfaces – REST, ATOM, XML, etc.

A great example of this emphasis on capabilities and modularity was a challenge a customer gave me – “we use Lotus Connections Activities for lots of small projects, can I get a view across all of them? Preferably as a timeline?”

We hit the “Ask the Developer Lab” and in about 15 minutes we had a Lotus Connections engineer, a Notes client developer and a Mac user bouncing ideas. They had two choices. The Activities to-dos can be accessed as an iCal feed and the Notes 8.5.1 client can display multiple calendars together. Alternately, the Activities assignments are available as a feed and IBM Mashup Center 2.0 was a new Timeline widget.

BTW, the three engineers were not together. The Lotus Connections engineer had Sametime Broadcasts to fire off the question.

Any surprises?

“Project Vulcan” was announced as was “LotusLive Lab”. When I get back to my laptop, I’ll write more about these.

What!?

Oh, I should explain. I came to Lotusphere and only carried my Blackberry (where I am writing this post) and occasionally had an iPod Touch. My goal was to test just how far these mobile devices could go.

I had access to email, calendar, Lotus Connections, my shared files, blogs, micro blogging (Twitter and my IBM Connections status), an a nice conference app built by business partners. I also could get to LotusLive where people were sharing emo materials, updated slides and more so could just Dogear (bookmarking) for later.

There is no way I could cover everything at Lotusphere, especially in one post but I hope this gives you a taste and feel free to comment on any points you’d like more info on!

Customers often ask about "mashups" and can be confused by the technology and all of the different options they have available.

Most mashups fall into one of two categories – "data mashups" and "functional mashups".

A data mashup is one where many different data sources are brought together into a single visualization to speed the user’s ability to understand and process the relationships between data and form answers and take action. Popular examples of data mashups include examples in real estate and city planning as well as more targeted mashups like flight planning for pilots. The majority of data mashups are created by programmers using the published interfaces provided by data sources and often uses a public display solution like a map with a published interface.

A functional mashup focuses on bringing together visual modules or widgets such as tables, maps, graphs, and input forms, to create an application to address a situational need.

A widget is a small program or piece of dynamic content that can be easily placed into a web site.

The key to functional mashups is the ability for each module or widget to communicate some of its state and information to other widgets so they may act in concert. In contrast to data mashups, functional mashups rely more on standards and reuse. As Nicole Carrier described in her talk in 2008 …

• Widgets and feeds are mashed together often come from independent sources and do not change when mashed
• New applications deliver new insights and capabilities (1+1 = 4)
• Build on a web-oriented architectures (REST, HTTP) and leverage lightweight, simple integration techniques (AJAX, RSS, JSON)
• Result is fast creation of rich, desktop-like web applications
• Simple applications that solve niche problems (i.e., satisfies the long tail)

For more information, you can check out Nicole’s presentation.