Last year at Lotusphere 2012 (now know as Connect) we held the inaugrial Social App Throwdown. It was a huge success both from an IBM and partner point of view. IBM got to demonstrate the powers of its social business platform and select partners got to demonstrate their apps on the main stage at Lotusphere.
I had a great time at MWLUG. LUGs are a different beast than Lotusphere, because they are so much smaller there is much more interaction which is great! I also got to attend other sessions, which was personally really enlightening. Listening to consumers of the (mostly) great products we (IBM) produce give me as an IBMer a completely different perspective on things. Personally I learned that maybe my sessions are a little to technical for most people 
This is why XPages is soooo successful, you don’t need a degree in computer science in order to build an excellent app using XPages. However if you do have that type of background you can really do some pretty cool stuff, which some of the speakers illustrated in their sessions. However we (IBM) need to make the barrier to entry for our app developers low, that way we get the most adoption. I plan on keeping this in mind, and working on refining our message on OpenSocial as we get closer to Lotusphere. We need to start working, maybe even in a hands on way, to get feedback from our existing app developers on how they want to use all the cool stuff OpenSocial provides, but to do that we need to make it easy for them to use it first.
In a about a week I am going to be heading to Pittsburgh to attend MWLUG. This is going to be my first LUG, so I am super excited about going, listening to the sessions and talking with everyone about Social Business. I am going to be giving an application development session on OpenSocial. As most of you know, OpenSocial will be one of the key technologies developers can leveraged in Notes and Domino Social Edition as well as Connections Next, so I will be prepping all you application developers on the cool stuff you will be able to do as well as giving some demos of some real applications working in both products. I am picturing this being more of an introductory session, but I am thinking of spending the first quater of it doing demos of how we use the technologies internally before moving on to how you can do the same. Plus I figured a majority of the attendees probably have not seen Notes and Domino Social Edition or Connections Next yet so I don’t want to jump into OpenSocial without baselining everyone first. Anyways if anyone attending MWLUG has topics you want me to cover or want to ask me indepth questions about anything related to OpenSocial, Notes and Domino Social Edition, or Connections Next let me know.
I have received a lot of requests to record a video demoing the application Stanton Sievers and myself built for our Show N Tell session at Lotusphere 2012. It has taken me a while, but I finally got around to recording a video of the demo. (Recording videos always seem easy when you start out but they usually turn into quite the project.) This video is not a recording of the entire Show N Tell session just a demo of the end application we built. The video demos how you, as an application developer, can use embedded experiences to enhance the existing user experience and functionality of your applications. In the video we act as an event organizer trying to get people to attend our event. In this use case we use embedded experiences in emails and activity streams an leverage the social data (via the OpenSocial APIs) to spread word about the event we are organizing. By leveraging the user’s activity stream and network contacts, we as the event organizar, can leverage the social network of the current user to attrack more attendees to our event. Since it is likely that the person who registered for our event knows people who would be interested in similar topics we are likely to reach our target audience for the event, therefore increasing the likelyhood of other people registering. This is a perfect example of how you can use the power of social to help achieve your business goals and help transform your applications into social business applications.
The video for the Lotusphere 2012 Social App Throwdown was finally posted today. All the applications demoed in this video were build using OpenSocial and ran inside of email in Notes and Domino Social Edition as well as Connections Next. For more information on embedded experiences and OpenSocial, see my previous blog post. This video is a great example of the power of OpenSocial and gives you some good use cases for how you can leverage OpenSocial from your existing apps. Feel free to contact me if you want more information.
I have yet to get the complete video from the Lotusphere 2012 Social App Throwdown, but one of the participants recorded a video of the demo they gave during the session.
Is it even possible to summerize Lotusphere 2012? Probably not, no one person can, but I will summerize it from my perspective Overall it was a great week, I enjoyed it. As always, it was busy. This year was the busiest yet (I have only gone 3 times so it is not much of a sample size compared to some.) Overall I thought it was a good conference. However, I did not feel the exceitement I had felt in the past, but that may have just been me, as an IBMer I have inside knowledge about things so I see things a bit differently.
Since my last post about Lotusphere 2012, I have had a few changes in my schedule.
It is that time of the year again, Lotusphere 2012 is just around the corner. I am a little late to the game this year, I have known about my sessions for a few weeks now but haven’t had the time to blog about them. As always I will be in the lab, and encourage everyone attending to head to the labs at one point during the week. The developers are there to answer your questions. Even if you want to come in and just chat, I encourage you to take advantage of the one on one opportunity to talk with the people who build the products you use.
Last year at Lotusphere 2011 IBM “released” its Social Business Toolkit. Since then there has been much confusion over what the Social Business Toolkit is, both inside and outside IBM. First, like Project Vulcan, the IBM Social Business Toolkit is not a product! When the toolkit was released last year there was a sample environment released where you could try out some of the technologies, such as AcitivityStreams and embedded experiences, in the toolkit which really confused people.
