Lotusphere 2010 - Busines Development Day

I am at the Swan/Dolphin in Orlando today, and for the rest of the week. Its been awhile. I came here for Mercury World when they launched Business Technology Optimsation (BTO) a few years ago so theres a strong sense of Deja Vu as I wander around. That is not the only reason for Deja Vu. I worked for Lotus years ago (1990-1994), and was a PM in EMEA for Notes Unix and Notes Mac (and cc:Mail and other things long forgotten).

I left Lotus before IBM became the steward of the brand, and I am quite curious to see what the latest positioning is I must admit. Especially since I have in recent times been working fairly intensely on Microsoft Technologies for my clients - firstly in development of collaboration software, secondly in the build out and improvement of a complex data visualisation application portal, and lastly and probably most interestingly, in working with my client to build out a Microsoft competency, platform, and business division responsible for collaboration and managed services based upon Exchange and SharePoiint 2010. (Phew, what a lot of buzzwords, sorry).

Well rested with 8 hours sleep I headed off to the sessions. I have spent a lot of time recently following, observiing, and reporting on what Microoft are doing in the market. I have attended their Office Devleoper Conference, Worldwide Partner Conferences, and SharePoint Conference in the last couple of years so I was looking forward to seeing the difference - as Lotus put it - seeing what "Lotus Knows".

Opening Business Development Keynote

It struck me that the keynote session could have been from when I was at Lotus.

"Lotus Connections and Quickr help turn tacit knowledge into institutional in the org says Lotus" I tweeted.

The reference to Tacit and Implicit knowlege took me right back to my readings of the early academic work by Nonaka on Knowlege Management. Surely, I thought, we are past that kind of thinking in the 2010's. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge if you want to read more about all that ).

A panelist  said "Customers are looking for value add connection to business outcomes in 2010". This was very reminiscent of Microsoft positioning. Outcomes are fashionable these days. They were at Mercury too in this same room - and they were talking about ROI of QA :-)

Lotus presented a Lotus Business Optimisation Map - Its a circle slide with sliced segments which was very similar to the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 slices slide - Once I get to Pedestal 25 at #LS10 to get the details I will post an analysis - I could not read the detail of the slide from the screens in the room.

In the breakouts Lotus more or less announced support for CMIS, OAuth and OpenId.

In the cloud computing breakout I found the positioning to be much more simplistic than the Microsoft 'Power of Choice' slide that is so partner inclusive and friendly.

LotusLive.com is an Open System of systems according to Pouley - I did not know what that meant? Open how?

Competitive approach

Lotus took pains to explain that the Panasonic case study numbers are genuine because they include Sanyo - This was an open rebuttal to Microsoft, who they accused of unfairly highlighting that Panasonic do not have neough employees for Lotus to claim as users. I honestly found this an astonishing thing to say. I would not personally have given the issue any airtime at all. I was impreseed at the SharePoint 2009 conference last fall Microsoft never mentioned IBM Lotus or Notes at all. Not to criticise it, not to compare anythign with it. All Microsoft did was in support of emphasis of their positioning positivity about their product. That is a useful lesson.

Crisp, clear, punchy positioning

I very much hope this improves over the coming days. I want to be able to make a judgement on these technologies based on their strenght of positioning and their benefits and capabilities. This will help me explain to my clients, and ther customers, the benefits and pitfalls of each collaboration universe.

I havent seen this level of focus yet today.

Microsoft Online Services vs LotusLive

LotusLive partner revenue exmples were all at 8000 user level but Sean Pouley had already said the Market was at 100-1000 so I will re-work this analysis with real-world models using both LotusLive and Microsoft Online costings. Should be fun. I think there are more interesting comparisons between LotusLive/Connections and Microsoft Online and have decided to write a comparison report. email me if you are interested in purchasing this report. 50% off for Lotusphere or SharePoint conference attendees.

Alfresco integration

John Newton talked about Alfresco plug in replacement for Lotus native document management. He intimated that Lotus supported CMIS, but I do not think Lotus have announced such support in public. (I may well be wrong). If so this is fairly interesting and gives a lot of interoperability potential even possibly between SharePoint 2010 and Connections :-) This would be useful for OneDoc, a startup client of mine. He also said that Alfresco was 30x more scalable than SharePoint 2010. Then he gave a demo showing Word 2003 document library functionality integration with Alfresco and claiming no boundaries between Lotus suite and Alfresco at all. I know from experience that this must have been hard to develop, but I think it was an unnecessary software enginerring project as nobody seems to use the Word 2003 document library functionality apart from in product sales demonstrations.

Office integration - IBM Lotus are 18 months away from where Micrsoft are today

There were some demo's of addin information into Microsoft documents from Lotus Notes. They were mostly rudimentary in function and horribly proproetary in terms of actual code to select a range and paste for example. The presenter of the session said that Microsoft is eighteen months ahead of anything that IBM Lotus have in terms of where they are taking Office 2010. The demos they gave were good though. I really liked the nex:// acess to notes via a browser like a file system with locking - that was *VERY* cool and I will find out more about it and write it up.

First Day summary

Lotus is still an imperfect world of advanced technology with flaws. I havent been this close to it for over ten years. I am looking forward to the rest of the week and refining my perception of Lotus positioning - finding out what in fact LotusKnows...

That is about it for today - but here are some other items that didnt warrant a whole paragraph. Tune in tomorrow for more

Other key messages of the day

• Lotus presented how partners were the essential ingredient of their success,
• LotusLive was 'Best Cloud Application 2009' according to CRN
• New 'Collaboration Agenda' launching tomorrow at with Banking, insurance, government and healthcare industry specific teams at IBM
• Increased focus on industry at http://IBM.com/isv/tech/validation/framework
• there's a new version of the lotusknows.com website up today
• support for OAuth and OpenID..
• Increading use of widgets and mashups esp using open social and CMIS standards to expose functionality in REST APIs
• Social Collaboration Roadmap shows rNext releases out beyond 2010 and no Unification between Quickr Domino and J2EE in that timeframe

Ballmer Keynote Buzzword Bingo

I posted my buzzwords on twitter.

#buzzwords #SPC09 Velocity, social, team, collaborate, sharepoint, 'thank you', Windows, aspiration, twitter, 'billion dollar business' :-)

Nobody joined in with me this time, he didnt say 'aspiration'.

The top ten cool things about Office 2010

1. Co Authoring in Word
2. Office Web Access
3. PowerPivot add-in for Excel
4. Broadcast Slide Show
5. Video editing tools in PowerPoint
6. Conversation tools in Outlook 2010
7. Microsoft Office 'Backstage' view
8. SharePoint Workspace 2010 (nah we had some of it on Mac OS X already)
9. Business connectivity Services
10. All round good performance (are MSFT saying 2007 didnt perform then? just saying.)

This must be right because its printed on the water bottle giveaways

Ballmer Keynote

Industry State of the nation

Ballmer talked about the advances in productivity and innovation being the only thing that are going to grow the economy. He proposed that anyone could propel their businesses forward 5-10 years with transformational technoogy thats as great today as it has ever been. From predominantly PC oriented world, he conjectured, in order to cope with phones, tv's, and other devices enterprise computing needed to embrace enterprise data centres connected to the Internet in what has come to be called cloud computing.

This he, said, required new user interfaces, not just mouse and keyboard, but voice and speech and touch. It was, he stated, an opportunity for Microsoft to change the way people live, interact, work, and connect. He added, that Microsoft still need to eveolve technology so thats its even more natural for an event like this.

I wondered if it was the number of glowing Apple Logos he could see in the crowd. I estimate some 40% of the people here have some kind of Apple Device.

SharePoint 2010 beta

Beta of SP 2010 was announcecd for Novemeber 2009.

SharePoint Workspace Client announced as a successor to Groove

The SharePoint Workspace client application in Office 2010, a successor to Groove. Offline, deals with slow links, dramatically extends and improves the SharePoint technology. Not only in a browser, but with rich client assist.

Slide: Summary of SP 2010 next generation platform

- Connect and empower people
- Cut costs with a unified infrastructe
- Rapidly respond to business needs

- Sites, Commuities, Content, Search, Insights, Composites (mashups)

A platform for a whole big set of scenarios which before were served by niche or specialist custom applications.

Three key changes in SP 2010
- Composites / mashups
- The move from customer premise to SharePoint Online.
- Very strong coverage in 2010 for Intranet and Internet facing web sties.

e.g.

• pricing analytics
• hiring processs
• conference
• delivery scheduling
• exec dahdoards
• citizen portals
• IT service Portals
• Expertise Finders
• Peronal profile Sites
• Sales Reporting
• Project Tracking
• Conference Planning
• Delivery Scheduling
• Compiance Review Sites

etc

SharePoint Designer Demo notes

SP Artefact based navigation in SharePoint Designer
New external content type - connect to SQL type
name to poroerty mapping from SharePoint Deigner to Office.
New List type ‘external list’
Outlook- SharePoint External List functionaloty built in. Map as an address, edit, etc.
Zero code BCS connecting to the database, all the way to office, Create, Read, Update, Delete applications.

Visual Studio 2010 B2 Demo

- Visual Web Parts - new functionality
- TFS based development built in
- SP built in to solutions explorer
- VS graphical designers to build ‘features’
- Adding items to the solution seamlessly
- Images in Web Parts, mapped folders with relative URLs for images
New Insert web part UI
Finf Web Part, and Add
Built in developer dashboard in SP  so you can see how things went in terms of diagnostics
Breakpoints just work.

Sandbox solutions

• Throttles
• write inside Vs, but also supports SP online
• upload an event reciever to SP online
• new solution UI. new CPU use, memory use etc...
• Allows code to be deployed on SP online (at last)
• Feature activation across farms..

Summary

• LOB connectivity
• Dev productivity
• Deployment on client or online with sandbox solutions

Back to Ballmer- (just rough notes at the moment, check back)

Compositing and from on premise to the cloud.
- Mixed environments for many years to come
- But your going to want to move things at vaious speeds to the cloud.
- Cusom LOBS more slowly.

SharePoint Online

A world in which there is choice beteeen SP online and SP server on premise.

• SharePoint Online, is SP in the cloud. We have today over a million users.
• 7000 partners working on SP online
• Updateing quarterly with new capabilities
• gsk - 100,000 SP users in the cloud.
• Ingersoll Rand - 60,000 users Internet facing
• Designed to give you choice
• Can run some on premise some on the cloud
• Mix and match, maybe you dont want to run LOB data in the cloud.

With SP 2010 providing a much greater depth of features in the cloud.
Almost all the end user features
A range of developer features - including a very robust sandbox environment

Slide: SharePoint Online

- Choice, Depth, Proven
- Run on premise, on cloud or both

Reliable, high availability.

SharePoint for Internet facing sites

- end user publishing without direct IT involvement
- collaboration and community increasingly important

e.g. Kraft Foods save $2m consolidating 200 web sites into one SP based infrastructure.
Reusable web parts, single platform.

e.g Volvo 36 languages, 70 countries, award winning web site. brand consistency world-wide

A new range of possibilities in SP 2010 for Internet facing web sites.

- SP Server ‘for Internet Sites
- FAST Search Server 2010 for Internet business

End User empowerment

- Ribbon for Web content management
- Cross bowser support
- One click page layout
-  Full fidelity copy and paste from Word to Browser
- New Blog capabilities in sites
- New rich media capabilities based on Silverlight
- Draft item and spell error checking

Plethora of products

Intranet, Internet

On Premise

SP Foundation
SPS
Fast

SPS for Internet Sites, Standard
SPS for Internet Sites, Enterprise
FAST for Internet Sites

Cloud

SP online
SP online for Internet Sites

CALS, Standard (Core), Enterprise

Ballmers Summary

More capable
More extensivble
More Internet and Cloud Focused

What does SharePoint compare with or compete with? Everything. it aligns with what you want to do and the way you want to do it.


Questions:
1) SP 07, difficult to find SPs and updates, can there be a Windows Update equivalent
2) Changing on the web, how will you keep up on the web
3) Major releases years apart. Application level functionality more quickly
4) SP 10 is about Social Computing, web 2.0, buzz, semantic web, user contributed content
5) Governance in SP, 20% software 80% process throttling for apps,
6) SP online industislses the process and governance. Gives new technologies which can be put back into SP
7) Teachers use macs... Steveb some things wont be available, some need Windows
8) VS 2010 tools are for 2010 runtime. Cant be used with 2007 optimistic this wont happen again. SharePoints becoming a platform almost like the oprerating system.
9 How will ing ar ethy to embrace social compuing in the enterprise. But they worry about that what that means, and need it to be interpreted in terms of securuty, information managemenbt and compliance ‘ there will be no facebook or socil computing in our enterprise’ fortune 50. If we can show a path that lets people interact but hs the same guarantee of information and idenity protection... Corporste data on face book or twitter... no, but birng those apporaches to the enterprise with SharePoint sure..

Ballmers telling comments

SharePoints becoming a platform almost like the operating system" – steveb

"Line of business data on Facebook? Never, ..show a path to the same result with sharePoint"

Internet sites werent really the design point for SharePoint 2007 but they are this time.

SharePoint Online will provide almost all the features inc a very robust sandbox environment

Footnotes

Microsoft Intranet indexes 45 million items, full crawl takes 8 weeks on 2007... better in 2010

Over 30 open XML power tools on http://tinyurl.com/yg6xdos

SharePoint 2010 Developer Center is now Live on MSDN! http://bit.ly/3jVPpZ

I am caught between thinking this is the end of traditional news right here, now today, and the rather conspiratorial thoughts that the twitter organism was mobilised like a kicked over ants nest by the master puppeteer journalists

Todays timeline from my point of view began at 07:27 with the BBC's Cellan Jones pushing me to read all about #trafigura

I followed the link, and read the piece in the Guardian with a good amount of outrage. I noticed the topic begin to trend on twitter. I started a search for the #trafigura hashtag in tweetdeck and I began to comment in my own small way about the Bill of Rights, and how this kind of thing simply misunderstands the real-time connected media world we live in whether informal or formal. Here are my first tweets. Knowing that Chuck Norris is a trending phenomena was just my sense of humour.

The formal media did not report it - twitter did.

A search on the hashtag found countless links to the documents in question. This is profound. BBC and Sky both must have known about the story but felt unable to even publish the side story of a developing real-time revolution online. Surely its an erosion of democracy when you can't report trending topics that are happening on the Internet in real-time.

Google news picked it up eventually, but still nothing on the mainstream news networks.

It became a trending topic on twitter and a flash-mob demonstration was organised for tomorrow complete with its own web site to deal with the evil censorship of free speech and the goings on in our democracy.

Cave in? Not yet it seems

Inevitably the carter ruck caved, or did they... The BBC reported it this afternoon, and a couple of hours later Sky News picked it up. And as of this writing #CarterRuck and #Trafigura are suing BBC Newsnight for expose of toxic waste story - we're not done here http://bit.ly/15F91h was just posted on tweetdeck. They cant win this? Can they?

Profound tipping point for 'official media'

I just wonder where this leaves us. No doubt you need investigative journalism of a professional nature, but here you have a story that could not be printed even though the journalists had the data and the informtion. The truth will always out I suppose. I am caught between thinking this is the end of traditional news right here, now today, and the rather conspiratorial thoughts that the twitter organism was mobilised like a kicked over ants nest by the master puppeteer journalists who wanted to get one over on the old farts but couldnt possibly commment on it themselves....

Newsnight

Newsnight covered the issue last night, with Paxo interviewing a couple of lawyers. They didnt seem to want to acknowledge the people power of the socia networks, and despite the naming of the report and its trending as a hashtag on twitter, they couldnt name the report anyway. I was underwhelmed.

I wonder if I will get a cease and desist notice for having the temerity to copy matters of public record on the timeline to my web site. Is it the 21st Century or 1984?

Not everyone retweets

I guess it might need to be said, but retweeting isn't yet a twitter sanctioned behaviour. Theres a new retweeting API coming, but its not universally praised. Retweeting is a phenomena that has grown up out of twitter popular use, and some conventions for hot to retweet have been established especially by client software like tweetdeck and tweetie. The conventions of

RT @username twitter message

twitter message (via @username)

Are retweets just spam?

Well no, - although there are those who think they are of little value. Retweets are, normally, physically sent to followers in response to being sent to a person. This isnt spam because its not unsolicited - if you are a follower you implicitly give your permission to someone to communicate with you.

But retweets do have some SPAM like characteristics. They can be irritating. They can be repetitive. They can 'clutter' your twitter message timeline much like SPAM clutters an email inbox. Like SPAM they can contain links which, because of the side effect of the 140 character limit in twitter and the resultant use of URL shorteners, means that theres no certainty about the destination of a link and the opportunity for phishing links is quite high.

Another key difference is the social side of retweeting. Often people, myself included, retweet things because they feel they might be of interest to the follower community. But there is a fine line between this and just clogging up the timeline with attention seeking tweets which are just designed to get people to follow.

Why people retweet

Microsoft Research provide an interesting collation of reasons why people retweet in a soon to be published paper on the topic (www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf):-

• To amplify or spread tweets to new audiences
• To etertain or inform or as an act of curation
• To comment on someones tweet
• To make ones presence as a listener visible
• To publically agree with someone
• To publically disagree with someone
• To validate others thoughts
• As an act of friendship, loyalty or homage
• To recognise less popular people or less visible content
• For self gain
• To save on your own timeline for the future

Personally I most often retweet to add a comment. I do this by adding brackets and my initials, as has become yet another convention to pack tweets with metadata). For example

RT @username Original tweet (My new commentary ^NN)

Certainly theres something quite refreshing about finding real people on twitter who just post about 'what they are doing now' rather than links to dubious content on the Internet. I wonder how twitter will eventually address the fact that having lots of followers actually devalues your importance to each individual you are in touch with. I've started unfollowing the big volume link tweeters - because of the clutter. To me, theres more value in people who tweet relevant interesting things. I can tune into a hashtag for an event without following all the people.

Less is more, someone said. I agree