IBM Research: Activity Explorer

I was just talking to Michael Sampson a couple of nights ago (I think it must have been mid-day at the time for him, but it was late at night here), and I started blathering on about my "vision" for a collaborative environment that is entirely based on the "buddy list" concept but isn't just for IM, and which accepts drag-drop events. I know I was talking this idea up with a number of people in the Penumbra suite at Lotusphere this past year, so it may sound familiar to some of you. The vision is that the IM-style buddy list, which is the most intuitive front-end for collaboration (ask any teenager!), can be the central switchboard for any type of collaboration. The idea is basically that you should be able to drag a URL, a doclink, a file, or just about anything over to your buddy list, drop it on a person or a group, and have the system figure out the best way to get the information over to the recipient(s). The decision-making for the routing could take the intersection of sender and recipient preferences into account, plus presence info, Recipients who are on-line might get the info via IM. Recipients who are not on-line might get the info via email, or perhaps via an RSS feed (if security considerations don't get in the way) or via a QuickPlace. In any case, the info -- along with a thread of tesponses could be maintained in an archive that routes updates to all participants in a similarly intelligent fashion. Logic associated with a group in the buddy list could even manage a workflow process that gets kicked off when you click on it, or when you drag-drop a file (e.g., an Excel spreadsheet expense report, perhaps) on it.

Apart from that one night at Lotusphere where I was running this idea past anyone who would listen, and a few other friends and associates, I've been a little closed-mouthed about it because I've been entertaining the notion of trying to find funding to get it built. I've never really pursued that, however, for several reasons -- one of which was "this is so doggone obvious that somebody has got to already be working on it!" Well... somebody is.

Today I spied this article about IBM's forthcoming collaboration tools and get to the third and fourth paragraphs:

Activity Explorer combines e-mail, chat and shared workspaces in one interface. Users can share a variety of work files with each other, which are defined as "collaborative objects." This content can include shared e-mail messages, files, folders and screens and pervasive chat. Users simply drag and drop objects they want to collaborate on to the users on their contact list.

The shared objects then form "activity threads." Each object has its own access control and new collaborative activities can be started from any type of content.

From this description, it sounds like IBM has got much of what I'm looking for in the works. I can't tell whether they've incorporated the "find the best way" idea into it, the idea of taking sender and recipient preferences into account, the idea of integrating RSS, etc. but these are such a natural offshoots of the idea of blending the buddy list UI motif into a tool for persistent collaboration that I'll bet they probably are doing it. I can't wait to have a look at it. It appears to be slated for Workplace 3.0, which isn't that far off. This may finally be the thing that gets me seriously interested in the non-Domino components of Workplace.

Update Five Across' InterComm product has the something similar to the "find the best way" idea, and it also has the drag and drop functionality, at least for files. IBM Lotus team.... are you listening? ;-)