As you may have read already, today I am in Madrid, staying over here for a couple of days while tomorrow I get busy participating in a workshop titled IBM Lotus Enterprise 2.0 where I will be providing a presentation on Social Computing @ IBM (A very similar one to the one I provided just recently at the Lotusphere Comes To You events in both Zürich and Geneva, respectively) and then I will be providing a series of demos on some of the most popular IBM social software tools. To give you an idea of what I will be demoing here is the listing of tools I will be covering during the course of the entire morning:

- Lotus Connections (With all of its various components: Blogs -with our very own BlogCentral, Dogear -Social Bookmarking tool, Profiles, Communities and Activities and showing some of the new features put together for v2)

- Beehive, Fringe, Atlas -a.k.a. SmallBlue and one other tool I will probably be talking some more about over the course of the next few months around the area of expertise location.

- Lotus Quickr, Media Library and Cattail, all of them as team / community collaborative spaces with both open, public and private access, where knowledge workers can have a public or protected environment to help them share their knowledge and experiences.

- Lotus Sametime and Sametime 8 Advanced (With all of the various different social networking related plugins available that extend the traditional concept of Instant Messaging into new levels)

- Wiki Central & Bluepedia (Where I will show how IBM has been working already for a good number of months on our very own version of Wikipedia: Bluepedia)

Of course, there will be a few other tools that I will be mentioning, like the Lotus Greenhouse or Lotus "Bluehouse", along with Lotus Notes 8, where I will be mentioning all of its integration capabilities and how, now more than ever, you can certainly state that it is just so much more than e-mail client!! (i.e. You got to love all of those widgets coming through!!), but in general those are the guidelines I am planning to go through.

Yes, indeed, a whole morning through packed with plenty of excitement as I would be able to talk, discuss and demo how each of those tools have been disrupting the way knowledge workers share their knowledge and collaborate inside IBM and beyond. It should be plenty of good fun, for sure, since I will be having plenty of time to cover each and everyone of the various tools I mentioned above.

As I get to wrap up this blog post, I am also going through the final finishing touches of the whole show, where everything seems to be working just fine, at least, at this point of time. We shall see how things go tomorrow when everything should be up and running, ready to go! Let’s hope that technology and a good Internet connection would not fail me … Fingers crossed.

And not to worry, I am not sure I would be able to share most of the stuff I will be doing tomorrow, but I am certainly planning to continue talking plenty more about each of those various IBM social software tools and surely after I prune the presentation deck I will also be sharing it over at Slideshare. Thus stay tuned because there is plenty more to come!!

Let’s get ready for the show now!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Computing, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Communities, Learning, Workshops, Madrid, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, LCTY2008, Zurich, Geneva, Lotus Connections, Connections, Blogs, Blog Central, Dogear, Social Bookmarking, Profiles, Communities, Actvities, Beehive, Fringe, Atlas, SmallBlue, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Media Library, Cattail, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Wiki Central, Bluepedia, Wikis, Lotus Greenhouse, Lotus Bluehouse, Lotus Notes 8, Notes 8, Widgets, Slideshare

Earlier on today, in our IBM internal blogging platform, Blog Central, one of the most respected, popular and knowledgeable bloggers on social computing within the enterprise made an announcement that I surely was looking forward to for a long long while! Yes, one kind of announcement that got me really excited, to the point that I thought I would share some of that excitement over here. Gia Lyons is now blogging externally!

Yes, that is right, folks! If you are into social computing and social software within the enterprise and beyond; if you would like to find out a whole lot more about IBM’s Lotus Connections; if you would like to find out some more about how IBM is actually driving the adoption of social networking within the corporate world; and if you would want to find a whole lot more from what’s in Gia’s mind, I would strongly encourage you all to subscribe to her, now external, blog!

Here is the blog post where Gia was mentioning she was going public: Public Gia. Read further on to see what she will be talking about and how you will be able to keep in touch with her through her blog (Yes, I know, about time! heh). And to give you a sense of what she has already posted in her external blog, here you have got some very interesting blog posts to get you going:

1. Connections is like the global lunch room. Beehive? Global cocktail hour!
2. The Connected Age: Are you a bursty Web worker?
3. The nature of males

Thus there you have it, another passionate IBMer blogging outside of the corporate firewall around the subject of social computing and social software, willing to dive into the external conversation on the Internet blogosphere with all of us. So go over to her blog, say "Hi!" and add her blog to your blogroll. I can guarantee you will be able to learn a thing or two, like we have been doing ourselves with her internal blog for a long while now, and have plenty of good fun all along!

Welcome on board, Gia, to the Internet Blogosphere! See what pressure can do to ya? heh

Tags: IBM, Metablogging, Blogs, Blogroll, Gia Lyons, Connected, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Connections, Lotus Connections, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities

A couple of months back I was contacted by Robin Carey, Co-Founder, CEO, of the Social Media Today collective (Of which I have also been a member for a good number of months now), to start working on putting together, along with a couple of other folks (Jack Mason and George Faulkner, amongst others), a case study on how IBM has been adopting social media / computing over the last couple of years, both inside and outside of the corporation, in order to help its employees share their knowledge and collaborate, both internally and externally, much more effectively.

And after a few e-mails, Skype conversations, follow ups discussions and a whole bunch of other types of interactions "From Employees to Members: IBM Connects With Social Media" was born. First thing that you would notice is that it is not just complete. It is still a work in progress but having the work now hosted on a wiki environment for everyone to contribute and add further up into completing the case study. Robin ventured earlier on into putting together a lovely weblog post, "SMT’s IBM Case Study, Wiki-Style, Please Pile On", where you can read how you can contribute to the overall effort. Basically, you can go into the blog post itself and share your thoughts in there. They will then be consolidated and added into the final document that will be distributed at a later time.

Or, alternatively, you can also go into the wiki page itself, start reading further and if you think you can contribute into the overall case study by all means, go ahead, edit the wiki, place the content and then save it! The purpose of the overall wiki space for this case study is to keep updating it and improving what’s already available, so that it can then be saved as a .PDF file and ready to distribute it further for everyone to have a look at what’s happening inside, and outside of, IBM as far as its adoption of social computing is concerned.

Over the next couple of days I am going to be rather busy preparing for my upcoming trip to Madrid to attend and present at IBM’s Lotus Enterprise 2.0 workshop event, but I am surely looking forward to keep improving it and updating it over the next few days and as time would allow it add some further details on it as there is plenty of stuff to share about the broader adoption of social networking and I surely look forward to spending some more time on it! How about you? Do you feel you can have a go and contribute some more into it from what the different resources on the topic that you may have been exposed to already?

Come and join us then! Let’s get busy!!

(Oh, and remember, if you have got some issues with updating the wiki page itself, you can also go and share your thoughts over at SMT’s IBM Case Study, Wiki-Style, Please Pile On. Post a comment or two in there and it will then be incorporated into the overall case study documentation at a later time!)

First day at work today, after having enjoyed a wonderful week, last week, in Zürich, presenting at a couple of events and with various different meetings talking about social computing and social software, and one of the things that I keep thinking about, and reflecting some more, is the beauty of face to face social networking activities I experienced. Nothing like the human touch to nurture and work through your relationships to help improve your social capital!

As you can imagine, I had a fantastic week over there and I am surely looking forward to coming back, specially to meet up again some of the great folks I got introduced to during the course of the week. Even though they may all well be a little bit crazy! Yes, you are reading it right. Crazy!!! And if not judge for yourself…

Folks, meet Daniel Saeuberli, Collaboration, Messaging & Portals at IBM Switzerland, and Urs Schollenberger, Manager of Lotus Sales & PLM Switzerland! Two of the hosts I had while I was there for the entire week and who went further and beyond their call of duty to make my stay incredibly comfortable having every single thing sorted out for me and nothing to worry about! Just two wonderful people, to be honest! If you ever get a chance to bump into either of them, go and stop them and talk with them. You will learn a thing or two, I am sure! I did!

One of the many things I learnt was how Daniel is, like someone I know would say, a little bit crazy! Yes, folks, meet Daniel in his spare time. Here is his Facebook profile to give you a hint on what he enjoys the most. It is not playing cards, believe me! Yes, that is right, Daniel is into skydiving, but not the usual skydiving that we are all used to and everything with people jumping off with their parachutes.

Daniel takes it to the extreme and, my goodness, does that word get a new meaning when he is around!! Check this out. Have a look into this video clip placed in YouTube of just a little bit under 7 minutes, where you can see him in action:

WOW! You may be thinking, right? Well, yes, so was I!! Daniel is the one doing all the shooting with the video camera while heading down at an incredible speed, in the middle of the mountains, with plenty of snow and rather cold, I can imagine, and still having a superb time! I still remember the conversation we had last week where he explained how it all got started for him. Purely fascinating!! (And I would fall short in describing how it felt back then!)

Not to worry, I am not going to jumping any time soon, although he tried to convinced me over a drink or two, but just watching over the video you can see what kind of passion drives Daniel and his team to do what he gets to do on a rather regular basis. I think it is just remarkable that out of his already pretty busy and tight schedule he still gets to do stuff like that!!

And they are looking for sponsors for their extreme skydives!! Can you imagine? Having your product or logo flying around in such a stunning scenery going at an incredible speed and recording it all while going down? Ha! Talking about viral marketing, folks!! Nothing compared to that, I am sure.

I tell you, it was a real pleasure meeting both Daniel and Urs, and a whole bunch of other folks while in there. But it was some serious fun as well get to know what these folks get to do, and I mean not just the business person, but the complete person. With their craziness and fascination for skydiving, errr, I mean extreme skydiving!!

Oh, and guess what? Some of his good friends, who are also doing lots of skydiving, actually hang around in a place, which is just about 10 minutes from where I live! In fact, I actually get to see them every single Sunday whenever I go to the beach! Small world, eh? heh Amazing!!

Tags: Zürich, Switzerland, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Communities, Social Capital, Daniel Saeuberli, IBM Switzerland, IBM CH, Urs Schollenberger, Facebook, YouTube, Skydiving, Extreme Skydiving, Speedflying, Extreme Sports

Here I am, once more, and like every week from now onwards, sharing with you all some further details on how my on-going fight against e-mail at the workplace is going. As you may have been able to see from the title of this entry, today concludes the fourth week in a row since I got started with this new initiative of moving away from work e-mail. And I must say that this week was actually one that I was really looking forward to, since it was going to be the first week I was going to be away from home the entire week and in disconnect mode most of the time presenting at various events and not knowing what my availability and Internet connection would be like.

Thus I had some reservations whether my plan to stay away from e-mail would work or not. In fact, I seriously thought that my incoming e-mails would be going sky high while I was away, but surprise, surprise, it hasn’t been like that at all! Incredibly exciting!

Even more when through Twitter and Sametime, a couple of folks pointed me to this particular BBC News article that I am sure you are going to find interesting: E-mail is ruining my life! where you can find a couple of gems that I thought would be really worth while sharing over here for what I have been trying to achieve all along:

"This technology [e-mail] also has its downside. It’s too easy to write an e-mail and hit the send button."

Or this other one:

""For me, e-mail is one of the most pernicious stressors of our time.""

However, one particular quote that I found incredibly relevant to what I had in mind for this particular mission on walking away from work e-mail and why, to me, there is no way back is this other one:

""Everybody started to think about what they were sending, who they were sending it to and whether they could use another method of sending the e-mail. So it had a very good immediate response, where people were actually thinking more about what they were doing.""

Yes, that is right! That’s exactly what I am trying to provoke when people keep sending e-mails along my way. If the subject of the e-mail is something of an OPEN and PUBLIC nature, I bet there would always be a much better and appropriate tool than just e-mail to make use of!  And if it is a social software tool, the magnifying and networking effects on it can then be tremendous! The fact this is my fourth week up and running proves the point that it can really work out all right despite seeing folks trying different things and failing after a short while.

I can imagine that it takes plenty of patience, perseverance, convincing and commitment to make it work, but from what you are about to see, I can certainly assure you it is worth it. *Very* worth it. And if not judge for yourselves:

Those are the results from the entire month of fighting e-mail!, and trying to make use of social software tools to achieve the same thing! If you think about the number I used to get before I got this started (An average between 30 to 45 e-mails a day!) and what I have been getting over the last four weeks, you can see that the differences are rather substantial, to say the least.

However, what I am really really excited about, and this is something that those of you who have been following this blog for a while may have seen already from the past, is that for the first time in a long long while (The 11 years I have been working in IBM!), this is going to be the first time that I am away from work for several days and when I get back home tomorrow afternoon, I have got NO E-MAIL BACKLOG waiting for me upon my return!!!

How cool is that? That, to me, is enough good reason to keep things going with it. More than anything else because in the next few weeks I will be travelling quite a bit and it is going to be very interesting to see how these numbers keep steady or keep going down. So far, now that I am done with the first month, things are working all right. Let’s see what happens on the second month. Then from next week onwards I shall start publishing the various different blog posts that I have already drafted on the different social software tools I keep using the most to get the job done, hoping that you may be able to leverage some of them. Why not? After all, we all want to get rid of unnecessary stress levels, right?

Stay tuned because next week I am back for more! Have a good one everyone!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Confidentiality, Privacy, Private Conversations, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Sametime 8, Sametime, Twitter, e-mail Backlog, email Backlog, BBC News, Stress

The last couple of blog posts that I have put together were actually detailing various different highlights from the trip to Switzerland I have been doing this week presenting at Lotusphere Comes To You, both in Zürich and Geneva, respectively. Well, this third entry will be the final post from the series where I will be sharing over here some of the highlights from the remaining of the week, Wednesday, Thursday and today Friday.

As you may well know, the original plan was to actually meet with a bunch of customers and conduct a number of different meetings and workshops around the subject of social computing and the kind of impact it is having within the corporate world. Not sure why, or what the reasons were, but all of those meetings have been postponed for later in the year and since I have got a non-refundable flight ticket I actually decided to stay over here in IBM Zürich, Vulkanstr., and enjoy some office time.

Mind you, I know that for a whole bunch of you, this may sound like something very common and not unusual, but believe me, for me it surely was. I have been working remotely from home for the last four years and my closest office location is over 1,000kms. So coming back to an office space after that long surely was going to be quite an interesting experience, to say the least.

What I enjoyed the most? I never thought I would be saying this, but the canteen! And big time! The choice of dishes and various different options is incredible compared to others I have been to in the past. What I enjoyed the most? Hummm, not sure I thought I would be saying this either, but actually being surrounded by a whole bunch of strangers who are my colleagues (Didn’t know any of them personally, by the way), yet didn’t know much more about them. I guess I have been spoiled by Twitter and its lovely ambient intimacy for just too long! Ha! There I said it! Oh, oh, by the way, have you checked out the awesome 2,5 minutes video put together by the Common Craft folks under Twitter? (Show it to your colleagues, friends & family, because I am sure they are going to love it and learn quite a bit where you have been hanging out all this time! And if you want to get them on board, make them watch it!! Yes, I know, it is that good!!)

Right, so after that little discrepancy of being more connected to my social networks online than to those folks who were sitting next to my desk (What a weird feeling! I need to fix that for the next time, specially if my hosts are not there Yes, I know, busy people with customer commitments, too!) I actually enjoyed the stay quite a bit.

I had the opportunity to witness how social computing is slowly, but steadily, taking over the day to day interactions over here. In fact, one of the coolest things I have been doing over here was to recruit social computing evangelists for one of the communities I am co-leading and which is part of my day job! I went from zero members from Switzerland to over half a dozen in a couple of hours! heh Yes, there is nothing like recruiting face to face over a cup of coffee and some great conversations! heh

It was so cool to be able to reconnect as well with some of the folks I used to work with remotely many many years ago and see how we have all moved through different paths to then reconnect again. And we used Beehive for getting together over lunch and get some conversations going. No e-mail, no IM, just purely Beehive! (Goodness, I love that social software tool! And hope to be able to blog about it very shortly as well, too!!)

The interesting part from this particular gathering was to actually get to hear first hand from a bunch of folks sharing with everyone what their experiences have been with social computing over here; the struggle, the challenge, the excitement of getting things done, the adoption rates going up, etc. etc. Till one of the folks being with us shared a hard copy of a newspaper article that I just found too funny! So much so that I couldn’t resist taking a picture of it with my N95: e-mail coming to an end (Article in German, by the way). I bet you guessed what we talked for the next few minutes, right? Yes, indeed, about fighting and challenging e-mail on the workplace! *So* re-energising, to say the least!

For the rest, and after having spent well over two hours of lunch (Yes, I heart those kind of lunches!! heh) we all went back to our desks and mentioned we would meet again when I get back, some time in April or June this year, we shall see. But one thing for sure is that I can’t wait.

From there onwards back to the desk in an open office with plenty of buzz and having to mute my phone while in conference calls because my team thought I was in some kind of party with all the noise in the background! (I wish! ;-)). Overall, I had an incredible week meeting some really smart and passionate folks who live social computing, so much so, that before I came over here I thought it would be rather dead, and on the contrary, it is alive and kicking and very much so!! Just brilliant!

Finally, from here a special word of gratitude to the wonderful hosts I have been having throughout the week. They have made my stay incredibly pleasant and very indulging, so much so, that they all know I will be back!! And I can’t wait for it, to be honest! Zürich still is one of my favourite cities in Europe and when you have got special places in dodgy areas like Lily’s, event better!!

Till next time!!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotusphere2008, Lotusphere, Lotusphere Comes To You, LCTY, LCTY2008, Collaboration, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Computing, Communities, Social Media, Learning, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Zurich, Geneva, Switzerland, e-mail, Office, Lily’s, IBM Zürich, Twitter, Ambient Intimacy, Commoncraft, Screencasts, Beehive, N95, Gratitude