This post originally appeared on the blog of forbes and its written by Kevin Cavanaugh Vice president, Business and Technical Strategy,IBM Collaboration Solutions.

The document as we know it — static and one-sided — has disappeared.

Documents today are no longer stand-still and no longer offer only one view. The old model doesn’t work for today’s social and always-connected business. Business communication has evolved to become more fluid, dynamic and collaborative and is now an integral part of business processes. And the concept of a document (whether that be text, spreadsheet, presentation or a hybrid approach) is still one of the critical outputs of many businesses.

The key is to help organizations break free of the outdated model, where the document is static, monolithic and tangential, to the more natural collaborative communication flow. And, more importantly, businesses across the world are looking for options to break free from huge fees and upgrade charges just to be able to access and edit content created and owned by that organization.

Because of this, we are seeing a major disruption in the field of office productivity software. Over the past 10-15 years, we saw what could be considered a monopoly around office productivity software. As a result, the marketplace of customers and solution providers stagnated. In early digital days, every word processor had its own unique format and because of this, interoperability across applications was poor. Document interchange initially was via printed copies. But with the rise of networked desktop, collaboration occurs electronically, not via paper. This opened the door to an interoperability crisis. But do we all have to use the same applications?

Thankfully, no.

We are moving towards a model that offers low-cost acquisition, coupled with high value and high collaboration around a document. Standards evolution, including the advances around ODF – Open Document Format – and document interchange; alternative forms of communication (email, IM, tweets, blogs); cloud delivery models for business applications; growth in smart, mobile devices; and economic pressures, are all converging to apply pressure to the status quo of documents. IBM Lotus Symphony, Apple iWork, OpenOfficederivatives, and other alternatives to Microsoft Office are viable office productivity suite alternatives, work well in businesses, and do not carry the same exorbitant costs and renewal fees. Additionally, cloud alternatives like Zoho, Google Docs, LotusLive Symphony andAcrobat.com are challenging the very notion of requiring desktop-based software to be productive in creating text, spreadsheet and presentation documents.

These other options have arrived due in part to the evolution of how people view “a document” and how people expect to collaborate and work together. Businesses are demanding these changes: it has become the norm to work in real time and be aware of updates as they occur. Vendors will have to meet these demands, and offer solutions to businesses that offer collaborative editing, assignment of tasks and management of comments.

We know that a static document does not meet this requirement. Businesses today do not accept the logic of being locked into one vendor’s office productivity software. With standards, users have more options to innovate. Documents go through many stages, from researching ideas, to outlines, to collaboration, to review, copy editing, approval and publication. No one tool is best for all stages of the document. Think of having several tools, each one adapted to a task, but interoperable at the same time.

Moving forward and breaking free of yesterday’s model is actually an easy process. A couple of initial steps will lead you in the right direction:

• Inventory the user population and the needs for office productivity software — whether it be casual, light or heavy. Which applications will be used most?
• Understand how dependent critical business applications and processes are on particular office productivity application vs. a particular file format.
• Thoroughly understand the licensing contracts with vendors — what do they really spend and what do you really get?
• And then analyze the alternatives and embark on small pilot projects.

A three to five-year office productivity and desktop strategy is critical as document creation factors into every businesses larger collaboration strategy. The business tasks we face have not changed much in 100 years, but the pressures companies operate under are different. Sure, we still develop plans and strategies, make decisions, develop and manufacture products, sell the products and track our finances. But we do these tasks under more time pressure – and increasingly in a global context. The technologies we use are also evolving. Because of this, it’s important (and easy) to start exploring options and uncovering the value new technology offers to your business.

Kevin Cavanaugh is vice president, Business and Technical Strategy,

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In the article Forbes mentions that:

“There is almost zero potential for surprise in most of our environments. Our email inboxes are about the only place we can truly be surprised by something. In most other business applications, we get answers to questions that we have asked.”

The concept of using the Activity Streams is to pickup and highlight information using standard defines verbs that describe what people have done and objects that may be acted upon by actors . When someone makes a comment on a photo the message of the sort “person X made comment Y on photo Z” is broadcast into a stream of activity that could be shared across applications. The goal is to create a mixed activity stream that would show what is happening and relevant to the user.

Forbes also mentions:

“The idea is part of IBM’s vision of social business, the term the company uses for the broad application to business of social networking methods. Powering this vision is a suite of IBM products such as Lotus Notes for email, contacts, and calendaring, Lotus Connections, the social networking environment, Lotus Quickr, the document repository, and Lotus Sametime for unified communications and real time collaboration such as web conferencing and instant messaging.”

Writer Dan Woods is impressed by IBM since Social Business is partly a marketing term, it is quite impressive how completely IBM walks the social networking walk with its own technology.

The idea is part of IBM’s vision of social business, the term the company uses for the broad application to business of social networking methods.

Read the full article here: http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/02/22/ibms-strategy-to-manufacture-social-networking-surprises/

Accoring to Gartnet the spending on Social CRM is expected to grow at a rapid pace over the coming years, it will not replace the traditional CRM but rather  augment the tradition CRM.

Gartner says that the Magic Quadrant is in response to “the growing interest and investment in social applications to support sales, marketing and customer service business processes.”

They have identified over 100 vendors of some type of Social CRM solution although few address all the categories listed below. It is expected that the market will go through major changes such as mergers and acquisitions, new entrants and exits over the next year or so. 

• Social Monitoring
• Customer and Partner hosted communities
• Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM)
• Product Reviews
• Sales Contacts

Right now Social CRM vendors differentiate themselves by the services they offer, their ease of use and the quality of their professional services, but Gartner believes it’s going to get harder for vendors be successful offering these core functions and sees the market moving towards Social CRM suites. They also suggests that much this capability will be integrated into traditional CRM solutions by 2014 — especially with the larger CRM vendors.

Making the Magic Quadrant Grade

To wind down the list of vendors, Gartner outlines a few inclusion/exclusion criteria which include:

• Offer a social application, supporting one or more of internal sales, marketing, customer service users, customers, prospects and partners outside the enterprise.
• Appear on at list 25% of Gartner’s Social CRM shortlists
• Have at least 8 accessible client references for the product

There is also a list of minimum functions for the included applications, one of which is the ability to incorporate findings or solutions into CRM operations.

Social CRM Leaders

Leaders of Social CRM have two characteristics according to Gartner:

1. Their software benefits both the company and the community.
2. Demonstrate support for multiple CRM processes and have substantial revenue specifically from Social CRM.

• Jive Software
• Lithium

Social CRM Visionaries

• KickApps
• Mzinga
• salesforce.com

Niche Players and Challengers

The bulk of the quadrant is filled with Niche players who focus in specialized areas of Social CRM. Some of these include Leverage Software, Visible Technologies, Radian 6, Oracle CRM on Demand and Overtone.

It’s also interesting to note that Gartner lists no vendor as a Challenger, which shows the room there is for growth within this market. 

Another important point is that no vendor listed in this report has tight integration with traditional CRM solutions (other than salesforce.com). This is an area we should expect to see real growth in over the next couple of years, although it’s likely that many of these vendors need to work on the social aspects of their solutions before they take it to the next level.

You can get the full details on the strengths and cautions for each vendor by obtaining the report from Gartner.

Download the whitepaper from here:

ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/orw03017usen/ORW03017USEN.PDF

Fire Department App – PSA from Fire Department on Vimeo.

The app is available over at http://firedepartment.mobi/

1. Install Gowalla on your mobile device. (http://gowalla.com/apps)
2. Sign up and connect with your friends and colleagues.
3. Bookmark Lotusphere on Location trips for a selection of must-see spots while at the conference. There are nine different Lotusphere trips you can complete to earn pins. As you visit each of these spots, check in to show where you are. You’ll earn custom pins as you complete trips and visit more and more spots.
4. Add your photos so others can see what you are up to.
5. When you complete three trips, stop by one of the Social Cafes, show us your trips, and you can collect Gowalla Items In Real Life too! (While supplies last.)

If you like to send my a friend request my user is: allerhed

The Lotus Connections 3.0 Performance Tuning Guide is now available from the Lotus Connections Wiki. This document provides recommendations for performance tuning of IBM® Lotus® Connections 3.30 based on the experience of the IBM Collaboration Solutions Performance team. However, the optimal tuning and the resulting system capacity can be affected by many factors, including the characteristics of the load on the system and the hardware used, including servers, disk subsystems, network topology, and more. Therefore the recommendations in this document should not be considered the optimal values for every situation, but rather a recommended starting point for tuning a Connections deployment.

If you are a business partner, or someone responsible for deploying Lotus Connections, you need to read this:

To download the full version, click here.

The app description form the appstore:

“APPLICATION DESCRIPTION

mLinked and mLinked Free are native iPhone applications to communicate with your public or corporate social network based on IBM Lotus Connections. IBM Lotus Connections is the industry leading solution for social software. Through mLinked you are able to connect directly from you iPhone to your network, search for profiles, make status updates and read blogs. mLinked Free features: – Pre-configured for Bleedyellow, My DeveloperWorks and Lotus Greenhouse – Support multiple networks – Status updates – Search profiles – Profile and network information – Call and e-mail directly from profiles – Accept and send invitations – Read, browse and recommend blogs – Supports IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 and 3.0 mLinked features: – Same features as mLinked Free – Configure and connect to your Lotus Connections networks Enjoy working with mLinked!

LANGUAGES:
English, Dutch

REQUIREMENTS:
Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.2 or later.”

Link to the iTunes appstore, click here.