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

Day 2 of Connect was Road Map Day for me

The day opened with Mat's AdminBlast session which was so full of tips and ideas he could barely get to all of them and he laid out how he manages his team and uses all the resources he can from Notes, Domino, Connections, Watson, etc. Great effort and valuable training for new managers to get a great view of how they could be working.

Usually the sessions are a secondary benefit, for people like myself that are involved in the product line for so long. We have various meetings, briefings, side chats, commitments to other partners and so our time is used quite well. I admit to barely getting to 2 sessions a day, but this is average for me over the years.

Not being a developer, a number of sessions didn't work for me. Road map and hands on sessions are what I look for to expand my knowledge, especially around what is available now or soon to be available. The future products that are a year or more away are nice to know about, but I have time. Plus, as an IBM Champion we get private briefings during the year as products progress.

I tweeted about the IBM Notes and Domino Road map session(links below are to the slides I caught on camera), which by the way was one of the best in years. Okay, we didn't get hard dates, but we did get end of Q1 for feature pack 8 and end of Q3 for FP9 see this slide. I know IBM said they want to issue updates quarterly, and I think they will, but my expectation is two updates a year for now. Once they iron out the process to handle quarterly updates they should hit the four.

What made this session so great was Barry Rosen Offering Manager for Notes and Domino took the time to see it from our view. And he did pretty well with it.

We, the customers, partners and community at large need to know definitively what is coming down and that there are plans. He laid out the change in future support for some servers and client operating systems. Various slides outlined what was coming even the development updates and ideas was discussed. There was even a mention of Quickr! Well it really was about CCM (if you don't know what this is, don't worry) and should interest people who need it. The committing support through 2021 is nice to hear.

Suffice it to say, for now we see into 2018 and that should work for many people who will, and should, at some point start looking at Verse on Premises for mail users. Why? Because I got the impression Watson and cognitive abilities will be baked into Verse instead of over the Notes client as will more pieces of the overall puzzle that IBM is putting together around the future of how we work. Like I said a few months back, we are in the 3rd or 4th level of change in the messaging/communication/collaboration/social and we need to evolve and look towards the future, while maintaining the current architecture.

I did not get into the session on Pink so one of the other Champions or bloggers I am sure will cover that and better than I ever could. I will reiterate what Jason Gary said, Pink is not meant to rewrite IBM Connections but augment it with more, newer features in a simpler more modular method.

One session I really wanted to go to, we had to commit to attending before the event, was the Docker 101 hands on class. Unfortunately, due to network configuration issues at the site we did not get that far but with the guidelines in hand I look forward to playing with this technology, especially as Pink is being designed to run on it. Curiously I found out Websphere today can be run on Docker. This could be very useful for some of you.

You can learn new things, you can also meet new people. Lots of IBMers have changed positions and moved out of ICS or back to it. Always be open to talk to anyone and everyone. One of my client issues with a Connections plugin was raised to the owner of the plugin. It can be hard to do this not in person sometimes, here is why.

I started with an Offering Manager (OM)I knew and asked who in the room, we were at a reception, would own the plugin which led us to two more people that led us to the right person who happened to be talking to my friend Mac. Since I never met this OM before I now had a known and a newly met OM introduce to me to the right person. If I had not done this in person, I would have still called/emailed/Sametime one of the OMs I know and find the right person. And then start a conversation. Maybe it is easier this way but if I didn't know any OMs I would search online to find some presentations on the subject then go to IBM Whois and look up the presenter and email or call to get on track.

As Eric Whitacre, the closing speaker, said, make issues your features. If you don't know someone, keep asking till you do.

Can you Social Business Opera?

Wen night I was one of the lucky ones, for a second time, to live tweet a dress rehearsal of the Palm Beach Opera's latest show, this time it was La Cenerentola. For some of you, it is Cinderella. And NOT the Disney version. A common mistake, no thanks to Disney. Opera rocks! Well, Tommy does, but still it is something impressive to hear a hall full of the singers voices with no microphones or amplification.

Pictures here for those interested.

The live tweeting of the opera is a genius move by the PBO. With a cross section of Tweeters that have various sizes of followers, we had TV personalities, magazine editors, writers, social media people, store managers, owners of their own businesses, men, women, older, younger to see if there was a thread and correlation to produce some help for the opera.

I think they could gain more benefit by having us tweet about the show a little earlier than the night or two before opening but I also understand how hard it is to get everything right and practiced in time.

So I went to the opera last night, tweeted all about it, but we had few retweets, so was it our tweeting? The opera itself? Me or us? The timing, 7:30-10:30pm? The night before Valentine's day? These questions are at the heart of every marketer and social media effort. Last time we had many more followers, possibly due to the leads. When I worked on Broadway it was similar problem. the title of the show helps but a known star or lead is really what brings people in, whether the show was good or not, they want to see the star. No doubt this is a similar situation for the opera. I wonder if IBM would let me borrow Watson to do some analytics to help the PBO?

So we were up against TV. Big deal. On the other hand, I don't expect everyone to be staring at their phones or monitors all night either. But this is the question, not just for opera but any business that works on a live or spur of the moment effort. What is the best way to get people to see, hear you?

Has America lost it's ability to respect the arts and music? Is it this generation which was limited in it's music classes or rather better promoted sports efforts because one can be a winner instead of a singer, dancer or artist? It is the arts which provide encouragement to many and also inspire greatness from others.

This show still has tickets, unlike the last one, La Traviata, which sold out. if you want to go and are in town, link was posted above. No doubt they have a sizable subscriber group and patrons, but in many cases they are older and as the curtain falls on their lives, few are behind them to fill int he gaps.

If you have some ideas about how to bring opera to the masses or at least how to help spread the word, let Amanda Kahan know or leave me some comments.