Episode 78, recorded on Thursday, 17th November 2011.  We discuss design and development processes in IBM Collaboration Solutions, Project Vulcan, OneUI, the future of mobile and web apps and much more…

Alternative title ‘the only value of a vision is the realisation of it’…

[Sorry for the echo in the middle-section of the podcast – please bear with it, it does go after a few minutes.  Music this week in by Julia Nunes.]

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Ronnie Maffa (twitter) is Vice President in Social Software Development at IBM.  Ronnie is responsible for the development of IBM Connections, Lotus Quickr, LotusLive Connections and Engage products.

Ethan Perry ( linkedin | twitter) is a Senior Product Designer, leading the LotusLive and IBM Connections User Experience teams. Ethan has also designed the user interface for IBM application development tools. Before joining IBM, Ethan was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab in the Sociable Media Group.

Topics

Design versus Development

* How do the two teams interact and work together?

* How do you ensure that Design create UIs that are possible to develop in a reliable and manageable way?

Project Vulcan

* What is the purpose of the Vulcan vision?

* How did it come about?

* Will there be more Vulcan content at Lotusphere 2012?

Design

* How does Project Vulcan get implemented in LotusLive?

* How does design for the Enterprise differ from design for the public web?

* What does that do to customer expectations on release schedules?

* One of the strengths of the latest Connections release is the ease of customising the UI (compared to say Sametime or Quickr).  Are there plans to continue this trend?

* Are there any plans to bring new design concepts to admin UIs as well? (e.g. WebSphere/Connections admin UIs)

Futures

* The Connections iPad application was really well done.  What other plans does IBM have to move their mobile, web, and rich clients into the area where their competitors just look weak?

* Mobile – What next?

Tips

Darren:

Cardstar iPhone, Android and BlackBerry app. Keep all those “Loyalty cards”used for discounts all in one place. Simply photograph the barcode on the card, this is then recreated on the device. When you shop and have to scan the card, simply have scan the barcode on your device. Great if your wife keeps all the cards 😉 (fantastic idea! SM)

Ethan:

In Connections 3 you can filter the news feed by following tags to see all content in your organization that was tagged with a particular keyword. Go to the Home page, click the little twisty next to News Feed, and select Tags.

Ronnie:

I am quite fond of just about every features we have added to IBM Connections 3, two that I rely on to keep me current with my social networks is following and email digest.  I use “following”to keep a short list of things that I need to stay current on,  and the “daily digest”to give me one place to quickly check in on what is happeni...