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

One of the things that I have noticed over the course of the last few weeks, is how 2008 is turning out to be that kind of a year where instead of going to some major conference events I keep getting invited to much smaller ones,  where I am much more in contact with my peers at work, as well as with customers and business partners. So far I have been putting together a number of different abstracts to various places and so far only a couple, later in the year, seem to have accepted. However, it looks like every time I get turned down for an event I get invited to two of three different smaller events with a customer exposure.

Thus if yesterday I mentioned that on the first week of March I will be in Zürich presenting at Lotusphere Comes To You, just a few hours ago I got the confirmation as well that I will be participating at a workshop in Madrid, Spain, around the subject of Lotus Enterprise 2.0, taking place on March 14th for over three hours.

This surely is going to be one of those events that I will be looking forward to, since it would give me the opportunity to go through a slide deck, which I’ll be sharing over here shortly, on Social Computing @ IBM, but at the same time I will have enough time as well to be able to demo extensively some of the different IBM social software tools we use both internally and externally and show their value to enhance our various knowledge sharing and collaboration experiences.

So instead of having to rush off through a whole bunch of tools, show how they work and how IBMers are taking much benefit from making use of them, I would be able to spend a good time picking up some of the most popular ones and demonstrate what the fuss is all about and why they are having such a massive impact in our daily interactions. The event is going to take place at an IBM location, so I am sure the network connection would be good enough for me to share some insights on how it actually went.

I am now currently finalising the last few details, but there is a great chance that I will be arriving there Thursday evening, and staying over the weekend as well, so if you fancy getting together for a drink or two, or just hooking up, do let me know or contact me offline. I will also be updating my Dopplr profile, once I get a chance to book everything. Stay tuned …

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotus Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Learning, Communities, Learning, Events, Madrid, Spain, Dopplr

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you would remember how there have been a few times a couple of different conference events around the subject of social computing and knowledge sharing that always seem to have slipped through my fingers and in the end I couldn’t make it to either of them. Well, this year, it looks like the trend is changing a bit, at least, partially.

Yes, that is right. It looks like this year I am finally going to be able to make it to one of the conferences I have been looking forward to for a long while: The Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Lead the Evolution, In Boston June 2008. Finally!! As the time goes by, I’ll certainly be blogging a whole lot more about it. No doubt, since it is probably as good as it gets to talk and deal with various different topics around the subject of Enterprise 2.0.

However, there is one other conference event that I have been interested in attending for a little while ago and that time and time again, I never manage to be able to make it! And that is the one organised by the folks over at Unicom called Web 2.0 and Beyond: Applying Social and Collaborative Tools to Business, which this year is going to be held in London - March 5th to 6th 2008.

Once again, the timing for me is the wrong one, but it surely is one of those interesting events that, if you are around, you cannot miss! You would be able to find some more details about it over here, as well as under the Programme & Schedule. In this particular occasion the topics are rather spot on on what I would love to talk about for hours and hours and hours (i.e. Social Tools Hit the Mainstream; Social Computing and the Knowledgepowered Enterprise; Facilitating Open Innovation in a Distributed Community Using Free Social Software Tools; Technology Brings Power to the People; How we got here with Web 2.0; KM goes Social: From KM 1.0 to KM2.0; Case Study: Deploying, Measuring, Succeeding with Social Software, etc.).

But if there would be anything that would be of interest to me as well, it would actually be the folks who are initially going there and who will be presenting. What a fine line-up! David Gurteen, Ian Hughes, Ian McNairn, Lee Bryant, John Davies, etc. are some of the folks who would be there and although I have been following most of them for quite a while, it would surely be rather nice to be able to make it and catch up with them in person!

Alas, I guess that will have to be at another time, because, like I said, the timing has been rather bad for me once again and I will not be able to make it, but if you are planning on going, don’t hesitate to let us all know about it and, much more importantly, share your insights with us through your blog(s)! I am sure we would be able to learn a thing or two from such a fantastic bunch of speakers! Sigh … Suppose it will be another time…

Are you going to be in London from the 5th to the 6th of March 2008 and don’t have any plans? Well, not to worry, here is a blog post where I am sharing the details from a very interesting conference happening during that time: "Web 2.0 and Beyond: Applying Social and Collaborative Tools to Business". Wish I would be able to go …

Tags: Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, Communities, Learning, Unicom, London, KM Events, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise2conf, Boston, David Gurteen, Ian Hughes, Ian McNairn, Lee Bryant, John Davies

Here we go with one more blog post detailing some of the highlights from the last day at the IBM Lotusphere event that took place last week. We are already on the last day of the conference, and what a conference!! One of the most re-energising and refreshing events I’ve attended in a long while! And the main highlight from me so far; like usual: the people!! The incredible talent put together jamming away for a few days talking about what drives their passion. Mine is social computing. So during those five days I just couldn’t stop bumping into people I knew for quite some time, and some others I was introduced to, who help me gain lot of experience and first hand insights on how other folks are adopting social software.

Later on, I will create another blog post, probably the last one from the series, where I will be sharing with you folks what I have learned from the entire event itself, and what I should have done to even take much more advantage from the conference itself. Yes, I had a great time, but there were a few things I think I should have done different in order to get even more out of it. But that is the subject for another blog post…

Waking-up late

Yes, I know, I am guilty of that one. Perhaps because it was the last day of the conference. Perhaps because I stayed up with the Lotus Connections folks till very early in the morning. Whatever it was, I eventually missed out the first couple of hours of speaker sessions. I just couldn’t. So I decided to recover and make some time to spend the rest of the day attending what was left from the event itself, which then proved to be rather interesting as well, to say the least.

GURUpalooza Session

To start with, I attended one session called GURUpalooza, which, to me, was quite an interesting session, since it was the first time I ever saw something similar. So here we have got a bunch of gurus on IBM Lotus offerings sitting on stage waiting to be hammered with questions from the audience on how to get the most out of those various applications. Anything goes. All questions get answered or, at least, it is tried. The session was moderated by Rocky Oliver, who I had the pleasure of briefly introducing myself to during lunch and which I wish I would have had more time to talk some more. Perhaps next time!

Although I couldn’t twitter as much as I would have hoped (For a few minutes the wireless connection was not up to speed) I did eventually get some twittering going on to share some of what it was like. And what I found remarkably interesting was the fact that there were plenty of various different questions and only one around the area of social computing. Yes, only one, when I would be expecting quite a few of them, specially around the area of why bother with social software? What are the business benefits? How do I get started within my organisation? Why should I care / listen to social computing? etc. etc. You know what I mean, the usual stuff you get asked about quite a bit from time to time.

Yet, it didn’t happen during that particular session, which makes me wonder whether people are already getting involved and still haven’t come up with those questions (Or they already know the answers) or, rather, that they are not bothered at this point in time and things are still very much at the beginning. Some food for thought… (We shall see what happens next year…)

Lunch Break

From there onwards we all went for lunch and although it was a rather informal and light lunch, it was one that I enjoyed quite a bit, since it gave me the opportunity to meet up other folks I have been working with for a while, but that I never got the change to meet in person. Well, I finally got it done! Here are some photos we took:

Ask the Developers Session

Right after lunch we went for what is supposed to be a classic from Lotusphere, which is the session Ask the Developers, where some of the top notch developers from Lotus products get on stage and over the course of one hour they get asked plenty of questions from the audience, most of them of a technical nature. Yes, this is the session where apparently you can tell the developers what you like, and don’t like, about a specific product, application, feature, etc. etc.

And after having attended it, I think I know why it is so popular! It is a complete buzz with plenty of people from various different companies sharing their ideas and experiences from using IBM Lotus products and providing some instant feedback on what works, what doesn’t and what they would like to see improved! Social networking face to face at its best!! Listening to feedback and reacting to it to help improve your products! It cannot get better than that!

I had so much fun with the entire session that I went crazy with Twitter and shared quite a bit of the different questions asked / answered, to give you an idea of the nature of the questions and the reactions provided. Lots of good fun, I tell you!

Closing General Session - Alton Brown

From there onwards, those of us who were still around headed to the main tent session, which was the closing general session where every year there is a guest speaker. This year that speaker was introduced by Marjorie Tenzer and it was no other than Alton Brown.

At the very beginning I wasn’t really sure what the real deal was, since I didn’t know who he was or what he would be talking about. Then after five minutes of him talking, a couple of Web sites surfed, I was completely sold! What a fantastic bloke! Yes, I know, those of you in the US & Canada probably already know about this, but must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it quite a bit. I twittered a little bit about his performance, but when we were getting immersed on what he was doing with food (Think of food & science mixed up together with some spices and lots of good fun!!) I decided to stop twittering and, instead, take pictures!!

And boy, did I get carried away or what? I took a whole lot of them that still need to be tagged, annotated and everything, but you can already find them in my Flickr stream. What a great show!! I could then see why he is such a bit hit in the US. Wish we would be able to watch him over here in Europe without having to pay for expensive sat. T.V. Alas, we would have to content ourselves with the whole bunch of videos on YouTube, which is not too bad (Was surprised to find so many in there!).

And with that we came to the conclusion of a superb conference event over the course of five wonderful days! It was my first time at Lotusphere and I am sure it won’t be the last one. I am *so* going to make it next year. No doubt! But then I will be sharing shortly one final blog post on what I am planning to do in preparation for next year, because there was just so much going on that one needs to be prepared well ahead of time. And that’s what this upcoming blog post will do…

For now, here are some pictures I took during Alton’s closing session:

Oh, and if you are wondering what I did in the evening, I actually went Downtown Disney with half of Ireland to enjoy a couple of pints, have some good dinner, head back to the hotel and enjoy the peace and quiet of hanging out at the Dolphin bar without the massive crowds from the last five days! Priceless!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, Events, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Communities, Lotus Community, Connections, Lotus Connections, GURUpalooza, Rocky Oliver, Twitter, Flickr, Feedback, Conversations, Developers, Ask the Developers, Marjorie Tenzer, Alton Brown, Show, Food, Food Show, YouTube

Yesterday I didn’t get a chance to create a blog post to share with you folks some more highlights from the IBM Lotusphere event that took place last week. Apparently, my Internet connection had other plans for the day. So I am back today with a short blog post where I just wanted to share a few thoughts on what has been one of my favourite gadget experiences from the entire event. It surely wasn’t the amazing Lotus Notes on the iPhone, nor the super fine Lotus Foundations server (That fits quite nicely in an envelope!). Or a whole bunch of other ones. It was just my Nokia N95!!

I knew I made a heck of a purchase a few months back, when I acquired the Nokia N95, but up until the Lotusphere event I didn’t really have the chance to test it out properly in such a massive event as that one. And, boy, was it up to the test or what?!? And big time!! With it I have been taking lots of pictures all over the place. All in all around 300 for the entire event, of which 268 are already in my Flickr account. I have been listening to various different podcasts, both related to the event and non-related. Watched a good number of vodcasts, too! (Gotta love the quality of the image and the sound!). Surfed the Web as much as I could do with the free wireless available throughout the premises, so I could check out what people were blogging about during the event or Twitter here and there about the different places I was or just simply checking out some of the Web sites from the various announcements that went live during the course of those few days.

Of course, I used the N95 quite heavily as well to make plenty of phone calls to meet up with people. Sent a whole bunch of SMS, played a few games while waiting on the hotel lobbies to meet up folks, etc. etc. But if there would be a single reason why I am in love with the Nokia N95 is because of this:

Yes, I know, there are very few words that can describe the quality of the output from those videos for such a tiny little device like the N95, which I now carry with me everywhere I go! Because you never know when it’s going to happen again, right?!?

(Stay tuned because last couple of blog posts with further highlights from Lotusphere are coming up shortly!)

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, New Media, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Learning, Podcasts, Vodcasts, Twitter, Nokia, Nokia N95, N95, Apple, iPhone, Lotus Foundations, Lotus Foundations Server, Flickr, Videos, Multi-Media, Multimedia, Blogging, Metablogging

Continuing further with my highlights from the IBM Lotusphere event that took place last week, we now go on to the fourth day of the event, Wednesday 23rd, where a whole bunch of really good stuff happened throughout the entire day! Not only from the perspective of attending some sessions, well, actually one of them, but also from the perspective where I got to meet up a whole lot of people I have been hanging around with for some time already! But let’s get started from the very beginning.

Social Software Keynote with Jeff Schick

First thing in the morning for me was to actually make it to the keynote on Social Software by Jeff Schick, which, I must say, was a rather entertaining show, since we did have our very own Innovation Idol live on stage (More of that in my Flickr stream and throughout this blog post, too!). But apart from that, it surely was one of those very informative keynote sessions where Jeff got on stage a number of folks talking about how their own businesses have been adopting social computing using some of the various IBM Lotus Social Software offerings: Ben Lichtenwalner (From TeachforAmerica), Josh Kimball (From The Bank of New York Mellon) and Mitch Cohen (From Colgate-Palmolive, who, by the way, happens to have quite an interesting blog with some really good stuff in there and he is also twittering! I had the pleasure of talking to him as well, while hanging out at the Meet the Developers Lab, while we both were getting a demo on Lotus Connections v2).

This specific section of the keynote, to me, was of particular interest as we were all able to hear first hand what were some of the main challenges for all of those companies to start adopting social software and how they have overcome them through time. So with great and avid interest I twittered the whole entire thing! Way better than me trying to reproduce it all over here. Very very informative, I tell you, and a clear move that despite some initial hurdles, in the end, it will happen. It does happen.

Going back to Jeff and instead of me telling you all of the stuff he mentioned I would refer you to the same links I shared above from my twitterings and also this specific YouTube video where you can see a good 3 minute show that will give you an idea of what Jeff talked to us about.

From there onwards we went into some really funny Innovation Idol stuff that I think would be very descriptive from the following pictures I took live at the event and which you can find in my Flickr account:

And then, finally, we got to one of the subjects I really wanted to dig in some more, which was going through an extensive demo with one of my fellow IBM colleagues, and good friend, Suzanne Minassian, who shared with us some of the really cool stuff happening with the upcoming release of Lotus Connections v2, providing us with a very thorough demo on some of the new features. At this stage I took a whole bunch of pictures and continued to twitter some more, if you would want to get a glimpse of what’s coming. But not to worry, I am planning on covering this very same topic at a later time since there were a couple of speaker sessions dealing with this very same subject.

Either way I was completely jazzed up at this point in time, more than anything else because some of the new features put together were things we all wanted to have for some time. And they are now finally happening! W00t!

Meeting with folks for customer meetings on social software

Right after the keynote session finished, and instead of going and attending a couple of breakout sessions, I actually had a meeting with a couple of IBM colleagues I have known for a while through our internal blogosphere to talk around the subject of social computing and some questions that a couple of customers were asking about back home. Really interesting and I am hoping that one day I may be able to blog about it and what happened in the end. Stay tuned for some more to come…

Meet the Developers Lab & Lunch with IBM’s Social Computing Ambassadors

After finishing up that meeting with those colleagues I decided to head down to the Meet the Developers Lab where this time around I hanged out with my good friend Adrian Spender, one of the main developers of Lotus Connections in Dublin, who gave me another hands on demo on Lotus Connections v2 focusing on the main Dashboard coming up very soon. Goodness! There I was again, drooling all over the place, making a mess! heh Like I said, I will be talking some more about it as time goes by, but those who have been playing with Connections would agree that it was a very much needed improvement and what an improvement!

That’s also where I met Mitch Cohen and we talked briefly while he was on his way out. Yeah, I know, I was surprised a bit when he mentioned he is one of my blog readers. Goodness! I didn’t see that one coming! But it felt good! heh (Hi Mitch! Great stuff being able to meet you face to face! Thanks for reading! )

Afterwards I headed down again for another superb lunch with a good bunch of IBM social computing ambassadors from the community I mentioned yesterday and spent quite some time exchanging ideas, sharing our stories on what worked, what didn’t, the challenges we have faced thus far, and overall made it a really really nice lunch where, as usual, I learnt a whole bunch of stuff on how social computing is getting adopted in different countries and geos. Very educational and one of the perks of bringing social networking into a real-live environment!

IBM Adoption of Social Software Booth

From there onwards, it was my turn again, for the last time, to co-host the booth we had and hoped that folks would come over and talk to us, but apparently things were a bit slow that afternoon, probably as plenty of folks were already preparing themselves for the evening party and / or early leave the next morning. Either way, we enjoyed some very very entertaining conversations with David Tebutt, who never stops to amaze me the amount of knowledge he has got around the IT world, and not just social computing. He can keep you entertained for hours no end, and he surely did! Thanks, David, for making a very quiet afternoon rather enjoyable and very enlightening!

Lotusphere 2008 Party: Universal Studios

And, then there was a party! Yeah, baby, one of those parties you know you are going to remember for a while! That’s right. All of those folks who wanted to go headed down to Universal Studios where we had a really good time and where instead of me telling you all about it, I shall just grab some of the pictures I took during that evening and you will see what I mean …

Oh, but that is not all of it … Because on our way back to the hotel I bumped into two really good friends of mine who I have known for years, but that we never managed to meet up face to face: Amy Widmer & Kathryn Everest. Of course, we had to go and celebrate it and we headed down to the Dolphin bar, where the whole Lotus Connections crowd was hanging out, and lo and behold I knew my evening had just gotten started!! … Till the very early morning! And it surely did!! Thanks to very thought-provoking and inspirational conversations (Yes! At that time of the morning!) with folks like Gene Leo, Miguel Estrada or Elias Torres (Oh, by the way, next time you bump into Elias ask him to talk you to about Spectacular! You can then thank me later… heh), along with Amy, I ended up going back to the hotel room very, and I mean very late!!!

Tomorrow, last day of highlights from Lotusphere 2008

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, Collaboration, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Communities, Flickr, Photos, Team Building, IBM Software, Twitter, Blogging, Metablogging, Learning, Socialising, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing Ambassadors, Social Computing Evangelists, Meet the Developers, Labs, Spectacular!, Social Networks, David Tebutt, Jeff Schick, Ben Lichtenwalner, TeachforAmerica, Josh Kimball, The Bank of New York Mellon, Mitch Cohen, Colgate-Palmolive, Lotus Connections, Connections, Connections v2, YouTube, Videos, Innovation Idol, Suzanne Minassian, Adrian Spender, Universal Studios, Amy Widmer, Kathryn Everest, Gene Leo, Miguel Estrada, Elias Torres