Posts Tagged 'פורטל'

Coming up this Sunday… – It’s HERE!

I need to sort out my time line, I know, but with the recent events and ongoing stuff at work you’ll understand and forgive this 24 hour delay. So, after promising something Sunday, then Tuesday, it has finally came, Wednesday, Dec 31st 2008.

Globes is the leading financial and IT publisher in Israel, issuing a monthly IT Magazine, by the exact name. IBM has bought some page space, 6 of them to be precise, dedicated entirely to Lotus Software. Excellent way to wrap up 2008!

Since IT Magazine doesn’t sport a website, I can’t send you links to the articles, but you can see them, scanned, at facebook. This is what you’ll find between the 6 page insert:

You can see and read the articles over at the facebook album.

IBM/Lotus User Forum – Summary

Before heading out to army reserve I wanted to post a quick wrap-up of yesterday’s IBM/Lotus User Forum. We had some 45 participants, customers and consultants, who came to hear two customer stories (which included live demo) and a live demo of IBM’s enterprise social software solution, Lotus Connections. Furthermore, it was great meeting, in person, some of my twitter and facebook friends – with all that social, it’s important to keep a personal touch, and actually, well, touching people and shaking hands.

Publicizing the event using social media only, we didn’t know what to expect in terms of attendance, but we were surprised by the number of people arrived, some registered at the day of the event! I’ll post a separate entry about lessons learned at a later date.

Now, the collateral from the user forum:
Dvir Reznik – Welcome Presentation (slides, Hebrew, downloadable)
Sharon Ben Haim, CTO, Ministry of Finance (slides, Hebrew, downloadable)
IBM enterprise social software solution – live demo (sync.rono.us blog)
Event photos (facebook)
IBM event website (presentations will be posted tomorrow)

Here’s the first presentation, my opening notes, from slideshare:

Mixing it up with IBM Mashup Center

There’s more to Web 2.0 than RSS, blogs and the 1,150,000,000 people connected to the internet. Web 2.0 is allowing us to bridge the gap between innovative (and social) technologies and business needs, in a simple (and code-less) way. I can take a map from Google, picture from flickr and a blog rss, incorporate them all into a single view – thus creating a new and unique service. It’s called a mashup:

In web development, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. [wikipedia]

IBM has been working for some time on develpoing a tool that would allow easy creation of mashups – IBM Mashup Center, that is now available free via IBM Lotus Greenhouse.CRN reviewed three mashup solutions: Google Mashup Editor Beta, IBM Mashup Center and Adobe LiveCycle. Here’s what they had to say about IBM Mashup Center:

IBM Mashup Center provides an easy-to-use, GUI-based method to combining maps, RSS feeds, and corporate data like customer lists into browser-based widgets. Creating a mashup here is as simple as dragging and dropping RSS feeds, mapping information, CSV files or other data sets onto a work board… IBM is targeting non-technologists—this is both less code-intensive and more business-friendly than Google Mashup Editor.

and closing with

The IBM Mashup Center provides a slightly more attractive alternative because of the platform’s flexibility and easy-to-deploy approach.

Mashups are definitely something that need to be in every CIO/CTO scope – the possibilities are endless, and those require little technical skills. Mixing up has never been so easy.
Stay tuned for my first mashup… coming soon.

Links:
IBM Mushup Center
Is Web 2.0 Ready for Business – CRN
IBM Mushup Center – demo (IBM)
The Business Case for Enterprise Mashups (IBM, pdf, 800KB)
Mashups – The new breed of web apps (IBM developerWorks)
IBM brings mashups closer to mainstream (Gartner, pdf, 160KB)

Empowering your workforce, browser only

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.

Not scalable, SQL only, but still wanted. Why ??

Earlier this week I read an interesting article on InfoWorld, ‘Microsoft SharePoint takes business by storm‘. The article discusses how MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) penetrated the corporate market, reaching 17,000 customers worldwide, using a clever marketing program that entitled the solution to Windows Server customers, thus reaching 100 million licenses.

SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 to less than lukewarm reviews as SharePoint Portal Server. In 2003, a stripped-down version was offered for free as part of Windows Server 2003 R2, which made it easy for users to test-drive the software, and soon, end-user created team worksites began popping up all over corporate networks.

Indeed, excellent marketing and packaging strategy – start by giving something for free, charge the users later. When they are already deep in it, and can’t say no. At first read it can be considered a very pro-Microsoft article, when in fact it’s not that pink.
There are some black spots.

SharePoint, however, isn’t without issues that users should consider, including the fact that it does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server, a concern Microsoft is working to answer in the next version likely to ship in 2009.

and

SharePoint does many things, but scaling is not one of them. SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server in what amounts to one universal table, which leads to lots of on-the-wire traffic and a Microsoft recommendation of only 2,000 items per list. By contrast, IBM WebSphere permits hundreds of millions of items per list.

Regardless of what platform you’re using for corporate portal, this is an article worth reading. The comments are also worth your time. Gia Lyons wrote about this article as well.

Or that its social-networking tools are considered rudimentary, that SharePoint’s portal capabilities still don’t measure up to enterprise-class platforms, and that the server takes customizations to make it truly sing.

“I think there is going to be some buyer’s remorse,” Gotta says.

About half the customers I met since starting this job some 8 months ago asked me about MOSS. I don’t tend to discuss the competition with people I meet, yet alone their disadvantages or marketing strategies, but this article opened the door for me. Between all the good things written, there are some things worth paying attention to – like scaling, supported DBs and social-networking capabilities.

The social-networking tools are uninspiring, and Microsoft is partnering with NewsGator (feed reader) and Atlassian (wiki) to cover bases, which will lead to inevitable feature clashes as SharePoint evolves.

In my opinion, the main message from this is ‘nothing’s free’. There’s always a price – either in licenses or in configuration. And I didn’t mention the SQL Servers (and only SQL) your company will need to buy to support the growing amount of data you store.

InfoWorld: Microsoft SharePoint Takes Business by Storm

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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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.