Naquada

So in the onwards hunt to find cool stuff about my new employer, I found a very interesting area of alphaworks called Sametime Plug-in for Trillian.

For those of you not in the know, Trillian is a very cool multiple message network IM client for windows, coming in a basic (free) and pro (small donation needed) version, its pretty much the ipso facto multi-IM client tool out there, supporting plugins and a nice user friendly UI..

Now I know myself and quite a number of other people inside Ascential use Trillian as their messaging client, mainly because we’re a hap hazard bunch that use various IM clients and networks to keep in contact.

But with the move to IBM, we’re obviously all going to be on Sametime as our IM network, but that still leaves non Ascential people to keep in contact with (partners, clients, family etc..)

So this IBM official plugin looks pretty cool, not just because IBM is rapidly going up in my view as a pretty cool company (blogs, podcasts, support of growing technologies), but their support for something like trillian means I can keep Trillian Pro as my IM client, and not have to have more software on my TabletPC than needed..

So following on from yesterdays posting, I’ve actually discovered IBMers get up to some pretty cool stuff…

IBM has a good number of public blogs running, but it also has over 2,800 internal blogs running.

Philippe Borremans, PR Manager at IBM Belgium & Luxembourg, writing in the IAOC blog says ‘At this moment we have about 2800 internal weblogs (on a total worldwide population of about 330.000 IBM’ers.) with about 12700 entries. About 200 blogs have more than 10 posts on them…

…But I have also seen that blogging is not for everyone. Some people are so used to the “older” methods of working that they really do not jump on the wagon. Being able to change people and get them to participate from the start is the biggest part of the job.’

In the screenshot of his blog you can see Philippe talking about podcasts amongst other things. This is all very interesting, and seem s to be that IBM and a number of other big coporates really are getting on the ‘cool’ bandwagon…

So in the move to becoming an IBMer, I’ve started doing some digging on what its going to be like working for IBM. There are many bloggers out there that work inside IBM, and they heap views, both good and bad on the company.

Of course none of these comments is any sort of official view of my employeer (old or new), and it is my own personal view, and it is in no way to be taken as anything else;

I’ve dealt with IBM people for a long long time, and I have I think so good friends over there, but the idea of working for them (in them being just SO big), is a little worrying, its more likely because its a massive change..

There are lots of blogs and forums that cover views of IBM employees, and I thought I’d look round to see what my future work lifes going to hold..
(more…)