Really interesting post from Stuart over at the Quickr blog – initially about migrating his blog to a new platform. The interesting sideline is about living inside his email client (which happens to be IBM Lotus Notes). Part of the problem for enterprises adopting Web 2.0 communication/collaboration platforms is that there are new applications to learn, which can create barriers. Social networking, blogging, wiki contribution, instant messaging, not to mention email, are all to often separate self-contained applications. When organisations try to roll them out there is often a negative reactin towads “yet another application”, and users have to manage switching between them, sometimes with different usernames and passwords!

Whilst I often encourage clients to move away from email as a form of communication, this doesn’t necessarily mean moving away from their email applications. Instant messaging can now be plugged into both IBM and Microsoft platforms – so you can reply to an email with an instant message, or a pc-to-pc phone call right from within your email client. This significantly increases the chances of your users to actually try the new communcation features rather than simply reverting to habit and relying on email. Stuart’s post shows that blog and twitter posts can now be managed alongside email and instant messaging from a single application. If Web 2.0 collaboration features can be provided within existing applications, the chances of people actually using them is likely to increase.

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Aside from the Lotus Connections install guide I don’t usually put much technical stuff up here – but we’ve been using Lotus Quickr (WebSphere Portal version) for a few months and there have been a few little things that were driving me crazy with no documentation available from IBM but that we’ve now managed to fix, so I’d thought I’d share.

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