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Posts Tagged 'לוטוס'

My BFF*, Alan Lepofsky

Published July 9, 2008 Uncategorized 2 Comments
Tags: alan lepofsky, career, ibm, lotus, ross mayfield, socialtext, אלן לפופסקי, יבמ, לוטוס, קריירה

My close friend and colleague, Alan Lepofsky, announced on his blog that he is leaving IBM and taking the position of Director of Marketing at SocialText, alongside Ross Mayfield. Wow!

Alan has been in Lotus since it was, well, Lotus, back in 1993. Lotus (and later IBM) is the only company he knows. For the past several years Alan has been the senior evangelist dude for Lotus Collaboration strategy, and if you happen to get an email from him, IBM email, his title is ‘Lotus StrategizR’ – COOL.

I came to know Alan some 2 and a half years ago, in my previous role, when I started to get into social media and collaboration, within IBM. Alan was the top result on every internal search I did, and the relationship began. Upon moving to Lotus Software I often quoted his posts and opinions, and he really helped me understand faster what Lotus Collaboration is all about.

The highlight of our (ongoing) relationship had to be LCTY Israel, back in March 2008, where Alan was keynote speaker. His time in Israel was well spent, business and personal, and it was a blast hanging out with him, touring Jerusalem for a day, IBM Party, visiting Haifa Research Labs and hearing him speak. Even thou his keynote was way longer then scheduled, no one said anything – they were hypnotized by his passion, dedication and belief in Lotus, and its collaboration benefits.
Pictured here, outside IBM Haifa Research Labs, you can see some of his enthusiasm – Yellow long-sleeved short (in the Israeli climate), smiling as always, after hearing what IBM researchers are working on in the collaboration space.

Alan, it was an honor and a pleasure working with you in Big Blue, and I wish you all the best as the new marketing chief for Socialtext.

* definition of BFF

Lotus Connections 2.0 – now in Ivrit

Published June 13, 2008 Uncategorized 1 Comment
Tags: hebrew, ibm, lotus connections, social software, יבמ, ישראל, לוטוס, עברית, שיתוף

Lotus Connections 2.0 was announced today, riding the hype around Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, with some cool new features, a brand new Lotus Connections homepage at ibm.com and most important – Hebrew support.
The Hebrew version will be available for electronic download on July 11th, but you can see how the new homepage looks like (also featured on my slides from ‘I want a facebook thing. I think.‘).

There’s also a video posted on YouTube, showcasing the new features.

If you haven’t RSSed Lotus Connections Blog – now is the time.

Link: Lotus Connections 2.0 announced:

Overview
IBM Lotus Connections is social software for business. It empowers business professionals to build and call upon networks of colleagues with whom they can share information, develop and refine new creative ideas, and collaborate on activities. This can help individuals to become more innovative and execute tasks more quickly.

Lotus Connections includes the following six integrated services that can be used independently, or together to deliver more value.

New features of Lotus Connections 2.0

Profiles: Quickly find the people you need by using keyword search

* People can build a network of colleagues to help them get their job done.
* Profile data can be customized to match what is most relevant to a company.
* Social tagging can be used to associate individuals with topics improving search.

Communities: Create, find, join, and work with communities of people

* Discussion forums are now provided.
* The ability to integrate with wikis from Socialtext and Confluence is now included
* Lotus Sametime Advanced can be used to communicate with a community

Blogs: Present your ideas in a Weblog and get feedback from others

* Recommend and notify other users of a blog entry they might find useful.
* Flag content as inappropriate to alert an administrator.

Dogear: Save, organize, and share bookmarks

* Send and receive notification of interesting bookmarks.
* Use a new tool to add a bookmark to Dogear, activities and communities.

Activities: Gather the e-mails, IM chats, documents, messages, and other information that you need to accomplish a business objective

* Information within an Activity can be organized into sections.
* The content entry form for an Activity can be customized with additional fields, including dates, people, and text

A new home page: Provides you with a consolidated view of your social data across the Lotus Connections services. You are presented with a view of:

* A Profiles widget displaying your colleagues with an indication of their new entries across the services, and also a data entry field for a search of profiles
* A widget displaying bookmarks lets you customize the view to include Popular bookmarks, Watchlisted bookmarks, or Recent Bookmarks
* A Communities widget show which communities you belong to along with an indication of which ones have been recently updated
* An Activities widgets shows your todos in a calendar, responses to your posts in activities, new entries in high priority activities, and a quick view of all the activities in which a user participates or owns.
* A blogs widget shows the most recent blog entries
* The Home Page is extensible, so administrators can add in widgets from external sites or their own internal applications.

By empowering your people to easily connect to employees, partners, and customers, Lotus Connections helps you realize the following professional and business benefits:

* Tasks can be executed faster because you have quick access to information from an expanded professional network
* Decisions can be made with confidence knowing they were vetted by experts across the organization and reflect past experience.
* Innovative products and services can be created from communities of employees, partners, and customers – driving growth for your business.

Empowering your workforce, browser only

Published May 24, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
Tags: collaboration, ibm, israel, lotus software, menora insurance, websphere portal, ביטוח, יבמ, ישראל, לוטוס, מנורה-מבטחים, פורטל

Earlier this week I met with Menora Insurnace, one of the largest insurance groups in Israel, founded in 1935.
Menora are a veteran customer of Lotus collaboration solutions, featuring Lotus Notes for messaging, Lotus Sametime for instant messaging, Lotus Quickr for team collaboration and WebSphere Portal as their one-stop-shop for doing business, both internal and external.

Arjan Radder and myself met our colleagues at Menora to discuss how they can leverage their existing investments in Lotus solutions, and explore new growth engines for Menora and its customers through implementing social software solutions, such as a blogging platform, or social bookmarking service.

Menora employees are working out of their browsers, no client involved.
Their internal portal uses single sign-on to identify and authenticate the user, which in turn presents a unique homepage for each user, based on his/her permissions and preferences.
Their messaging platform is incorporated within the homepage, and they can access their inbox, calendar, address book and composite applications in a click of a mouse.

I’m always amazed to see the breadth of approaches customers take with their Lotus solutions. Building everything around the internal portal is an innovative concept, but in a SaaS (Software as a Service) era, putting everything online (behind the firewall of course) is the way to go.

You can read additional case studies here.

To twit or not to twit

Published May 13, 2008 Uncategorized 4 Comments
Tags: communication, community, IM, instant messaging, lotus software, sharing, twitter, הודעות מיידיות, ווב 2.0, טוויטר, לוטוס, מדיה חברתית, סייםטיים, צאט

I wasn’t a twitter fan to begin with. In every customer/analyst/colleagues meeting I spoke, twitter was always my example of ‘too much information’, ‘too much sharing’.
The reason I sighed up to twitter was really to update my facebook status, using the Twitter application in FB – made my life easier, telling the world where I am and what I’m doing (sometimes too much information.. ;-).
I often met friends after hours and they were like ‘how was the meeting in Tel Aviv?’, or ‘enjoyed that lunch?’ – and I didn’t know where they got their info from.

Working with Twitter was difficult at first – how do you explain yourself in 140 symbols or less? what should I twit about? when to update? what application to use?
Sam Lawrence provided some insights on different twitter services, Ouriel talked about email vs. twitter and my friend Alan compared twitter to IM. And there are many more twits out there, discussing how twitter changed the way we communicate. Even in a time of disaster.

Most of the day I use twhirl – simple desktop application for twitter. Easy to use, follow, reply, direct and add friends. I also use TwitNotes in my Lotus Notes 8.0.1 client from time to time. When I’m offline (strange – I’m never offline, only ‘laptop-less’) I use twibble on my Nokia N95, or text message instead. Twibble provides a fair alternative for twhirl, but there’s no way to add urls or photos like it twhirl. There’s also Fring on my N95, mostly for VoIP and chats, but I can also update twitter from there (chatting via Google Talk).

For me, the main question is choosing the right sharing tool:
Should I twit about it? maybe write a post like this one? or post to my facebook profile? why not IM? IBMers are no strangers to technology and innovation and some of my good friends are twitting – sometime I find it easier to communicate with them using twitter, because it’s more instant than IM. Especially if they’re ‘offline’.

My thumb rule for choosing which tool is the content. You can’t twit about everything.

Sharepoint integrator from Mainsoft

Published May 9, 2008 Uncategorized Closed
Tags: collaboration, ibm, lotus notes, mainsoft, mainsoft integrator, microsoft sharepoint, moss, יבמ, לוטוס, מיינסופט, מיקרוסופט

Mainsoft announced yesterday of a new solution, Sharepoint Integrator for Lotus Notes (free 30-day trial), that enables Lotus Notes users to access Sharepoint content, via an Eclipse plug-in, at Notes 8 sidebar. You can download the solution sheet (PDF file) or watch a demo (WMV file).

The new integrator was previewed at Lotusphere 2008 in Orlando back in January, and Ed Brill already managed to talk about it, on his way to Turkey, couple of hours before the announcement.

Many companies are using Sharepoint Server as ‘content repository’ to store files, but still want to enjoy the benefits of Lotus Notes as a platform, and not ‘just’ another messaging application. This new Sharepoint Integrator for Lotus Notes provides just that. You can keep your Sharepoint content and work with it, inside your Lotus Notes client. For the Israeli market this announcement is big news, since many customers are using Sharepoint Server to store/share files, but are looking at Lotus Notes as a collaboration platform. [click the image for a larger format]

Excerpt from eWeek:

Mainsoft is essentially cozying up to Notes users by letting Notes and SharePoint content coexist, Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen told eWEEK.

“Customers are sick of all these migrations,” Cohen said. “Customers are saying, ‘Show me how I can leverage what I’ve already purchased.'”

Some features of the SharePoint Integrator, which Cohen demoed for eWEEK May 6, include the ability to drag and drop Word documents, Excel worksheets and PowerPoint presentations from a Notes sidebar into Lotus Notes e-mails, calendar appointments and task lists. This is extremely useful for Notes users who need to make SharePoint files actionable through Notes.

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My BFF*, Alan Lepofsky

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