Leadership By Numbers

Category Lotusphere
Lotus executives and a group of bloggers convened last night to review press announcements, Lotusphere highlights, and Project Vulcan.

Lotus Owns Messaging Mobility: With the current build out of a complete mobile client for Android (on both 2.0 and 2.1 SDK platforms), IBM now dominants mobile presence for enterprise messaging and collaboration. Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connection integration with Blackberry devices, and the Traveler companion plug-in for Apple's iPhone have demonstrated both the technical depth of Lotus' integration as well as their vendor neutrality.

Lotus Foundations Continues to Surge in Growth: The Lotus Foundations server appliance is an innovative solution to a complex problem: how to provide big-iron reliability and performance to the small business office. It's also emblematic of how well Lotus has been focused on nurturing it's Business Partner relationships, as Foundations is only distributed through partners. New vendor relationships with Mitel, Shoretel and NEC have been added to the roster, along with Xerox.

Sametime 8.5 is being released on the J2EE platform with the ability to support applet-free web conferencing; no downloads required.

Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections well be fully compliant to CMIS standards. Throughout the week, the information about the Alfresco tie-in with Lotus Quickr has been becoming more evident, and the CMIS commitment makes sense of it. Alfresco rounds out the portfolio for back-end processing, providing a necessary alternative to FileNet.

Project Vulcan is a deliberate ploy to excite developers with the creative possibility of building and integrating business-grade, collaboration technology into their own platform. It's not product, but it is the exposure of the parts and pieces that IBM/Lotus has defined as core to the future of Rich/Thin/Mobile collaboration work.

It's providing a streamlined experience with 'social analytics' - performing smarter match-ups for content owners and associating search with social analysis. In fact, Jeff Eisen says its 'about analytics in general.' It's a loosely coupled architecture, relying on RESTful APIs.

It's a fascinating play, that in combination with LotusLive Labs, is giving developers an environment to create their own applications based on the back-end, cloud services of Lotus using REST, CSS, and HTML5.

Technorati Tags: IBM/Lotus, Project Vulcan, Lotus Foundations

Posted by Jack Dausman At 8:20 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
Institutional IT bureaucrats, admin-nerds, marketing buccaneers, Micro-ISV developers and tired corporate drones, happy for a respite; the entire swath of the Lotusphere population could be re-costumed for the Mos Eisley catina. In the last day, I've had discussions with participants from Singapore, France, Germany, Italy, and all over the U.S

The range of concerns is vast and the attitude is upbeat. Some Business Partners are hinting that Monday's Open General Session with Bob Picciano and Alistair Rennie will include surprises beyond the Alfresco and Panasonic announcements.

Random commentary and general rumor-mongering:

LotusLive is a fleet of steamrollers.
Last year's announcement left some puzzling about its strategic importance, outside of the buying 18 million email accounts from OutBlaze. Today, it's being demonstrated as a SaaS platform with many products and different points for customization and integration. With the Panasonic (and other) migrations, LotusLive has made good.

What was boutique is now becoming better recognized.
Lotus Connections, Sametime Unified Telephony, Lotus Quickr are getting noticed by analysts and accepted by customers. Last year, these were seen as respectable products, but they didn't get much media attention.

Symphony is under appreciated.
Lotusphere may nudge some of its capabilities onto a wider stage for a larger audience. Lots here, for developers, that should assuage concerns of its viability to compete with other office suites.

Bob did an amazing job with re-aligning Lotus divisions to improve their customer-facing response.
By restructuring internal communication, the product offerings are being better coordinated for synchronizing their releases and focusing on customer concerns. His departure from Lotus is a promotion. The buzz is that because Lotus is now running on all cylinders, it will benefit more from a GM within Lotus, than one from another software group. Alistair is taking leadership of Lotus, at a time when it is probably at an organizational height it hasn't had since the release of R5.

Business is up, but it's a complex patchwork of different regions and technologies.
Many accounts can't be publicly used for vendor reference, but are rather large success stories (e.g., Bank of India). The traditional Notes/Domino on-premise systems are doing modestly well; in particular, the Pacific rim, South America, and Europe. U.S customers are heavily challenged from a well entrenched Microsoft, but the ND8.5.1 release has returned the collaboration package to wider acceptance. Business Partners that restrict their business to only Domino/Notes have not been the profit leaders. The strongest growth is happening with Lotus Connections, Sametime, Quickr and adding value by doing things like server consolidation. I'm looking to learn more where others are finding growth.

Open-source, open-standards is mainstream.
I'm using Lotus Symphony and Notes on a Ubuntu netbook for Lotusphere. Last year, this would have been novel; today, it's not buying me any drinks. I know I'll be hearing more about Alfresco/Quickr, Ubuntu OCCS, Linux servers, etc. However, with cloud computing and SaaS, there just isn't a demand for a specific desktop configuration. Verde's VDI has already been making a splash in foreign markets, and I know we are going to be hearing more of it. Open-source is driving down overall costs, and extending into a greater choice of hardware platforms than with proprietary systems. I'm getting hints that there will be more open-source announcements tomorrow (e.g., Xen support, etc.). I have my fingers crossed for more cross-platform growth (e.g., Quickr connectors, iPhone, Android, Blackberry/RIM, etc.).

Business workflow for the knowledge-worker is in transition from being centralized around document management, towards process and relationship management.
Collaboration is a nest of IM, e-mail, conferencing, document management, and social media. From a Linked-In widget for Lotus Notes, to a completely SaaS LotusLive solution, collaboration is no longer exclusively organized around generic messaging technology. I think the impact of this trend will be that the revolution of Google Apps will be seen as setting a new baseline for functionality, and corporations will quickly require collaboration that is nuanced to their own business structure.

The hybrid cloud is it.
This conclusion is as surprising as watching gravity work. Running a business completely as a SaaS is not a reasonable option. However, the costs of being purely on-premise is too high. So, the solution is going to be found in the hybrid model.

Calendar integration is being pushed outside the corporation by SaaS
Forget hardwiring different corporate departments that can't do calendar lookups. The answer will be in Doodle, LotusLive, Tungle, or someone else. Because everyone is connected to everyone else with a variety of mail systems (and most business users have several personal mail accounts), collapsing a variety of corporate mail systems into one platform, isn't going to simplify directories or calendaring. Why not? Because a large percentage of all of my work communication goes outside my company.

If you have enough experience, you might remember the beginnings of corporate LAN messaging, before SMTP. Email was only sent to someone else in the same building. That's where we are now, with calendaring and scheduling. iCal brokers, outside the corporate walls, are going to become widely accepted.

Technorati Tags: Lotusphere, Quickr, Linux, iCal, LotusLive

Posted by Jack Dausman At 4:16 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
Panasonic dumps Exchange for IBM/Lotus; open-source Alfresco plugs in to Quickr, Connnections, and Portal; and Lotus General Manager (GM) Bob Picciano's position is being filled by Alistair Rennie. In one week.

Dang. I have that same mix of pride and let-down that comes when a favorite indie band breaks through to wild success. My son wears a Pink Floyd t-shirt, but I saw them at Winterland before they were monster.

Lotusphere is going to be different, because the news isn't about technology, it's about movement. At 8.5.1, the cross-platform Lotus Notes client is certifiable great, Domino is a best-buy, Quickr continues to build credibility, Connections is visionary (not my words, but an analyst), LotusLive is crushing its competitors, and WebSphere Portal is still winning hearts.

At last year's event, I had a conversation with Michael Cote, who referred to the announcement of LotusLive as "shockingly contemporary." He nailed it. With a rollout from Panasonic that is expected to move as many as 300,000 accounts, the LotusLive initiative is the most successful play for any enterprise messaging migration to cloud-based hosting. It dwarfs every Google Apps account.

Alistair Rennie I know through an IBM advisory board that I served on, a few years back. Very focused, clear minded and a straight shooter. He's the type of person who can disagree with you, but explain it in a fashion that clarifies the matter for everyone's benefit. He's a good fit for his new role, especially as he is a Lotus insider, rather than a GM from another division (as has been the IBM tradition).

As for the Alfresco integration, I haven't heard a sound, yet from Matt Asay, but I'm expecting a thorough analysis.

• MAPI is out (mea culpa, I've argued for its inclusion, I was wrong).
• Open-source integration is in.
  

Press and analysts will have a lot a work at this year's Lotusphere. Can't make the trip to Orlando ? Then I guess you'll be listening to "Wish you were here."

Posted by Jack Dausman At 8:32 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
If you are booking up on virtualization, then these should be in your RSS reader:

• http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/everyday-virtualization/list/blog-list.aspx
• http://vlp.vmware-land.com/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/virtualization/
• http://www.brianmadden.com/

Posted by Jack Dausman At 7:57 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Management
BusinessWeek has a write up on "The Return of the Outsourced Job," certainly a divisive topic in a recession. What does this mean for your job ? Outsourcing occurs in a variety of forms, from H1-B work visas to off-site data centers. Iowa Senator, Chuck Grassley, and Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders, have taken the offensive tack for trimming back H1-B visas, an action that is seen by outsourcing executives as "a restrictive trade practice." The intent of the proposed legislation is to constrain employers from using H1-B guestworkers to replace employees that have suffered a layoff.

A Federal Reserve report indicates that the sort of outsourcing which purged IT departments of talent is no longer seen as cost-effective (or politically appropriate). But, chief financial officers are still keen on balancing their workforce with a lean staff, augmented by outsourcing resources for at least the next 32 months.

Despite the downturn in H1-B usage, IT professionals are still in a difficult job market. The Janco 2010 IT Salary Survey gives a listing of headline summaries:

• Layoffs have focused on middle management and IT support staff
• Enterprises that have cut costs in lieu of laying staff off are now planning to institute a round of layoffs in order to meet 'their numbers' for 2010
• Companies are continuing to reduce the benefits provided to IT professionals.
• There now is a surplus of seasoned IT professionals available.  For the second time in less than ten years, retirements are being put off because of the downturn in the stock market and the resultant reduction in savings available to support IT professionals as they retire.  Added to this is an influx of retirees who are looking to get back into the job market due to of the massive reduction in their investment portfolio.

This bleakness frames a specific IT population, as well as suggests some opportunities. Organizations are going to continue to flatten out their management to line-workers ratio, so being skilled in technologies important to the company is essential. And, there is the possibility of jumping in front of the outsourcing parade, giving leadership to "cloud computing, managed services and Saas."  

It's workable for there to be on-premise management for hosted, cloud-based, resources. Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Cisco are marshaling vast armies of technology into the cloud. I'm looking hard at everything from VDI for the client, to federated directories between a cloud-hosted service and on-premise servers.

But the most important survival characteristic for 2010 is not about techie skills, it's about working with techies:  having the ability to handle morale issues is going to be the single most significant work trait. There is nothing vaguely cloudy about keeping a positive focus; work hard, make friends.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, outsourcing, h1-b

Posted by Jack Dausman At 8:19 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Management

I love reading Shankar Vedantam's many thought pieces for The Washington Post, especially his "Department of Human Behavior." His book, http://www.hiddenbrain.org/, is close to release and has already garnered impressive reviews.

" disturbing but enlightening look at the power of the unconscious over human action and decision-making." A tour into dark realms of the psyche by a personable guide.""
-Kirkus Reviews

" Washington Post science writer, Vedantam explores the findings of social psychologists about unconscious bias. Recounting people's stories, he grips attention immediately."
-Booklist

"In The Hidden Brain, one of America's best science journalists describes how our unconscious minds influence everything from criminal trials to charitable giving, from suicide bombers to presidential elections. The Hidden Brain is a smart and engaging exploration of the science behind the headlines--and of the little man behind the screen. Don't miss it."
-Daniel Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Stumbling on Happiness

"Shankar Vedantam brings his critical eye to a question that has haunted scientists and writers for centuries: Does the unconscious matter, and if so, how? With a light touch, the book takes us through the complicated landscape of research on psychology and human behavior. We come away not only understanding how we act, but Vedantam moves past mainstream economic reasoning to shed light on the relationships we create with each other. The book addresses the madness and beauty of our struggles to create a moral and just world."
-Sudhir Venkatesh, New York Times bestselling author of Gang Leader for a Day:
A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

You can also follow him on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/HiddenBrain)

Technorati Tags: Shankar Vedantam

Posted by Jack Dausman At 12:06 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Administration
"In case you haven't noticed, IBM Lotus not only didn't go away, it's here with a vengeance" is how Ted Schadler of Forrester Research summarizes many of the newest initiatives by Lotus. Ted explains that Sametime 8.5 is a major overhaul, "an important upgrade" for click-to-conference usability with a zero-download client.

Ted then runs through an IBM/Lotus inventory list, mentioning (1) LotusLive (now a Best of 2009), with its 18 million accounts; (2) Domino's DAOS (my earlier summary); (3) and Lotus Connections. Regarding LotusLive, it's not just another off-site mail alternative. IBM/Lotus has announced how they've been using LotusLive for a joint project with Navartis and Vodafone that combats Malaria in Africa.

Lotus Connections continues to draw tremendous interest, with Government Computer News writing of its "popular social networking features" being used by such staid and frugle organizations as the LA County government.

Lotus has a lot of momentum going forward for 2010.

Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes, Forrester Research, Lotus Connections, LotusLive, Lotus Sametime

Posted by Jack Dausman At 8:20 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category IBM/Lotus Domino
This week I was speaking with a very good friend at IBM/Lotus, who provides pre-sales technical support: he knows his stuff. "You know," he tells me, "Lotus is moving too fast. It's really hard to keep up with all the new stuff." Which is true. There has been a string of announcements over this last year, Lotus has really been chugging along.

About time.

So, perhaps all this effort has been straining internal staff on staying current, but the rest of the world is giving heed. Laren McKay of Destination CRM has summarized Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace '09:

Leaders:

Gartner notes that leaders are well-established vendors with solid customer bases. The report says, "Their leadership is being established through an early recognition of user needs in this market, their overall market presence, and their success in delivering user-friendly and solution-focused suites with broad capabilities." These vendors are continually investing in social support and are seeing consistent traction.

• IBM: "IBM is a leader by virtue of being ahead of the market with a strong market presence," the analysts write. IBM is not only an established technology vendor, but the report points out that IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 offers a comprehensive social software suite and that the company offers many flexible deployment options. One caution is that IBM could stand to improve its usability.

Technorati Tags: Laren McKay, Lotus Connections, Gartner

Posted by Jack Dausman At 5:33 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category
InformationWeek Executive Editor, Fritz Nelson, writes on the importance of customer engagement as the "future of the web."

Words like "crowdsourced," "social," and "sticky" are simple labels for complicated ingenuity. Anyone who sets out to create The Next Big Thing invariably fails compared with those who create something out of real social need, or passion.

An example of web marketing going awry was Microsoft's Windows 7 Parties, swinging between "the ultimate in banality" and kind of being "like your grandmother spewing a few Snoop Dog lines."

There are, however, interesting lessons, lessons that assume a business already believes in using the Web to listen to, follow, and engage customers -- and most important, get them to act. . . .

We have perfectly good examples in the physical world. Anyone who's ever attended Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) World, SAPPHIRE, IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s Lotusphere or Impact, or Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) Networkers knows that those companies' customers come in droves to sit captive to marketing muscle and messaging, face-to-face with the supplier. The hosts sometimes hear the best anecdotes and customer feedback, forge new relationships, strengthen existing ones, and even conduct transactions.

Of course, there is also the list of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technologies to be had with WebSphere, Lotus Notes/Domino, Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime, LotusLive . . . well, I think these year's Lotusphere has got a lot of promise.

Technorati Tags: Lotusphere 2010

Posted by Jack Dausman At 9:03 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category Administration Messaging And Collaboration Sametime
My company has formally committed to a full scale Lotus Notes 8.5 upgrade for all servers and clients. It was not a mindless choice, but the consequence of a long deliberation over competing platforms and Domino functionality. UltraLite and DAOS were the first introductions into Domino 8.5, promising a freshness and currency to the entire Lotus collaboration architecture.

This week I've finished wiring up the integration for iNotes 8.5, Sametime, and Quickr2. It's a very impressive web messaging stack. We are looking to reduce desktop maintenance, and the iNotes suite has sufficient appeal and usability that a surprising number of users prefer it over a full client.

One sticking point for my efforts, was aligning the Single Sign-On certificates. Domino supports several different types, with dissimilar configurations. A comment by Warren Elsmore in a Lotus Notes User Group newsletter gave me the hack that I needed to include our portal interface with our web messaging.

Wrapping together iNotes 8.5, Sametime and Quickr2 is an early holiday gift to our mail clients that have been on iNotes 6 for many, many years.



Technorati Tags: Lotus Quickr, Lotus iNotes, Lotus Sametime, Warren Elsmore

Posted by Jack Dausman At 7:43 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category Lotusphere
When I go to Lotusphere, it's for finding answers. Curiously, "Lotus Connections" has become something of a sleeper hit. Those who work with it claim it's Collaboration 2.0. Michael Cote quotes a tweet by James Governor:

holy shiv. just confirmed: Lotus Connections closed 1m licences in 2 weeks- and that was just *six* enterprise customers.

Those numbers have a big wow factor to them. Come January, I'll be giving Lotus Connections a much closer look.

Technorati Tags: Lotus Connections, James Governor, RedMonk

Posted by Jack Dausman At 7:54 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category
The latest release of Ubuntu has a terrific new feature: advanced security for browsing with Firefox. This feature is not enabled, by default, and requires running a single line in a console to activate. The Karmic Koala release hints at this capability in the release notes:

A new profile is provided for Firefox as well, though it is disabled by default. Users can enable AppArmor sandboxing of their browser by running:

$ sudo aa-enforce /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox-3.5

This is pretty amazing, as the only other reasonable solution for browser protection is the recommendation of Brian Krebs to rely on booting up with a Live CD. Useful, but not practical. In a work environment, I need to use my browser continuously, and having to juggle with a Live CD is not a practice which is going to be widely adopted. On the other hand, by relying on Ubuntu's AppArmor profile for Firefox, I achieve an extraordinarily high level of Identify Protection with barely an inconvenience.

Why isn't this feature turned on by default ? Reading the Ubuntu Security Team wiki on Firefox, explains that users "must opt-in to using the profile and therefore should know that AppArmor confinement could cause Firefox to behave unexpectedly." Unexpectedly ? That's not a term which bolsters my confidence for adding the profile. I asked Canonical's Security Engineer for Ubuntu, Jamie Strandboge, if he would describe the benefit of enabling the AppArmor profile for Firefox:

The basic idea is that Firefox is a complex application. It (like all browsers due to the complexity) has had a lot of security vulnerabilities. AppArmor confines an application to being able to perform only a known and well-defined set of actions. Because of Firefox's complexity, the profile is disabled by default, to not interrupt the user's experience. If the profile can provide the necessary protection as well as a good user experience, then it may be enabled in a future release of Ubuntu.

I absolutely recommend using AppArmor in a corporate environment, which is one reason why we ship it. It is well tested in Ubuntu, and does work with extensions and plugins shipped in Ubuntu. The best thing to do is try it out and report any bugs.

Jamie hasn't found any broken Firefox applications, and when I read through the bug reports, it seemed that any problems with a secured Firefox were related to user configurations, and not to AppArmor's Firefox implementation. I think the enhanced security of Firefox on Ubuntu is one more reason that Ubuntu provides a solid corporate desktop environment.

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Firefox, AppArmor, Jamie Strandboge

Posted by Jack Dausman At 6:37 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category Announcements DC Events IBM/Lotus Domino
Please join us for the Lotus Knows Bus Tour on Friday, November 6th, from 12 to 2 PM! The Lotus Bus will be stopping at the Federal Triangle Metro Station.

Debbie Greenberg would appreciate a headsup RSVP at debra_greenberg@us.ibm.com. This will be a social event and a great time to chat about Lotus Software.

Location:

• Across from the Federal Triangle Metro Station
• 302 12th St., NW
• Washington, DC

Date: Friday, November 6th, 2009
Time: 12 to 2 PM

Looking forward to seeing you on the bus!

If you can't make the bus, there are PDF posters of Lotus Knows.


Technorati Tags: LotusKnows, Lotus Notes

Posted by Jack Dausman At 7:02 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category IBM/Lotus Linux Ubuntu
IBM is now offering the African package of its Virtual Ubuntu for the rest of us. It's touted as a choice fit for today's netbooks--a downsized desktop for the pintsized workstation. Does it really make sense ? It's definitely a splashy topic. The news made it on Slashdot, with an unusually large number of respondents. Let's look at the parts:

• Ubuntu on a netbook has proven itself, even providing a 'Remix' version best suited for the smaller netbook screens. Dell just released their Ubuntu 9.04 ISO, so anyone can purchase brand-name hardware that supports Ubuntu.

• Virtual Desktop Integration (VDI) is starting to get some serious attention. These platforms have come a long way from their earlier, nearly dumb terminals based on protocols like VNC. Citrix and Microsoft are promoting the XenDesktop package, with VMware and Parallels presenting their own VDI infrastructure. Canonical's Ubuntu has had several different VDI choices, but with the addition of IBM's approval and partnership, Ubuntu under VDI is being recast as Enterprise Grade.

• Lotus Symphony looks good and works well on Windows, Macintosh and Linux. As a Microsoft Office alternative, it's a good choice, but it's not the only player. The question for IT managers is whether or not Sun's OpenOffice is preferred to Lotus Symphony. Both have large companies behind their development, offer support and sell at a zero price point. Until recently, I would have understood a hesitancy to pull in Lotus Symphony. But, Sun is now in negotiations to be purchased by Oracle; a company that is not a flagbearer for Free Open Source (FOSS). The future of OpenOffice is uncertain, and IBM is strongly committed to the ongoing maturation of Symphony. Interestingly, Lotus just released an upgraded Symphony development kit that uses a Visual Basic style of programming (LotusScript) that works with Lotus Notes.

• Lotus Notes is now at release 8.5.1, and has revitalized their entire product line. It's obvious from numerous press accounts, that inclusion for iPhone support has been widely welcomed. Lotus Notes has been polished up and shows well in any office environment. Rob Koplowitz, Forrester Research's principal analyst summarizes that,"Lotus can now go side-by-side with Microsoft in a UI bake-off." Add in the integration capabilities of Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony and there is now a framework for a uniquely productive office suite. I'm not sure there is anything equal to it. With the addition for Sametime IM and Quickr Entry, IBM has a challenge to Google Apps.

An IBM-Canonical VDI looks like an arrangement where the pieces fit well together: each link stands well on its own merits. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols gives his summary analysis of IBM's news, and concludes with a pricing breakdown. If your site is running Lotus, then you need to be evaluating VDI possibilities. If you are not using Lotus, then you couldn't ask for a better friend during your next round of negotiations for license renewal.

---

Update: I'm looking to identify some point of contacts for the IBM Business Partners who can provide the VDI solution. I've worked with Virtual Bridges, and I know they are included in the list. In the meantime, there is a ROI/TCO calculator with some more details.

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, VDI, IBM/Lotus

Posted by Jack Dausman At 8:33 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category
Jens Gapfert has created a tremendously useful video tool for generating MPEGs from JPGs: PhotoFilmStrip. My first try at cutting a Ken Burns Lite video was using Google's impressive Picasa. I used it for making a DVD of the 50th anniversary of some good neighbors.

On the next upgrade, Picasa 3, sadly left out the video capability and I've been searching for something that could match Picasa in creating a DVD from still images. Well, PhotoFilmStrip exceeds Picasa in this aspect, it makes great videos from stills.

• Simple and easy to use graphical user interface
• Comfortable way to specify the motion path for each picture
• Picture comments are generate into subtitle file
• Several output possibilities
• Special feature is Full-HD resolution and MPEG4 output
• Background music for the slideshow
• Export and Import of a PhotoFilmStrip project (all pictures in one file)
• Automatic detection of picture rotation (extracted from EXIF)
• Some picture effect like "black and white" and sepia
• Some quality settings for each output renderer
• Command line interface for batch processing

Thanks, Jens, PhotoFilmStrip is awesome.

Technorati Tags: PhotoFilmStrip, Jens Gopfert, Linux, FOSS

Posted by Jack Dausman At 9:53 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)