Portals and KM

Photos of New Orleans Neighborhoods: Treme

Here is another in my series on New Orleans neighborhoods taken in 2011. This post covers Treme located next to the French Quarter. It is a subdistrict of the Mid-City District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are Esplanade Avenue to the north, North Rampart Street to the east, St. Louis Street to the south and North Broad Street to the west. It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, and early in the city's history was the main neighborhood of free blacks. It is now home to a number of musicians including Kermit Ruffins.

The first pictures are from Willie Mae's Scotch House (2401 St. Ann Street, 504.822.9503). It serves some of the best fried chicken I have eaten: “caramel brown, audibly crisp, juicy as meat can naturally be.”

Another great place I tried is Dooky Chase’s, (2301 Orleans Ave (504) 821-0535). Frommer’s wrote, “For decades, Leah and husband Dooky Chase have served prominent African-American politicians, musicians, and businesspeople Chef Leah's classic soul food as gloriously influenced by the city's French, Sicilian, and Italian traditions. This was the place people like Ray Charles (who wrote "Early in the Morning" about it) would come to after local shows and stay up until the wee hours telling stories and eating gumbo -- one of the city's best.”

At the bottom is the Candlelight Lounge where I saw the Treme Brass Band do two great sets. 

Here is a summary of images from my last trip in January 2010 when I provided a more extensive coverage of New Orleans neighborhoods. 

                                             

 

Photos of New Orleans Neighborhoods: Bywater

Here is another in my series on New Orleans images taken in December 2011. This post covers the Bywater neighborhood. It is a subdistrict of the Bywater District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are: Florida Avenue to the north, the Industrial Canal to the east, theMississippi River to the south and Franklin Avenue Street to the west. Bywater is part of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, but is located along the natural levee of the Mississippi River, sparing the area from significant flooding.

As the Wikipedia states, “during Mardi Gras the Society of Saint Anne marching krewe starts their procession on Mardi Gras morning in Bywater and gathers marchers as it travels through the French Quarter and ends at Canal Street. This walking parade of local residents, artists, and performers is preceded by the Bywater Bone Boys Social Aid and Pleasure Club (founded 2005), an early-rising skeleton krewe made up of writers, tattoo artists, painters, set designers, and musicians.” Bachannal, a wine bar, provides food and music in its backyard most nights as you can see below. There is also The Joint, a greatBBQ place. 

Here is a summary of images from my last trip in January 2010 when I provided a more extensive coverage of New Orleans neighborhoods. 

                

 

IBM Connections Conversations - 3: Analytics + Social

This is the third of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took a detailed look. In my last post I looked at some of the themes and features in the next release. In this post we will look at the new analytics capabilities, as well as the advantages of being able to work both inside and outside the enterprise through the same platform.

In the next major release, Connections will offer an enhanced dashboard to monitor adoption and community vitality.  It will provide key usage indicators from Connections services and page views. The metrics will look at people, participation, and content. For example, you will be able to see such items as  top contributors, number of unique visitors, new members, and much more.

There will be a starting collection of metric reports but then community managers will be able to choose more from numerous (just in case we need to shorten the list I'd prefer to be more generic here) options that can be implemented by the system administrator, IBM’s Cognos is providing this capability in the background. If you want to go even deeper you can do custom work within Cognos itself, specifically Report Studio. For example, you can get further data beyond who is participating to what is their geography, department, job function, and other profile attributes specific to your organization. All of this data can help better understand how adoption is working and what needs to be done to further it. You can create custom reports or modify existing ones. You can drill down and do data slicing on time dimension, Connection component dimension or up to 3 different "filters" you can specify about a person's profile (Geo, Role, Dept being the default ones).

What is exciting here is the integration of social capabilities and analytics. For example, a marketing professional can now gain real-time access to data that highlights patterns and consumer sentiment related to marketing trends. They can adjust campaigns on the fly. But what is even more interesting is the ability with a single click, for professionals to react to these new insight by automatically creating a social network, on the fly, bringing together experts across geographical and market intelligence topics to work together and to respond to these insights.

The ability to take insights from consumer facing communities and bring them inside for internal conversation on how to respond shows one the advantages of having a platform that serves both communities inside and outside the organization. Another is the ability to align messages across these communities so employees are in step with customers and their insights. Suzanne said that the market interest in Connections  has shifted from usage dominantly inside the enterprise   to a combined focus of inside and outside the enterprise. I think this is a big advantage over single purpose platforms.

McKinsey has offered data to support this advantage of using social media both inside and outside the enterprise (see: How social technologies are extending the organization). They found extensive benefits for using social software inside the enterprise (e.g. increasing speed to access knowledge, reducing communication costs, and increasing speed to access internal experts) and outside the enterprise (increasing effectiveness of marketing, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing marketing costs). However it was the fully networked organizations, the ones who used social business both inside and outside the enterprise that gained the most. For example, the fully networked organizations had almost twice as such integration of social aspects into the employees day to day work and a greater improvement in benefits.

I see the new capabilities within Connections covered in these three posts to further support this integration of social into business. Companies that adopt these approaches should be the winners going forward.

 

 

IBM Connections Conversations - 2: Overview of Next Release

This is the second of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform for social business. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took a detailed look. After covering Connections 3.0 as I discussed in my last post, we covered aspects of the next major release.

There are three main themes addressed in this next release of Connections: the evolution of the social platform, enhanced communities for teams, and more capabilities for business to consumer use cases. The common underlying theme is the movement from Connections providing a suite of applications to becoming a comprehensive social business platform with tighter integration.

One of the enablers of this tighter integration is the use of Connections with the OpenSocial Foundation,  a standards board that IBM  and other firms such as Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, and Jive collaboratively develop or utilize. Here is the list of OpenSocial adopters. The Wikipedia defines the OpenSocial Platform as a “public specification that defines a component hosting environment (container) and a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based applications.” This effort is designed to give social tools the ability to work together, a wise move.

Looking more closely at the three themes, the social platform evolution is designed to address the need to streamline work, provide anytime, anywhere access, prioritize important content and filter out distractions, and offer a consistent integrated collaboration experience. The enhanced community capabilities for teams add new features to address team use cases. This includes support for the need to share and collaborate across a group of people, to support different groups with different requirements, and to develop and manage shared documents across teams. The business to consumer capabilities accommodates the need to build social communities to enhance loyalty and revenue, to understand what works and gain insight from trends, and support openness and choice. Here is a sample Connections dashboard.

One of the major advances on the social platform evolution is the enhancement of the activity stream. I really applaud this move as I see the activity stream becoming the glue that holds the social enterprise together and make it run efficiently. To this end IBM has made its Connections activity stream open to third party apps. For example, an approval request from an SAP application can be placed into the activity stream and acted upon without leaving the activity stream. This is the type of capability that will truly enable the connected enterprise. Here is a sample activity stream.

IBM has contributed this embedded experience capability into the OpenSocial Foundation so others can use it. So to be more specific you can take an item from a backend system, such as the SAP tracking order I mentioned, and place it into a side bar within a Connections activity stream. There it can be worked on and the results sent back to the backend system without the user actually having to go there. The capability has opened doors for IBM to make stronger connections with other members of Open Social such as Atlassian.

IBM wants the activity stream to become the central workplace and I fully support this concept. You can have both manual updates like Twitter or auto-generated updates such as the SAP example. It is light years ahead of email as a central workplace and you can even bring email and calendar from Exchange or Domino into Connections. You can work on emails within Connections just as you can back-office tasks like SAP. It is becoming truly capable of being the central work place of the enterprise but with a social twist.  You can even give feedback on items through the ”like” feature and follow conversation through hashtags. Because of the embedded files capability you can also display images right in the activity stream unlike in Twitter. Here is sample screen with email inside Connections.

In my next post, which will appear tomorrow, I will look more closely at the analytics that is coming with the next release of Connections

 

IBM Connections Conversations 1: Review of 3.0

This is the first of a three part series on IBM Connections, their collaboration platform for social business. I recently had an extended conversation with Suzanne Livingston, Senior Product Manager for Connections. I have covered Connections before (see for example, Looking Closely at Lotus Connections) but it had been a while since I took another detailed look. We began by discussing Connections 3.0, released in 2011, that has expanded features to support communities.

This community support includes video and photo sharing and support for idea generation, including Ideation Blogs. It also provides the means to better manage a document library for communities through integration with IBM Enterprise Content Manager and IBM FileNet.  Community moderation is offered and communities can manage their documents within Community Pages. The document library services are provided through Quickr for Websphere Portal. This allows security setting, users, and groups to be synchronized between Quickr and Connections.

Expanded mobile capabilities are provided through IBM’s Social Everywhere mission, which has been a major part of each release since Connections 1. You can upload photos and videos from your phone. Now you can get native apps as well as hybrid ones through  a mobile browser. You can access all of your Connections data from mobile browsers or through free native apps. You can download native apps from the major app stores such as iTunes, Andriod Market, and Blackberry App Worlds.

IBM created a version of Connections specifically for the iPad that takes advantage of the new capabilities that a tablet offers over a smartphone. This includes editing while maintaining the gestural navigation found in both devices.

On the Web facing side, Connections 3.0 continues to support Websphere Portal 7 and 8 beta with better integration with the portal. This enables more robust use of Connections for external communities. With this release you can have community page portlets with blogs and profiles. This gives you the option of using Websphere Portal as your website UI but with Connections capabilities built in. You can also simply use Connections as your Web interface. The Spanish Red Cross is one example of this move. Connections 3.0 is offered through the cloud and on premise.

Connections 3.0.1 can  also be used for compliance purposes. All Connections posts, comments, blogs, etc. are logged instantly and available for eDiscovery.  IBM works with their partner Actiance to provide this capability.  There is real-time content monitoring, a keyword blacklist, and granular policies to map compliance requirements by user type. Alerts can be sent when posts contain blacklisted words. Mail security can be invoked before posting to avoid such things as SEC violations.

This collection represents a solid foundation for the evolution of Connections through the next major release of Connections that I will begin to discuss in the second post in this series which will appear tomorrow.

 

 

My OutStart Blog Posts – January 2012

As I mentioned on this blog I am now helping OutStart with their social media efforts as part of the OutStart team. I am one of several people contributing to our OutStart Knowledge Solutions Blog (see: My New Role within OutStart’s Social Media Efforts). I will not be repeating my posts for that blog on this blog. However, once a month I will post links to my writing there. Here is the eighth set covering January. I am including posts by other members of the OutStart team. I welcome your comments.

Selection & Management of Outsourced Content Providers: Part 1 – Five Common Challenges

Selection & Management of Outsourced Content Providers Part 2 -Six Ways an LCMS Can Help

Mobile Learning Modernizes a Ghana University Making it Easier for Students to Learn and Communicate

Five Ways to Make Your Content More Engaging

Social Business Software as a Platform for the Connected Enterprise

Charles Jennings on the 70:20:10 Model for Learning within the Enterprise

Three Ways an LCMS Can Support Assessments

Five Key Steps for Course Translation and Localization

Six Ways to Use Mobile for Learning

Expanding the Scope of Learning in the Connected Enterprise

Do You Have A Twitter Addiction? Do You Have A Connection Addiction?

Sameer Patel aka @sameerpatel pointed to an interesting article in the Guardian through Twitter. The title was: Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds. Now this is a topic I have covered before – see for example my 2009 post, Is Twitter Like Going Out for a Smoke? More on this older story later in this post but first the Guardian wrote, “Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.” Powerful stuff this Twitter.

The research reported by the Guardian is not the first to tackle this issue. In 2009 I wrote about a Study of Social Media Addiction from Retrevo. It found that their sample used social media in the car (over 35 – 9%, under 35 – 40%), at work (over 35 – 29%, under 35  - 64%), on vacation (over 35 – 41%, under 35 - 65%), on a date (over 35 - 9%, under 35 - 34%), and after sex (over 35 - 8%,  under 35 - 36%). I am sure these numbers are increasing, especially if you include playing scrabble on your smart phone.

Twitter seems to be the most addictive. For respondents under age 35, 27% of those who use Facebook said they check it more than 10 times a day compared to 39% of Twitter users checking in on Twitter more than 10 times a day. Across all age groups, 56% say they check it between one and ten times a day. I certainly find Twitter more addictive than Facebook. The activity is very fast and real time so you want to stay connected and it is easy to make a quick check.

The biggest enablers of this new addiction seem to be smart phones and other mobile devices, especially if you are under 35. In a Gadgetology study only 19% of the 35+ group use a phone as the preferred device for social media services with 81% preferring instead a desktop or laptop computer. This is me as I never use a phone, even though I have an iPhone. Perhaps I will as I get more used to my iPhone. Over on the other side of the generation gap they found 46% of those younger than 35 indicating their preference for a mobile device for all things social media.

Returning to the first post I mentioned, Is Twitter Like Going Out for a Smoke?, I wrote about how smokers often formed informal networks as they had to go to designated spots for their habit. I added the following.

So if implemented right Twitter is more like the smoker’s group without the health risks. With Twitter there is also the timing factor as to whether your paths will cross which also applies to the water cooler. In both cases, the smart networker will know the patterns of his or her prey and look for the right times to engage. Since the smoker group is together for longer periods of time, there are also more likely to be established rules of contact than the newcomer needs to learn to be effective. Smoker’s groups might be more likely to meet at certain times. There are also patterns of high Twitter use to observe. I covered this combination of taking a break and informal networks in two other related posts:

Is Twitter Like Stopping at the Water Cooler? Is this Productive?

Is Twitter like Taking a Nap? But More Productive?

I do find Twitter to be a great way to stay connected and find out what is going on with people I like to stay connected to such as Sameer. In the month of April I will be working from a Greek Island but what made it possible for me to stay “away’ so long was the wifi connection in my temporary home so I will have Twitter, skype, this blog, etc. More on this later. Image from Hellblazer! Flickr creative commons. 

 

Photos of New Orleans Neighborhoods: The Marigny

Here is another in my series on New Orleans neighborhoods taken in December 2011. This post covers the Marigny neighborhood. The Marigny (often referred to as Faubourg Marigny) is a subdistrict of the Bywater District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are: North Rampart Street and St. Claude Avenue to the north, Franklin Avenue to the east, the Mississippi River to the south and Esplanade Avenue to the west.

Frenchman Street is part of the Fauborg Marigny. It has some of the better music clubs and ones that are much less tourist oriented than Bourbon Street but still a little touristy compared with neighborhood clubs. Clubs shown include Blue Nile, Cafe Negril, Apple Barrel, Vaso, Spotted Cat, and d.b.a, I saw David Glenn Andrews and the Treme Brass Band at d.b.a. and I saw the Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses at Vaso.

Here is a summary of images from my trip in January 2010 when I provided a more extensive coverage of New Orleans neighborhoods. 

                                       

 

New Orleans Restaurants December 2011

On this trip I wanted try as many new places as I could. I started off with dinner at the Maringy Brasserie, 640 Frenchmen Street near the music clubs (504) 945-4472. I had an excellent blackened red fish with crawfish cream sauce and Southern fried rice.

Next was lunch at Dooky Chase Restaurant 2301 Orleans Ave in Treme. (504) 821-0535. I had their gumbo and Shrimp Clemenceau that is shrimp with nice flavor and small fried potatoes with peas.  They also had a great looking buffet that I only resisted because I would eat too much. Frommer’s wrote, “For decades, Leah and husband Dooky Chase have served prominent African-American politicians, musicians, and businesspeople Chef Leah's classic soul food as gloriously influenced by the city's French, Sicilian, and Italian traditions. This was the place people like Ray Charles (who wrote "Early in the Morning" about it) would come to after local shows and stay up until the wee hours telling stories and eating gumbo -- one of the city's best.”

     
Dinner was at Coop’s Place 1109 Decatur St. in the Lower French Quarter. I had gone there once before and sat next to an off duty chef who had the crawfish with tasso ham cream sauce on pasta. I had to come back to try it and the dish did not disappoint.  It was the single best dish I had on the trip and was only $10.

     
Breakfast was nice creme pie at Croissant D'or Patisserie 617 Ursulines Ave in the lower French Quarter. I have been here many times and it was close to my hotel. As the name implies their croissants was excellent.

     
I went to Magazine Street for lunch at Casamento’s 4330 Magazine St. (504) 895-9761, a place I have long wanted to try. It is famous for its oysters and the oyster man was very busy at the bar. I had oyster bisque and a soft shell crab loaf. They call it a loaf because it is not on French bread like a poboy but was really good anyway.

         
Dinner was at the bar at Dick & Jenny’s, 4501 Tchoupitoulas Street, (504) 894-9880. I had two appetizers: Duck confit pie and fried frogs’ legs in a crystal hot sauce butter with cole slaw. Both were excellent. They came with a nice basket of cornbread and I did a painting of it that you can see below.  This was another place I had wanted to go. Like Cassamento’s and Coop’s Place, they do not take reservations but it is easier as one to get into these places without a wait.

     

   
When I came back to New Orleans from the Lafayette Opelousas area I started with breakfast at Stanley’s. My hotel recommended it. I had walked by the place many times but because it was on Jackson Square I had assumed it was a tourist place. The food was actually excellent. I had a variation on Eggs Benedict with two poached eggs sitting on top of some boudin sausage from Charlie T’s in the Lafayette area, hollandaise sauce and French bread. It is now on my list of places to trust in the Quarter.

     
I had lunch at Willie Mae's Scotch House (2401 St. Ann Street, 504.822.9503). It serves some of the best fried chicken I have eaten: “caramel brown, audibly crisp, juicy as meat can naturally be.” It was also the only place that was a repeat for lunch or dinner except for Coop’s Place where I had a very different dish from the first visit. Of course at Willie Mae’s I repeated the fried chicken with some very flavorful green beans and a nice rice side with subtle light sauce.

   
Dinner was at Clancy’s 6100 Annunciation Street (504) 895-1111. Prior to the 80s it had been a neighborhood bar and poboy restaurant similar in style to those found in nearly every New Orleans neighborhood at the time. Then it was transformed into a white table cloth place serving classic Creole cuisine. It was another place I have wanted to try for some time. I had two appetizers at the bar, shrimp remoulade and a rabbit sausage en coute with a nice sauce.

On my way to the airport I had lunch at Luizza’s by the Track 1518 N. Lopez 504-218-7888 near the Fairgrounds race track, site of Jazzfest. I had their award winning gumbo that was the best I had on this trip and some excellent shrimp remoulade. After lunch I walked around the area on a warm sunny day in December in the mid-70s and wondered way I was getting on a plane to go North.

     

The best value for money in alphabetical order are: Coop's Place, Luizza's by the Track and Willie Mae's. The best high end place for me remains at Patois located at Laurel Street near the zoo.  I did not eat there this time as I wanted to try new places but on a past trip I ate both lunch and dinner there. The dish you see below is a potato gnocchi with crawfish. We had it for lunch and then again at dinner. You also see their gumbo. We also had the roasted pheasant breast and confit leg and almond crusted Gulf fish, as well as a crispy duck confit salad. 6078 Laurel Street 504.895.9441.

                

 

Remember When Social Media Was Simple and Mostly Blogs?

I was reading a blog post, Corporations at Risk From Social Media Adoption Issues, by Brett Greene, or maybe it is an online newspaper article since it is on the Huffington Post, with the tag line: the internet newspaper: news, blogs, video, community. So is news an article and commentary a blog? These questions are not my real point but just a symptom of it.

The real point is the proliferation of social media types and the growing complexity of dealing with them. Brett was commenting on a recent Altimeter report. A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation, by Jeremiah Owyang. Their research found that global corporations are trying to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts. He adds, “The genie is out of the social media bottle and he's creating new technologies and tools at dizzying speeds.”  Now there are even tools to manage the tools and these tools are actually filling a real need. What have we done?

I also recently shared related research by Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research as they looked  the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. They found that the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, texting, downloadable mobile apps and Foursquare are increasing while there are reductions in the use of blogs, message boards, video blogs, podcasts and MySpace.

It makes sense that blog use is decreasing as they use to serve more functions that are how handled by an increasing variety of specialized tools. In 2004 I saw several examples of what later would be termed enterprise 2.0 or social business that were built with blogs since they were the main social media tool around.

For example, Al Essa, the CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Management at time, had each project team in his group create a blog forum for every project. Managers now provided updates and everyone in the department could access all project blogs inside the firewall. The project blogs acted as true dashboards. Al could review each project’s status on line and drill down for more detail as needed. He could also point project teams to others who faced the same issues. These status reports were now available to everyone in his department, so cross-project communication was a simple matter, a by-product of the new blog reporting platform. The instant, secure, and constant accessibility, in searchable format, that blogs brought was a huge productivity improvement over swapping project reports and commentary through multiple emails.

Now there are a variety of tools to handle these same issues. Have we gotten better? Perhaps but I would argue that the improvement is only incremental over the transformative work that people like Al did simply using blogs. We are also in danger of going backward if we push the complexity too far. This is happening both on the Web and inside the enterprise. One of the great benefits of blogs remains their simplicity.  We need to maintain this simplicity as we add functionality. 

 

My Favorite Tweets for January 15 - 31 2012

Here is another in a series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later.

I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month.

RT @SocBiz2day: Factories: The Original Social Businesses #socbiz #e20 http://su.pr/9GQBL9

RT @FrancineAllaire: RT @markwilliams: How to Keep Up With 100K Twitter followers by @AnnTran_ http://vsb.li/HACgM1

The Pen Is Mightier Than The Phone: A Case For Writing Things Out | Fast Company http://j.mp/vXUimx

RT @SameerPatel: #Cloud Computing Fueling Global Economic Growth http://ow.ly/8Jgjx - @joemckendrick

RT @SmartDataCo: Forrester’s Take on BI Trends—Plus Collaboration by @ericadriver http://goo.gl/fb/1hQLl

Who Are The Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers? http://onforb.es/zB3zjx

Why Marketers Are Learning to Embrace Sustainability Through Social Media http://bit.ly/z9yDpZ

RT @nahumg: Picture of Day: Original Macintosh Computer Turns 28 http://bit.ly/x9Ljse > did sales training for it :)

RT @SameerPatel: Now THIS is simulation RT @OddityCentral: Chinese Army Plays Lethal Pass-the-Bomb Game http://bit.ly/yysVyb

RT @forrester: Apple infiltrates enterprise: Globally, 21% of info workers use Apple for work http://forr.com/xZusZb

Google to Combine Data on Users, Making Anonymity Harder http://on.wsj.com/Apump

Don’t tell my mum I’m a community manager, she believes I play piano in a brothel http://bit.ly/ABRneD @bduperrin

5 Things You Should Look For in a Community Manager http://rww.to/AhHJHY

Super Bowl first: Social media command center http://bit.ly/ycBA1h #nepatriots

RT @JimLundy: Summarizing Lotusphere in 3 words: Social, Mobile, Watson http://aragonresearch.com/archives/3148 #ls12

RT @jowyang: Huffington Post: Corporations at Risk From Social Media Adoption Issues http://trib.al/04BrWx

U.S. tech firms add jobs despite automation http://bit.ly/zUmiXf

RT @outstart: RT @C4LPT: Sleeping giant – Social Business stirs in 2012 http://bit.ly/ylNp2i

RT @darwineco: NEW POST: The 7 Roadblocks to Content Curation http://www.darwineco.com/blog/bid/77683/The-7-Roadblocks-to-Content-Curation

RT @DavidGurteen: Collective Intelligence And The Internet http://bit.ly/y8Xf6k

How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work http://nyti.ms/zcbtIK?

Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple http://read.bi/xNkVMI by @markfidelman +!

ways to increase engagement through Twitter http://bit.ly/wAOkV5

RT @dhinchcliffe: Email and Enterprise Social Network http://ow.ly/8AAkX #socbiz #CoIT HT @digitalnaiv

RT @ellenfeaheny: JIRA+ Enterprise Activity in IBM Connections, by AppFusions: http://youtu.be/j7k0jn5ppTA via @youtube

RT @outstart: RT @jbowles: RT @socbiz2day Democratization of workplace #socbiz #workplace http://su.pr/2zYlZl

Lotusphere Learnings by @CRozwell > great summary #ls12 http://bit.ly/w8jGif

IBM, other tech results point to robust IT demand #ls12 http://reut.rs/yP8Qi9

RT @darwineco: RT @vernaallee: RT @rossdawson: Twitter acquisition confirms that curation is future http://bit.ly/z7NhcX

RT @rossdawson: how Apple's success doesn't flow into US jobs http://nyti.ms/wHgXj9

Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple read.bi/xNkVMI by @markfidelman +!

After an Online Firestorm, Congress Shelves Antipiracy Bills http://nyti.ms/zzyOpI

ways to increase engagement through Twitter http://bit.ly/wAOkV5

RT @dhinchcliffe: Email and Enterprise Social Network http://ow.ly/8AAkX #socbiz #CoIT HT @digitalnaiv

RT @ellenfeaheny: JIRA+ Enterprise Activity in IBM Connections, by AppFusions: http://youtu.be/j7k0jn5ppTA via @youtube

IBM, other tech results point to robust IT demand #ls12 http://reut.rs/yP8Qi9

RT @C4LPT: Twitter Acquires, Shuts Down Social News Startup Summify http://tcrn.ch/ySC8Sa via @techcrunch

RT @socialmedia2day: The Evolution of Social Business by @haydn1701 http://ow.ly/1gOM7j

Jon Stewart great on #SOPA http://lat.ms/zjosxy

Social media star companies to work for http://cnnmon.ie/zXRFO2

RT @darwineco: Gartner: CIO 2012 IT Budgets like analytics and mobility http://bit.ly/xtvjpq

In Tech, Starting Up by Failing http://nyti.ms/xsbfaK

Twitter is adding 11 new accounts per sec could pass 500 million in Feb 2012 http://bit.ly/yHUtY5

As Social Media Hits Television, 2012 Is Year of Must-Tweet TV http://bit.ly/yHUtY5

RT @chooseportal: 5 key Social Business learnings from TD Bank at #LS12 hpic.twitter.com/uEOFsozf

RT @SmartDataCo: Big Data Redraws the IT Landscape by @gilpress http://goo.gl/fb/2XPj9

RT @darwineco: RT @NigelFenwick: Mo' Data, Mo' Problems http://bit.ly/wi7gFN #CIO

RT @catshinners: San Jose State & IBM-new academic program to advance students' social biz skills http://bit.ly/A5wkXl #ls12

Ten Social Media Strategies to Define a Successful 2012 http://bit.ly/whoJnW

RT @Edtweeps: Five things I learned from Henri Cartier-Bresson The Mind's Eye http://awe.sm/5dLRz > +1

RT @Edtweeps: BBC News - Five ways the digital camera changed us http://awe.sm/5dLWx

RT @dhinchcliffe: 5 Ways Communities Best Networks - http://bit.ly/y8TyaN #socbiz HT @TheCR

 

The Value of Writing Things Down

Here is an interesting bit of research. Kevin Purdy reports in, The Pen Is Mightier Than The Phone: A Case For Writing Things Out, that “a Forrester Research survey of business professionals found that 87 percent of them supplement gadgets with paper productivity, and 47 percent thought their personal and company efficiency would improve with better note-taking.” Now I have always valued writing things down. That is why I have posting on this blog daily since May 2004. While much of my blog writing remains electronic, I also use paper a lot. I still do paper to-lists. I prefer to read paper books. While I blog events on my laptop, I take interview notes on paper.

I am a very visual person and also draw and paint so I am attracted to the feel of working with paper. The article another good point as Kevin wrote that, “The role of paper is “changing from information recording and archiving, to a more temporary role of containing transient information,” says Jenny Englert, senior cognitive engineer at Xerox, in summarizing some of the research her firm is doing on the future of work.” I find this also. When I take interview notes on paper, I transfer them to electronic form for both distribution and storage and do not keep the paper. Of course, I am careful to recycle the paper. There is also something to stroke over a completed task on my paper to do list. When it has many crossovers than undone task I usually throw it into the recycle bin and start another.

I am not sure there is a systematic reason for me to choose paper over electronic. Now electronics are required for distribution. However, I used to keep paper calendar and saved them every year. Now my calendar is electronic and I do not tend to go back in time any more. In same ways paper was better since I always had the calendar with me. Now I have to wait to confirm appointments to get back to my laptop. Of course, I should just use the calendar on my iPhone since it is usually with me. The smart phone may replace a number of paper-based tasks but it will be less likely to replace paper note taking. 

Some one should do a systematic study of paper versus electronics. Every communication medium has it strengths and limitations. The cuneiform of Sumer and Akkad used a wooden stylus on wet clay. The tablets were then baked. While lasting for millennia with no degradation, they were not very portable, and transportation was difficult. Pieces of pottery were also widely used for letters, accounts, and even homework, but they were not much good for lengthy texts.

It was not until the development of papyrus that real literary and academic works could easily be recorded and transported. This technology was used by the Greeks and Romans from the 5th century BC until the 8th or 9th century AD. It was superseded by parchment beginning in the 4th century AD. Both of these new media were easier to store and transport than the clay tablets but they were also more susceptible to the fire of invading armies.  Now we have lost hard drives, the need for electric power, and often the need for connectivity to the Web.

 

 

My App Gap Posts for January 2012

The AppGap posts began toward the end of January 2008.  Here, I am primarily doing product commentaries with a few other things thrown in. Below are the ones for January. There will be more in February.

SpringCM Offers Enhanced Support for Salesforce.com and Enhances Its Mobile Capabilities

JackBe Presto Takes Self-Service Business Intelligence Mobile

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: IBM as a Social Business

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Innovation Lab Tour

My Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Summary Listing of All Posts

Forrester's Take on Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience

 

Shifts in 2011 Inc. 500 Social Media Usage

I have been writing about the work of Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for some time. See my last post on them: Is Social Media Reaching a Plateau in America's Largest Companies? They recently released a new study on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. This new study continues the Center’s work on Inc. 500 social media usage for the fifth consecutive year, providing a useful longitudinal study of corporate social media use.

In the first study of 2007, the smaller INC 500 companies outpaced the Fortune 500 in blog use (19% vs. 8%) and this trend continued as both group increased their blogging over the years. Now for the first blogging has declined in the Inc. 500 as other social media tools have emerged. In 2010 50% of the Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008.  Now in 2011, the use of blogging dropped to 37%. In contrast, they found, in a related study that blogs continued at the same 23% level in Fortune 500 companies.

There are other shifts as the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, texting, downloadable mobile apps and Foursquare are increasing while there are reductions in the use of blogs, message boards, video blogs, podcasts and MySpace. Specifically, in 2011 74% of the Inc. 500 used Facebook and 73% used LinkedIn.  Twenty-five and 24% respectively find that Facebook or LinkedIn is the single most effective social networking platform. In addition, texting, downloadable mobile applications, and Foursquare are used by 13%-15% of the 2011 Inc. 500.

Social media is seen as an effective tool in a variety of ways with 90% of responding executives indicate that social media tools are important for brand awareness and company reputation.  In addition, 88% find social media as important for generating web traffic, 81% find it important for lead generation, and 73% find social media tools important for customer support programs.  At the same time I was surprised to see a drop in monitoring social media as the 2011 study found that 68% of companies do monitor, down from 70% in 2010, which was the highest percent of the past 5 years. Although is a small drop and we will have to see if this trend continues.

Investment in social media will continue to increase for most as 71% plan to increase their investment, 25% said they would keep their social media budget the same, and only 1 company (4%) plans to decrease its investment. Only 24% of the Inc. 500 now have a written social media policy for their employees who use these tools on behalf of the company. This number clearly needs to increase.  Measurement will also likely increase as current metrics include: numbers of fans, followers and supporters (26%), web traffic (25%), lead generation (16%), reduced cost of customer support (10%), the value of sales generated through social media programs (7%). 

Most firms are filling resource requirements internally as 66% report retraining or repositioning existing employees to handle their social media efforts, 10% use external consultants or agencies, and 7% have made new hires specifically for their social media needs.  In summary, 91% of the Inc. 500 are now using social media to market their brands with a shift from blogs as the main tool to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This matches my intuitive and informal observation but it is really useful to have this useful research to validate these trends.

 

Second Annual Fess Festival at Tipitina's New Orleans December 2011

I drove to New Orleans from seeing Geno Delafose and French Rockin' Boogie at Whiskey Landing in Henderson and went directly to a festival of local musicians at Tipitina's. It was the second annual Fess Festival. With special guests Cosimo Effect, Tom McDermott, Joe Krown, Cha Wa Featuring Tom Worrell, Brother Tyrone & The Mind Benders, John Gros, Khris Royal, CR Gruver, Glen David Andrews, Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, David Torkanowsky, Alfred Uganda Roberts, Joshua Paxton, Jo "Cool" Davis, Rich Vogel, DJ Davis Rogan.

   
As the site said, “Pianist, composer, and singer, Professor Longhair, is one of the most important musical figures in New Orleans' rich musical legacy. Born Henry Roeland Byrd (also known as Fess) in Bogalusa, Louisiana. Ne became the embodiment of New Orleans rhythm and blues at his peak in the late '70s. Fess influenced countless musicians, such as Fats Domino, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Henry Butler, Huey "Piano" Smith, Marcia Ball, Champion Jack Dupree, Jon Cleary, the Meters, and the Neville Brothers.”

The first group was good. Then there was a buzz at the side door and people move closer to the stage. Dr. John made a surprise appearance and he brought a great band. They did a long high-energy set. I was standing 15 feet from him during this. The crowd was going wild. John Gros from Papa Grows Funk joined him for one number and John later played with some others.

 
Then Joe Krown played a solo. Dr. John was a tough act to follow as he noted. Just as the crowd had calmed down a bit after Dr. John, Allen Toussaint shows up as another surprise in a red coat and does a solo gig. He did some standards and then a few Christmas songs. He was very warm and spent a lot of time talking to people as he came and went. There was a lot of love in the room.

 

There were some other great acts including both old timers like Al Johnson (0n left below) and Jo "Cool" Davis (on right below) and new acts with younger players. 

 
Later Donald Harrison, the big chief who advises HBO Treme and who taught Clark Peters how to be a big chief, played piano with a band and did some Indian songs. Later he played sax and did jazz. 

   
Brother Tyrone & The Mind Benders did a few numbers, the Cosimo Effect played several times and John Gros came out with some good players.

   
Later Davis Rogan, who is the model for the Steve Zahn character in HBO Treme played, piano and sang. He was good. There were other bands and it was still going strong after midnight. 

   

 

New Orleans Lives Music Samples December 2011

One of the great joys of going to New Orleans is all the wonderful live music in a wide variety of music styles, most of which originated here or in the country side to the southwest of the city. I already covered the Cajun and Zydeco musicians on their home turf that I saw on this trip (see Taking in Zydeco Music in Opelousas Louisiana and More and Taking in Cajun Music in the Lafayette Louisiana Area). Here is what I found in New Orleans. I went out every night but still missed a lot.

On my first night I went to Frenchman Street for a nice dinner and some music clubs. The best one was a high energy set by Trombone Shorty's brother David Glenn Andrews at d.b.a. It got off to lively start and he played most of the numbers from his new CD that I bought. Then he mentioned some actors from the HBO series Treme were in the audience as they did a benefit together over the weekend. First, the Big Chief's friend who did the hauling business, actor David Jay, came up on stage after being in the audience for a while. He was actually a good singer. See first photo below. He is on the right doing a bounce version of a 80s R&B number. Then the actor who plays the Big Chief, himself, Clark Peters showed up and came up on stage and joined in for a number. He is the far right in the second photo.

     
On the way to d.b.a I also saw Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses at The Masion and got one of their CDs. They play old style swing jazz.  Earlier there was good blues by Lil Red and Big Bad at the Balcony Music Club (1331 Decatur Street – 504-599-7770).

     
On several afternoons I went to the Gazebo in the French Market where they have live music in an outdoor cafe. It is relaxed venue. There is another outdoor music cafe close by but I find the Gazebo more intimate. This time I heard Ellen Smith and her group and bought their excellent CD of covers, On Time: Gazebo Afternoon.

I ended up seeing the Treme Brass Band twice. First at d.b.a, on Tuesday and then at their home club, the Candlelight Lounge in Treme on Wednesday. The Candlelight Lounge is located at 925 North Robertson Street (504) 525-4748. The high energy trumpeter Kenny Terry leads the band, co founder Benny Jones, anchors with snare drums, co founder Lionel Batiste is on the bass drum, and a there is a cast of regulars and guys who come to sit in. The core of the band was the same at both clubs but a few extras joined at the Candlelight.

The crowd at the Candlelight was much younger so they were more active than the older folks at d.b.a. and danced more and were entertaining themselves and encouraged the band. The audience made the break entertaining as they continued to be active with some good background music playing loudly. I stayed for the second set as a result.  The sets were essentially the same but I would recommend seeing them at the Candlelight as there is much more energy and it is their home club.  The first photos are from d.b.a. and the second set from the Candlelight. Here is my friend Paul Tamburello’s post on them: New Orleans: The Treme Brass Band Lights Up The Candlelight Lounge.

           
Then I went to the Lafayette and Opelousas area for Cajun and zydeco. Returning on Sunday night I went to a fess festival to honor Professor Longhair at Tipitina’s (501 Napoleon Avenue). It was amazing with serious surprise guests and deserves it own post that appears tomorrow.

On my last night I saw Papa Grows Funk at the Maple Leaf 8316 Oak Street  (504) 866-9359 in my old neighborhood. Their band leader, John Gros, had played at the Fess Festival the night before both in a number with Dr. John and with a group of his own but not Papa Grows Funk. I have several of their CDs and saw them at the French Quarter Festival. This set featured some new numbers and was very hard driving.

     
Here are my music explorations in January 2010, and New Orleans Lives Music Samples May 2011, the last two times I was there. The WWOZ music calendar provides a comprehensive list of live music in the city. 

 

JackBe Presto Provides Self-Service Business Intelligence on a Mobile Basis

I have writtten about JackBe several times over the past few years and watched their evolution from a mashup provider to using their technology to support a new wave of business intelligence (see for example, JackBe’s Presto provides Real-Time Intelligence with a Focus on the Business User). What originally started as an enterprise mashup platform has now evolved into a real-time business intelligence platform that connects directly to live data sources and delivers information through Enterprise Apps and Dashboards as needed by business users. I recently spoke with Chris Warner, VP of Marketing and John Crupi, their CTO, about their latest release of Presto which focused on smartphone and tablet users.

Chris talked about the rise of mobile in general and with business intelligence in particular. One analyst puts the current use of mobile for business intelligence at 8% of total use. Gartner now claims that by 2014 a third of business intelligence will be accessed through mobile devices. If they are including tablets in with mobile I can see this happening.  Chris said that this increased use can take two forms. It can be a new channel for current users and an opportunity to reach new users with new apps. He hopes that the latter occurs, as it is a great opportunity.

Chris gave me an example. A data center operation manager, who supports several centers and is constantly on the go, needs to be able to monitor what is happening at these centers without having to log into a desktop or even lap top computer. They need a mobile tablet to get alerts, check on performance levels and respond to calls for support. They need a mobile operations dashboard. There are many people who do have operational responsibilities who fall into this category of need.

GE Aviation is one of JackBe’s  clients using Presto for data center monitoring. GE Aviation has been working with Presto over the past year and half and has been very successful. They attribute some of this success to being able to develop Apps at a much more rapid rate than with previous technology solutions. For example, “A request came in from senior management asking for an additional App to be developed after the majority of the solution was implemented, ‘the project sponsor was able to send a last minute requirement to their developer and the was App built and deployed in less than 24 hours’ Normally, this would have taken them several weeks due to all the politics and policies GE has in place for their BI environment.

Chris predicts that operational dashboards, in general, will be one of the killer business apps for tablet. Other examples include agencies within the US Dept of Defense that use Presto for situational awareness, Smartronix uses it for budget performance management within its government clients, and Qualcomm looks at real-time program management KPIs. This all makes sense to me. Here is a sample dashboard on an iPad.

Chris went on to say that business intelligence is under going a renaissance and taking new forms. I would agree and it is the new forms that are driving the resurgence. First there is big data as the volume of content expands. Part of this growth is driven by user-generated content through social media. There is also an increase in the quality of analytics and focus on predictive measures.

Looking at social media there is some structure present through metadata. For example, Twitter has hash tags and location. You can look at volumes and tagging to see where spikes occur around topics. This and other sources now allow for real-time intelligence so business users can get information while it is still relevant to their decisions.

So support this new wave of business intelligence software needs new capabilities. Chris outlined three components of these requirements. First there are live connections, second, self-service assembly, and third pervasive apps. You need to get information immediately from multiple sources. Users are increasingly expecting self-service in all that they do and finally, you need to be able to publish and use apps anywhere. This latter requirement is where mobile comes in.

Chris and John showed me some components of Presto that address these issues. One of the features that I especially liked is the ability to preview what an app looks like in desktop mode, smart phone portrait and landscape views and tablet portrait and landscape views. You can see a close up of screen that shows these options below.

Here is sample screen optimized for a smart phone in the landscape view.

Creating apps is done through visual mapping and making selections from drop downs. Below is you can see an app being developed. I really like their ease of development and ease of use.

Mobile users are starting out expecting self–service. Most of them go out and get their own devices and do not wait for their firm to supply them. These same people are not going to want to wait for IT to set up their business intelligence apps. I think that Jackbe is making some wise moves to not only go into mobile in a significant way, but also to enable self-service for users as part of this offering.

 

 

 

Moving Your Web Site into the 21st Century

Geoff Bock provides a useful look at what firms need to do to make their Web sites relevant to today’s Web users with is article, Beyond the Web page: Broader Web strategy a must for business success. He sees 2011 at the end of Page-oriented Web sites. Geoff notes, “enterprises can no longer afford to maintain their digital presences simply as collections of Web pages designed for full-screen browsing.” This is because “we now expect a level of interactivity and immediacy in our digital experience that far outstrips the capabilities of the page-oriented Web to deliver.”

So what needs to be done? Geoff suggests that we start with the customer experience and work out from there. This is always a wise move. Start with business use cases and not the tools. One way to do this is to get more granular with your content segmentation. Geoff suggests offers some examples: a “news article,” a “music album,” a “marketing plan” and an “instructional video.” These provide a more business oriented approach and set the stage for the required metadata. For example, a news article is a text file and has such fields as “headline,” “byline,” “body,” “image” and “subject keyword.” A music album is an audio file and has such fields as “title,” “artist” and “genre.”

This makes a lot of sense and opens up many possibilities including common elements across content types such as byline for a new article and artist for a music album. Getting the right level of granularity for metadata is one key element for a successful content strategy. You need to make content accessible and targeted for search engines and people. You also need to set content for the semantic Web by making it understandable to machines. Geoff sets some of the conditions for making the Semantic web work.

 

 

 

Why Apple Needs to be More Like IBM

Mark Fidelman wrote a very spot on article recently, Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple. I will not repeat it here and suggest you go to his original. However, I do want to add my own perspective that is driven by both industry observations and personal experience with both companies. Apple created one of the more memorable Super Bowl Ads in 1984.  It portrays IBM as Big Brother controlling the mindless masses and Apple coming to the rescue.

Mark writes that this ad “does not represent today’s IBM – or Apple for that matter.” I would add that the roles are now completely reversed.  As Mark notes, IBM is successfully fostering an open culture within its 400,000 employees and the 8 million participants in the IBM developer network. IBM is looking at new ways to better understand the conversations that are occurring within these groups and to continuously support transparency (see Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Innovation Lab Tour).

I have also heard from a trusted source that with Apple’s policy a developer who works on Apple iOS is not allowed to work on another mobile operating system unless certain conditions are met. So many companies have to maintain separate development units for such systems as Apple iOS and Andriod. Apple has consistently supported closed systems and IBM has supported open systems for quite some time.

I did work for both Apple and IBM in the 1980s as a service provider. This was the white shirt and tie IBM and the jeans and sneakers Apple. However, the IBMers, were, as they are now, very friendly, open, and seemed to lead balanced work lives. There was an openness to new ideas and a wide range of personal interests. I had less exposure to the Apple people but they seemed to work very long seven-day weeks and their job was their life. I grant this is just an impression and I could be wrong.

Now I remain a fan of many of Apple’s products. I find the employees in their stores to be very helpful and they seem to be empowered to go the extra mile for customers.  As a disclosure, I am writing this on a Mac, own an iPhone and an iPod. I use iTunes all the time. I hope they do not take them away from me for writing this. IBM has also allowed me to attend Lotusphere for the past two years so I have a better understanding of what IBM is doing. Here is a summary of my notes from the 2011 Lotusphere and here is a summary of my notes from the 2012 Lotusphere.

But what will happen to Apple now with Steve Jobs gone? My advice to Apple it to reinvent itself as IBM did and develop an open culture and an open product strategy.

Mark titled his article, Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple. I would add Apple to the list of companies that need to be more like IBM. 

 

harmon.ie Expands Its Social Email Offering to Include Lotus Notes

harmon.ie provides a cross-platform suite of enterprise collaboration products designed to boost user adoption of dominant enterprise collaboration tools. These include bringing central components of SharePoint into Outlook so people can collaborate on documents within their main flow of work. I covered hamon.ie earlier this year (see: harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Help Drive Enterprise Collaboration Adoption). Their new Notes edition now enables Lotus customers, many of whom have deployed SharePoint, to bring SharePoint functionality into the email environment for Notes users, without a costly migration to an all-Microsoft platform. For example, this cross-platform strategy enabled utility company American Water to integrate SharePoint and Notes rather than budget an additional $3 million to change its 7,000-user Notes implementation. Here is sample Notes screen that shows the harmon.ie documents pane, with presence for the latest SharePoint document modifier and document ratings visible within Lotus Notes.

I recently spoke with David Lavenda of harmon.ie to learn more about their latest moves. In addition to the Notes capability, harmon.ie has also integrated several instant messaging tools including: Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Link or OCS, and Cisco UC. These expanded capabilities allow harmon.ie to become an aggregation platform operating within the email environment, whether it is Outlook or Notes. You can now see an activity stream within the email client.

I think this both adds substantial efficiency and draws many more uses into the social software usage. This has been their experience. For example, the multi-national firm ABB more than doubled their SharePoint usage after implementing hamon.ie to further engagement.  Prior to this, their employees had to log into 6 to 9 separate communication and social apps on their desktop. Now they can do much of the same work within the email client, where people spend most of their workday.

David showed me how it works, including some of the new functionality since we last talked. They have now added a people tab to go with their document tab in the right side bar that sits along with the email interface. This people tab allows you to see colleagues and what they are doing. It also suggests potential new colleagues based on several factors: who you email, who you connect with through other channels, and who you share documents with. You can add these new colleagues to existing groups or start new ones. Temporary groups is the main way work gets done now and harmon.ie makes it is easy to start and stop groups. Here is a sample screen showing the people tab.

Here are some of the other new capabilities in their latest version beyond suggesting colleagues, harmon.ie 3.0.

• An activity stream providing both document and people status updates, marking the first time that this information is available in a multi-threaded activity stream format.

• The ability to open documents as well as view detailed user profiles from the activity stream, allowing users to perform these tasks without leaving the email interface. This reduces context-switching distractions that decrease productivity and collaboration, as well as inhibiting SharePoint usage.

• One-click phone, chat, videoconference and/or email connectivity to colleagues from the activity stream, including support for Microsoft Lync/OCS, Lotus Sametime and Cisco UC, eliminating the need to change windows to initiate communications.

 harmon.ie will be soon announcing plans to provide the ability to integrate Connections into Outlook and Notes. Like their SharePoint capability, this will allow a tighter integration of social business capabilities with email.  I think that this approach of bringing new social capabilities to email, where people do most of their work, will greatly speed to adoption of social business. I know that I still sometimes use email with attachments as a collaboration platform, but if the social tools are inside email,then there will little need to resort to using old school attachments. harmon.ie has also seen this play out with numerous clients. They plan to continue to enhance this offering and I look forward to seeing what is next.