IBM too expensive for your wallet ? Are you kidding me ?

Tags

cloud, connections, ibm, social

In my role as storyteller and enthousiast about #NewWayToWork, I present at different locations and talk about the differences between social media and social business. During my presentations, I also spend time talking about how social media influences our way of working and engaging and how this change affects our way of working at the office.

During my presentations I like the interaction with the audience and throw from time to time a question in the room to get some feedback. One of my questions before talking about IBM Connections is the following:

“What comes up in your mind when I say: IBM ?”

In most of the cases, I get the same responses back. Responses which I like to share with you so that we can demistify some myths.

Here’s the list:

• Mainframe, hardware
• Too expensive for our budgets
• Only for big companies, we are just small businesses

Most of them don’t know that IBM has affordable software to transform and help your business to become a social business.

Most of them don’t know that IBM’s software is a real integrated and open platform, not like other vendors pretend to be. With the help of the intuitive interface, users adopt easily the way of working and they don’t have to care about where to store their data they want to share since there is only one place to put data from where your start sharing. This is not like in other products where you don’t know in which silo you need to put your data.

Just check out the video and afterwards visit this site to convince yourself about price and possibilities.

IBM Connections 6 knocking on the front door !

Tags

cloud, connections, ibm, pink, social

Hello there !

Is I wrote already in a previous post, the road to Connections Pink is through IBM Connections 6. Today IBM announced the official release of IBM Connections 6. The full story can be read here

IBM Connections 6 is the last version running IBM Websphere, DB2 and all that stuff. We gradually go to a newer version based on micro-services and containers and where development is done in new development technologies.

Connections 6 has major improvements on the homepage with Orient Me, provides much more flexibility for Community Owners to change the layout and even create a template of the layout to reuse it for other Communities.

Connections 6 is an adoption driven update that provides user-friendly guidelines to get on board and get started !

General availability to download the update will be on friday,  March 31

 

Notes/Domino Feature Pack 8

Tags

domino, feature pack, ibm, Notes, social

Last week, IBM announced the release of Feature Pack 8 for their 9.0.1 Release of Notes/Domino.

Feature packs are the replacement of the well known fix packs. Feature packs include fixes and new functionalities in the products.

Here you can get a list of fixes and new functionalities. The next feature pack is due to be released in Q3 2017.

Connect 2017

Tags

api, connections, domino, ibm, pink, social, watson, workspace

A lot of changes this year at Connect, my first time as an IBM Champion, a complete new location in a complete different state, California, and a different city, San Francisco.

This year the venue was the Moscone West Center

For me personally, the venue was not as good as in the past. You didn’t have the possibility to run into someone, grab a seat and have a conversation. Last year we had the possibility to go out in a kind of a garden, now we were in the centre of the city.

When everybody is staying in several different hotels, it’s much more difficult to meet up as when everybody is in the same hotel and having a drink in the hotel’s bar 🙂

But enough about that, part of the above, I had some nice conversations and meetings with interesting people !

I attended a lot of interesting sessions and noticed that IBM is changing its mindset and it is about time that we kick some ass and battle against Microsoft !

Let’s talk first about Domino.

For all of you that think that there is no future anymore for your Domino applications that are present in your company for years…sit back and read further on.

Do you know any other platform that comes out of the box with the following features ?

• Security
• Replication
• Clustering
• Encryption
• Ability to go offline
• Open to other platforms
• Ability to develop and customize

IBM will enhance its current API framework (Mail, Calendar, Freebusy, Data) to extend capabilities and enable the use of modern application development tools (ex. Swagger)

The additional REST services that will be added to expose more powerful capabilities are

• Directory Service: browse or search a directory
• Contacts Service: manage personal contacts in your mailfile
• Mail Search Service: search your mailfile
• Subscription Service: poll for changes or register for push in an application
• Management Service: register users and manage users & groups

Thanks to the openNTF community there is a project available, SmartNSF, that allows access to your Domino applications via REST APIs. It’s available as an extension for your Domino Server and Designer.

For customers that are defining a path for their Domino applications, it is interesting to know that in Q2 2017, Panagenda’s Application Insights will be released.

Application Insights will be free of charge for customers under S&S and will allow you to analyse the 50 most used applications based on

• Application usage
• Application complexity
• Application code

If you have more than 50 applications, then you can by an extra license.

On Wednesday, there was Pink Wednesday. IBM Connections Pink is about a new revolutionary product. Pink is a journey, not a destination.

Jason Gary stated the following “We are not going to build Software for You, we gonna build Software WITH you”.

This means that Pink will be based on open standards and you will have the ability to customize as much as you want without having to lose your work thanks to the new Muse Proxy.

With Pink you will have the choice where you want to store your data, you can have for example all of your files in the cloud and the profiles on premise. The different applications will run in Docker containers, this will allow you to install updates of the different components individually without disturbing another component.

Recently there was a OpenMic WebCast about Connections Pink, you can find all info in here

Gradually we will see the impact of Pink crawling into Connections 6 as new features:

• Orient Me: the homepage that knows you
• Modern Communities: allows to modernize the look & feel and to copy the design as a template to create a new community
• OnBoarding experience: a guided tour that allows new users to get started and get involved much easier through suggested lists of users and communities

IBM Watson Workspace was present everywhere at IBM Connect, there is a tight integration between Watson Workspace and the rest of the Collaboration Stack. During OGS I saw interactions between IBM Verse and Watson Workspace , where you can share a received email in a space so that the ones where you work with in the space are notified and you can start discussing or even start working on a shared document that you get from your Connections platform…

The integration of bots in spaces allows to have nice integrations and acces to all sorts of data coming for instance from your CRM application.

To wrap up I also want to mention that they showed something brand new that is still growing in the labs, IBM Livegrid. Livegrid is the new IBM Application Development platform for IBM Connections. It promises to be something really cool, they showed us a demo where a spreadsheet upload was transformed in a nice looking application in just a few clicks !

So, as you can see, a lot is going on and lot is coming in 2017. Open your eyes and ears in the coming months and enjoy this rollercoaster trip together with us.

Project Toscana named IBM Workspace

Tags

cloud, ibm, social, watson, workspace

Last year at IBM Connect, they announced a new revolutionary project, called Project Toscana. Now, a few months later at World of Watson they announced the progress they made in the project and since it is now in a closed pilot phase, they renamed it to IBM Watson Workspace as the official brand name of the product.

IBM Watson Workspace is an environment where you can create spaces, within a space you can invite team members and start having conversations around a certain topic/project.
The cool thing about those spaces is that conversations can continue when you leave. When you come back in, you can pick up the conversations where you left off.
You can work on files and other content. Share files in a space, paste images or animated gifs.
Recently they’ve added the “Launch moments” feature into spaces. This feature allows you summarize the conversations in condensed moments so that you can easily have an overview of the ongoing discussions during the period you left off.

Now, why has it Watson in it’s name ? Well, IBM Watson Workspace is an application built on top of a new platform, IBM Watson Work Services. This platform offers the possibility to use cognitive API’s and cognitive services that understand conversations.

With its cognitive features and the ability to interact with a bunch of other apps, you can work more easily and work the way you want.
There are a lot of integrations with apps possible but you can extend this by integrating your own developed apps.
This platform allows you to create bots, webhooks,….written in the language of your preference, whether it is Node.js, Python or Javascript.

Interested to know more about this new product ? Go and have a look at http://workspace.ibm.com and look at the Help & Forums link you find at the right side.

Are you interested to know more about the integration of apps or about the development of apps, then you can go to the Developer section of Watson Work Services at http://developer.watsonwork.ibm.com

There are already a set of examples available to download and to reuse so that you can integrate them into your own spaces and play around with them. Hereby an overview

http://github.com/watsonwork
http://github.com/van-ibm
http://github.com/opencode4workspace

Interested to know how you can start developing and integrating the apps into your workspace, go and have a look at this replay https://ibm.ent.box.com/s/sxe0cld7ciysc020nb4sely01be4d4bk where the process is very well explained.

Engage 2016

Tags

Engage, ibm, social

Last week we had, again, an amazing Engage event. This time the venue was the Evoluon building in Eindhoven. A former science museum that now can be used for events like Engage.

There was a real good atmosphere present and nice to see a lot of familiar faces back since Connect 2016.

The event started with some keynote sessions of outstanding IBM speakers. The first keynote was done by Inhi Cho Suh, the new General Manager of IBM Collaboration Solutions. She revealed that we will have a Connect2017 from the 19th till the 22nd february in the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Inhi was the whole day present at the event and there were possibilities to discuss with her during several roundtables.

With over 60 sessions and over 400 attendees, Theo did again an amazing job and got suprised by the raffle we offered to him and his lovely wife Hilde.

I had a session about IBM Traveler on the first day, the rooms was fully packed with around 40 attendees and we had a lot of interaction, which makes it always interesting when you have a session.

You can download the slides here engage-ADM08

See you at the next Engage in 2017

 

Looking back on Connect 2016

Tags

social

I must say that, with the experience of ConnectED 2015, I had a double feeling on going to Connect 2016. Of course, there’s a good atmosphere within the community, but last year a lot of the attendees had the feeling to be kind of pushed into a small box because of the event was held only in the Swan.

When arriving in Orlando at the Hilton hotel, I was surprised to see such a large building. I picked up my conference badge and went down to the surprising welcome reception.

On Sunday, I noticed the real size of the venue and, very practical, a beautiful terrace in the immediate area with chairs , umbrellas and tables.

This year I felt again the energy like in the days of LotuSphere, the positive vibes are back and we reloaded our batteries again with lots of positive messages around the products.

I heard a lot like “we listened to your comments and changed……” or “we heard you and we adapted…..”

We will get an IBM Verse on premise version in the second half of 2016 together with a Domino Next version.

The project Hawthorn, better known now as using your MS Outlook client to connect to Domino, will be GA in the first half of 2016.

So, all those that want so badly to use MS Outlook, don’t need to spend an incredible large budget to migrate to that other platform, just to send mail….They can use MS Outlook to connect to Domino. In addition to that, they can use xPages to connect to their applications or through the IBM Client Application Access client, formerly known as Notes Browser plugin for those applications that are not already enabled with a nice & fancy xPages frontend.

About xPages there was a lot of great news like the ability to develop xPages in BlueMix. This allows customers to use xPages for their applications without thinking about installing the correct stuff on their Domino Server. The data remains in the application on your Domino Server, while the Xpage is running in BlueMix.

During the OGS they announced a new product, called project Toscana. For those who are familiar with Slack, they will see directly the link.

Project Toscana will allow to have persistent chat rooms , file libraries, real-time conferencing, and cross-device / mobile-first design center. This new product will be available in the 1^st half of 2016.

I’m loaded with lots of energy and ready to attack 2016 !