Power i users can still go to the social software business ball, even without a direct port of the latest 2.5 version of its Lotus Connections application, says IBM.
Although IBM issued a statement of intent to run Connections on OS/400 when the social software debuted in 2007, it now says there are no plans for a native i port. That's not to say that i users can't benefit from its many features which include micro-blogging, community/wiki creation and sophisticated file sharing, says IBM's vice president of social software, Jeff Schick.
Schick points out that the new 2.5 version of Connections runs on Windows, different flavours of Linux, AIX, and supports Oracle, SQL Server as well as DB2. It can plug into SharePoint, Outlook, Notes and Sametime and has portlets built for SAP and BEA and WebSphere Portal.
"When you start to think about platforms that you’re running on and integration points, it’s a bit of a journey for us," he says. "There's no specific reason for [not running on] iSeries, other than the fact that most of the customers that have talked with us about that have been willing and are already running some set of Linux or Windows capabilities on the iSeries hardware. So it seemed an easier path to provide the capability on that technology set versus probably a bit more work than it would take to do it on the native operating system. And the same could be said about z. We’re doing this on z Linux as opposed to native z/OS."
Could this put traditionally conservative i users off implementing a type of application that they might already be wary of? Social software for business is, after all, a fairly recent phenomena.
Schick says: "No one fits in a tidy box but we do generally think of the iSeries as mid-market type of clients that were looking for a full-service capability-set delivered on a single platform with integration across all of the components including database and so forth and how easy can you make that for folks to use. While we don’t run natively on the iSeries, we’re seeing quite a bit of success in the mid-market area for us, both small and medium business adoption, leveraging social software for both internal and external collaboration. So we’re hitting the mark and people are either choosing it to run in a partition or run it on a Linux or Windows machine as part of the infrastructure that they support for the organisation."
Mid-market firms can benefit from social software in the same way that IBM itself has transformed communications within its own organisation and move beyond the primitive use of contacts and email. Schick cites the use of micro-blogging within IBM which means that colleagues know that he is travelling in, say, Paris, and can ask for his help with a French customer while he's there.
"People start to share information about what they’re doing," says Schick. "They’re not likely to give half a million people inside the company access to their calendar and the same could be said about a smaller organisation like Cardiff University where they’re starting to share information through the micro-blogging capability and now people know what each other are doing and it’s all searchable and part of the genetic record of someone’s profile.
"We’ve got a lot of small and medium business-type clients in the UK and Europe that are thinking in terms of leveraging collaboration in the same way and then also building externally-facing collaboration points where they can touch their partners or contractors or suppliers. And this spans everything from the mid-market construction company to the local county, to a university, to all manner of commercial institutions."
Readers who are familiar with Microsoft-oriented environments will be all too aware of the phenomena known as "SharePoint sprawl". Employees take the opportunity to sprout collaborative networks all over the place without too much recourse to the IT department. Perhaps it's no wonder that 47% of European executives recently surveyed by The Economist say that management of their firms resist extending greater technology freedom to employees.
A similar number claim that management is supportive, but the fact that few companies provide training to staff in the use of social networking applications suggests that readiness for technology "democracy" is not high.
Schick thinks that uncontrolled collaboration is more likely to happen in a bigger organisations where there are large autonomous sub-divisions and that Lotus Connections can actually provide an answer.
"In some sense, the technologies are able to bring these sort of organisations back together again because you have a technology that can scale, you have a technology that the organisation can provide collaboration with but do so in a way where you’ve not fragmented that at a department level," he says.
Connections provides a plethora of widgets and plug-ins to attract Domino/Notes-on-i devotees. Despite a sense of Cinderella-syndrome when it comes to IBM application development in general, what's the message for i users who are considering social software?
"We’ve moved beyond the stages where people are experimenting," says Schick. "We’re at the point where around the planet every country, every industry segment, every size of business is leveraging this sort of collaboration technology to gain business value and so the advice is if you’ve not already looked at what we’ve done you ought to take the time."