I've just finished posting several demo videos of Lotus Connections release 2.0.  They are all less than 10 minutes in length and cover the basics of the services. 

Head over to the blog, YouTube or Viddler to see them.

As does Luis Suarez, certainly based on this latest update in his campaign to reduce his dependency on email:

Yes, indeed, I am talking about e-mails that are related to scheduling, setting up and participating in conference events, customer meetings / workshops, specially when it is to show my own experiences on this new reality itself. I am thinking that if I would be able to find a way to reduce those I would be getting my number of incoming e-mails down to 15 to 20 a week. If not less! Yes! As massive as that!!!

So that got me started into thinking about a way of getting rid of those e-mails and divert them elsewhere. And it wasn’t easy, to be honest. John Tropea (One of my favourite bloggers in the Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing & Librarian 2.0 spaces and surely one of those bloggers to add to your blogroll in case you haven’t done so already!) put together, not long ago, a pretty impressive blog post under "Examples of re-purposing e-mail" and he already provides some hints as to what I could be doing, but I will comment more on that blog post as time goes by. Too good to just mention it over here and definitely one that would be worth while exploring further into building a wiki space, putting together all of those different examples as a way of showing everyone else how they can start doing it in small, but steady steps.

John seems to be inclined to make use of Lotus Connections‘ Activities for the calendaring and scheduling coming through e-mails and I must confess that I have thought about it, too, myself, as well as a couple of other options. I have been thinking as well that a forum, with a discussion group (i.e. Newsgroup) may be another option, but kind of walked away from that idea since the IBM Forums I am exposed to cannot protect entries that may be of a sensitive nature. Then I thought that a wiki, with protected access where needed / required, may be another option to go by, but perhaps too difficult for other folks to engage with.

However, Connections’ Activities seems like it is an ideal way out for me. More than anything else because they can host both public and private events discussions. Also the fact that they are fully integrated into Lotus Notes 8 and Sametime 8 allowing everyone I may be working with to set up one of them and then send it over across to me, so that I can chime in and share a thought or two on the topic. And right there we could consolidate all e-mails exchanged thus far, IM chats involved as well as well as attaching the corresponding files as the final output of the event, and if there are any feedback forms collected after the event they could also be shared over there.

Thus here we go. I think that I am going to settle down for Connections’ Activities and start making use of them to walk away from e-mail one step further, as a way to arrange all of these different events and see if I got it right as to how further more I could reduce my weekly incoming e-mail count.

Oh, did I mention how you could collaboratively work together with other folks on the same activity? Let’s see how it goes from here… Stay tuned for further updates and see what happens in upcoming weeks! In future progress reports I am sure I will have an opportunity to share with you my experiences on them.

So, if like Luis, you want to reduce the number of emails that you send and receive, why not try out using Activities on a regular basis with yoru tema colleagues and see whether it makes a real difference for you?

Now enterprise organizations can take the best collaboration tools out of the office.

BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections gives mobile professionals the ability to connect wirelessly with colleagues. Users enjoy the same features and functionality found on the desktop IBM Lotus Connections – with minimal effort and set-up support required.

• Collaborate on projects with teammates
• Find internal subject matter experts by name or topic
• Share information with colleagues effortlessly.

And, because it’s backed by the tried and proven security model of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution, you can be confident your information and communications remain protected.

Download from the RIM site... 

We are very pleased to announce that an exciting new Connectr session is being planned for Tuesday 3rd Junes, IBM Dublin, Republic of Ireland.

As you may be aware the Irish Lotus User Group (http://www.ilug2008.org) is scheduled on Wednesday 4th till Friday 6th June and we are now  offering the chance to spend an extra day in Dublin's fair city along with a number of Lotus luminaries to add to the melting pot of ideas and debate.

We currently have a number of top presenters committed to attend, including a "Meet the Developers" session, one of Suzanne Minassian or Heidi Votaw from the Lotus Connections team, Ian McNairn will be presenting virtually, and ILUG speaker Daniele Vistalli.  More to be announced soon.

The event is being planned to take place at the IBM Campus, Damastown, Mulhuddart.  More information to follow.

Last week I had another opportunity to meet up with Dave Snowden, one of our keynote speakers at our very first Connectr session, and a number of his practioners from the Cognitive-Edge community.  I had subsquently signed up for a newletter from their website and managed to find the time to make it along to an evening that was arranged as a social element for their recent Practioners Accreditation Course and took place in a very good London Pub called the Old Bank of England.

On entering the pub I checked I was in the right place and made my way to the bar and purchased a pint of Discovery, an apt choice I thought considering I arrived only knowing Dave and the names of one or two others.  I was soon deep in conversation and very glad I made the effort meeting people such as Dick Willis - Director of Skills & Education at Collaborating through Networks for Results and Peter Duschinsky of The Imaginist Company.  Topics ranged from discussing the city of Bristol, England, where I grew up, to Chinese traffic protocols to complex project management and solving intractible problems in organisations, such as those in the UK education system.  These latter topics are very much in line with the purpose of the community, which to quote their website;

"Cognitive Edge is focused on rejuvenating management practices to better equip organisations when addressing intractable problems or seizing new opportunities in uncertain and complex situations. Where traditional approaches have failed to deliver success, Cognitive Edge techniques enable the emergence of fresh and insightful solutions seen from multiple perspectives.

Cognitive Edge solutions, comprised of open source methods, original research and the Cognitive Edge SenseMaker^TM Software Suite, are delivered through the Cognitive Edge Network. The Cognitive Edge Network is a widely dispersed, cohesive Network of experienced professionals in private and public sector organisations from diverse disciplines with deep-rooted experience in both business and science. It includes academics and practitioners, in house and commercial consultants."

A very interesting group of people and I would recommend visiting the site to learn more, in particular to download the podcasts from recent presentations which contain some fascinating and thought provoking insights.

More news on forthcoming Connectr sessions soon as Connectr goes overseas. 

First of all I met up with Zhang Hong Wei, Manager of North China BP Technical Sales team, SWG China, who has her office base in downtown Beijing on the 20th floor of IBM Towers and we discussed a number of topics, including the Channel Models for IBM in China and how the market is taking off over there. 

Then it was the first of two particularly hairy taxi rides (road traffic etiquette in China is somewhat "interesting"!) out of town to the IBM China Research Lab to meet up with Yu Hang Gao, aka Hazel Gao, Manager, Lotus Collaboration Development and Test IBM China Software Development Laboratory and Han Mo Guo, aka Cindy Guo, Business Operations for IBM China Lab Based Services, Leader of SBE Business Partner Enablement & University Pilot, see photo left to right respectively.

We discussed a wide range of topics in partcular the challenges of delivering products that are not only multi-lingual but multicultural versions along with the implications this has for User Interface design, also 27/7 "Follow the Sun" development practices and we also discovered that we had a common passion for encouraging academic initiatives (see previous post and IBM Academic Initiative).

Luckily all of these ladies spoke excellent English, which was just as well as my Mandarin currently does not go much beyond "Can we speak English, please?", but this is always a handy conversation starter in any foreign language!  China is a fascinating country and I feel very priviledged to have had the opportunity to visit Beijing and beyond to get a glimps of the country as it devlops at an astonishing pace ahead of the Olympics. 

Anyway, the key point I wanted to make is that as we move beyond mere multinationals to the era of Globally Integrated Enterprises I believe it is increasing important to reach out and establish contacts with colleagues around the corner and around the globe.  Social networking tools and other collaborative applications help, which is how I managed to organize my visits, but there is still no replacement for a good old fashioned handshake and face to face meeting.

More news on meeting face to face and some exciting announcements to follow soon.

Luiz Suarez lives in the Canary Islands and works from home. He has three bosses--two in the U.S., one in the Netherlands. Ten weeks ago, he decided to stop sending e-mail.

Suarez, IBM's official social-computing evangelist, might have been expected to feel isolated, or worse, lose his job. Instead, he says he's never been more productive. Rather than respond to the daily deluge of e-mail with yet more e-mail, he answers via his preferred means: blogs, wikis, Twitter and social networking sites, including Facebook and IBM's internal social network, known as Beehive. His coworkers, he says, are starting to pick up on the idea.

"I was getting the same questions by e-mail over and over," says Suarez. "Now I never get the same question twice. And when someone asks a question, the whole network helps to answer. It's always an open conversation."

Thanks to Web-obsessed employees like Suarez, IBM has chucked its white-starched-shirt approach and is going hypermodern. The theme of a recent meeting of around 200 of its top researchers: how the world's oldest computing company can tap every aspect of the Web to charge not only its internal communications but also its customers' businesses.

The article goes on to discuss Luis' use of Twitter, Connections, blogs, wikis etc to replace email, and also how IBM's use population as a whole is proving to be incredibly forward looking with its use of Web2.0 and social networking tools:

IBM's spokespeople claim it has 24,000 Facebook users and 155,000 LinkedIn users, giving it one of the biggest corporate representations on both sites. IBM also boasts that its 350,000-plus employees maintain around 10,000 internal blogs and 15,000 wikis, discussing everything from collaborative software development to idle water-cooler chat. 

The article is definitely worth a read, and I really do recommend further investigation into Luis' experiment, and how you might replicate it (or parts at least) in your daily work life.  Keep it going Luis! 

I'll be the first to admit I'm a terrible mobile phone user. I have hardly any numbers at all stored in my address book and therefore always struggle to ring my colleagues if I'm out and about. So, even before I've really tried out any of the other aspects of IBM Lotus Connections on the BlackBerry, the Profiles feature is an absolute revelation. All I have to do is go to the Profiles search page, type in the name, search, and then I can call their number or e-mail that person directly from the results.

This being Connections you can also look up a person's about-me information and background. And as well as looking them up purely by name you can also perform a search on their information and tags.

More on the Blackberry site... 

We have been trying for couple of years to organize a local Bulgarian lotus user group. It appears in our very busy days it is not easy to gather the people even you are paying the drinks :-)

After connections release we had the feeling that maybe it is the right time to launch a web community and try again to attract lotus fans in Bulgaria. The launch of bleedyellow was another proof that web communities are the most efficient way to communicate and remain connected with people with common interest.

It was very important to have a place where all the posts are in Bulgarian language. We tried to attract people to greenhouse and bleedyellow but without much success. So we planned and launched locopo.net giving another try to gather lotus fans into a community.
The portal is a full featured Lotus Connections 1.0.2 server with a Domino 8.5 beta as user directory server. Sametime 8 advanced will be added soon to the infrastructure in order to provide instant communication between the members.

Locopo.net was launched on 19th of March and so far it has 37 registered users and more than 50 blogposts. It is a real success as Bulgaria is more or less Microsoft dominion.

I cannot help but applaud efforts like this.  It is easy for us English-speaking folks to slip into thinking that the entire Internet and business community are happy to communicate (and thus collaborate) in our language.  Clearly, in some countries and communities this assumption can be a huge barrier to technology adoption. 

Therefore, the folks at IBS have created a brand new Lotus Connections-based site for the Bulgarian-speaking community. Whilst it is still early days for the site, it clearly has begun to take off and I am more than happy to help in any way I can.

Having recently visited the country, I can vouch for the incredible growth in international business and investment that is taking place since Bulgaria became part of the EU, and it is great to see partners such as IBS taking the Lotus message forward in this territory.

Check out the Locopo.net site (the name is short for LOtus COmmunity POrtal).

(click to enlarge)

On Monday, David Klevan (from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and I spoke at the MAAM Creating Exhibitions conference about Web 2.0 and museums. I provided the Web 2.0 framework, and David shared lessons learned from the huge range of projects the Holocaust Museum has initiated.

The biggest question that came up again and again was: how much does it cost? In most cases, the audience wasn't asking about money: they were asking about time. When David explained that each of the Holocaust Museum's myriad comment boards, blogs, and online forums is moderated by a staff member, the audience turned a little green. As one woman put it, "spending time on this means time staff isn't spending on other work." Absolutely. So in the interest of hers, yours, and everyone else's time, here's a rundown on what I see as the real time costs of a variety of Web 2.0 ventures.

The time cost of Web 2.0 is not in product development but in product management, maintenance, and growth. It may take you only a few minutes to create a blog, but doing so means (hopefully) a commitment to frequent content posts. When you start any Web 2.0 initiative, you should think about what (and who) it's going to require over its lifespan, not just pre-release. The time estimates below are written with sustainability in mind--the week-by-week management of Web 2.0.

Would you agree with the graph and the post in general?  That you need 5 hrs+ a week to blog, 10hrs+ to run a community etc.?  I think the estimates are pretty accurate actually...

The full article is definitely worth a read, and I would advocate subscribing to the Museum2.0 blog if you have any interest in social networking - there are real gems in there!