Accountability and the ESN

In this Golden Age of social networks that pretend to be burying email servers like Rod Stewart goes through wives, we have a black hole that is not discussed.

Email is not perfect, but better than most countries normal postal services.
IM is great for awareness of who is online, but just because I show up online does not mean I really am at the machine, phone or browser.
Twitter is awesome....when you are connected to the internet.
SMS is far from perfect, as anyone who travels can tell you when they get messages days later, if ever.
RSS feeds do, um, something for some people. But really, do you ever catch up on those feeds?
Faxes are, wait, you don't still use those do you?
Phone calls work well, but not when you are on 12-14 hours of different time zones.

Why do I bring these up? Because if you work any place on Earth, your life is ruled by email.You may say it isn't and for a handful of people, this may be true.

For the rest of us, email is the "certified and return receipt" way of knowing something happens.

Now comes along the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) and the status updates. A new inbox, so to speak. Some call it a waterfall, others call it the river, but what it all leads to is a big flooded lake of information.

Inside that lake lies missives of information that you may need to get your work done. But your job now is to go find it. Just when you thought you may have figured out the Inbox Zero thing, along comes another place to check and take you away from important work.

The early adopters will gesticulate so their Google Glass picks up their excitement about getting used to checking in multiple places. For IT people, we are used to getting information from all types of places like our Wii or Xbox not just our phone, laptops, ipads and watches.

Our normal employees, and executives, may not appreciate needing to check multiple places all day long. They can choose to check in every few hours maybe, but then what if they missed something? Those sneaky IT people are always making changes in the background and not telling people what they changed.

Yes, you will say that all the status updates COULD be setup to go direct to people's email. And maybe this is one way out of this mess, but maybe a better way would have been to just integrate email into the ESN properly so there were status updates that were really email? Why have another method or name for what really is just more email? I understand, the ESN sends updates to people that follow you, so the onus is on me to care about you. But what if I don't know you exist yet?

Or better yet, why is there no send update to SMS, Twitter or for the non_IT crowd, Facebook? Why is the default to use their email system or nothing else? Of course, why would a company want their information to get published publicly? For that matter, why would a company want to make their employees lives easier? Isn't that the whole point of the ESN? Helping everyone to know what is going on...in the ESN and hopefully in the company at large? The company values its privacy and security. This reminds me of when companies used to maintain multiple email systems because they could not agree which one to standardize on and for some crazy reason they think maintaining duplicates of everything would be a better solution.

Now we have the ESN where ideally we may be led down a path to drop our email systems.

Except for one little thing. ESNs have no way to talk to each other. They do not have SMTP servers nor gateways to other networks, even their own internal company ESNs in some cases can not talk to each other and they are from the same vendor!

IFTTT.com (If This Then That) should be expanding their reach to help fill some of these holes, but I doubt it will work for enterprises.

If you create a Status Update and no one sees it, now what? What if my stream is so filled with items, and you did not tag me in it, that I just miss the very item I need for my project or deadline? Who's fault is it? How do we work around this problem? Email crush should be the game everyone plays, not candy crush.Your inbox will now be at zero, but your ESN notifications page is massive.

How do you solve this dilemma? Will it be solved? When? How? By Whom? Do we even see the end in sight yet?

Excellent Domino Customer Service via Twitter

I just saw a tweet on Twitter from the UNLV IT department. You guys are doing a great job if you can be this upfront about your work. Most Fortune 500 companies aren't this good.

What a great way to communicate services. The only problem is people have to be following you. So before you go run out and do this for your clients, find out if they use Twitter.

If they do, introduce them to Twitnotes from Mikkel and teach them how to use the sidebar at the same time.

Wonder if they have the server send this automatic on startup/shutdown from the server doc or some other means. Anyone have a way to do this now, let me know as I would like to do this for my servers.

Firefox hanging? Kill It

Don't you wish nsd -kill existed for other programs? Well it does.

Sure you can kill processes but for some reason Firefox seems to leave threads hidden or just doesn't end properly sometime(I run FF 3.5.3 right now).

Thanks to a Twitter follower, Dims an IBMer who pointed me to this tool set from Microsoft.

PSkill is just one tool in the download. And it works remotely as well!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896683.aspx

PsKill v1.12 By Mark Russinovich
Published: December 4, 2006

Windows NT/2000 does not come with a command-line 'kill' utility. You can get one in the Windows NT or Win2K Resource Kit, but the kit's utility can only terminate processes on the local computer. PsKill is a kill utility that not only does what the Resource Kit's version does, but can also kill processes on remote systems. You don't even have to install a client on the target computer to use PsKill to terminate a remote process.

Installation
Just copy PsKill onto your executable path, and type pskill with command-line options defined below.

Using PsKill
Running PsKill with a process ID directs it to kill the process of that ID on the local computer. If you specify a process name PsKill will kill all processes that have that name.

Usage: pskill [- ] [-t] [\\computer [-u username] [-p password]]
- Displays the supported options.
-t Kill the process and its descendants.
\\computer Specifies the computer on which the process you want to terminate is executing. The remote computer must be accessible via the NT network neighborhood.
-u username If you want to kill a process on a remote system and the account you are executing in does not have administrative privileges on the remote system then you must login as an administrator using this command-line option. If you do not include the password with the -p option then PsKill will prompt you for the password without echoing your input to the display.
-p password This option lets you specify the login password on the command line so that you can use PsList from batch files. If you specify an account name and omit the -p option PsList prompts you interactively for a password.
process id Specifies the process ID of the process you want to kill.
process name Specifies the process name of the process or processes you want to kill.

See twitter is good for something.

Lotus Twitter Advertising

Sure you can advertise on Twitter, it just takes some thought, after all 140 characters really doesn't go far.

See if you liked any of these(I posted them all today while discussing advertising online with someone):

Competitive:
Does your email server fail regularly? Never get ahead of the curve to work on something new? Still running a 5yr old server? You need help.

Immediately Followed by:
Get Lotus Domino now like always for nearly 20 years,rock solid and easy to maintain, we can help you out of Exchange in time for 2009!

Sametime:
Never able to find coworkers or friends outside of the office?With Lotus Sametime you will never miss them again.Make it happen in 2009!

Quickr:
Work on many projects with many clients? Tired of trying to connect everyone to file servers,web sites and emails? Get Lotus Quickr in 2009!

Sales Pitch:
If any of these ideas interest you,let me know how we can help you with them.If you are a Lotus organization,let us help you into 2009!

So what do you have to say and how have you been advertising these days?

TwitTime - Sametime acts like Twitter

Twitter, for those that don't know is a microblogging site or a simple updater or a virtual water coller or perhaps just a persistent chat room.

Lotus Sametime can do this and act like this as well, but you get added benefits of a secure IM session, encrypted, saved chats and a Persistent chat room, using Sametime Advanced.

Would a persistent chat room help you or your organization? Yes it would.

As a virtual water cooler, it can act as a place for out of office people or home workers to convene and meet up with the office staff.
Why is this different from normal chat or IM? Because everyone is in on it not just 2 or 3+ people.

So if you like Twitter and what it can do for you, your clients, customers and especially employees, ask me or your Lotus rep/Business Partner about how Sametime can help you today accomplish the same, if not more, productivity in a secure way.

Widgets are cool, but twitter in a Notes client can be useful too

Apologies to Pink Floyd but...
"You twitter and waste the hours in an offhand way"

Well you can and is that a good thing or bad from your IT department's perspective?

I was on the phone today with someone at CIO magazine and he was writing an article about Facebook from an IT perspective. Should have discussed Twitter instead, Chris if you read this, call me, I have your next article.

While I do not see Twitter as useful to me in my daily life, one person, Luis Suarez of IBM Spain is using it now almost exclusively and shuns his email. An interesting thought.

At Lotusphere many of us, including myself, used Twitter non-stop, nameless Lotii twittering at 3 or 4 am even. Now at a conferene like that it was very useful because, there was no way to sametime anyone...yet(read future posts on this topic). Well Lotus 911 did get Bleedyellow to handle Sametime for all of us, but it was mostly afterwards we all joined.

So with nothing from Lotusphere itself, we could rely on Twitter. And it was great especially during the opening sessiosn when we all probably killed the Twitter servers tryingt o be first or last with a comment.

Anyway, so now it's a gadget in my 801 Notes client and it is enjoyable to read an occasional missive from Luis or Chris Miller of IDONOtes fame or Bruce "Ideajam" Elgort among many others.

But as I received an email which would interest Luis I could twitter him directly and send him the information. Yes I could IM him as well(I need your IM Luis) but since he was just sitting there this worked out well.

The bottom line is, I never had to leave my Notes client for anything, browser pages are embedded in it, Sametime is as well and now Twitter, Linkedin, the Symphony suite and more.

Thanks Mary Beth for adding this benefit for everyone. And thanks to the Turtle Partnership for hosting an open Widget catalog for everyone as well!