The other day I was working with a customer who had upgraded from 2.5 to 3.0. They asked me how to get the images for the timezones back up. At first, I wasn't sure what they were referring to, so I went over to BleedYellow and checked my profile there. Towards the right hand side of the screen you can see my local time and a graphic depicting my timezone as shown here:
So I got on a 2.5 server and figured out how those images were generated and then made the appropriate changes in the 3.0 server. Here's what I ended up doing (in case anyone else wants to do the same thing):
Extract the images to this folder: C:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization\profiles\images (note that this path may be different depending on where you are storing your Connections customizations)
You should now have a folder C:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization\profiles\images\globes with a bunch of jpg's in it.
Copy the file businessCardInfo.jsp from C:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\installedApps\showcase2Cell01\Profiles.ear\lc.profiles.app.war\WEB-INF\jsps\html\scenes\profile to C:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\customization\profiles\WEB-INF\jsps\html\scenes\profile
Open the file with your favorite text editor
Search for the text: <div id="businessCardActions"
Abstracts are now being accepted for the Exceptional Web Experience conference which is happening May 16-19 in Orlando, FL. An Exceptional Web Experience is what all companies must strive for as it deliver real business results. In fact, Larry Bowden, VP of Portals at IBM, recently wrote this article on 7 Ways to Get Lucky Online where he highlights results such as 75 percent reduction in the time to roll out new customer-oriented applications. An Exception Web Experience is a must!
Abstracts are now being accepted for breakout sessions (60 minutes) and hands-on labs (75 minutes). The conference is divided into 6 tracks (listed below), where 3 tracks are focused on the Business Impact, and the other 3 tracks are focused on the technology side. Abstracts will be submitted until March 4th, 2011 so put your thinking caps on and submit your abstract! (Note: you need an account in Greenhouse to submit an abstract).
Business Impact Program
Track 1: Customer Case Studies and Industry Solutions
Detailed presentations of client solutions,including Project Goals and Analysis,Industry Specific Approaches,Implementation and Governance Techniques, Best Practices.
Track 2: Accelerating Solution Time to Value and ROI
Proven Strategies to Build the Vision and Value of an Exceptional Web Experience; Building a Portal Delivery Roadmap: Paths to Success; How to Successfully Justify and Deploy Portal and Social
Software in Your Organization; The Real Scoop on Understanding the Portal Competitive Landscape.
Track 3: Optimize Customer Experiences to Build Brand and Generate Revenue
You are What You Market: Leveraging New Rules of Marketing; Getting Smart with Retail Portals to Address the Accelerated Shift in Buyer Behavior; Delivering Your Portal Solutions to Mobile Audiences: Best Practices; User Experience Optimization Initiative: Understanding and Applying Web Analytics.
Technology Program
Track 4: Web Experience Platforms and Solutions
Getting Started with IBM WebSphere® Portal and IBM Web Content Management; WebSphere Portal 7
Technical Overview and Strategy; Leveraging Portal NOW to Deliver Exceptional Web Experiences; IBM
Forms Technical Deep Dive; What’s New in Lotus® Quickr™?; Extending your Portal to Mobile Devices; IBM Mashup Center Overview; Exceptional Web Experience in the Cloud – How to Use IBM WebSphere Portal; IBM Web Content Management; Forms and Mashups in the Cloud.
Track 5: Developing Exceptional Web Experiences
Improving the Online Experience: Building Next Generation Web sites;Using Adobe FLEX to Deliver IBM
WebSphere Portal and Collaboration Services; Developing Web Applications using IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory, IBM Rational® Application Developer and IBM Lotus Widget Factory; Powering Exceptional Web Experiences Using Industry Toolboxes; Leveraging WebSphere Commerce and IBM Web Content Management; Deliver Operational and Real-time Business Intelligence with Cognos® Business Intelligence; IBM Forms Technical Deep Dive.
Track 6: Best Practices and Implementation
Managing the Portal Deployment Project: Best Practices, Effective Portal Governance; High Availability Designs and Implementation with WebSphere Portal, Virtualizing Portals, Successfully Managing Your WebSphere Portal, Virtualizing Portals; Successfully Managing Your IBM Web Content Management Solution; Hands On Lab; Administrating WebSphere Portal.
As Lotusphere #ls11 is now a dot in the rear view mirror, I'm still getting swamped with questions around the Quickr Connectors. For those of you who may not know, the connectors are a great way to get files in and out of team places. It integrates directly into your instant messaging client, email client (Notes and Outlook) and even to your Windows desktop. All of the actions available in the web UI are also available natively in the desktop (which really helps drive adoption).
In fact, I was surprised as I talked to customers from all over the world, their only interface with team places was through the connectors. Very few seem to use the Web UI. It was great to see how many people were leveraging this to improve their productivity. Here's a screenshot of how the integration looks in the desktop.
And because most people seem to rely more on the connectors than the web UI, I heard a lot of questions around future support. The top two questions?
When will the Quickr Connectors support Windows Explorer on Windows 7 64-bit?
When will the Quickr Connectors integrate natively (ribbon) into Microsoft Office 2010?
The questions were answered throughout various sessions at Lotupshere, including Ask The Product Managers which Mitch Cohenliveblogged (and you should go back and read if you haven't yet). In fact, in that session, Mac Guidera, the product manager for Quickr Connectors, announced that we have been working on it and should be available later this year.
As I mentioned before, post-Lotusphere I've also been swamped with these questions, so I figured I would recap the latest public information here and have something I can point others to very easily. If you want to know more details about the specifics and dates of when the Quickr Connectors will be updated, stay tuned to Mac's blog and this blog and you'll be the first to know.
IDC has just released a new whitepaper called "Becoming a Social Business". The timing for this whitepaper couldn't be better as we are all getting settled from an amazing week at Lotusphere #ls11 where the theme was Social Business. IDC believes social networking applications are now becoming a huge business opportunity. At the same time, it notes that some places still fear social networking applications because they may lead to wasted time.
In the whitepaper, IDC quotes a study it made titled Social Business Survey where 41% of respondents said they were using social software. 35% of respondents believe that social software has increased productivity in the workplace! If I'm doing my math correctly, 85% of those using social software have seen an increase in productivity, with some noting up to 30% in time savings. I think the tide is turning and 2011 is going to be a tipping point where more organizations are going to rely on social collaboration tools to become more agile and beat their competitors.
To further prove that social collaboration is valuable, IDC partnered with IBM and conducted various interviews with different divisions of IBM to understand how they were using social software to accelerate innovation, provide deeper customer/employee relationships, and achieve quicker decision-making capabilities. I was one of the interviewees along with Luis Suarez and Rawn Shah.
For each interview, IDC compiled a list of "challenges", "tipping points" and "results / ROI". In other words, it lists what challenges existed, what caused a particular individual or department to embrace social business, and what have been the benefits/value obtained since becoming a social business. Towards the end of the whitepaper, IDC captures some best practices that may help kick start adoption of social software inside of your enterprise.
If you are thinking about becoming a social business, but have doubts as to its value, this whitepaper is for you. To download the free whitepaper, go here.
The whitepaper is 12 pages long and available in PDF so it's easy to store in your iPad (or favorite eReader) to read on the go. What do you think of the whitepaper? Is it something you are going to distribute to your customers?
I've been anxiously waiting for this. We are just days away from the grandevent where IBM's supercomputer (a.k.a. Watson) will take on previous Jeopardy! champions head on. Last month, there was a practice round between Watson and the former champions, and Watson won. I can't wait to see who wins the the real competition for $1 million.
On Wednesday of this week, PBS aired a special called NOVA: Smartest Computer on Earth. If you missed it, check out the live blog replay. One of the interesting comments was a question from the NOVA show to the IBM Researchers who created Watson. The question was about if they were scared about how Watson learns (SkyNet anyone?). The researchers said they are not too worried about it because they know how it learns and that Watson can only do what it was programmed to do.
IBM's Researchers in Conjunctions with Universities
Earlier today, IBM's press release announced that Watson was created in part with IBM's awesome research team but in partnership with several universities such as: MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, RPI, and UMass among others. I'm a big fan of MIT and artificial intelligence so when I read that MIT was involved my interest peaked even more.
A team of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Boris Katz, principal research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, pioneered an online natural language question answering system called START, which has the ability to answer questions with high precision using information from semi-structured and structured information repositories. The underlying contribution to the Watson system is the ability to break down the question into simple sub-questions for responses to be quickly collected and then fused back together to come up with an answer. The Watson system architecture also took advantage of the object-property-value data model pioneered by MIT, which enables the information in semi-structured data sources to be effectively retrieved in response to natural language questions.
Learning More From MIT
I was lucky enough to get a chance and "sit down" with Boris Katz last night. As we kicked off the call we found that we have tons of things in common. Turns out that I used his technology as part of my thesis work at MIT. It also turns out that Ask Jeeves has licensed his patent, and Ask Jeeves was also the company the acquired the start-up I worked at shortly before joining IBM. So we are pretty sure that we at least worked in the same building at one point at MIT.
So this brought up the question, when did START (SynTactic Analysis using Reversible Transformations) go live? I learned that START went online in 1993 about the time the web started. Mr. Katz said that he immediately got value out of it as people from all over the world were using it and he was getting valuable research data for free (crowdsourcing at its best 18 years ago!!). As I got ready to interview Mr. Katz, I played with START to see how it worked. Here's what I asked and the responses from the computer:
Q: Who is better the Red Sox or the Yankees?
A: Sorry - I don't know whether or not the Red Sox are better than the yankees.
Q; What is the weather for NYC this Saturday?
A: It gave me real-time info from weather.com
Q: Who is luis benitez?
A: I am sorry to say I don't know who Luis Benitez is. (notice that the name is capitalized. so it detected my name, but just didn't know who I was. I also detect some humor in its answers)
I asked Mr. Katz who approached whom when it came time to incorporate START into Watson. Turns out IBM approached him as IBM was trying to replicate results that other companies claimed they could do in the area of natural language processing. Since other companies weren't giving IBM their code, IBM in conjunction with other institutions and university decided to create the Open Advancement of Question Answering Initiative (OAQA). That's where Mr. Katz got involved giving talks and demos to IBM researchers and software engineer.
Clearly START provided some great intellectual capital to Watson so I asked Mr. Katz if he had to change some of the code to be integrated into Watson. Turns out that Mr. Katz didn't provide the code since, he says, IBM has far superior software engineers than undergraduates that barely work a couple of hours a week on it. (funny)
Looking Towards the Future
Watson and START sound like amazing technologies that could prove to be the next big search engine. Mr. Katz says that the technology is still in a "playground" phase. "It's important to society because it's going to bring new students to the field, but I think we are still very far from understanding language and answering questions or respond properly to any query", says Mr. Katz. And this is evidenced, according to him, when you see Watson give silly responses. There's still tons of work that needs to happen and he's evaluating how to make the system better either by giving it vision, touch, partnering with cognitive sciences, etc.
This brought me to my next question. I told him how some people were referencing Watson as the beginning of Skynet since Watson has some learning capabilities in it. Mr. Katz says that Watson uses Machine Learning technologies with history from the past 20 years of Jeopardy! It uses this history to pick the best answer from the up to 1000 candidate answers it sometimes generates. If you think about it, this is not how humans think. When you are asked a question, you don't evaluate 1000 past responses/alternatives and try to pick the best one. You just know. According to Mr. Katz, "the real question is, can we build a machine that can scratch the surface and be even as smart as a 3 year old? In some sense computers can do things faster than us like multiply two large numbers together. But 3 year olds can understand language and execute commands like no other machine. How long will it take to build a 3 year old? Frankly, I don't think anyone knows".
Mr. Katz says that he hopes that in 20 years this technology can be used to help society like drive cars, and do simple tasks. Some of this can be seen already today with devices that can recognize certain commands and execute them. IBM certainly has plans for this technology.
Where To Learn More
By the way, if you are like me and like videos, check out the video collection for more on how Watson works here. Watson, of course, has its own Facebook and Twitter accounts (though it's not clear if it's Watson himself responding or humans). Finally, Watson has its own social media aggregator which makes it very easy to see what everyone is saying about Watson in one page, including photos, videos, blogs, tweets, etc. If you want a single place to catch all Watson related news, the aggregator is for you.
What do you think? Is Watson going to win the 3-day competition? Where would you like to see Watson applied in real life?
During Lotusphere #ls11 , and the days after, I've heard the same question a couple of times: what can we done to easily allow files to be drag-n-dropped into a place. This was doable in 8.2 if you were using Internet Explorer since we had an ActiveX control. The ActiveX control allowed you to easily drag-n-drop files from your Windows computer into a place in a snap.
The control, however, had some performance issues and it was highly requested by a vast number of customers that we remove it. In 8.5 we removed the control and we finally were able to build a UI that worked and behaved the same in all browsers that we supported. Our expectation was that most customers would simply use the connectors (which I heard is how 95% of people use Quickr) to achieve this same functionality.
Some customers, however, are wondering how can they get this functionality back. One of our developers from our Dublin lab has documented how to do this in the Quickr Wiki so that you can re-add this capability to Quickr 8.5 as shown below:
Once you follow the instructions, you will have a Java applet which will let you drag-n-drop files into Quickr. As an added bonus, because it's Java, it should work cross-platform. If you need this capability, simply follow the step-by-step instructions here.
Enjoy!
#ls11 (if you are following in Twitter) was awesome and I believe it was in part to these great presentations. Attendees to these sessions came up to me and said: "Luis, did you go to session XYZ? It was AMA-wait-for-it-ZING!" I was so jealous of people who got to attend these sessions. Unfortunately, I was in meetings when this happened (or doing my own sessions).
Congratulations to the speakers for putting up such great presentations (and for sharing these):
1) CUST106 Proving Collaboration Works at 3M - I shared a bit of this story in a previous blog entry, but here's more info directly from the source:
2) INV203 People-Centric vs Content-Centric: The Copernican Revolution to Become a Social Business - Given by Louis Richardson, it's based on one of my favorite blog entries:
4) Suzanne Livingston's presentation on What's Coming in Connections Next - I was actually outside the room during this session and all I heard were applause every 2-3 minutes. Of course, I already knew the content of the presentation, but I was looking forward to watch and learn from Suzanne, the demo goddess.
Were there any other sessions that were simply outstanding that I should've checked out?
Tomorrow, Wednesday February 9th, we'll be hosting a webcast on upgrading your Quickr server to the latest version: 8.5. If you haven't upgraded to Quickr 8.5, you really have to. The latest release is amazing!
What? - IBM Support team members hosting a webcast on upgrading to Lotus Quickr Domino 8.5
When? - 9 / February / 2011 ; 10:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (15:00 GMT) (lasts 1 hour)
Why? - To provide all the necessary info you need for the upgrade and answer your questions
If you can't make it, we'll be recording the webcast and will make it available later. However, I strongly encourage all of you to attend so that you can ask questions live to the experts on the call. And if you can't make it, I hope you have a good excuse like you are attending the IBM Social Business Jam.
If you have any questions that you would like the team to answer, please post them in advance here.
What an amazing Lotusphere 2011! As we all catch up with Lotusphere and go through our recaps, I wanted to get the year officially going and give you some homework:
Make sure you are subscribed to the Synch.rono.us blog -- our developers are actively looking for your feedback there. Your feedback to those posts will help us plan the next release(s) of the product. And the more we hear from you, the more the community benefits. In particular, we want your feedback on these key topics:
Please take a few minutes to complete 3 Lotus Connections tasks on Lotusphere Online 2011 and provide us with input for future improvements to the website. To participate, please go here and remember to authenticate with your Lotusphere Online credentials.
Help my fellow Notes product managers. If you are a Notes customer, please take this survey to help us determine which features to include in the next release (shouldn't take more than 10 minutes)
So that's it! Five items that you need to do as homework. Your due date? This Friday!
For those of you who are catching up, I've blogged about my recaps from Days 1-4, so you may want to readthose first. Day 5 of Lotusphere 2011 always comes with mixed feelings. You get to say goodbye to your colleagues, but I'm extremely happy to go see my family.
So Thursday's highlight (for me) was the Ask the Product Managers session. For some reason, I was a bit nervous about this one, but it turned out to be just fine. I was all the way to the right of the stage (and was very conscious of the 1-2 inches I had; I thought my chair would fall at any second). (picture courtesy of Mitch)
As we introduced ourselves, Ed Brill wanted us to announce something that most people may have not been aware of. Thus, I announced the availability of the new Quickr 8.5 connector for Connections 3.0. It was made available on Saturday as people traveled to Lotusphere 2011. You can download it from the catalog.
Towards the very beginning of the session there was a question that was directed to me, but it was actually around the Quickr Connectors. MacGuidera actually owns this particular module so I deflected the question to him.
Three quarters of the way into the session, I did get my first question from Lisa Duke: "Will Quickr D remain as a standalone product?" The answer was easy: "Yes!" and that made Lisa happy. Yay!
Mitch Cohen captured a live blog of the session, so check that out to get a transcript of what happened. After the session was done, I grabbed my lunch box and headed out to the airport to make my way back to SJU.
Now it's time to catch up with the feeds and see what I missed while I was heads down at #ls11.
In the previous blog entry, I shared my recap of what happened the first part of Day 4, Wednesday, of Lotusphere. I wanted to share a bit of what happened towards the end of the day. At 5:45p I had the chance to deliver my first Birds of Feather (BOF) titled Lotus Connections: Lessons Learned from the Field. I had participated in a BOF before with StuartMcIntyre, but only as a guest speaker.
This time, however, Stuart was scheduled for a BOF at the same time as me. I had to do something to draw a crowd . I figured if I could get a celebrity in the room, that would help. Therefore, I invited RawnShah to come in. He couldn't make it so he instead donated 3 autographed copies of his book: Social Networking for Business (which Steve Bell reviewed here). Three lucky attendees left with a copy of the book.
The purpose of the BOF was to concentrate on bad / best practices for social software adoption inside of the firewall. I wanted to generate a discussion between customers in the room to share what was and wasn't working in their organizations as they tried to become a social business. I didn't want to touch on technical stuff because, well, because there had been plenty of technical sessions throughout the conference. As I walked towards the room I ran into SachaChua and invited her to come along. She agreed and even volunteered to scribe the session. I've always been a big fan of her hand drawings.
Here's what we talked about in the "words" of Sacha:
I heard from the attendees that the session was valuable so hopefully we'll repeat it next year.
One thing I would like to do different next year is set up the chairs in a circle. The chairs were organized as if I was going to do a presentation and I think a circle arrangement would've allowed customers to more easily see each other.
After the BOF was done, #ls11 attendees headed out to Islands of Adventure to check out the new Harry Potter attractions.
So far I've recapped Days 1, 2 and 3 of Lotusphere 2011, or #ls11 if you are following in Twitter. Wednesday was the busiest day of them all. The day started with the morning keynote titled: The Future of Social Business. The guest speaker for the keynote was AndyMcAfee which was a total surprise to me. I found out early in the morning and was excited to listen to him. Before I got to the keynote, though, I went to the Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Get Up To Speed with XPages where I worked as "host" in a speedtesting game. It was tons of fun and I got a chance to meet David Leedy in person.
After the BOF was done, I headed over to the keynote. I'm so glad that we were able to get Andy on stage. For those of you who don't know Andy, he coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and is very passionate about the topic. He does research at MIT, right next to IBM's Center for Social Software.
As promised, Mitch Cohen and I live blogged the keynote. Since I'm a big fan of Andy, this day's keynote was my favorite (I also like Kevin Spacey). One of the reasons why I was so excited to hear him was to see what he would say on the whole Enterprise 2.0 vs Social Business conundrum. For those of you who couldn't make it, Lotusphere's theme this year was Get Social. Do Business.
I thought Andy did a good job at addressing this early on. I also loved the examples he used to prove the value of the wisdom of the crowds and why businesses should Get Social. I strongly recommend you go through the live blog from the session. Additionally, you can also watch a replay here:
After the keynote, I headed over to SandyCarter's session. Her session was titled Social Media: 10-minute update (although it lasted 1 hour ). As she started her session, I really liked what she did for an agenda slide:
A quote that stuck out was "Business Process are the 'soul' of your company - to truly be a social business, you must embed social into your soul". I believe this is critical and is something that I preach to the customers I talk to. For me, one of the things that has driven my usage of social software is the fact that Connections is embedded into everything that I do and use (email, instant messaging, mobile, etc):
Sandy closed with 11 things to do in 2011. Take this as a list of things to do this year, perhaps one thing every month of the year left:
After that I was mostly in meetings all day with customers and partners brainstorming on the future of Quickr among other things. Once those were done, it was time for me to finally lead my first BOF. The BOF was titled Lotus Connections: Lessons Learned from the Field. I think I've been talking enough in this entry, so I'll leave that for another post.
Day 3, Tuesday, of Lotusphere 2011 or #ls11 for those of you following in Twitter, was a fun one for me. A big part of the day was spent talking to customers and hearing their thoughts on the direction we should take for our products. That's always fun, especially when they validate what you are thinking of doing.
As it happens every day, the day started with a keynote. The keynote was titled: "Becoming a Social Business". One of the guest speakers was Jon Iwata, Senior VP Marketing Officer for IBM, . I live blogged the session along with Mitch Cohen. Jon had some very interesting quotes throughout the session:
People are afraid of social business, just like they were afraid of giving Internet to the employees
Is there risk in social business? Sure! Is there risk when doing business in emerging markets? Sure! But will you pass on the growth opportunities ?
Really makes you think, huh? A customer panel was also available where Cemex and State St told their stories. Definitely go check out the live blog for all the commentary, and if you want to see a replay of the session, you can see it here:
In between customer meetings, I got a chance to tour the Product Showcase. I saw some really cool solutions from our partners, but I'm not going to give them justice here. I'll blog more about those later.
Then towards the middle of the day I had a chance to finally deliver my first session at Lotusphere. Because Jay Boyd and I were tag teaming (and he was really going to dive into the technical details), I asked the audience to live tweet questions and I would answer them as a backchannel. I got some really good feedback from the audience on this approach and I thought it kept the audience engaged and that way they didn't have to wait until the end to ask questions. You can see the tweets here.
This time, however, Stuart was scheduled for a BOF at the same time as me. I had to do something to draw a crowd 
. I figured if I could get a celebrity in the room, that would help. Therefore, I invited 
