This is an important announcement for two quick reasons – firstly the outblaze technology can bring added functionality to IBM’s Bluehouse platform, and secondly it signifies that IBM is pretty committed to investing in its  “big play” in the online collaboration space.

I reckon 2009 and 2010 are going to be busy years in terms of acquisitions – Steve Mills (the chap who runs IBM’s software business) has a track record of smart purchases, and while I don’t expect him to go crazy with the corporate credit card, I reckon there’ll be a few bargains that he just won’t be able to pass up in the coming two years.

I’m expecting to hear lots and lots on Bluehouse from IBM at the upcoming Lotusphere 2009. It’s very much something to watch…

What is Bluehouse?

Bluehouse (which is from the Lotus guys in IBM’s Software Group) is an online collaboration platform – that allows people to connect to eachother, share documents and form groups. It has a lot in common with Google’s “Apps”, and with other companies like Huddle.

Bluehouse was announced more or less a year ago at the 2008 LotuSphere event, and at the time I reckoned it was the most exciting announcement at the event. I signed up there and then for the beta program and have been a fairly regular visitor ever since.

Is it any good?

It will be.

At the time it was first announced I thought that Bluehouse had the potential to offer organisations an “enterprise quality” alternative to Google Apps and Facebook. That potential remains, but so far Bluehouse has been something of a “slow burn”. In order to get people excited about signing up to “yet another collaboration platform” you have to offer them something special, and BlueHouse isn’t quite there… yet.

At the moment, it feels a little like an empty Cathedral – Beautiful, Well built… but somehow “waiting”.

Bluehouse integrated with a slew of Lotus products (although I’d like the integration to be slicker)… and there’s a really good opportunity for IBM to deliver something that will provide a reliable, trusted, SaaS alternative to Microsoft’s small business server.

I’m off to Lotusphere 2009 in a couple of weeks… and I hope I’ll have a LOT more to say on the topic of Bluehouse then.

http://www.zimbra.com/

This has resulted in an interesting “moment” on the term “Open”. One of the facets of Open must, at least in some context, be “open platform” – the ability to run on different platforms….

On visiting the OpenGroupware.org site, I learn that they don’t actually have binaries for Windows…. instead here’s what they say..

The project currently does not provide prebuild binaries for Windows. There are basically three ways to attempt to run OGo on Windows: port to Cygwin, run with GNUstep for Windows and run in VMware. Only the last option is well tested and works fluently.

So only the VMware option is tested. Let’s look specifically at that…

This option runs rock solid, fast and is well tested for years. Just install one of the Linux distributions (eg Debian) inside VMware running on Windows. The VMware approach is very similiar to the approach used by Java based solutions (run a virtual machine, in this case Intel ix86). The advantage is that VMware is much faster than a Java virtual machine given that the instruction set matches (both client and server use the ix86 instruction set).
And: VMware is now available for free!

Yes… OK, that is undoubtedly a way around the fact that the software doesn’t run on Windows… but it’s not a work-around I’m willing to engage with right now.

This stuff is NEVER going to take off unless it can be perceived as better than anything that you can get on windows today…. which means running on Windows.

Argh.

I’ve been using Thunderbird to connect (via Pop3) to exchange. Of course this hasn’t given me calendar – so I’ve been using Google Calendars with the the Google Provider and Lightening plug-ins for Thunderbird.

This has worked superbly for me; but I’ve been willing to put up with the fact that the Thunderbird plug-ins don’t actually do “sync” – they need a connection to t’internet in order to show me my google cals.

My colleagues are “Thunderbird curious” – But they need contact sharing, and sync to their phones.

So…

For contact sync I’m looking at -

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2533

And for Google cal-sync to phone I’m trying the free version of GooSync -

Next things… Outlook Mail Import (likely to be tough)

Mail Server replacement? When, how, with what.