Scoot’s thoughts on all things technology, design, photography and life in general !
Having finished a number of books related to E2.0 I thought that it was only right that I made a quick summary of my views on them. As a very slow reader of books and someone who always has at least 4 books on the go at any one time excluding manuals 
content can get fused. This has the plus side of allowing me to remix ideas and content to suit my business requirements. For example real world stories from non E2.0 books may actually provide context or anecdotes for business scenarios. I tend to read a lot of history related books, which is very strange considering it was one of my least favourite subjects at school. Typically I read military based history books so at the moment I am reading Tobruk: The Great Siege 1941-42 by William Buckingham as well as Admirals by Lambert. Both these show how people interact, work, collaborate,fail and succeed.
So back to the two books I have finished in recent months on E2.0. The first was the long awaited Andrew McAfee – Enterprise 2.0 : New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges and the second was Willms Bushe, Soren Stamer – The Art of Letting Go Enterprise 2.0. The first thing that struck me about both these works was the excellent references to real world examples.
Coming from a technology background and having implemented, supported and sold collaborative capabilities over the past 12 years I am always looking for content that will aid me challenge my customers views of the new fads in the IT world and how to look for unique business opportunities to drive adoption and participation of E2.0 platforms.
I think this book really captures the essence of Andrew’s blog and hopefully will provide the opportunity for him to deliver a follow-on work that provides a more detailed insight into the progression of E2.0 and of course E3.0, or whatever term is coined to label the next wave of collaboration capabilities.
One final comment relates to the term social, I like Andrew’s idea of avoiding this term in some circumstances as in reality this is about collaboration and this has been a perfectly good term to describe the capabilities.
Moving on to the Art of Letting go this was a great example of essays from different people on real world situations and implementation of E2.0 style technologies to fulfil business requirements as well as enhance businesses standing with their customers. The book drew on experiences from Prof Andrew McAfee, Craig Cmehil (SAP), Stephen Johnston (Nokia), Stefan Bocking (Vodafone), Willm Buhse (CoreMedia AG), Suw Charman-Anderson, Nicole Dufft (Berlecon Research GmbH), Gotz Hamann (Die ZEIT), Prof / Dr Michael Koch, Prof / Dr Kathrin Moslein, Prof Dr Frank Piller, Prof / Dr Ralf Reichwald and Soren Stamer (CoreMedia).
All of these different authors bring their experiences to you enabling you to see how different organisations implement and use these types of capabilities everyday. I would recommend both of these works.
Day 1 – Started with forecast call and history of the area, plus introduction to the area where the urban coyotes that live across the street from the office. The real sessions started at 1pm after a quick lunch.
We meet with some of the development team and the business leaders who walk through the evolution of Beehive and the business unit. This moved into how we use it internally and finally moving into the business pitch for some of the new capabilities. Once the product is released I will go into details.
We finished day 1 with dinner at Champps watching the Denver Broncos getting beaten by Pittsburgh 28 – 10. Had a steak burger and a few Flat Tires (nice local beer).
Day 2 – Early start at 8am and loads of very interesting content on the roadmap, more details on capabilities of the product and the team and introduction on how to sell collaboration to your mother Finished the day exhasuted at about 6.30pm and headed for a technical team dinner at the local mexican. Very good food and cheap. Got to chat with the Sales Manager for Oz and also the Channel GM for Beehive. Back to the hotel by 9pom to revise for the presentation I would need to certify against.
Day 3 – Looked at the On demand and competition plus more roadmap details before each running through a certification pitch in addition to listening to the industry pitches. Very exhausting day but also very interesting. Finished around 6.30pm and headed to get quickly changed before heading to dinner. Journey to restaurant proved a challenge as the map and directions were wrong. Barry ended up ringing the boss and asking for directions, only in the US can you be at a retail park with a Cinema and the restuarant be a mile up the road on a retail park with the same Cinema chain
Dinner was at Jing an Asian fusion place and the food was excellent and so was the wine. The clientele were not from IT and this place seems to be a hangout for the beautiful people of Denver. Great starter and Kung Pao Chicken for main.
When finished 10 of us headed to a local steak house that has a smoking room and bar. We spent a couple of hours drinking after dinner goodies such as 20/30yr Port and par taking of the cuban cigar
Day 4 – Final day so finished with sesisons on case studies, Channel/alliances and then a test. Wow my writing was v bad Finished by lunchtime so headed to the airport with Brian, Richard and Rob. Checked in and upgraded again to economy plus for those extra inches of leg room.
Managed to grab LCJ a pressie and boarded a very full flight to Washington for our connection. Landed early in Dulles and the wait was very short only an hour before we were on the way home. Watched UP again plus started Harry Potter but fell asleep for a couple of hours.
Landed early again at LHR, so this is a first 4 out 4 flights landed early, must be the Oracle magic. Beat CJ & LCJ to the arrivals but very very glad to be home and to see my family.
BTW – this is officially the first time I have been to the US where I havent done any shopping, surely thats a crime
Just come back from a week in Denver Colorado where I attended an internal training course related to the next version of Beehive. The course was an excellent chance to meet the rest of the team that we have spread around the world including Sydney, Beijing, Reading, Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, Columbus, San Fran, SoCal etc etc.
I flew into Denver via Chicago on Sunday 8th from LHR on United and to be honest I wasn’t expecting much, but the flights were very pleasant especially as I upgraded to economy plus that gave me the extra room. A great help even if I am short Both the transatlantic and US flights arrived early and security at Chicago was a breeze taking only 25mins from touchdown to being on the train to the next terminal.
On the flight over I watch UP and enjoyed it very much. The film has a bit of curve ball in the beginning, not what I was expecting, but very funny in places. The weather on arrival to Chicago was a bit of a shock with 19C and sunny but much appreciated.We grab a couple of beers at the bar by the gate before grabbing some food and heading to the plane. Richard managed to drop his sandwich which was most amusing
The second leg from Chicago was good and manage to watch BBC episode of Yellowstone whilst listening to music and eating. The main fact I remember from the program was reintroducing the Wolf increase the numbers of Beavers. Google it if u want more info.
Finally arrived at Denver around 5pm local time, about 2am UK time not too tired, but then waited about 45mins while the bags were sorted. It seems that some idiot decided to mix connecting bags with normal and left them on the ramp 
Got a cab to the Hilton in tech center and did a quick unpack and shower before heading down to meet Richard for a quick beer and dinner.
Shane arived around 9pm and we also bumped into Kirk & Jim. Had steak, well had to be done then retired for the night.. Slept through till about 5am and then got up at 6am got dressed and headed to Breakfast.
So I promised to show more Oracle Beehive stuff in my blog and finally got round to covering some of the aspects of Outlook integration for Beehive. Lets start with the basics here we have a connector that allows the Outlook user to access their normal PIM components including email, calendar, contacts and tasks. Now this is pretty standard functionality in this day and age, but to show you some of the neat features here are some screen shots:
So first here is my inbox, note this is not an MS Exchange Inbox it is an Oracle Beehive Inbox. But this is a familar interface for many business users today.
With the sidebar in Outlook we can expose the personal and team workspaces that a user is a member of. The user will need to select those workspaces they want to interact with using Outlook.
The integration of the workspaces provides the ability to drag and drop emails from the users mail file into the inbox of a workspace. This provide the users of a workspace access to all relevant pieces of email content related to this activity, project, programme or team. This ensures as team member come and go from a project the core data is always available to use and review.
In addition to the inbox capability you can drag emails into other folders but these would not be available within the Zimbra Web Email client.
The workspaces provide folders for documents, pictures or any type of content which a use may wish to store in the documents workspace. The outlook client by default provides the ability to preview a number of attachment types including office documents and PDFs without the need to open the document with the local application.
From a folder within the workspace I can double click an Office document and launch the relevant application to review and edit the content and then save back into the workspace with my revisions.
Here is an example of viewing a bitmap from within the workspace folder…
Now you can see my calendar entries within Outlook including my selected workspace calendars. This shows them in overlay view so I can see the appointments from the selected source overlaid on my personal calendar. If I am invited to an event on a workspace calendar I get an appointment available to added to my personal calendar. This is very useful when using my blackberry or iPhone to view my perosnal calendar.
This shows the side by side calendar view in Outlook. You do also have the option to create multiple calendars within a team workspace so that you can manage different events on different calendars without the need to create a separate workspace.
Here we have moved onto the Contacts within Outlook, first here are my personal contacts
Now we have opened a workspace contacts list related to one of the team workspaces:
This is the tasks list show my personal tasks.
Again we display the workspace tasks.
Thats the very quick tour of MS Outlook using Oracle Beehive. In the near future I will do an article on somemore of Oracle Beehives capabilities.
Its about time I introduced some of the Oracle Beehive capabilities in my blog. The content I am showing is part 1 of a series that I have produced based on some of the key capabilities without you needing to download and install the product.
Let start with some key facts about Oracle Beehive, firstly it is one product, a set of services aware of each other with a central data store based in the industry strength Oracle database.
So we provide the following key capabilities:
- Enterprise Messaging
- Team Collaboration
- Synchronous Collaboration
- Collaboration Platform
The above is the high level capabiliies but these can be further broken down into a number of key services that include the following:
- email
- instant messaging
- presence
- web conferencing
- team workspaces
- team calendar
- announcements and discussions
- tasks
- RSS feeds
- API & Web Services
A key aspect of Beehive is the availability of a number of client options for our customers to leverage including Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, Workspaces Client, IM Clients (XMPP), Apple Mail, iChat and Zimbra Web Client.
So now the intro is over here is a quick tour of the Workspaces Client available in v1.5 of the product. The following is the workspaces list that you belong to, so any workspace you are a member of will be displayed in this view. You can see that there are navigation options for the other clients, your workspaces, home and then on to favourites and recent activity.
All Beehive workspaces
The following screen is the favourite view of your workspaces.
Favourite Workspaces
This screen shows the recent activity within all of your workspaces, and this view is available at the workspace level.
Recent Activity
The final screen shows the overview page of a workspace which illustrates the announcements, team calendar, participants, shortcuts, recent activity and links for the documents and wiki components of the workspace plus the trash
Workspace Overview
In the next part we will drill deeper into the workspaces before moving onto some of the other clients.
So 45 days have passed since starting the new role, so its 45 elapsed days and only 26 working days due to weekends, holiday and bank holidays. Having a blast so far with learning loads of new products not just Beehive, but lots of familiar concepts and architectures due to JEE. Have spent some time build and demoing the product whilst learning on the job in terms of the capabilities of Beehive.
Looking forward to the start of the new quarter which looks like it will be very busy with lots of interesting leads coming in now for the product. Likely to be a trip to Netherlands soon and then we shall see where else I need to go. One thing I have noticed that I have been so busy that my blog and twitter entries have tailed off a lot, but hopefully I will address that soon.
It is good to see that Mac’s have been embraced by the Oracle population as a business tool although its not standard issue. As with other companies it is creeping in as an alternative. Wondering if I should try the Linux desktop at some stage but this will need me to run a VMWare client image for some demos especially the Outlook integration. Nice to see a large number of iPhone in use and the option to use either IMAP or push IMAP service on it. Enjoying using the Blackberry 8900 as a busy device especially with its huge battery life. I will see what Apple do with the WWDC event in a week or so with the iPhone, might be worth upgrading if battery life is better.
I have loads of training materials to get through over the next month and need to look at what other training materials I want to do in the coming year. My training schedule has been something like this:
- Induction to Oracle
- Product and Development Training on Beehive
- Sales Training
- Red Stack Training (Beehive related products only)
Look at development tools as well to gain an understanding of the art of the possible going forward. Other areas will be related to portals and other E2.0 products including ECM, RM and IRM.
I will post a similar update in a month or two….
Headed into TVP Oracle site in Reading this morning to meet up with my new team for Beehive. Started with breakfast, followed by a general discussion with Dickie on Beehive and activities in the first weeks. The office is nice and am hot desking which is very familiar scenario after all my time at IBM.
Spent the morning looking at information and documentation on Beehive and now waiting for the Lenovo to deliver my new laptop which is due on Friday.
In the afternoon looked at some more background information and some presales materials. This was followed by meeting one of the account team to discuss the On Demand option for a customer followed by a whiteboarding session to help create a session abstract for OpenWorld for the development team.
Looking forward to the coming days and hopefully being completely online.
OK after nearly twelve years at IBM I am moving on to a role at as part of the Oracle Global Sales Unit for Beehive. Obviously this was a difficult decision for me to make after such a long time with IBM within the Lotus Brand. Currently the product set that Lotus has in the market is excellent and covers many aspects of Portal and Collaboration. Although the products are good it was time for a new challenge and one that would allow me to stretch myself and to be part of something that is new and exciting especially with Oracle.
Beehive is the new offering for Collaboration that will replace Oracle Collaboration Suite which frankly had a bad press. I will be a Principal Sales Consultant working in the EMEA region with the Sales teams and the customers. This will start with me being part of a very small team worldwide to grow the business and who know what will happen next.
The most interesting aspect of this new role so far is the recruiting process that I have been through that was a very different experience from my previous job moves. I first became aware of Oracle’s product Beehive and the requirement to recruit a new team came in the form of an email via my LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/scoot
The email was at first ignored and then after a week or so I thought why not ask for some more information on this one this was back in the first week or so of December 2008. I dropped the Oracle HR person an email to ask for more information that was promptly responded to within less than a day. The response gave me some brief details plus a job description but that was about it. At this point I would like to highlight that Social Networking has proven that electronic interaction does work.
I read the short job description plus the background detail on the product Beehive and thought actually there is something in this, but I cannot put my finger on it at this stage. So upon the request of the HR contact I sent through a CV that I had been working on updating with my Technical Sales role activities for 2008. A day later I was contact be another HR consultant at Oracle that was interested in having a brief chat to discuss the role and my skills and experience. This was duly arrange and a call took about 90 minutes on a dark December Friday afternoon. On completion of the call the consultant Brigitte asked me if I was willing to have a phone interview with one of the VPs in the US who were involved in the hiring. The answer was yes and I thought long and hard about what it could mean going forward and what did I have to lose by having further discussions.
Then followed a period of time in which I had regular contact with the HR consultant on how things were being progressed and apologies for the delay in arranging the follow-on meeting. Finally post Christmas and New Year I had a call with the VP to understand if both parties were on the same page and that I had the sort of skills and personality for the role. As it turned out there were actually two different roles one with a pre-sales and the other post-sales focus. After the discussion it was clear that I had the skills for both roles with my background in Technical Sales, Services, Early Programme Management and internal Systems.
The next step was to have two further telephone interviews with someone from the development team and someone for the consultants group. These were arranged very quickly and both went well and answered a lot of questions that I had and also Oracle need to know. The next stage was to have a further interview with the head of the team. This was arranged for a Friday evening and the discussion went very well especially since I had met the person when they were in fact employed by IBM Lotus in Europe. This was bizarre to be interviewed by someone that I had met about 9 years previous when I provided support to our eastern european offices. Again this went well and I was informed that I would have a technical interview in the next week or so. At this stage I was packing for my trip to Lotusphere and wondered whether this was going to happen. I had also managed to find out from the VP that Oracle had an Architect (ex-Lotus) attending Lotusphere so were given her details to arrange a catch-up to really understand what working for Oracle is like.
So off I went to Orlando to see what we intended to do over the coming year in the products from Lotus and hopefully meet up for a drink and a chat with the Oracle Architect. On the Tuesday evening I met the Architect Barb and had a really good chat about Lotus and Oracle and how it was a fab place to work. I was now thinking hey this is sounding better all the time. It definitely wasn’t a walk in the park, but had a real set of challenges for me to tackle. Later in the week I was contacted by the hiring manager and discussed my skills and experience and filled in the blanks about the technical aspects. After this call which was the sixth call and didn’t include the quick beer at Lotusphere I was told that they would be making their decision in the next 5-7days.
A week after returning from Lotusphere I was called and verbally offered a position at Oracle subject to their standard vetting process and management approval. At this point it was decision time or would be in a couple weeks as the process to vet and approve takes about two weeks. I completed a vetting questionnaire and passed to the vetting agency to process and report back to Oracle.
After about three or so weeks the process was finally completed with the management team approving the hire, apparently part of the process given the investment being made in the current economic times.
So this was now crunch time with regards to taking the plunge. I had received the paperwork over the weekend of the 7th March and ironically in the same post was a letter from the Software Group VP at IBM congratulating me on my successful 2008. So as I had the Monday off and was out at the Science Museum with the family for CJs birthday had to text my manager and try and get a meeting arranged. Managed to arrange time for a quick chat on the Tuesday lunchtime to discuss my position. The chat went OK and my manager had thought something was on the cards. We agreed to touch base on Friday at the pre arranged face to face in London, where things could be finalised.
The following day I was called by my manager confirming what IBM could do to try and tempt me to remain in my current role. In reality this was limited by a set of processes and very much based on guesswork as nothing could actually be confirmed at this time. With this update I decided that it would be best for my career development, a fresh challenge and improvements in my package that to get the formal resignation to my manager. We arrange to meet on Thursday lunchtime to compete the process which included handing back all of my IBM property
So after spending Wednesday at UC09 at Olympia talking all things Sametime I sorted out my kit bag of IT, Comms and gadgets and packed it up ready to take into South Bank for my lunchtime appointment. It was very weird on Thursday driving into the office ready to hand over my stuff and complete my resignation. It was good to meet up with Spradders and Malcolm and grab some lunch before finally leaving an IBM building for the last time as an employee. The upside to this process is the fact that I have been put on a months gardening leave so now have the task of sorting out how best to use my time.
What makes a network social? I suppose the first part is people, the second is interaction and third is collaboration. If I take a look at my various networks all are social in some shape or form, so doesn’t that mean all people networks are social. Point open for discussion no doubt and I think I wanted to puts some comments down on some of my experiences over the years with my various networks.
If I look today I have a number of electronic tools that help me connect to my networks, theses include internal works only sites and external public sites. So what do I use, lets take a look:
Work Intranet – We have components of the intranet that have now been productised (is there such a word) into Lotus Connections and with more to come as the product evolves. Basically I have a number of different sites within IBM that allow me to build networks and connections between colleagues regardless of where they are. Today I can use Lotus Connections, Bluepages+1 and Project Beehive (Internal Project not to be confused with Oracle Beehive).
Another tool is Lotus Connections.
What these two tool allow me to do is build my internal networks, neither is externalised so only IBMers in these networks, which works well in a lot of circumstances, but in the real world I need that mix of both internal and external, which I can get via the Lotus Greenhouse project (greenhouse.lotus.com), but this means having my details populated in another place, so that would be 4 in total with Beehive, Connections, Fringe and Greenhouse. This is just pushing the boundary to far in terms of maintenance. Basically with any social networking tool the ability to use and maintain is key so having multiple tools we need to have update once write multiple times.
Thats internal covered what about external, well to be honest I have three tools that I use regularly. They are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. All of these have the notion of networks and the ability to be friends with people. With the concept of Twitter we have a different spin to that of Facebook and Linked as I can easily follow someone without the person necessarily knowing me. What this does mean is I can get information from maybe influential or for interest perspective. With the other two sites it is a notion of a friend on Facebook or colleague on LinkedIn. There is the need for someone to accept your friendship unlike twitter which you would need to block people to stop unwanted people following you.
So what do I use these sites for? Facebook is a way to interact with both friends and colleagues but more on a social level rather than professional level and I have friend and family as well as colleagues on the site from all walks of life and age ranges.
With LinkedIn I only use this for professional contacts with fewer updates. I have used on a number of occasions recently when ensuring I have links to some of my colleagues in the US who may be moving on. I will write more on my experiences of LinkedIn in the next week or two.
So I have babbled on for a while about networking and have decided that all of these tools are social in some shape or form and that each has its uses. The one thing I love and also hate is the fact I link my twitter updates (tweets) to Facebook , but sometime the tweets are lost on a lot of my facebook friends, really need a method to tell twitter not to always update facebook.
Well I will write more on this subject as time passes..
Today up at 6ish dressed and email checked off to get breakie meeting up with Karen and Rob. I bumped into Brian Campbell and Dan Kikuchi and chatted about our time working on the Portal 6.0 beta programmes and how the economy is in both the US and UK.
After breakfast off to INV105 Glimpsing the Future: Report from IBM Research & The Center for Social Software with Brendan Buckingham. Irene Greif and team went through the what research are doing in the Social Software space. This session was an excellent insight into some of the project on going within IBM especially the Social Accessibility tools demo’d by the team from Tokyo Labs. The tool was an excellent example of social networking and the crowdsourcing of getting content accessible.
The other neat research project explained was related to travel and this was entitled Sojourn/ Voyager The tool will basically allows you to interact with fellow travelers and start to manage trips, with co-workers to allow you to benefit from sharing cars/taxi and meeting for dinner etc. The tool will also allow you to to see recommendations on things like hotels and airlines similar to content that is available in tripadvisor.
Coffee with Brendan Tutt checked in at home and then went to AD401 IBM Lotus Connections Customizations with Karl Brooks and Mike Roach. The session looked at CSS customisations, header and footers and finally widgets.
INV101R From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration, Productivity, and Adoption in the Enterprise. Reckling and Kogan providing more information on Web 2.0 to E2.0. Lots of references to books on mass collaboration including Clay Shirky Here comes everybody. Walked through three scenarios on using E2.0 in business.
AD405 Are you REALLY taking advantage of an integrated Lotus Collaboration experience – Thomas Schaeck and Derek Carr gave an informative overview of the services available to consume and produce with REST APIs within the Lotus product suite including demos of Quickr, Connections integration with Portal with improvements coming with an iWidget for Quickr libraries
Caught up with Jon and had a look around the showcase, store and bookshop. Spoke with MainSoft team on MOSS and WSS integration with Lotus products.
ID217 IBM Lotus iNotes for the Apple iPhone and iPod with Will Williams and Eric Portner with some really good demo on a simulator for the iPhone. I have used the Lotus Greenhouse Ultralite mode in iNotes (see greenhouse.lotus.com to get access to the service). It is really good and we are waiting for access to the internal pilot for this service at IBM.
