What is this Watson Workspace thing?

IBM in recent days has made a number of announcements, some of which are more public than others, today I want to discuss Watson Workspace (WW) and Watson Workspace Essentials (WWE).

As the name implies, it is an Instant Mesaging (IM) program that, hang on, that's not right. Let's back up a second.

Why the name Workspace? I have no idea, I thought it was a beta name. Seriously now, it is because the young generation of marketers were not born when us old people were using ICQ, AOL and other vintage messaging tools and they prefer the old school term of collaboration, so collaborative workspaces. Yes. I know IBM calls it a messaging app, semantics, semantics.

So Watson Workspace is an IM program, sorry, I mean a collaborative workspace in which your discussions can be analyzed and enhanced by the cognitive capabilities of Watson. and it is FREE!

Why would you want this? Some of you out there that do not have the FOMO (fear of missing out) problem can get an easy recap of those 100 messages about whether to call the next product a number or a verb and just tell you the outcome.

No, it will not automagically answer people that ask you something, but as bots expand and more developers get a hold of the code I believe this will come soon enough. Good thing too, as someone who sits 7 hours ahead of EST, by the time I read the messages the discussion is over, so an automatic bot would be nice.

But when you just want that executive summary, I know of no other IM, sorry collaborative messaging platform that provides this benefit. Leave me a comment if you do.

There is a mobile version and a windows desktop edition (64bit only, sorry tree huggers) in addition to a browser version. For all of you that think Slack is so unique, there is an IFTTT integration between WW and Slack assisting you to never leave your cocoon and can interact with your peers that are chasing that corner executive suite.

Speaking of executives, you enterprise workers will want need the Watson Workspace Essentials (costs money edition) so you get Single Sign On (SSO) and some control over the system.

Here is a quick breakdown of the differences:

WW is FREE, with 1GB of storage per user, no enterprise management and only an online support forum, and it is FREE!

WWE costs $6/month/user, provides 20GB storage per user, enterprise management and SSO integration and guest user management

Right now WW only speaks English, but within the next 60+/- days PFIGS will be available otherwise known as Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish.

Interested?  It's easy to get started with WW, just sign in (or register) with your IBMid to  https://workspace.ibm.com and you can be up and running in seconds. 

Go on, try it, you might like it. This is not your grandfather's IBM.

PS - This is why I don't write marketing copy for IBM,  they take everything way too seriously