It’s been a hectic week, especially the last 2 days, and I had little time to comment about recent IBM/Lotus related events. When I saw this evening that our employee portal (w3 On Demand Workplace) has been updated with Lotus Symphony’s 2008 Product of the Year Award, I knew it was time to post.
Lotus Symphony wins CRN 2008 Product of the Year Award
Lotus Symphony acts much like Microsoft Office, which is good if you are looking for something to replace Office at a fraction of the cost (free!)… The Office 2007 installation here at the Test Center by default saves documents in the Office 97-2003 format (in the interest of backward-compatibility) so there were no problems editing files created in Symphony under Office 2007, or vice versa. The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless.
Asteroid hits office building, servers are down Bilal, my colleague across the pond, has launched (along with the Lotus Foundations team of course) the first ‘official’ IBM viral campaign in recent years (‘The Art of The Sale‘ preceded it, but was more a parody than a solution advertising).
Web Conferencing in the Clouds After Lotus Notes and Domino have reached the skies, it was only a matter of time before Lotus Sametime will fly high as well. IBM’s award winning IM solution have been sporting a web version for a long time, that only improved with Web Dialogs’ acquisition. Lotus Sametime Unyte now available in version 8.2, with a new distribution partnership to InterCall’s customers around the world.
New: Lotus SocialText Community Wiki My dear friend Alan Lepofsky has started the Lotus SocialText Community Wiki, a place for Lotus lovers to contribute, connect and create pages. What can you do at the wiki?
Create you own pages. Have some information you want to share? Questions you want to ask? Feedback you want to give?
Edit pages created by others. That is what wikis are all about! Please help keep the content accurate and up to date.
Comment on pages. I know you have opinions!
Tag pages. What attributes do you think of when looking at a page?
Follow people. This will let you easily see the updates they have made.
Tag people. Find people will specific skills. Group like people together.
Customize your Dashboard. It’s all about organizing your digital world!
Wikis are an excellent web 2.0 tool that allows free discussion and contribution from users. It’s also a great way to connect users with developers with product managers, as contributions are open to everyone, thus giving people direct access to the PM and PD teams.
First off I’m glad to hear Microsoft is doing what it can to help local businesses. These are tough times, and any executive needs to have some action plan in place to navigate the coming 3-9 months. Nevertheless, I hope customers, when evaluating IT spending, are looking more closely at the numbers, rather than the product logo. Here’s a slide that will help:
Lotus have an excellent, open standards, desktop solution that features: messaging, basic collaboration and document mgmt., instant messaging, office productivity editors, mobile access, application development, SQL and SAP integration, Eclipse based and Domino server – for $201-$338 for user, depending on your OS.
One of IBM’s BP invited me this morning to lecture about our collaboration solutions, at a briefing they held to start ups and SMB companies, under the PC title of ‘building a smarter infrastructure’. Those 30min were an excellent opportunity to expose small and medium business leaders (CEOs, CTOs and CIOs) to what Lotus has to offer, under our Express solutions.
I decided to keep my presentation short and simple (21 slides), showing why collaboration is a factor, even at small companies (<50 people), what the employees are looking for nowadays, how Lotus can help and our strategic position at the market. It was refreshing to see CEOs and CIOs actually taking notes, writing down the prices, doing cost comparison and asking questions.
The presentation is available at my slideshare space, and embedded hereunder. Comments and feedback are always welcome.
This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.
Once again (for the 9th year), Genii Software came through and created the Lotusphere Agenda DB for PDA Synching and Session Planning. On top of the usual Notes DB, there’s Blackberry support and iPhone integration as well. Now you can plan which sessions, workshops and panels you’d like to attend during the 6-day conference, and plan accordingly. If you’re new to Lotusphere this is something you need to know. Veteran participants will recongzine and appreciate this tiny piece of resource.
