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by Michael Cote.
Original Post: PeopleOverProcess.com: IBM SWG: Lotus "Ventura"!
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While seeing CMDB's auto-filled is thrilling, the most exciting thing I've seen at the event is IBM's "Ventura" project. I saw part of it in the labs session I went to yesterday, but one of the other sessions yesterday -- labeled something like Web 2.0 and/or Social Computing -- was the full-bore overview of IBM's upcoming offering around blogs, social bookmarking/tagging, social networking, and the layers of combination above all of those.
Ventura
While you can't get it from IBM just yet, Ventura is the productized suite of several "Web 2.0" technologies, like:
IBM's BluePages - an end-user oriented directory for storing and looking through people profiles
Activities - a to do list with, of course, much more that just bullet points with things to do.
Communities - the "groups" part of the application.
Roller - for blogging. One question is how much IBM's extended roller vs. used it out of the box. As ever, Sun should be asking themselves why IBM's the one who's figuring out selling roller "first."
Lots of glue - things like search (which I need to get more details on), integration with SameTime and otherwise making all the components feel more like a suite rather than just separate things. And, of course, enterprisey things like directory integration and security. And, of course, feeds on everything.
One thing missing, as Carol Jones pointed out is a wiki. The word is they're still deciding on one to use, with the clarification that IBM's QEDWiki is more about wiki as an application platform (a la jotSpot) than wiki as a document/text collaboration tool.
Another missing item, which I asked about, was a feed reader (or "aggregator"). With all the feeds around, it's a bit odd that Ventura doesn't have a feed reader to use out of the box: whether it's from IBM or an endorsed reader from someone else. I've always liked the NewsGator stories along these lines of pre-populating and updating people's feeds per their role. Having a feed reader would help tie all of Venture together even more so. That said, I get the feeling that Lotus looks more towards SameTime as the focal point for everything...which may not be too bad: it's not your father's IM "client."
Writing this up, I realize that I've given Ventura on a pass on being open rather than closed. If I was writing up SharePoint, for example, I'd have looked much more critically at the open question. So, we'll have to see on that point for Ventura. That said, Carol showed us that for most (all?) of the pages that you can click on a link at the bottom that shows you the REST call/API to get for the page. Here comment was something along the lines of "whatever we can do, you can do."
Lunch is calling, so I'm cutting myself off here. The summary is that "Ventura" is something to be excited about: once delivered, we'll have to check back with it to see if it's an implementation of the "bring Web 2.0 behind-the-firewall" vision I've been waiting on for sometime.
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