Thoughts on IBM Activity Explorer, Jul 12

From what I can glean about IBM's new Activity Explorer (a capability of IBM Workplace and the forthcoming Notes "Hannover" release), it looks really neat as a quick and easy way of creating a shared environment for two or more people to work together on a task of joint significance. It enables users to shift beyond just using email, by gifting them a new way of self-directed interaction. I was unable to get a demo login to try Activity Explorer in IBM Workplace on my own, so these thoughts are the result of looking at screen shots and reading the various pieces of information that are available in the wild.

My Thoughts
The fundamental idea of Activity Explorer is to give business users shared viewing and/or editing rights over an ad hoc collection of discrete events that take place through a variety of communication tools. That's a fairly formal way of saying that two or more users can accumulate an organized listing of notes, IMs, files/documents, and shared screen sessions related to a specific project or task, which IBM is calling an "activity". Rather than having these discrete events held within their own discrete data store, Activity Explorer brings them together for side-by-side viewing and organization. Activities are a different take on a collaborative workspace, which is normally more formal, more long-term, and can require IT involvement to establish and configure.

I have the following questions about Activity Explorer:

• When a file is dragged onto someone's name in the "Instant Contacts" list, is the file is sent by IM or email? By the nature of dragging and dropping, one gets the impression that it would be shared by IM, but the screen shot process that I've seen makes it look like it is shared over email. Firstly, if it is only shared by email, then that needs to be stated, and sharing should also be enabled by right-clicking the email or file to share and selecting someone's name. Secondly, if the metaphor of drag-and-drop is retained, then the email or file should really be shared in that way without further prompting.


• Why is the screen layout of Activity Explorer so different to email? Email clients have a generally accepted three pane layout: mailboxes/folders down the left hand 1/4 of the screen, with the list of messages in the mailbox/folder in the top portion of the 3/4 remainder, and a preview of the selected message in the bottom portion of the 3/4 remainder. Activity Explorer is broken into four quadrants: top left is type and versioning details of the selected shared option, bottom left is a list of shared items in the activity (the "activity thread"), top right is the list of activities, and bottom right is the preview pane. In other words, things that I'd look for in one place within email are in a different location in Activity Explorer. That is a red flag for me ... users will get confused easily. I suggest the following revamp: the list of activities in the left hand 1/4, the activity thread in the top right hand part, and a preview in the normal preview pane. The list of type and versioning attributes could be a pop-up on the activity name in the left hand listing.


• When a document is shared out of a document library, is there any versioning information retained? In other words, is the master edition in the document library marked as being checked out? When edits have been finalized on the draft document as shared within an activity, will that document be automatically recognized for its lineage when put back into the document library? Can a document be shared in multiple activities at the same time? If so, what happens to all of those different editions when the activity concludes? Is there any automagic reconciliation across the potential multiple versions? Without a very strong content repository underlying all of this, document sharing could turn into a nightmare.


• How will activities be shared between organizations? Within the current code from IBM, Activity Explorer only works within the same domain infrastructure (a collection of servers that have a common lineage). It does not work across domains, and it does not work across organizations. IBM is planning for inter-domain activities, but the implementation details have not been finalized and the roadmap timeframe has not been communicated.


• Is a recording of a shared screen session retained within the Activity Thread, or is it lost? Important decisions and points-of-view will be advocated and debated within a shared screen session, so I think it should be retained as a historical artifact. Ideally, the audio component of the session should be captured and retained too.


• Finally, why are Activities segregated into a different section of the screen and treated as different and separate from email messages? If an activity is an organized collection of multi-channel events, isn't the paradigm just a richer take on a view of an email thread? How about listing current activities in the generic "Inbox", and showing the Activity Thread in-line? Activities could then be put away into folders, just like email messages.

Your Thoughts
Have you looked into Activity Explorer as a new capability to use at your organization? Do you see potential for it, or only potholes? I'd love to hear your thoughts, either by leaving a comment below, or sending me an email at michael.sampson@shared-spaces.com.

Comments

[Ben Poole]

Those are all valid concerns. I haven't fired up Activity Explorer in a little while, but your questions have prompted me to do so... I smiled when I read the bullet re sharing activities between organisations: remember the question put to David Marshak at CTC2005 regarding Activity Explorer?

"Is this compatible with MS Outlook?"

:o)

[Ben Rose]

>When a file is dragged onto someone's name in the "Instant Contacts" list, is the file is sent by IM or email?<

I'd expect a doclink to be sent either way, not the whole file; that's the whole point of the central store in the first place surely?

To be honest, this whole Activity Explorer thing reminds me a lot of Groove Virtual Office which of course is owned by Microsoft now.

Groove allows activity areas like these to be knocked up on an adhoc basis without much effort and are much easier to share securely with external organisations, one of the queries you had above.

Ironically, it was this "ease of sharing" that put us off Groove. As users could just create Groove workspaces without much control and then share the contents with anyboby else online it posed a huge security risk to our organisation.

As all the links were securely encrypted we couldn't monitor what was being transmitted or received and keeping them backed up wasn't an easy task either.

Sharing data within Notes, which ultimately Workplace may well superceed, has always been powerful but also controlled; I hope IBM stick with a similar model for the new products.

That's my 2p anyway.

[Michael Sampson]

Ben @1 ... yes, time will tell.

Ben @2 ... Duh! on my part. Of course the file isn't IM'd or email'd ... just the invite to the newly created shared location on the server. Secondly, thanks for sharing re GVO and the concerns you have/had. It will be interesting to see how organizations respond to GVO as a component of Office, given these security risks.

[Ben Rose]

Trackback to my Groove/Workplace blog entry in January.

http://www.jaffacake.net/BensBlog.nsf/dx/groove--workplace...non-identical-twins.htm

[Ingo Erdmann]

IBM has a great vision about activity centric collaboration that originates in the Cambridge lab of IBM research. Activity Explorer is just a first, still very limited incarnation of this vision.
Currently, AE stores physical objects, which in my opinion is not the right approach from an information management perspective. Activity centric collaboration in my understanding is meant as an all-embracing entry point to information objects in shared spaces, e-mails and other sources, processes, people and applications.
Therefore I am sure that future versions of AE will not store objects, but links to objects. That way, Ben's concerns would be fully addressed, as the information object itself would not directly be stored in the personal activity space.

[Steve Hartwell]

There's a July 25 article on IBM developerWorks "Discovering Activity Explorer in the IBM Workplace Managed Client" at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ae/ that has a good overview.

[Michael Sampson]

Thanks Steve ... I'll check it out.