A New Ventura

I know I have been very quiet the past month or so but not because I didn’t have anything to say on the contrary lots of stuff is going in my personal life and work at IBM. But now, I can tell you a little bit more about what I have been working on at Lotus for the past months. I am part of the Ventura Team at IBM and we are putting together a suite of Web 2.0 applications for the enterprise. For now I’ll let the Redmond dude summarize:
Lotus Ventura is:
  • IBM’s BluePages – an end-user oriented directory for storing and looking through people profiles
  • Dogear – IBM’s social bookmarking app.
  • 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.

It is obvious that my involvement is mainly on the Roller work but I do give everyone else a hard-time whenever I get a chance. I’m really excited of the work that is happening at Apache Roller and the people working on it: Dave, Allen, Matt and the whole crew (you know who you are). I first met Roller in 2003 when I started this very blog and I knew we had to deploy it at IBM. At first, I (and now Google’s Kevin Gibbs) made the mortal sin of forking the code to make it work on DB2 and WebSphere and did not contribute back to the community, but I knew then that I could not let that happen again. I sort of did the second time around, but at least this time I joined Apache and began working with the folks there for which I have nothing but the utmost respect for their skills and dedication to making this project succeed. This is my first IBM product experience and it has been a very positive one so far, but we can talk about that later. The experience of taking something built by the community and making it a product has been incredibly rewarding but brings with it a great sense of responsibility. We are very serious about Roller and are committed to giving back as much as we can. This is our first release so don’t expect too many different things, since we are focused on our supported platforms, performance and usability, not necessarily on new features.

The post is dragging already so I will save some of the technical details for later, stay tuned.

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About this entry

You’re currently reading “A New Ventura,” an entry on Elias Torres

Published:
11.30.06 / 9pm
Category:
Technology, Work