Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Announcing the MWLUG 2014 Sessions and Workshops

We are please to announce the MWLUG 2014 sessions and workshops.  We have 43 sessions and workshops that will be presented starting from Wednesday, August 27, 2014 at 1:00 PM all the way to Friday 5:00 PM, August 29, 2014 with food and fun before in between and afterwards.

This year we had the largest number submissions from IBM customers.  Also, this year we had the largest number of submissions by potential speakers.

Congratulations to all the speakers that had their submissions accepted and thank you to all the speakers who submitted their abstracts.  The MWLUG 2014 speaker committee had a hard time rejecting the great abstracts that we received. Unfortunately, we only have so many slots. 

So don't miss this chance to attend MWLUG 2014 and receive 47 hours of technical and business training plus food and fun for the cost of a few Starbucks coffees.

Help connect the human community the most important community!!!

http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2014.nsf/Sessions.xsp



Monday, June 23, 2014

Preliminary Schedule for MWLUG 2014

Since everyone keeps asking.  Here is the preliminary schedule for MWLUG 2014.
 
 
Wednesday August 27, 2014
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM - Optional Social Event 
1:00 PM to 5:00 PM - Workshops and Sessions
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM - Exhibitor Showcase Reception

Thursday, August 28, 2014
08:00 AM to 09:00 AM - Breakfast
09:00 AM to 11:00 AM - Opening General Session
11:00 AM  to 12:00 PM - Sessions
12:00 PM to 01:00 PM - Lunch
01:00 PM to 05:00 PM - Sessions
07:00 PM to 10:00 PM - Thursday Social Event

Friday, August 29, 2014
08:00 AM to 09:00 AM - Breakfast
09:00 AM to 12:30 PM - Sessions
12:30 PM  to 01:30 PM - Lunch
01:30 PM to 04:00 PM - Sessions
04:00 PM to 05:00 PM - Closing Session

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Announcing the MWLUG 2014 IBM Opening General Session Speaker

As we head towards MWLUG 2014 in August things are picking up steam and we are quickly moving forward in providing you one of the best ICS user group conference of this year.  We have many things planned and a few surprises.  If you miss this year's MWLUG, you will be missing something that you may never have a chance to experience again. So don't miss it.  We will be announcing this the near future.  The theme of MWLUG 2014 is "Connecting the Human Community" and this is what user group conferences bring to our community.  It is an opportunity to network and learn from our colleagues within our community.

I am please to announce that one of the newest member of our community, Kramer Reeves, Director of Product Management for Collaboration Solutions, will be the IBM Opening General Session speaker.  Kramer who became the Director of Product Management for ICS last year comes from an area of great interest for me, business process management.

 

Kramer Reeves has over 15 years experience in the enterprise software industry, 11 of which at IBM.  He is currently Director of Product Management for Collaboration Solutions inside IBM Software Group.   In this role, Kramer leads a world-wide team and overall business responsibilities for key product lines including IBM's messaging and collaboration solutions; unified communications software; and the workforce productivity portfolio.  Prior to this role, Kramer was Director of Global Marketing for IBM's Business Process Solutions portfolio, leading IBM’s Business Process Management (BPM) and Operational Decision Management (ODM), Business Rules and Event Processing software portfolios and IBM's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) marketing agenda.  Kramer has a BS in Engineering from Virginia Military Institute and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Transforming Domino into a Social Collaboration Platform, Part 3 - Teaching an Old Dog To Do New Tricks

Transforming Domino into a Social Collaboration Platform, Part 1 - Where Do We Begin?
Transforming Domino into a Social Collaboration Platform, Part 2A - Experimentation
Transforming Domino into a Social Collaboration Platform, Part 2B - Experimentation

So now that we had all the tools and capabilities to create our social collaboration tool, what should be build? We wanted to build a SMB solution similar to IBM Connections or Yammer, a small business solution that utilized the power of enterprise technology.

So we were all set with our mighty tools in hand and created our new social collaboration solution.  Like all application development, how a designer/developer thinks is not how users thinks. We developed our first version in early 2013 and users shot it down!!! How there they? But the true set in. 

From our discussions with our clients and watching how they worked, they were not interested in a general social collaboration tool, but a focused solution that provided only the tools that they needed for their tasks in hand.  Effective communities or groups were no more than 20 to 50 individuals and in most cases under 10 not hundreds or thousands.  Therefore, we had no interested in recreating a general social collaboration tool.

Instead, our goal was to build a community-centric solution not an individual focused solution, a purposeful social collaboration solution that allowed users to manage focused tasks for which communities were created.  As a result, things like activities are tracked only within the context of the community not the individual.  This seems anti-socially compared with Facebook and others, but the reality is that unless there is a purpose that drives the need for social collaboration, users will most likely not use it.  In a large enterprise environment, there are other driving factors that define things differently so solutions like IBM Connections are more appropriate.

So what were the important things that clients wanted?
  • Create and share content in a community/group environment
  • Allow members with the appropriate access to create, publish, and organize content within folders environment
  • Ability to create open or restricted communities
  • Ability for members with the appropriate access to comment on published content within the community
  • Ability to control email notification when content is published
  • Ability to create restricted sub-communities within a community and allow only certain community members access
  • Control who had the ability to create communities so that community creep would not occur.
  • Ability to find and locate content with a community
  • Ability for community members to send messages to each other in a private environment.
  • Regardless of whether the community member was an internal or external user, they had the same capabilities and features when assigned the appropriate rights
  • Ability to tailor the solution with different add-on capabilities controlled by the community manager
  • Full management of the solution using a web interface
  • Keep their content and information secure and private
  • Desktop and mobile device access.
  • Extensible API
  • Simple, easy to user interface
  • Minimalistic environment to reduce the clutter
  • Activity-based trigger workflow
  • Ability to incorporate the solution into other applications


So back to the drawing board we went. After another year of redevelopment and many redesigns and architecture changes, we now have version 2!  It has something new, something borrowed, and something old, iPhora Foundation + Domino/XWork + Integrated Business Framework.  iPhora Touch 2 is finally here.

Next time,

Transforming Domino into a Social Collaboration Platform, Part 4 - The Results So Far


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