Ed Brill

Earlier today, IBM delivered on a promise.

Last July, in throwing our support to the new Apache OpenOffice podling project, we committed to contribute the source code of Lotus Symphony -- a fork of OpenOffice -- back into the mainline project. This morning, that contribution is complete.

With today's action, we are re-uniting behind one OpenOffice, and will work with the Apache OpenOffice community to take the best of Symphony forward along with the best of OpenOffice. We will do this in The Apache Way -- community, merit, and openness.

Clearly, in the week since Apache OpenOffice 3.4 was announced, the market has welcomed OpenOffice back with "open" arms. In the first week, AOO 3.4 has been downloaded over one million times. Relevant? I certainly think so.

As I commented last week, IBM is continuing our support for Lotus Symphony, until we are able to offer an IBM-supported version of Apache OpenOffice that best meets the current and future needs of our current and prospective customers. Of course part of that is to align the social business objectives of these organizations with the incorporation of a modern, innovative Apache OpenOffice.

Meanwhile, to integrate AOO 3.4 with some of the IBM collaboration solutions, we have posted a series of AOO extensions -- one for IBM Connections, one for IBM SmartCloud Social. These are demonstrable evidence of our commitment to the broader AOO effort, not just what we will deliver with an IBM label on it.

More details on our Symphony contribution to Apache OpenOffice can be found in the project wiki.

Link: Apache OpenOffice-Lotus Symphony contributed features >

Earlier today, I posted the latest version of the IBM Social Business presentation on mobile strategy. The presentation covers solutions available from IBM software for mobile social business, business intelligence, and commerce, as well as a deep dive on Lotus Notes Traveler, IBM Connections Mobile, IBM Sametime Mobile, IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices (nee BigFix), Lotus Mobile Connect, and custom application development through XPages or IBM Worklight.

I suspect when you review this that you'll find as I did that only IBM offers this range and depth of solutions for the mobile web and social business.

The presentation PDF can be downloaded from SlideShare in addition to being viewed below.

Some cool Domino-based solutions being deployed for smarter healthcare in Russia...

IBM is also working with KMIS and the Emergency Hospital of Petrozavodsk in the Republic of Karelia in North Western Russia to implement electronic medical records and an automated hospital information management system for its eight therapy and three diagnostic departments.

The new system which is based on IBM Notes and Domino software provides unified access to many types of medical data, allowing doctors and medical staff to share and record information and access tests and lab results instantly to improve decision making.

The new system also helps automate many administrative processes throughout the hospital such as appointment booking, work scheduling for doctors, nurses and staff as well as helping to better manage the hospital’s financial processes and reporting requirements

“Our doctors now have real-time access a complete archive of a patient’s medical data. As a result we have improved our ability to diagnose medical conditions and make optimum decisions for patients,” said Andrey Myachin, Head of the Control System Department at the Emergency Hospital of Petrozavodsk.

IBM is engaged on similar projects at other public hospitals throughout Russia including those in the regions of Volgograd, Leningrad, Kirov, Pskov, Perm and Vladimir as well as the Republics of Khakassia and Udmurtia.

Link: ibm.com: Hospitals in Russia’s Regions Turn to IBM to Transform Healthcare >

Recently, as part of the rebranding from LotusLive, the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business added a pretty important capability -- "buy online".



In the past for LotusLive, this was a somewhat-complicated process through PassportAdvantage Express. The new e-commerce engine allows online purchase of key services including SmartCloud Engage, SmartCloud Meetings, and SmartCloud Notes.

For small customers especially, which continues to be one of the key market segments for software-as-a-service, this is a rapid path to getting up and running in SmartCloud Social. Simply click here....

Link: IBM SmartCloud - Plans and Pricing >

I was out of the office most of the day so didn't have a chance to link this earlier...

The Apache OpenOffice Project today announced the availability of Apache OpenOffice™ 3.4, the first release of OpenOffice under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation.

Apache OpenOffice is the original open source office productivity suite, designed for professional and consumer use.

"With the donation of OpenOffice.org to the ASF, the Foundation, and especially the podling project, was given a daunting task: re-energize a community and transform OpenOffice from a codebase of unknown Intellectual Property heritage, to a vetted and Apache Licensed software suite," said Jim Jagielski, ASF President and an Apache OpenOffice project mentor. "The release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 shows just how successful the project has been: pulling in developers from over 21 corporate affiliations, while avoiding undue influence which is the death-knell of true open source communities; building a solid and stable codebase, with significant improvement and enhancements over other variants; and, of course, creating a healthy, vibrant and diverse user and developer community."

Apache OpenOffice is the leading open source office productivity suite, with more than 100 million users worldwide in home, corporate, government, research, and academic environments, across 15 languages.

As indiciated, this is the first release of OpenOffice since the Apache project began. Much of the work between then and now has been to bring the community that was already established around OpenOffice.org forward, including our participation at IBM. We hired "the Hamburg five", five developers who created the original Star Division project that was acquired by Sun and later Oracle before becoming an Apache podling project.

As discussed in previous blogs about the work IBM is contributing to OpenOffice, we have much to do on the road ahead. We have yet to merge our contributions from IBM Lotus Symphony into the project (stay tuned on that) and the community is discussing the next Apache release vehicle for the project. Meanwhile, Symphony continues to ship and be supported as part of Notes 8.5 and on its own at Symphony.Lotus.com. Once there is an Apache version that includes our contributed code and other enhancements, IBM will begin supporting an IBM edition of Apache OpenOffice.

This release is a great opportunity to see the future of desktop productivity alternatives to Microsoft. It also marks a basis for other communities to draw from the master OpenOffice source, hopefully uniting those desktop productivity alternatives. As Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady said in today's announcement,

"[T]he first release of OpenOffice 3.4 as an Apache project marks an important new chapter in the life of a landmark project. Following months of effort, the open source productivity suite is now licensed and built with the intent of courting a large population of users, developers and ISVs worldwide."

Footnote: eWeek incorrectly states that IBM have discontinued Symphony. This isn't the case as you can see at the Symphony website. eWeek seems to have also taken the angle that this is some kind of competition with LibreOffice, with a "let the games begin" conclusion. My take is actually that this is where the games should end, but I realize that takes much more than a sentence on my blog to make happen. Thankfully, IBM is 100% committed to bringing together those that want to provide a viable desktop productivity open source approach, and you see many IBMer names on the volunteer list responsible for today's OpenOffice 3.4 release.

Link: The Apache OpenOffice Project Announces Apache OpenOffice^TM 3.4 >

Thanks so much for over 100 comments worth of valuable input on where we should be taking Notes/Domino in the future. We took this chart into the meeting as one of many inputs, coming from edbrill.com readers:


 

Other inputs included the design partners, feedback from events like Lotusphere, competitive analysis, SPRs/APARs/PMRs, strategy coming down from IBM software group at large, sales input, and many many many other input vectors. Triaging for a mass-market product is always one of the most fun, but most challenging, parts of product managing.

Obviously, I can't telegraph my future roadmap to the public market at this phase. So, talking about the outcomes of this meeting on the blog, or even at this phase with design partners, is pretty much impossible. We also roped off application development and mobility to mostly be separate topics for subsequent workshops, and thus focused on client, server, and SmartCloud Notes.

We had many very good discussions about what a rich client needs to be in the future, with the future being deployments in 2014-2017. We talked about the role of HTML5 vs. an installed client, we talked about iNotes and Connections/"social mail", we talked about mobility, we talked about Eclipse, we even talked about Outlook. On the server side, we talked through the capabilities that have been built for SmartCloud Notes and their applicability to the premises product, we talked about TCO (total cost of ownership), we talked about architectural limitations. We had a great business discussion about ways to improve our offerings in market, including branding, packaging, licensing, bundles, and all those other usual vectors. We had a good discussion about market segmentation and growth opportunities, and our sales and marketing teams provided input on what's working and what isn't.

Our drive to Notes/Domino "9", "10", etc. continues from here. The leadership team will come back together in August, and then present our anticipated plans initially at our Leadership Alliance meeting in October. I expect you'll see some of the decisions play out even sooner than that.

OK, so this six-minute YouTube video violates one of the frequent requests made of IBM marketing: we aren't showing the product. Instead I try in a little more than five minutes to explain what we mean by a "social mail" experience, and what we are building for the next release of IBM Connections (and in the future, other mail experiences we deliver):



The IBMSocialBiz channel on YouTube has many other videos we have produced in the last few months, including one filmed at Lotusphere where I talk about the value of your IBM S&S contract for product updates, support, etc.:
http://youtu.be/LjZENiBYzmM

Check out the whole channel.

Link: IBM Social Business on YouTube >

Next week, my team and I will be in our labs in Littleton, Massachusetts US, working with our engineering team leadership on plans for the Lotus Notes and Domino roadmap for 2013 and beyond. The Mass Labs, as they are known, house many of the top architects, engineers, and developers who work on Notes, iNotes, Domino, and Designer, along with other IBM labs throughout the world. The whole leadership team -- many of whom you have met at Lotusphere, including VP Sandesh Bhat, Directors John Woods, Norm Lord, and Chief Architect Russ Holden -- are all at the Mass Labs, so it makes sense to bring my somewhat-more-distributed product management team together there, along with representatives from the Traveler team (labs in Austin, Raleigh, and elsewhere) and other parts of the Notes/Domino portfolio.

Our priority for the workshop is to lay out specifics of what we want to achieve in the next release of Notes and Domino after "Social Edition", likely to be called "9", and where we go after that. Many of the themes for "9 or whatever we call it" were shared at Lotusphere 2012, but this workshop will be a deeper look and plan for that release and beyond. The product managers, sales, marketing, development, and executive team will be working for two days on these plans, and of course we will also be looking at tactical ways to continue the momentum that we're seeing once again in the Notes/Domino and XPages/XWork space.

Some of the themes that I am expecting to focus on include the continued evolution towards web and mobile interfaces, integration with third party software (this one I hear over and over as a continued priority from customers), future direction for the Notes rich client and improving management and deployability, and taking further elements from the "Project Vulcan" blueprint into the product overall. On the server side, we're going to be looking at work that has been done for SmartCloud Notes and how much of it can be brought into the shipping software product, more standards work, more integration work. Of course we've used sources like IdeaJam.net as input, along with PMRs/SPRs and the usual inputs to the product management process.

We're working in parallel on a set of activities around the application developer/development roadmap, so that's not a focus for next week's workshop (and we won't have Brent Peters, Phil Riand, or others who would be needed for that). But from an infrastructure perspective....what general areas would you like my team and I to be thinking about? I'm not asking for your favorite feature request, but a higher level hot button thought of what you are looking for from us next. I won't be able to respond to your ideas, and no commitments that this ideation will lead to implemented features. Still, it has worked many times before to throw these discussions open on the blog -- so let's go for it.

Last week, a couple of IBM business partners posted interesting new Sametime-related videos on YouTube.

The first, from BelsoftAG, shows how to use the new Sametime Meetings for iPad client, just released last week! It highlights the interactive nature of the app, the ability to participate in meetings on multiple servers, and and even being able to share links and other content in the meeting.



The second, from foresee, showcases a demo that was conducted at the German CeBIT last month. foresee's InteracTable Collaboration Room provides an innovative form factor for emeeting participation -- the furniture itself.



The whole video is a Sametime meeting, as evidenced by the selection of the meeting room at the start of the video and other functionality, e.g. choosing documents out of the library of the meeting. Details of foresee's participation at CeBIT can be found here.

Thanks for Volker Juergensen for sharing the foresee video and to Marlon Machado for the pointer to the BelsoftAG video.

My colleagues in development and support are hosting an open mic call next week to discuss the latest developments with Lotus Notes Traveler....

IBM will host an Open Mic webcast with Lotus Development and Support Engineers on 24 April 2012. The topic will be "What's the Latest with Notes Traveler?."

Details in this technote....

Link: ibm.com: Open Mic Webcast: What's the Latest with Notes Traveler? - 24 April 2012 >

Earlier today, we distributed the first external beta code drop of Notes/Domino Social Edition to our Design Partners. This is also the third code drop of the Notes/Domino 8.5.4 beta release, but the first to start adding the key new Social Edition features.

Design Partners are still covered by a non-disclosure agreement, so you won't hear from them quite yet on what's new. To give you an idea of what they're now playing with though, it's what we described in various sessions at Lotusphere 2012.

This is the first build where the Notes browser plug-in, which allows the use of Notes client applications in a web browser without the Notes client needing to be installed, is officially ready for testing. The release has only been in Design Partner hands for a few hours and I am already receiving "OMG" emails :-). Note, starting with this build, we have simplified the name of that plug-in --  we had been calling it something like a "Notes Application Player Plug-In for Windows" and now we are just saying "Notes browser plug-in". Also we are building that for Internet Explorer and Firefox; I know my Lotusphere slides showed we hadn't decided which two browsers to focus on first.

There are several other enhancements in the code drop 3 build, including completely updated iNotes calendar forms, abbreviated dates in the inbox, SAML support, and a number of XPages enhancements.

We expect the next code drop - likely about six to eight weeks from now - to be more broadly available to beta program participants, and also to include updates to Notes Traveler.

As indicated at Lotusphere, we plan to ship Notes/Domino Social Edition and the Notes/Domino 8.5.4 release by the end of 2012.

Here is a screen shot of the new iNotes calendar workflow UI:

This plug-in, which was demonstrated at Lotusphere 2012, is now available. As announced on the download page...

The IBM Connections plug-in lets you add Lotus Symphony files to an activity or a files, create To Dos for activity users, post a Symphony document to a blog or a wiki, or search IBM Connections for a person's profile or other content.

I'm downloading now!

Link: ibm.com: IBM Connections plug-in for Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 >

My first trip to Asia in five years was basically a return to the last place I had spent any time - Bali. Bali served as a convenient side trip weekend between the intensity of the Australian Lotus User Group and a few days of business meetings in Jakarta. Nonstop flights to/from made it a no-brainer choice, though with all the excitement of the democratic movement in Myanmar/Burma last week, I still regret that I couldn't find my way there. Another time.

My wife and I honeymooned in Bali five years ago, so going back without her was disappointing. I resolved that I was there more on a photography mission than anything else, and on that front I was successful. My Bali 2012 photos are posted here, though the pictures don't quite tell the whole story of course.

I used to think "an island is an island is an island", but Bali changed all that for me on our first visit. Yes, you can scuba/snorkel/sun bathe, but the Hindu Balinese themselves don't pay the water much attention. There are luxury, best-in-class hotels, but there are small bungalows as well. There are tourists drinking to excess and counterfeit goods to purchase, but thankfully these are mostly in highly concentrated areas.

For this trip I stayed at the Bali Hyatt in Sanur. TripAdvisor reviews said the place was starting to get a bit run down, but it was a great location for me and amazing service. The club level "lounge" was an outdoor thatched hut with free wifi, so I was able to Facetime my kids while chowing down on my favorite Indonesian food, mie goreng. I would stay there again.



I hired a driver through the hotel for two days. I didn't want to do an organized tour, but rather had picked out a few places on my own to visit. On my first day out, I went to the village of Tenganan, home of the Bali Aga people. Some of the tour books described this place as "disney-fied", and it kind of was. But the photos weren't too bad. From there, I went to the water palace of Tirta Gangga. This was really awesome, a collection of sculpture, water features, and vegetation laid out harmoniously. One could even go for a swim there for about US$2, but I passed on that. My third stop that day was also a water palace, the very recently-restored Taman Ujung (mentioned in same wikipedia entry). This was a wonderful surprise, a lush home laid out right near the sea. There was a couple shooting their wedding photos on the grounds, and a few dozen other people, but it was very very quiet.



In stark contrast, the next morning I set out for Tanah Lot, a temple built on a rock formation along the coast. Tanah Lot is relatively close to the main tourist cities of Kuta and Seminyak, so tourist come to Tanah Lot by the busload. It was ridiculous. I felt nothing special about the visit, and you can't even view the temple itself except from afar. It amazed me how busy Tanah Lot was -- set among row after row of crap touristy merchandise -- and how empty Taman Ujung was, all on the same island.



So while Bali, like other Asian cities, has too much traffic and too little infrastructure, it offers the possibility of making it your own experience. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to spend a few more wonderful hours exploring it.



Link: Bail 2012 >

I survived 34 hours of transit between hotel room in Jakarta, Indonesia, and walking in the door of my home again "yesterday". Thank you to Andi and Chris and Gunawan for being great hosts in Jakarta. Among the top hotels I've ever stayed in for IBM travel, excellent meals of local cuisine, and the traffic wasn't near as bad as I was lead to believe (or maybe I just got lucky). I had few flight options coming home from Jakarta, most of them involved mutli-hour stopovers in either Hong Kong or Tokyo. Either way I was going straight from a guest lecture at Binus University to the airport, meaning traveling in a suit. Oh well. The best routing ended up being ANA (All-Nippon Airways), which also had the bonus of a stopover in Narita that would be long enough for some nice sushi breakfast (yes, really - try it sometime) and a little time to catch up on work. On board, my seat selection jujitsu continued to work well and I ended up with the middle seat open next to me, one of five or so empty seats on the whole plane. During flight, I was watching a movie ("Tower Heist", pretty funny) on the iPad, which was propped up on the middle seat's tray table. Thus I was surprised when a flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to my white dress shirt....stained along the left side with red blotches that looked like spilled wine. Uh oh. In her limited English, she couldn't explain what had happened, but the result was unmistakable. She indicated she would try to clean it up, and returned a few minutes later with some towels and some kind of cleaning solution. She then proceeded to try to blot up the stains on the shirt while I remained sitting there, which already struck me as way more than an American airline would do. But whatever she was using wasn't removing the stains, just turning them from red to blue. So a few minutes later, the flight purser joined her and asked me if I had something else to change into. I hadn't changed before the flight mainly because everything else I brought along on the trip was either cigarette smoke-infested or damp from the Bali humidity, and it was in my checked luggage anyway. So the purser offered to bring me a sweater from the first class amenity kit, and asked me to give them the white shirt to try to clean further. She then brought me back to one of the lavatories, cleaned it from top to bottom, and then let me use it as a changing room. The sweater, which I can only describe as "small Japanese old man zip-up style", wasn't going to join my wardrobe permanently, but it would do for a few hours while they did whatever they were going to do to my dress shirt. A few hours later, the flight attendant fetched me and brought me to the rear galley, where they showed me the shirt again. The stains were almost entirely gone. They were very proud of their result, but at the same time extremely apologetic. They further apologized, saying they realized what a "horrible flight" I was having between the shirt incident and the unruly child seated across the aisle from me. I noticed the child (he was playing his iPod music without headphones at one point during my slumbers) but hadn't the adjective "horrible" describing any aspect of the flight. Once the shirt was dry, about an hour before landing, the purser came to return it. This became a ceremony, where again she cut to the front of the line for the lavs, cleaned one top to bottom, and let me use it as a changing room. When I emerged, a formal apology was given, Japanese-style. There was much bowing in my direction, and I was given a post card with a written apology along with the business card from the purser. They also had me fill out a voucher for cleaning cost reimbursement, in case further cleaning was needed, and US$20 in cash was handed over after I signed the voucher. They even threw in a deck of playing cards as a gift. All of this was extremely valuable to me, as I was heading straight from O'Hare to my younger daughter's preschool and indeed needed to look presentable after the long flight. It is impossible to imagine the crew on a United or American flight doing much more than an apology and maybe offering some frequent flier miles. I didn't know what to expect, but like the last time I was in Indonesia, the Japanese airlines seem to establish the benchmark for customer service. Arigato gozimashta, ANA. I'll see you again.

Information Week's David Carr reports on Alistair Rennie's keynote from last week's Enterprise Connect conference....

As someone who writes a lot about enterprise social software, I kept waiting to hear more about how it fits with unified communications while attending UBM's Enterprise Connect show in Orlando.

I got my wish when Alistair Rennie, general manager for Lotus and collaboration solutions at IBM, took the stage for a keynote address. Rennie called social "a fundamental game changer for unified communications," a technology that has been falling short of its promised potential for years.

Rennie then proceeded to give a speech that was almost entirely about social and very little about UC. The onstage demo he introduced was mostly about the IBM Connections enterprise social network and navigating from conversations to documents, with a brief demonstration of how you can move from a comment or a document to viewing its author's contact information, reaching out with a Sametime instant message, and escalating from a textual message to a voice or video call. ...

"I don't think we have any shortage of technology at this point, and most of them work," Rennie said, but getting people to care about collaboration technology has been the hard part. That all changes with the advent of social software, particularly when an enterprise social networking initiative is aligned with business goals.

Social + Communications. It makes sense to me.

Link: Information Week: Will Social Show Its Face In Unified Communications? >