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IBM is testing out a group chat collaboration tool branded Project Toscana, but judging by the reaction from channel partners involved in the beta, it’s not going to worry Microsoft, Slack or anyone else for a while yet. Toscana, which will run on a browser or as an app, includes IBM’s tools in the Collaboration Platform - …
I know of a certain accountancy firm who are currently migrating away from Notes onto Google mail. Many of their clients are up in arms as they don't their emails to be read and analysed by Google/the NSA. So they're sticking with Notes, alongside gmail, i.e. two email systems. How the hell that is going to work is beyond me, but that's progress.
It's still used internally at IBM. It's still a pile of crap. It's 'integrated' with Sametime and office products under the guise of 'Symphony'. Symphony products were supposedly being re-worked as I left, and it was being merged into Open Office.
When you install Notes, you also needed a little utility called 'Zapnotes' because Notes crashes from time to time, and leaves lock files laying about, so 'Zapnotes' tidied all that up so you could restart Notes.
I've changed jobs now, and we use Outlook and Lync. Far superior products. They don'tcrash, for starters.
Having had to suffer the insane 'not invented here' attitude of IBM (cf. Lotus Symphony and Connections for example) I am not at all surprised that they have created their own half-arsed Slack clone that will forever remain incomplete and laughably inadequate yet lauded as the the next great thing by management and foisted on all employees.
IBM has an internal project, Project Whitewater, that exists to support people using external tools (including Slack, but also Github, Mural, Travis CI) where no internal tool is suitable. This is such a useful, pragmatic concept that I can only imagine senior management are not aware of it (the only code-named projects that IBM senior management are engaged with are generally those that involve firing lots of people).
So Slack is pretty well used in certain corners of IBM. I can imagine the waling and gnashing of teeth that would accompany any enforced transition from that to using our own dog food. I've not seen Toscana, but I *have* seen the pile of poo that is IBM Verse (sadly Whitewater doesn't extend to something genuinely useful such as a decent email client).
"(the only code-named projects that IBM senior management are engaged with are generally those that involve firing lots of people)."
'Chrome' for me,... perhaps the last generous package that was offered, I got a year's take home to go away. Recent packages have been statutory minumum I understand.
Trying to think of the codenames,... one of my jobs went offshore during 'Quantum', but they still had 'The Bench' back then and I got an internal vacancy within weeks. There was 'Jura', and of course 'Chrome', but I know I'm missing some, they pretty much came along every two years.
IBM, for Pete's sake. There are chat clients all over the Internet with every license imaginable, and IBM has to jump into the fray with a bleak, barebone excuse that would get squashed by what some college kids could have done in a week-end.
This is friggin' IBM. That product should have been a polished, almost-saleable demo. It's not like IBM hasn't already dabbled in this market. Someone mentioned Notes, which means they know about Sametime. God knows that IBM has had long enough to play with that to know what features are required in a chat client.
Somebody reassure me : this is an intern's summer project that finally got the green light, right ? Or did they allocate resources to it last week and two guys looked at the spec sheet, then checked the delivery date, and said "right, we'll just get a connection working then we'll see how it goes" ?
Because this is obviously not a project that has actually been worked on by a team, with proper milestones and so on and so forth.
Because this is obviously not a project that has actually been worked on by a team, with proper milestones and so on and so forth.
Why would they need all that? The only buyers will be clueless "enterprise" buyers, inflicting this on thousands of hapless, angry (but powerless) users. The PHBs can't even turn on a computer, and rely on PAs to do everything, so they will neither see, know or care.
In the world of enterprise software, there is no lower bound on quality.