E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

On the Road Again! This Time to Madrid for an Enterprise 2.0 Workshop

Yes, that’s right! If you folks have been checking my Dopplr account recently, I am going to be on the road tomorrow afternoon, once again. This time around to Madrid, where I have been a few times already this year, but this time around for a specific and concrete event I will be participating in with a couple of good friends and colleagues that I am really excited about. No, this time around I won’t be doing one of those "See the Light – Thinking out of the Inbox" sessions per se, although I am sure I would be having the opportunity to chime in and make a few connections with what has kept me busy for the last five and a half months!

The main reason why I am flying out tomorrow afternoon / evening to Madrid is to participate in a specific workshop event on Thursday morning that I have been organising with a couple of colleagues from IBM Software Spain where we will be covering a number of different topics related to Social Computing and Enterprise Social Software. The workshop event itself actually fits in quite nicely with the current work I am doing at the moment, along with the rest of my team, where we are helping accelerate the adoption of social networking & social networking tools within the IBM Software (Tech) Sales teams, and, as a result of that, to the entire company as well, since most of the stuff we do is open, public and available to everyone (Inside of the corporate firewall, that is )

Thus tomorrow afternoon I am flying over to Madrid and on Thursday morning I will be spending most of the morning, working with a couple of colleagues, and good friends, too!, on a workshop that will have two different and specific sections. The initial one where I will be spending about one hour explaining further some more what social computing is all about, some of its main key concepts, then explaining a bit my team’s mission and goals and then, finally, hoping to engage in a good conversation as to why Enterprise 2.0 is there and why we should engage with it & start embracing it for our daily interactions while we collaborate, connect and share our knowledge with others.

Pretty much along the lines of the slide deck you will be able to find over at IBM: Web 2.0 Goes to Work, which has been shared in Slideshare already, and which was recently presented by my boss’ boss, Gina Poole, at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. But perhaps with a couple of modifications to accommodate an internal only audience. I have taken the liberty of embedding that deck from Gina to give you a glimpse of what I would be covering on that first hour:

IBM Web 2 0 Goes To Work Presentation:

Then, once we are done with the first hour, we would go for a short break, and right after that the good fun will start! A couple of IBM folks from the IBM SWG Tech Sales team and myself will be working through, following a workshop format, two hours of intense practical tips on how to carry out common tasks from our day to day interactions with a 2.0 flavour, while we collaborate and share our knowledge with other fellow peers by focusing on some of the most powerful, and popular!, Enterprise 2.0 applications that IBM has got as offerings and which we are also making use as part of the Technology Adoption Program:

- Lotus Notes 8
- Lotus Sametime 8,x
- Lotus Connections
- Lotus Quickr
- Lotus Sametime Unyte

At the same time, we would also be covering some of the various different IBM Research applications that we are all currently testing out through the TAP program I mentioned above and which would give folks a nice intro into the bleeding edge of some of the most compelling Enterprise 2.0 tools IBM has been testing for a little while now. Like, for instance, Fringe, Beehive, Small Blue / Atlas, Cattail, Media Library and a bunch of others. Plenty of good fun, I am sure!

A solidly packed workshop of closer to three hours which will keep us busy for most of the day. Then right after that, I will be staying in the city for a few hours before flying back home late in the evening. Thus I am not really sure whether I would be having plenty of time, but if you are around and want to get together for a coffee, tea, a quick chat or something, give me a shout and we can look if we can make it fit this time around…

I wish I could share some of the stuff we will be covering during this workshop, as I am sure you would be wondering right now whether I would be able to share the various materials, but I am afraid that this is an internal only event since some of the slides, plus most of the demo is of a sensitive nature containing information that may not be suitable for everyone. Hopefully, as time goes by I may be able to share some more of these materials after sanitising them a bit. We shall see how that goes …

Either way, we are back on the road! And I can’t wait to share with folks how they can be more productive in their daily routines by spicing up their interactions with some more 2.0 flavours coming from all over the place!

(Oh, did I mention how we actually organised the whole entire event through a Connections Activity and a conference call? Not a single e-mail was sent out whatsoever! )

Tags: IBM, IBM SWG, IBM Software, Technical Sales, Sales, Tech Sales, Workshops, Events, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, Innovation, Dopplr, Madrid, Spain, See the Light, Enterprise Social Software, Slideshare, Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Gina Poole, Technology Adoption Program, TAP, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Lotus Notes 8, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime 9, Lotus Connections, Connections, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Lotus Sametime Unyte, Sametime Unyte, e-meetings, Research, IBM Research, Fringe, Beehive, Small Blue / Atlas, Cattail, Media Library, Connections Activities, Productivity, Productivity Tools, Productivity 2.0

IBM Lotus Enterprise 2.0 Workshop Outline – Madrid – March 2008

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

IBM Lotusphere Comes To You Highlights – Zürich March 2008

As you may well remember, not long ago I created a blog post where I was mentioning how I was going to be this week in Zürich, Switzerland, presenting as one of the keynote speakers at the Lotusphere Comes To You event. With the rest of the week on customer meetings & workshops talking about Social Computing @ IBM. Just this morning I have been told that all of those meetings I had planned for the rest of the week have been postponed for a later time. So here I am putting together this blog post where I will be sharing some of the highlights from Monday’s event, and then I will be sharing another one from yesterday’s highlights.

I know I will be back to Zürich as soon as by the end of April, so perhaps I will expand further on those different events I had planned and which then got postponed. We shall see.

For now a couple of highlights from Lotusphere Comes To You – Zürich March 2008:

It was the first time that I ever made it to any Lotusphere Comes To You event and must confess that I was a bit nervous just before getting the show started. Being the kickoff keynote speaker session talking about Social Computing @ IBM to about 100 customers and business partners, surely puts plenty of expectations straight up front to you to do the right job! And not sure why, must have been how incredibly well organised the whole set up was, but there I was with my Mac, the other presenters with their ThinkPads and no other computer in the whole room! Ready to rock!!

What a great event it was! I spent about 40 minutes talking about the kind of impact social computing is having within the enterprise and how it is tremendously disrupting the way we share our knowledge and collaborate with others and how communities are the primary social computing drivers within the corporate world of social software. I mentioned as well how they are the ones who are defining together which tools to stick with and which ones to bypass. How for the first time they are responsible for the tools suite they would be using with their own community members. And how organisations are starting to pay more and more attention to how communities are operating and increasing their overall productivity and knowledge shared by making use of these social tools.

From there onwards I shared a number of different screen shots with some of IBM’s most popular social software tools, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall. To name a few of them: Lotus Greenhouse, alphaWorks and alphaWorks Services, Blogs (Including some BlogCentral stats where we recently reached over 200,000 blog posts and comments since late 2003), Lotus Connections, developerWorks Spaces, IBM Jams, ThinkPlace, Fringe, Dogear (Part of the Connections bundle), Beehive, WikiCentral (And wikis in general).

Then from there onwards we had a bunch of different questions on how it may potentially work within the corporate world and what may be potential issues, like taxonomy vs. folksonomy, security, privacy, letting command-and-control go, etc. etc. Yes, along the same lines of what you usually can expect for the kind of presentation I gave.

Reason why I am mentioning all of this in here is because originally I thought I would be able to share the slide deck with you folks over here, but unfortunately while I was revising it to sanitise it a bit I am not going to be able to. Most of the slides are screen shots from those various tools where it is showing the names and telephone numbers, amongst many other details, from various of my social networks along with their pictures and I don’t think it would be fair to them to expose them, just like that, because of a presentation. I rather prefer to respect their privacy, just as much as they would be respecting my own, and that’s why I am going to leave things as is.

Sharing the slide deck without the tools / screen shots section would not be having the same effect, so perhaps what I will do is come up with some kind of mockups and share them accordingly as time goes by. We shall see. Or perhaps I’ll ask my social networks whether they would like to come up on the show or not. We shall see. Will keep you posted.

From there onwards, and while Ron Sebastian and Jutta Kreyss, were providing their own presentations on demonstrating the latest Lotus offerings from Lotusphere 2008 and Best Practices on the Open Client, respectively, I actually had to go to the IBM Research Lab in Rüschlikon to present that exact same presentation to an IBM client within the banking industry. 12 people sitting in a small room and with plenty more time to dive into the various topics and get a bit of a much more interactive section, which is what happened in the end.

Some folks out there say how both the banking and government industries, perhaps banking even a bit more, are a bit reluctant from Web 2.0 and social computing behind the corporate firewall. Well, what I experienced with that particular customer and their understanding of social computing was rather quite the opposite. Ready to rock and get some action going to help empower their knowledge workers to be in control of the knowledge flow again and get back into the conversations! Fascinating stuff!! Really.

I thoroughly enjoyed that very first occasion of presenting at Lotusphere Comes To You and no more, no less than in Zürich, one of my favourite European cities, specially when after a hard working day of having some really good and exciting conversations about the stuff you are passionate about, you go out with some friends and enjoy a super lovely evening with a chocolate fondue to end up the event and then off to dinner for a meat one! And, of course, some lovely Swiss beer, too! … It just cannot get better than that!!

Fantastic!!

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, Switzerland, Ron Sebastian, Jutta Kreyss, Mac, Greenhouse, alphaWorks, alphaWorks Services, Blogs, Wikis, BlogCentral, WikiCentral, Connections, developerWorks, developerWorks Spaces, Spaces, IBM Jam, ThinkPlace, Fringe, Dogear, Beehive, Rüschlikon, Fondue, Beers