iSOCIETY, System iPortal, and Truth

Attention System i users!

Several new marketing tools were announced today at the Fall 2006 COMMON conference Town Hall Meeting earlier today. The first is a user portal called iSOCIETY.org. "It's like facebook for adults" was one of the comments. You should go signup from the website. Temporarily, the site is isociety.common.org, but iSOCIETY.org is coming soon.

Second is the System iPortal. It's a single point of reference for System i information. You can search the web, code, blogs, etc... for all things System i related. No more Googling for: dns configuration and AS400 or iSeries or i5 or System i. Since I post a lot of Domino information related to System i, I've requested my blog to be added to the blog search. Some of you should do the same. Soon, I will also have a System iPortal search section on this site.

Perhaps the most anticipated announcement is a new marketing initiative by IBM focused on the System i. There will be some cool "viral marketing" television commercials. We were shown a preview of one of the two. Basically, it's IT guys that get fed up with all of the server sprawl associated with Wintel servers. It's something we Domino folks like to point to as well - being able to consolidate MS implementations onto a single Domino system. The i want control/truth features the ability to add your own comment about System i. See if you can find mine. It's a really slick site that can really help generate some buzz for the public to see how much the Systm i is loved. My only concern is related to the url that was on the preview commercial we saw. It's ibm.com/iwantcontrol/truth - it could be a little much for potential customers to remember.

iSOCIETY and System iPortal are excellent examples of what a dedicated customer base can do to spread the word about the best computer system on the market. The Truth marketing campaign should (hopefully) allow IBM to better position the System i as the amazing "integrated" system that it is. Keep up the great work to all who are involved - especially "Angus!"

Technorati: System i, iSeries, COMMON