The Week Enterprise 2.0 Became Reality
What an amazing week!
Web 2.0 Summit
The week included the Web 2.0 Summit. I crashed the event to talk with Jeff Nolan and also managed to have a fast conversation with Anil Dash. I also bumped into John Furrier.
Bumping into John reminded me to head over to PodTech. It had been a little while since I checked on their progress. I am going to make a point to stop by more often. What a great site.
My favorite two recent stories on the site include LunchMeet: Widgets Done Right with yourminis.com and The best demo at Web 2.0 Summit: Microsoft’s Photosynth.
Yourminis.com is really powerful widget dashboard and a beautiful example of what can be done in Flash. Michael Arrington has a good article about YourMinis on TechCrunch. Photosynth is just cool technology. Front a bunch of 2D photographs, it implies a 3D space, and then uses that space to display your photos. Right now, it looks like a consumer product.
Watching these videos, I was struck by how powerful and persuasive a simple interview can be. Scobble was right when he said that when business issues get tricky, video is a better way to communicate with your customers. At least better than just text in the form of a blog. People can see your body language and here the pitch and tone of your voice.
Suite Two
The week kicked off with the announcement of Suite Two.
Suite Two is sponsored by Intel Capital. Suite Two is a blade server that has several key components of Web Office / Office 2.0 installed, including a blogging server, a wiki and a news reader. In this specific case, the package includes MovableType, SocialText, NewsGator, SimpleFeed and the folks at Spike Source are supposed to provide support. Josh Bancroft has a good post about it entitled Intel’s “SuiteTwo” Web 2.0 play - the Good, Bad, and Ugly
All I have seen is the press release, so I have no idea if the product is good, but the idea is fantastic.
Together, these kinds of technologies represent the next generation in knowledge worker productivity tools. Having written about this for over a year now, it is great to see the beginnings of that combined reality starting to finally hit the market.
IBM QED Wiki
First, just watch the video:
The video may be kind of cheesie, but damn, the technology is a cool concept. Basically, the idea is to try an make building a real web based application as easy a building a spreadsheet. Instead of cells with numbers and formulas, end users get a wiki page with widgets that can be plugged together to make a new application.
A while ago, I wrote about The Next Xerox PARC … Maybe. I was talking about some of the brilliant technology inventions going on at IBM. Today, I realize the irony in the comparison with Xerox PARC. For those not familiar with geek history, the folks at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center invented the first personal computer, with a graphical user interface, a mouse, and a word processor. The did this all in the early 1970s. They then flew to NYC, talked to their head office and said “We have invented the electronic office of the future”. The idiots at head office said “We’re a paper company, and this would get rid of paper”. So eventually, they showed it all to Steve Jobs, who made the Mac, which Microsoft copied, and the rest is history. The problem with QEDWiki is that it could easily face the same harsh treatment from an anti innovation old guard.
The internal political pressure within IBM, coming from both the Lotus Notes crowd and consultants and aimed squarely against Rod Smith and the QEDWiki team must be amazing.
In earlier posts, I suggested that new technology will make it both easy and simple to move off Lotus Notes. In one comment, Bill Buchan said this:
I can think of two very large customers that have exceeded 100,000 lines of code in at least one of their notes applications. One in Lotusscript (and is purely notes client-only), and one in a combination of Lotusscript, Java and Javascript for web-based clients.
I find it interesting that Bill believes that a great application is one with many lines of code.
Update My apologies to Bill. I over simplified what he said. In a comment below, Bill explains further:
I mentioned the number of lines of code in these applications to illustrate that these are complex, business applications. Things you dont screen-scrape like some brochureware piece of IIS code.
My buddies in the Ruby on Rails community believe that elegant, maintainable systems mean less code, not more. If it isn’t clear to you why you would want fewer lines of code, read this article by Joel Spolsky entitled Oh, the emails you’ll get..
Updated Simple Recipe to Get Off Lotus Notes
- Screen scrape all static content. You could use some Notes APIs, but why bother finding someone who learnt Notes back when it came out in 1984?
- Have end users rebuild all your Notes based applications using QED Wiki, or something similar, such as Teqlo.
Step one might be even easier if your Notes team has set up standard compliant feeds, such as RSS or ATOM for your static content. With a system such as iUpload, Blogtronix, Suite Two or Atlassian’s Confluence, it is a small coding exercise to bring your existing content into a new system.
For more detailed background on QEDWiki, check out Dion Hinchcliff’s article entitled Web 2.0 Summit: IBM evolves vision of SOA and Web 2.0
Web 2.0 University
Dion Hinchcliffe and his firm, Hinchcliffe and Company and O’Reilly Media have teamed up to produce something they are calling Web 2.0 University.
Dion is one of the most brilliant minds I know. He understands the space in very powerful and interesting way. There are two types of people who should attend Web 2.0 University.
- The top 10 to 15 people from the IT departments in any fortune 1000 company. If you want to compete, if you want to be prepared for the major changes that the “MySpace/SalesForce” generation of technology is going to have on how you hire, how you work and how you and your competitors are going to interact with your customers, then Web 2.0 University is going to worth your time.
- The 30 to 70% of IT execs who do not “get it” yet. While Ray Ozzie is saying “Ozzie: Vista, Office must adapt to Web era“, there are plenty of old school, head in the sand vendors, such as IBM’s Lotus Notes team, who are still focusing all their efforts on a thick clients (Hanover) and closed systems.
And then IBM goes and spoils the video by pointing to a geeky URL. Disappointing.
Rod, thanks for the info on QEDWiki, I hadn’t caught that on developerWorks yet (probably because it doesn’t have its own page).
I do wish you’d stop attacking the Notes community. I resent the repeated implications that we’re all clueless and don’t “get it”. You took Bill’s comments about your previous screen scraping suggestion out of context and used them here in an attempt to bolster your notion that we don’t embrace Web 2.0. The paragraph following the one you cherry picked shows his true intent:
“Are you seriously *still* trying to assert that a simple screen scraper approach could even begin to replace the business logic inherent in these monster applications ? I think not.”
You’re not helping your argument when you take comments out of context and misrepresent them. He never said he felt that 100K lines made a great application, he was pointing out you made no concessions for the complexity built into many applications. End don’t know or care how much code is behind the scenes, but it is not something that can be completely dismissed. You did that previously and you’re doing it again.
I think you’re the one who doesn’t get it and who isn’t learning from past mistakes. That’s all I have to say on this subject, but don’t be surprised if you get flayed alive… or simply written off.
There’s a saying I’ve heard going around: IBM Research doesn’t release products, but sometimes they managed to escape ;-)
“For those not familiar with geek history…” Notes wasn’t released in 1984. Right decade, though, so you do get partial credit.
And you wouldn’t need someone with 20 years of Notes experience to do a better job than your screen-scraping method. Yeah, I know you were being ironic, but Rod… you’re really missing the point here: the reason your screen-scraping suggestion is so far away from being useful at all is because you can do so much better without a lot of effort. Really! Even static data has metadata associated with it that won’t come across in screen-scraping and preserving it dramatically improves the value of the data. For about an order of magnitude improvement over screen-scraping, you’d need someone with about five minutes experience with Notes, the intelligence to know how to search the Notes help file for the word “export”, and a couple of hours to experiment. For another order of magnitude improvement, you’d need someone with a few weeks of experience with Notes and some experience programming with XML in other environments, just a hint of knowledge about the fact that Notes can produce XML, and a couple of days to experiment.
As for QEDWiki, it and many of the other tools that IBM has exhibited every year in the IBM Research lab at Lotusphere is great stuff. Far from dismissing these things as you assume we do, we in the Notes community are embracing them. We have a pretty decent history of doing that, you know. We embraced web technologies when IBM integrated them with Notes back in 1996. We embraced IM technologies when IBM integrated them with Notes. Unlike you, though, we don’t ask “how can this replace Notes?” We ask things like “how can this new technology enhance the investment tens of thousands of organizations have already made in Notes?”, and “how can these cool technologies work with the many terabytes of data that is already available in Notes databases?”
The really cool thing, IMHO, Rod, is that IBM has these really good technologies coming out of their labs and they have the ability to make them relevant to a customer base of more than 100 million. There’s huge business sense in that, and it makes even more sense when you realize that the Notes installed base includes a lot of customers who are truly committed (or think they are, anyhow) to collaboration. Sometimes IBM does need to be gently reminded of the importance of that, though. See my post about the debut of their Activity Explorer technology here: http://www.rhs.com/web/blog/poweroftheschwartz.nsf/plinks/RSCZ-68Z8FE
Wow - Mr Boothby - your a mind reader! You claim:
> I find it interesting that
> Bill believes that a great
> application is one with many
> lines of code.
Ahh. Perhaps not. Certainly not my mind.
Did I say that ? No. Do I believe it ? Quite the reverse.
I was trying to illustrate a point - which you still fail to grasp in an endearing “Forest Gump” fashion.
I mentioned the number of lines of code in these applications to illustrate that these are complex, business applications. Things you dont screen-scrape like some brochureware piece of IIS code.
And since you have a low-clue-quotient in terms of groupware, can you see the delicious irony in your statement:
> The 30 to 70% of IT
> execs who do not “get it” yet.
(In the same manner you dont get Notes)
> While Ray Ozzie is saying “Ozzie:
> Vista, Office must adapt to Web era”,
> there are plenty of old school,
> head in the sand vendors, such as
> IBM’s Lotus Notes team, who are
> still focusing all their efforts
> on a thick clients (Hanover) and closed systems.
Given that Ray invented Notes, your “fat-client-bashing-de-jour” application ?
And have you a clue what hannover actually is ? I suspect not. But hey dont let actual facts get in the way of your entertaining bluster. And if the message dont fits - get personal on folks - as you have with me - implying that I’m some sort of drooling sycophant.
Anywhoo. Keep taking the pills, sooner or later something will stick.
Enjoy
—* Bill
http://www.billbuchan.com
The Week Enterprise 2.0 Became Reality
What an amazing week! Web 2.0 Summit The week included the Web 2.0 Summit. I crashed the event to talk with Jeff Nolan and also managed to have a fast conversation with Anil Dash. I also bumped into John Furrier….