Collaboration In Your Pocket Is Here
Monday, February 15, 2010 at 12:53PM Okay, I don’t have an iPhone and I don’t use Lotus Connections, but I think this demo of Lotus Connections on the iPhone is really cool:
Here’s why this is neat: Focusing on interfacing with Lotus Connections via a portable device such as the iPhone has necessarily resulted in a significant decluttering and simplification of the Lotus Connections interface. We see in the demo nothing but the basic elements of enterprise expertise management — access to individuals and groups and the ability to locate and obtain access to needed expertise.
These functions incorporate the essence of expertise management that I wrote about here and here back in 2006. Now, though, the tools and functionality have become more accessible, more streamlined, more user friendly, and much more mobile. Hopefully all smartphone interfaces will be able to access such apps in the future.
We still face challenges in some quarters to acceptance of “enterprise 2.0” solutions such as this, and expertise management systems and knowledge access networks still don’t build themselves — yet. But pushing sophisticated functionality like we see in the demo to a usable, friendly, hand-held device is a major step forward in making sophisticated collaboration and expertise sharing tools available anywhere.
Text copyright (c) 2010 by Dennis D. McDonald.
Dennis D. McDonald
Reader Comments (1)
Your post on Lotus on an iPhone demonstrates an interesting point that many developers of technology find hard to accept. Without an interface that makes the technology accessible, intuitive and attractive it is so much potential energy.
In the same way that its hard to proof read one's own writing its quite hard to design an interface that entices and enables use if you are the designer of the function. You already KNOW the how's and why's and find it hard to see why others don't see the capability as you do.
Doug