MR: Challenges hierarchical systems, business systems could break down private information shared.  dangers regulatory meltdowns on sharing regulated

upside is the transformaitonal power that could be pheonominal. seeing beginnings inside .  global consulting business talent pool.  find and leverage experiece is the competitive : The virtual worlds phenomenon is experimental but interesting.  Innovate, a game on how to do IT training in a game mentality was cool.  Get to certification by playing levels in the gaming, which appeals to the gaming generation. That’ a close system, but with multiuser and immersive experiences it can get somewhere.  Research that Tivoli did around virtual datacenter visualization was very interesting.

I asked what is the most disruptive thing he has seen that he needs to, perhaps through this audience, get you people to pay attention to?

Social Software (I’ll link to someone else’s notes)

IBM Research is a great place for me to go shopping.  Bluehouse’s live charting and Cattail file sharing came out of IBM Research quicker than before.

People are running from Domino and Exchange to Gmail, wdyt?

In September we announced hosted Notes.  Logical thing.  Domino access light is a good first step.  From an SMB standpoint with Foundaiton, consistent UI, opaque if it is hosted or appliance to the user.  More interest from different walks of business around Foundations today, a non-profit in Africa for example.  We see it, recognize it, but we have a long way to go.  Dont have to go on an 18 month lifecycle, doing it Agile with 4 week iterations.  Symphony is on 6 week iterations.  First question it the press conference was how did you get your team to do it so fast, a great start to talking about it.

Rob Novak: dependencies on Active X and others?

We’d love to work those out.

Rich Schwartz: Love the SMB initatives, they look real, but how can you solve the key problem — every month in my mailbox I get flyers from local organizations offering MS and Cisco courses, but never from IBM.  What is going to be done about certification for small to midsize markets?

Not going to pre-announce something, but certification should be very high on my priority list.

In my day job I work for a large company (Colgate) and working on winning over the Microsoft camp.  How are you going to overcome the toolbar for Outlook that you see on every popular SNS?

Started working on it, needs to be done.  When you have a new product like connections, they (YASNS) are trying to figure out if they are friend or foe, but we are working it through.

A Scot asks, Lotusphere always has somebody fameous speaking, what happened this year?

Room laughs.  I thought Bob Costas was fantastic.

Microsoft?

The last thing Microsoft expected us to do is launch Symphony and at such a rapid release rate.  Microsoft is still running around saying they’ve got blogs.  Now they are renaming things.  They can’t compete with what we have got in social software.  In addition to the client and catalog on Mashups is the app dev environment.  30% of Sametime deployments in Exchange shops. 

Traditionally when they attack somebody they don’t expect people to defend and fight back.  It wasn’t expected that we would have this level of investment in the brand.  The development organization is the biggest its been, across 11 countries.

Bruce: Lets talk about the Notes franchise.  Notes client has a lot of value, but how can we expand the out of the box value?

You saw the new templates in the Web 2.0 style.

Alexander Kluge: As a business partner, with Bluehouse, I am interested in what is in it for us.

Only started to show you the beginning of Bluehouse.  Positioned with Foundations for a reason. Extensions to Foundations, taking content and putting it in a marketplace, but we haven’t talked about how it is a loosely coupled environment to allow you to integrate what you are good at into the environment.

Don’t know the business model and margins yet, will run experiments.  What is right for clients, partners and ecosystems is unclear because of a radical shift in the value chain.  All I know is the ad model eventually runs out of gas because there is a fixed amount of advertising in the world.

Warren Elsemore: Foundations seems to be competitive against Small Business Server, its a different bunch of people that who you are used to selling to.

When you open a new front in a battle you ensure your supplie lines and amunition are well stocked and you don’t telegraph your locations.  We see some interesting new channel models that we are doing through acquisitions.  When you acquire companies that are serving SMBs you need to listen them and expand the role that their channel partners play.  Also some non traditional ecosystem lays in surrounding areas.  Playing to win, agressive on cost, reveal TCOs.  Easy to give it away when you charge $400 per copy of Office.

Bright yellow hair: last year was wisdom of crowds, this year it is emergence, how do you see lotus leveraging the social aspect that surrounds you?

Remember when we had Connections up last year and took it down after the conference?  Our business partner community went non-linear, but had some concerns.  24 people from Redmond here.  But we put it back up. Encourage everyone to join the Greenhouse.

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IBM Plays Symphony, One-Ups Microsoft

IBM Lotus executive Ed Brill noted how the Symphony name is a classic one, and using it for this new offering is "a very strong label for describing the current and future intent from IBM Lotus around these editors."

The Lotus Symphony tools for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations form the suite. It is freely available for Microsoft and Linux platforms, with Apple support planned for an undetermined future release.

Symphony can handle the typical Microsoft formats seen in millions of documents. It supports exporting documents as PDF files. Also, Symphony opens documents created in the Open Document Format found in OpenOffice and StarOffice.

Brill also said the Symphony debut "demonstrates the strength of IBM’s commitment behind desktop alternatives (Linux, ODF, etc) to the broader market — which should help with all distributions of OpenOffice.org-based editor tools, today and tomorrow."

For techies whose experience in IT doesn’t date back to the age of the dinosaurs, like ENIAC, Wikipedia can get you up to speed on the history of the Symphony name.

There is a big difference between the social networking software people use to discuss their lives on the Internet, and the products Lotus announced on the first day of its Lotusphere conference. Security has been on the minds of developers as they prepped new Lotus products for debut.

In typical social networking, security flaws can be a nuisance at best. For an industry under federal observation, like health care or finance, regulations determine what can and cannot be exposed. Retention policies for communication have to be in place; no investment firm wants to have to explain to the SEC why a broker was able to give out insider information without leaving an audit trail.

For most people, information is a means to accomplishing their tasks at work, and the audit trails should be someone else’s problem. Lotus wants to solve that, and with their latest disclosures at the Orlando conference they think they have the necessary tools.

Lotus Connections contains all the software a typical social networking user would recognize, but built for businesses instead. Connections users would have the same solutions available – networking, profiles, bookmarking, blogging – but with the add layers of protection provided by the corporate network.

Another new product, Quickr, provides a number of collaboration assets, like content libraries, team blogging, and wikis. Lotus has created Quickr as an open solution; it can be connected in enterprises where Microsoft Office is the reigning king just as it can be with Lotus.

IBM and Lotus invoked the Web 2.0 meme with Quickr, from the dropped ‘e’ in the product’s name to the use of Ajax for dynamic page content, to touting its openness and connectivity to Microsoft Office or Lotus userbases.

They also discussed Websphere Portal Express, a product aimed at the small- to medium-sized markets. With it, a business can set up an intranet site or Internet presence with this out of the box service.

Michael Rhodin, general manager, IBM Lotus, said at the conference that Lotus is thriving in the marketplace. “The business is very healthy,” he said. The Websphere portal and Domino are the company’s biggest products today. That’s no small accomplishment given Microsoft’s dominance on the global desktop.

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I’d wholeheartedly agree. I’d like to add “or within the open source group of a traditional software company”. (Yeah, Matt’s advice is snappier).

Here’s why I suggest the addition:

Take a look at this job posting for Director of Product Marketing at SocialText which I found on Roberto Galoppini’s blog. The only requirement which appears to be a skill that you’ll build more easily at an open source pure-play than a traditional software vendor is “Holistic understanding of commercial open source software“. If you’re in a division at IBM, Oracle or Sun that is leveraging the value of open source, you’ll get this experience. It doesn’t hurt to play with open source on evenings or weekends.

Next, the following comment from Elias Torres. Elias is an IBMer (whom I’ve never met, but know of because I use his Firefox extension) who worked on Lotus Ventura. Elias is an IBMer working on the Apache Roller open source project and on the team using Roller within Ventura (a commercial IBM product). His experience balancing the needs of the community with the needs of his employer are going to be a valuable asset for Elias I’m sure.

“This is my first IBM product experience and it has been a very positive one so far, but we can talk about that later. The experience of taking something built by the community and making it a product has been incredibly rewarding but brings with it a great sense of responsibility. We are very serious about Roller and are committed to giving back as much as we can.”

Lastly, I can speak from personal experience with trying to get a product (WAS Community Edition, aka WAS CE) based on open source technology (Apache Geronimo) out the door at IBM.

Being the WAS CE product manager was the best job I’ve had at IBM. Even though IBM had a lot of experience with open source at the time, a lot of what we did with WAS CE was new territory. Using an open source business model of paid support around a free product was completely new. To say we had some internal angst from other groups at IBM would be an understatement. But the angst wasn’t because we were trying an open source business model. It was because we were doing something that wasn’t business as usual. We got through these challenges with some help from executives that gorked the value of WAS CE to the WebSphere portfolio.

The many meetings to explain what we’re doing and how it fits with a given IBM product’s plans also helped. There was, and remains, plenty of day-to-day work to ensure we did/do the right things in the Geronimo community, for WAS CE customers/partners and for our broader WebSphere & IBM customers/partners. Did we make some tradeoffs to balance all three interests? Definitely. Did we usually pick the business as usual route? Nope. Did knowing the business as usual route help? Absolutely. Was it easy? Nope. Was it fun? Heck ya!

I believe that the open source business model will continue to find a home inside more and more traditional software vendors. As this occurs, folks who have experience with open source software and traditional software are going to be very valuable. Folks that can walk the delicate tightrope between the ideologies of both camps will be even more indispensable.

Yes, I know that sounds like a self serving statement

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

“We didn’t want to go dark in the market,” explained Ed Brill, the Business Unit Executive for Worldwide Lotus Messaging Sales at IBM, during a chat on Monday. Since they had a slew of features ready to go, and so much attention being paid to the productivity space this week, IBM decided to release the latest version of Lotus Notes/Domino.

We talked about three specific aspects of 7.0.2 that Notes users should appreciate. The first one is the ability to place Notes on a 512MB USB stick or other storage device like an iPod, and take it along on trips. This allows the person to take a personalized Notes environment and plug it into any USB-compatible PC.

Once deployed on that machine, the user has a replica of the usual Notes workplace ready to use. Users can download a utility to create the installation, and place that on the portable storage device.

Although the second notable feature, blogging with Notes/Domino, has been part of Lotus for the past three years, Brill noted how the application IBM acquired to provide this functionality has been updated to meet IBM’s standards.

This takes the form of an out of the box template for Notes, where users can design and create blogs. Entries can be created offline, and when the user next connects to Domino, new and updated entries will be updated to the blog automatically.

The third new feature of mention brings the ability to publish RSS out of Lotus. I asked if this would be more likely used internally within an enterprise or externally, and Brill felt it is mostly meant to be internal. “It’s a great way to be alerted to changes,” Brill said of syndicating content this way.

Additional features like SAP integration and iCalendar compatibility offer improved methods of working with other processes and people in the enterprise.

Plenty of focus on productivity suites and portability has been generated this week with the opening of the Office 2.0 conference, the rebranding of Writely as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and the efforts of companies like Zoho and ThinkFree to create desktop-less office applications. The portability option for Notes now adds to this mix.

Brill highlighted a number of the features coming out in the latest update on his blog. That and his running battle with a blogger named Rod Boothby over Lotus Notes makes for some interesting reading today.

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And just in time for Lotusphere 2006 in Orlando, too. How thoughtful of Microsoft.

Just in case anyone forgot the competitive nature of the tech industry, Microsoft’s statement announcing their utilities to help migrate firms using Lotus Notes/Domino arrived in inboxes just a few days ahead of Lotusphere’s opening in Orlando. Microsoft listed those tools in its statement:

Microsoft holds a dominant position in productivity and messaging in big businesses; the efforts being made here to bring in even more companies underscores Microsoft’s desire to widen its revenue stream and possibly nudge a moribund stock price that has been essentially flat for a few years.

Upgrading delays by existing customers presents an ongoing concern for Microsoft, as it aims to launch new versions of Office and Windows in 2006. If current businesses using either Windows or Office choose not to upgrade for a period of time, Microsoft suffers a loss of revenue.

An influx of new corporate users, preferably at the expense of a longtime rival, helps the Microsoft bottom line, and can enhance its perceived value on Wall Street. With that, the company could finally begin moving its stock price upward from its present range. That would make people from Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates on down to its staffers much happier, not to mention investors.

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Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM’s answer to Microsoft’s Office and Exchange offerings, have been updated. IBM notes in a press release how Notes 7 has more than 100 new features to help users.

IBM mentions new memory functions present in Notes. If a systems shuts down and restarts, open applications and documents will be preserved. Microsoft recently touted this as an upcoming feature called Freeze Dry in Windows Vista. It looks like IBM is already there.

On the Domino side, IBM has included a design element that allows it to function as a web services host. Domino applications can be extended to the web, using “open, standards-based Web services,” which would mean open source. IBM has been a booster of open source projects for some time.

Notes 7 will run on Windows 2000 or XP; Mac support for future versions has been promised. Domino runs on Windows 2000 or 2003 servers, as well as versions of Linux, AIX, IBM’s zOS, and Solaris 9. Support for the now open source Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 will be forthcoming.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Microsoft CRM has a connector to Microsoft Exchange to send and receive email from Microsoft CRM lead, opportunity, account, and contact. There is a competitor email server: Lotus Domino. Some large and middle size customers, who decided to use Microsoft CRM – want to use Lotus Domino as their e-mail server. In this small article we would like to give you top level technical overview.

When emails are received in Lotus Domino, a trigger in Domino should check if email has a GUID in the header and, if so, should check on the object in MS CRM with this GUID. If the object is found in MS CRM, email activity should be created in CRM and be attached to the object.

The incoming message is processed before delivery by a Java Agent registered on incoming mail boxes (Inbox folder) and sent mail (Sent folder).

The Purpose of the Java Agent is to transfer a kernel of communications to MS CRM (the information in the received messages such as addressees, recipients, bodies of messages etc).

For incoming messages, it is necessary to transfer the necessary message RFC-headings for an analysis by the Java Agent. The analysis consists of checking the Subject heading (CRM: {GUID}:MRC).

For outgoing messages, the agent should modify the heading Subject by adding a similar line at the end of the existing data. In this case, the Outgoing Message Connector will carry out message transfers from MS CRM to Lotus Notes/Domino

The Java agent carries out the communications with Web Services Front-end by means of asynchronous calls to a web-service. This will prevent a big number of blocking methods when processing messages and it will also allow reducing the load on the Lotus Domino Server

The Web Services Front end accepts the information and transfers it to a COM + Back end. The COM + Back end is composed of objects which carry out the communications with MS CRM using MS CRM SDK and direct access to MS CRM database

The COM+ Back end consists of objects written in .NET C#. These objects contain methods for searching users in MS CRM, creation of Email Activity and queue updates, among others.

Boris Makushkin is senior software developer in Alba Spectrum Technologies US nation-wide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, based in Chicago and having locations in multiple states and internationally (www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Unix, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports, Microsoft CRM SDK and Exchange Server SDK developer. You can reach Boris: borism@albaspectrum.com

Instead, the titles will be renamed under the larger IBM certification program. The change is part of a move toward brand consistency and the company’s previously announced effort to organize its software certifications around specific job roles, the company said.

Click below to read this article at the CertCities.com website:

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The publishers of Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine Online welcome you to CertCities.com, an online magazine for the certified IT professional community. Covering over 80 IT certifications, our mission is to provide the best independent editorial on the Web, featuring news and insights for every step of certification process. We also provide general IT technology articles and a community environment where certified professionals can interact.