So, I’m sitting in a session all about the buzz technology and what IBM is doing in this space, so what better time to do a little bloggin’.
The session provided a brief and quick overview of the three technologies, blogs, wikis & feeds.
Blogs
- On the CIO radar and being adopted bottom up, like the way IM hit the company, which shows their importance but also has issues with security and management. The goal is to make them “Fit for Business”
- Security, content management (blog content re-use), community (integration with groups and directory), policy (big brother), all without messing up the capabilities and usefulness.
- Movement from ego centric ( opinion/thoughts of blog owner) to business use and value.
- Example: Ford “blog”, controled point of view, marketing, multiple authors
- IBM internal blogs: high adoption rate, team collaboration “lite”,
- Alpha blog tool in Workplace on alphWorks
Wikis
- Internally used, some work in portal and quickplace, not too far along
- Editting is a “little ugly” (my opinion)
- Need good versioning to roll-back messed up content since everyone is an editor
- Adopting faster than blogs internally, managing editors
Feeds
- Various use of feed: summaries, file sharing (e.g. flickr feed), calendar, and the biggie podcasts
- Feed types: RSS, Atom OPML, RDF
- Subscribing to a feed via: Buttons, auto-discovery
- Read feeds in an agregator (one way), Plugins (Sage in Firefox), plus……
- RSS 2.0 format frozen and Atom is the successor (IETF standard) and addresses RSS shortcomings.
- Nothing new, feed have been around for 8 years!
Feeds @ IBM
- IBM goal: an orange button everywhere to subscribe. Feed XML as input to other applications. Atom Publication Protocol support, content publishing to Websphere Portal
- Teamspace/Quickplace to produce feeds.
- WCM content to be feed sources
- Portal document Manager – syndicate folders & files
- Workplace Forms, Domino.Doc, Quickplace (there are demos!) Domino (database to produce feed), Activity centric computing feeds.
Demos
- WCS doing a blog.
- Release this year, searchable (via portal search), multiple skins, RSS & Atom support, permalinks, (OK, so far basic stuff), creating content via the rich text editor, post to “external blog” as an option (Blog Central (IBM Internal), Blogger, TypePad and QUICKPLACE!).
- Portal
- Feed support from Portal Document Manager (document store of Portal). feeds by each level of folder hierarchy, link and download enclosure tag, looking at podcast integrated into PDM and using PDM for the feed – this would give discussion forum attached to a podcast.
- Feed Readers / Agregator
- Discussion on Sage as Firefox extension.
- In IBM public sites, most support areas have feeds (i.e. Quickplace etc.)
Customer Example about Feeds
- Lab services guy talks about a real life customer experience. Content Feed Service to take content from other CM systems to Portal via IBM WCM.
- Consuming feeds, (currently manual, will be automated) to take feeds from any source to pull content into portal
- Can also create taxonomy, security settings, and categorization in WCM
- WCM RSS Connector
A little plug that the presentation was given using the open source productivity editors and the document was in the ODF standard.