Project Agora Next - imagine this for Lotusphere 2011
I'm currently commuting doing some late catchup on what happened at Lotusphere. Among other things I was lucky to have Stephan tell me to go and check out Project Agora Next in the Innovation Lab (Agora: Next Generation Meetings). This is very cool technology.
Agora: Next Generation Meetings
Agora is a collaborative media service with the primary goal of surfacing information buried in monolith meeting recordings by making it accessible from a collaborative point of view, as well as from an information mining aspect. This web-based solution enables users to upload recorded meeting video and/or audio, automatically create transcriptions and attach metadata such as micro tags and comments. Tags and comments are identified along the meeting timeline highlighting items and segments of interest. The metadata can be edited and improved upon through collaboration. Metadata is used to facilitate searching for segments of interest, as well as collaboration and discussion.
So what does it actully do? Well imagine that you missed a web meeting and/or wanted to see what happened in the meeting. Instead of having to sit through the entire recording the system has transcribed the audio, indexed the transcription and slides for searching AND made a note when something of interesting happened. So what's "something of interest" you may ask. Well that's a slide changing, new speaking appearing, a question being asked etc. With all this info you can jump directly to the interesting sections instead of having to sift through it all. Way cool. Oh! And the system also automatically updates your calendar so that when you search your calendar for that meeting you cannot quite remember, you'll see the thumbnails and links to interesting spots right there in your very own calendar. It just got even more cool.
Besides being available in the Innovation Labs at Lotusphere Agora is also available now in LotusLive Labs (probably requires login to LotusLive but has some cool recorded samples) so you may check it out there as well.
Imagine stuff like Agora for all Lotusphere sessions coupled with a persistent Lotusphere Online community. How cool would that be. Persistent access to all sessions, transcribed for easy searching with a community aspect of tagging cool demos and the like. Wicked!!
Changing the way I approach selling the value of social software
Yesterday I spoke at Lotusphere Comes To You in Copenhagen (and will be again tomorrow in Århus) on Lotus Connections and how companies should consider implementing Lotus Connections. As part of the discussions we have been having at the office in preparation for these talks I realized that my take on social software has changed significantly. I have spent a great deal of time the last year(s) evangelizing, installing and talking about Lotus Connections but I never really took the time to stop and think about whether I was doing it the right way.
While preparing for the talks I realized that the discussion has changed from a "isn't this cool technology" and "you got to have this to be forward thinking" discussion to a "how can you live without it" and "you need this to be current" discussion. And I think that's where the ball dropped. You need this kind of technology to be current. Not forward thinking. Current.
From the discussions I'm having it still seems like many people think of social software as something related to their private lives. Social software is Facebook - it's not something for use on the job - at the office we use e-mail. For some reason many consider it an either/or and that the two doesn't complement one another. It's also becoming clear that many are so used to using specific applications that the concept of having multiple interfaces for the same data/functionality and that social capabilities may surface in many locations is foreign to them.
Another interesting thing I realized is that I need to stop talking about Lotus Connections as a product but instead talk about social software services. If we start discussing Lotus Connections as a product we quickly get into a technology discussion which it really isn't. We need to discuss the need for social capabilities. The customer may obtain these social services from other sources than Lotus Connections - they may come from LotusLive. I see this as an interesting way to approach the problem of getting social software into business.
Lotus Traveler calendar invites on iPhone caveat
Just after we had our main Domino servers in the office upgraded to 8.5.1 FP1 I looked into doing to Lotus Traveler configuration updates required to be able to process calendar invites on the iPhone. I did the changes, restarted Lotus Traveler but were unable to see invites on my phone. I messed a little around with it but with no success. Today however I heard other iPhone-enabled colleagues mention that they processed invites on their iPhones. WTF!!
Tonight it hit me why. I have been using the Notices mini-view in my Inbox to show calendar invites for easy processing. Having invites show up in the mini-view apparently blocks the invites from reaching my iPhone because after disabling the use of the mini-view in the mail preferences and sending an invite from my private e-mail/calendar system the invite appeared right away on my iPhone. So there it is - problem solved.
Automatically redirect iPhone users to the mobile UI of Lotus Connections
If you're running Lotus Connections 2.5 and you installed the mobile interface you really should redirect your mobile users to this interface and not have them remember the URL to the mobile interface. By default users need to specify http://<hostname>/mobile to access the mobile interface (see bleedyellow.com/mobile if you want to see what it looks like) which is not what you want. You want it to happen automatically. To accomplish this simply use mod_rewrite to automatically redirect the user based on the User-Agent of the accessing browser (much like setting the default feature).
To add a mod_rewrite rule to automatically redirect iPhone users add the following to your httpd.conf and restart IHS. Doing the same for Nokia S60 users should be equally easy if you know the User-Agent for those phones.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "^Mozilla/[0-9]\.[0-9] \(iPhone.*"
RewriteRule ^/?$ /mobile [R,L]
Easy isn't it?
Remember Lotusphere Comes To You next week in Copenhagen and Århus
If you missed Lotusphere 2010 then do remember that Lotusphere Comes To You next week in Copenhagen and Århus. Among others I'll be no stage at both events to talk about Lotus Connections and how you may get started easily whether that be with an on-premise solution (Lotus Connections) or a hosted solution (LotusLive Engage/LotusLive Connections). You may sign up for LCTY 2010 here.
I'm a certified Lotus Connections 2.5 Administrator
It's official - I'm certified! How cool is that?! The certification exam was quite hard and the questions range from Websphere Application Server administration questions to administering the individual features to configuring security to deployment scenarios. There's a huge deal of things you need to know and the infocenter was my friend throughout preparing for the exam. Don't bother taking the exam if you haven't worked with the product for a while and put in the hours preparing.
I must admit that this is my first ever Lotus certification as I've never had the need before. While studying for this exam my view on certification has changed a bit. Before taking this exam I heard all the stories about certification and how it was about know exact UI wording etc. This exam was nothing like that. The question was very valid and made you think quite a lot and base your answer in your knowledge of the product. An exam as it should be. Another benefit is that I've read about areas of the product I otherwise wouldn't have and I've discovered quite some stuff that I need to implement or configure at customers. All very nice.
Single-sign-on with Lotus Connections for Windows users
Just stumbled over this new article on the developerWorks site on how to configure SPNEGO for Lotus Connections to allow SSO for Windows users. Should be an interesting read. For more information see Configuring single sign-on for IBM Lotus Connections in the Kerberos environment on the site.
Trying a move to the Mac
This week I'll be trying a move to the Mac as Per Henrik Lausten (@perlausten) was kind enough to lend me his Macbook Pro until Thursday. I've had it for a couple of hours now and it's already becoming easier. One of my pet pives is keyboard navigation which is something I really want and need. I'm a keyboard kind of guy so being able to navigate applications using the keyboard is going to one of the deciding factors. Finding links like this sure makes it easier but the judge is still out.
I'll post more as I progress through the week.