Brian Pearson, IBM Executive Collaboration Solutions Advocate, has been building out a "Social Business Everywhere" video series. As part of that, he just released a 3-part demo video series showcasing IBM Collaboration Solutions integrations of IBM Sametime, IBM Connections, IBM Lotus Quickr and more to Microsoft productivity applications, including Office, Outlook and SharePoint. As Brian states in the opening of Part 1:
 
 
With these videos, you can see IBM's continued commitment to supporting a "social everywhere" environment. supporting multiple platforms and environments. 

 
So you want an easy entry point to bring VoIP into your enterprise? As you heard from our May 18 announcement, we added the IBM Sametime Unified Telephony Lite Client license to our Sametime product family. This easy-to-deploy VoIP solution quickly adds many softphone capabilities directly to your users' desktops right from their Sametime Connect client. We just posted a demonstration of how this works to YouTube. Take a look, and let us know what you think!
 

 

 
Today IBM announced enhanced capabilities for mobile collaboration. Customers can easily download the software from all major app stores including Android, Apple, and BlackBerry, and gain immediate access to blogs, employee data, status updates, wikis, as well as share files, videos and photos. This includes IBM Sametime enterprise instant messaging and IBM Sametime Unified Telephony dialers for Android, and IBM Sametime meetings on the BlackBerry. IBM is also helping IT administrators simplify the management of corporate and personal data on employee devices. by allowing employees, customers and partners to collaborate more effectively while on mobile devices.
 
You can read a more in-depth analysis of this announcement, and why we're so excited about it, on Todd Watson's Turbo Todd Blog. As always, we would love your feedback: how are YOU using mobile collaboration in your business environment?

 
Interested in implementing unified communications, but concerned about cost and deployment resources? A cloud-based unified communications strategy could dramatically lower your infrastructure and other fixed asset costs, while offering a flexible deployment model. Leverage the power of the cloud to collaborate! On August 30 at 12noon Eastern US time, please join speakers from IBM, and IBM Business Partner Meetrix, to learn about  UC as a Service (UCaaS), powered by IBM Sametime. Register here for free access today. Speakers to be confirmed shortly.

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#ITEXPO
FYI, folks. In case you're attending or in case you happen to be in the area, the ITEXPO West 2011 conference is coming to Austin. The conference will take place at the Austin Convention Center from September 13 to 15 and it promises to bring together lots of industry heavyweights as well as interesting newcomers. This year ITEXPO will feature keynotes from IBM (Mike McCarthy, VP of Cloud Computing Services as well as from Polycom and Siemens.
 
Mike Ross from 4PSA and Tim Wittbrod from Interactive Intelligence will join me in a discussion on one of my favorite topics: the role of unified communications in social work patterns--precisely what I've been blogging about in the last few weeks.

 

I submitted this topic to the conference back in April (I think). I wanted to discuss the fundamental differences between the natural way in which humans interact, a.k.a. people-to-people interactions and the artificial way in which we've forced ourselves to interact at work. The conference was nice enough to accept my abstract and they invited Mike and Tim to join in.

 

As you know, we work very closely with Interactive Intelligence and we've talked about people-centric business processes in the context of what we do together. The conference is placing our session under the Social CRM track, which could not be more appropriate. I have not met Tim and Mike but I'm sure this will be a productive and enlightening conversation.

 

Our session is scheduled for Tuesday, September 13 from 2:30 PM to 3:15 PM. You may also want to check out other sessions from IBM and from our business partners by visiting the conference program page. 

  

Please join Karl LaWall, Worldwide Sales Leader for Unified Communications and Collaboration Software, at 12noon ET on August 24 for a free webcast (registration required), "Putting social to action with Sametime". Karl will demonstrate live the latest capabilities of Sametime 8.5.2. See how these latest capabilities can help you become a more social business: find and connect with experts more quickly, speed decision-making, and improve productivity, while lowering telephone costs, travel costs and total cost of ownership.

  

I've seen Karl do lots of these live demos using our free Greenhouse service. His sessions are always very interactive and engaging. I highly recommend it.

 
IBM has submitted quite a few sessions for the upcoming SXSW Interactive Festival 2012. Many IBMers tend to go to this event, and this year we have 5 submissions from Team IBM. And for the first time this year, our own Caleb Barlow has also submission a topic for presentation: Enterprise-grade Social Communications http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/10749 . This year's SXSWi continues to include input from the public on which sessions should be included. Audience votes count for 30% of the score used to decide whether a session is accepted for the event. We would love your vote, of course :-) Just register for the SXSWi Panel Picker and add your voice to the selection process.

 
 Sheri Branco over at the Sametime Design Blog on IBM developerWorks is asking our users to participate in an online survey. We would like to better understand the relative importance of the tasks you use Sametime for every day. We would love to hear your feedback. Click above to participate.

#ibmsocialbiz
As many of you know, we've been working with Interactive Intelligence in integrating their CIC contact center suite with Sametime. The integration allows contact center agents to tap into expertise beyond their immediate reach.
 
The expertise location pattern is critical to improving customer satisfaction, up-selling and cross-selling, and to keeping customer-facing business processes moving. That's exactly what the CIC-Sametime integration does. Our friends at InIn produced this nice video illustrating how the integration works. Take a look:
 

#ibmsocialbiz

This is my second posting on the role UC plays on the path to Social Business. In my previous post I discussed the roadmap to becoming a Social Business. The roadmap, as you may recall, has four steps: emphasize people-to-people interactions, retrofit existing people networks, help people extend their organizational reach and enable newly created people networks to function. Well, today I want to talk about the first step.

 

The first step towards becoming a Social Business involves seeding the behavior needed to make the transition from people-to-process and people-to-information to people-to-people interactions. Emphasizing people-to-people interactions is key to introducing social interaction patterns in environments where people don't always know each other. This is how we transplant the natural behavior humans exhibit in their own social groups into a work environment where they spend most of their time surrounded by perfect strangers.

 

Social interaction patterns are natural to us and they start with people. Under this paradigm, information and process are mere attributes. When we interact with friends and family we start with the person. When a child is hungry he will most likely yell out "Mom, I'm hungry. What's for dinner...!" He starts with the person (his mother), then provides status information (he communicates that he's hungry), and then requests data from the other person (he asks what his mother is preparing for dinner).

 

This type of interaction, a people-to-people interaction, is more efficient than finding out, first, who's cooking dinner, then letting that person know that one is hungry to verify that there's a match between an empty stomach and freshly-prepared food, and finally asking what that food actually is. At work, we've done this for years. We've been trained to think in terms of information and process first and then to consider who can provide the information or who can make something happen in the context of a business process. After a few trials we identify a go-to-person and that person becomes part of our immediate people network. Then we no longer base our interactions with that person on process or information. We call on them first and then ask for information. In other words, we gravitate to the type of interaction that comes natural to our species.

 

The technology we've used at work so far has not been flexible enough to facilitate people-to-people interactions. The consumer space, on the other hand, has built solutions to enable people-to-people interactions beyond the people networks we can build within our immediate surroundings. Now we can initiate people-to-people interactions with remote parties through various channels. Facebook, for instance, provides asynchronous channels for exchanging status information and it also provides real-time channels to exchange data as needed. Twitter allows broadcasting information to multiple parties in real time. These are social interaction patterns and most people already understand how the technology that enables those patterns work. In other words, the behavior is already there.
 
Since the behavior is there, all that's needed now is to enable it at work. All we need to do is help people exercise the same social interaction patterns they rely on to interact with friends and family with the people they work with. The goal is to infuse the enterprise with the same degree of efficiency social interaction patterns give us in our daily lives.
 
This is the first step of embracing change. It means letting people use the tools that let them interact with each other naturally. Ten years ago many companies regarded instant messaging as a toy and labeled it a distraction. Now I'm sure there are very few companies out there that have not embraced instant messaging. Most companies, I'm sure, would agree that they could not do business today without it. The same applies to people-to-people interactions and the technology that enables them.

 

So, what to do? As part of the need to embrace change, I say don't be afraid of letting people be people. Let your employees interact with each other as people. Let them exercise people-to-people interactions at work. Let them use Facebook, let them tweet, let them leverage instant messaging, email and the telephone to enrich their interactions with colleagues, customers and business partners. That's what emphasizing people-to-people interactions means.

 

In my next posting I will discuss what happens when the behavior has been seeded and internalized. Stay tuned. 

Back in 2010 we released a detailed IBM Sametime Reviewers' Guide for version 8.5. We just refreshed and updated the Guide for the latest release, Sametime 8.5.2. This document will help you evaluate how IBM Sametime software can help you collaborate in real-time with your professional networks. Use it to review Sametime 8.5.2's broad range of functions, and gain a better understanding of IBM Sametime 8.5/2's capabilities. And as it's an e-book, you can easily navigate from section to section. It's an excellent companion piece to our IBM Sametime product web pages and the IBM Sametime Wiki on IBM developerWorks.

 

Free registration is required. You can download the Reviewers' Guide by clicking here on ibm.com.
 
And your feedback is always appreciated! You can leave comments in this post's comment section.

  I just updated our earlier post detailing our promotion, discounting selected licenses for external collaboration with Sametime by 75%. I've added in the links to the specific country announcement letters, so you can get a better view of the Terms and Conditions applicable to your specific region. Let us know if you have any questions!

 

In a post entitled "Breaking cultural barriers to enterprise social software adoption", SearchUC.com published an in-depth Q&A with IBM's Caleb Barlow discussing how organizations can overcome barriers to adopting and effectively using enterprise social software:

The barriers to enterprise social software adoption are far more cultural than technical. Internal social networking tools make for great demos, but unified communications (UC) pros often struggle to define what problem enterprise social software is trying to solve.

 

And finally, SearchCIO.com in "Video conferencing systems integral to unified communications agenda", notes IBM as a key vendor promoting unified communications with embedded video experiences.