Enterprise 2.0 Conference Day 1: Social Computing Platforms hosted by IBM & Microsoft 9-12

That’s right its your boy, and I am here at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston giving you the live updates real time. In this session there will be presentations by:

Speaker – Heidi Votaw, Program Director, Social Computing Software, IBM

Heidi was part of the team that was responsible for providing the first social software offering from IBM. She currently runs the team that is responsible for the overall Lotus Connections business which includes a mixture of Product Management, Offerings Management and Program Management that is part of the Lotus Software Group within IBM. Her team provides the strategy and direction for the emerging area of Social Software. She is responsible for setting the product requirements for the technology, contributing to the overall efforts in marketing the product, being an advocate for customers / partners / ISVs, and setting future directions, to name a few. In addition to assisting customers with social software directions and solutions, she also works to help drive usage and adoption throughout the IBM Corporation. Heidi has held numerous positions at IBM from Support, Marketing and Product Management. Before leading the Social Software she was the lead Product Manager responsible for the Notes client. She was responsible for contributing to the efforts of the revamped Lotus Notes 8 client. Prior to that, she managed the entire client portfolio for Domino (iNotes Access for Microsoft Outlook, Domino Off-Line Services, Domino Web Access), setting the strategy for the initial Workplace Messaging / Workplace Client Technology / IBM Symphony offerings as well as products such as Lotus SmartSuite and Lotus FastSite. She continues to present product strategies and plans to both internal and external audiences worldwide. She has also held a variety of roles in her tenure at Lotus Development Corporation since joining the company in 1991. Heidi received her bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Regis College, Westin, Massachusetts and her master’s degree in Marketing from Rivier College, Nashua, New Hampshire. For more information on Lotus Connections visit http://www.lotus.com/connections or our blog at http://synch.rono.us.

Speaker – Lawrence Liu, Technical Product Manager, Microsoft

Speaker – Suzanne Minnassian, IBM Lotus Connections Product Manager, IBM

In my past experience, I have held a variety of roles within software development, including development, design, user research, and now product management. I am currently the product manager for Lotus Connections, a social software suite for businesses and organizations. In the role or product manager, I work to define the overall product strategy, develop and drive the product requirements with engineering and design, work with customers and partners to shape the product, and publicize the product through demonstrations and presentations at numerous industry events. I came into IBM through IBM Research Collaborative User Experience group as a user researcher on the Unified Activity Management project and a developer and usability specialist on the Reinventing Email project. I hold an MBA with a concentration in Human Factors in Information Design, and I have a strong interest in collaboration technologies and personal and business productivity tools.

Speaker – Venky Veeraraghavan, Program Manager, Microsoft

Stay tuned. e2.0T2008

Here is the breakdown. There will be 2 15 minute breakdowns where represenatives from each vendor present use cases for application of the tools in a business scenario. Those will be followed by a Platform Component Walk-thru. Then there will be a Q & A session. Last thing is a vendor wrap-up.

IBM is up first. For all of you out there that will be getting SameTime, pay attention. Platform approach yes; but ecosystem & stewardship are critical.

Suzanne’s Pitch

Lotus Connections (LC) is a suite of social software tools. They can be run standalone or can be tied into an already existing sites. It also already exist as a service that could possibly integrated into a SOA. It can be served through almost any portal that you have. Good if you want to increase the “stickiness” of your site. Information inside LC can be customized to the user based on preferences. Users can import personal business cards pulling data from multiple points on the web. The tool seems to really allow a user pull into lots of content about themselves in order to allow people who may come into contact with the profile to get the maximum amount of benefit. First look it kind of reminds me of Jive’s Clearspace. Seems to be a solid application though I am not blown out of the water, but this was a health care scenario.

Now she is demoing LC as it is used on IBM’s internal intranet. It has blogs, wikis, and a tagconnect like feature. She is showing of bluepages, IBM’s version of kind of Facebook profile pages. She just did a search on the word tagging and got several results, and though there were several results that data was also augmented with social data i.e. results of people who know about tagging. This capability is vital if we are to ever solve the problem that we don’t know what we don’t know. They have a capability to do a kind of enterprise youtube, similar to our iVideo. They can also share mp3s. All this content both video and audio can be crunched down and transfered to portable devices such as an iPod. Now she is showing a collaborative space called activities where you can keep up with all your to dos about a certain event or project. Suzanne’s time is up, good presentation so far.

Lawerence Liu’s pitch

Microsoft has taken a bit of a different approach. They are demoing SP 2007. He is now showing a similar feature that allows you to connect people on a topic, using a degree of seperation approach. Again this reiterates the need for a tool that allows you to easily find the skill sets you need, so no just info about a topic but people who know about that topic also to tap there knowledge. He is now demoing the wiki capability in MOSS. It highlights my issue again that it doesn’t have a plugin to allow you to use mediawikis markup language, it would increase adoption.

Suzanne’s Next Pitch

Now she is doing a more detailed walkthrough of the tool. You can pull info from tools like Siebel and then allow users to write back to that app, so they can update their own data. It will integrate with a lot of tools out of the box it seems. So far LC is kicking Microsoft’s but a little. They are showing a capability to view the person’s management chain. They support microformats such as V-Cards. You can always put in audio on how to properly pronounce someone’s name.