An archive of my writings from 2007 till 2011. If you're interested in the recent stuff, visit my Tumblr at dvirreznik.com.
I’m sure most of you out there have met an IBMer (aka IBM Employee) one day, and wanted to contact him/her, but oops – no details were exchanged.
Now (actually it’s here for some time, nothing new) there’s an answer to your query:
whois.ibm.com – IBM Employee Directory, where you can search all 386,558 employees worldwide, and get their full name, email address, phone number and location. You need at least a last name to start your search.
and thanks to Mac Guidera.
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 communityBlogs: 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 textA 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.
Monday morning at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston was a day Microsoft will probably want to forget: MOSS 2007 was hammered by Lotus Connections, as an enterprise social software solution, out-of-the-box.
IBM really did put on a great show and demo at Enterprise 2.0, led by Suzanne Minassianminassian@us.ibm.com and Heidi Votawheidi_votaw@us.ibm.com. Their preparation and presentation of Lotus Connections were superb !
Earlier today I attended and spoke at KM Conference, in Tel Aviv. At first glance, I didn’t like what I heard – the speakers referred to MOSS as ‘the best portal solution in Israel and WW’. Folks, MOSS has two distinctive pieces: Sharepoint team services and document sharing (WSS) and Sharepoint Portal. All the 3rd party vendors (which sponsored the conference) enhanced the team collaboration and document sharing. MOSS does have a big piece of market share, especially in Israel, but organizations often use its team collaboration piece, thinking they have a full-featured portal solution.
Here’s a short selection of what went down this week in Boston:
CIO.com: Enterprise 2.0 Faceoff: Microsoft Lags Behind IBM in Social Software
While both vendors showed their products could integrate with existing e-mail systems (especially e-mail systems that they sell, such as Notes and Exchange), IBM’s Lotus Connections looked, at minimum, a year or more ahead of SharePoint in its social computing capabilities out of the box.
CMS Watch: IBM-Microsoft shoot-out at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference
IBM came off looking better for various reasons. They fielded a more focused demo team — never to be underestimated — but also because Connections has some slick, Ajax interfaces, and SharePoint does not. Ajax does not necessarily bring better usability, but done right, it can simplify complex interfaces.
ITSinsider: First day surprise at Enterprise 2.0 Boston
The first one, Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft revealed an unlikely sturdy competitor in the sea of terrific startups that are competing in this new arena. IBM, yes, IBM demonstrated a competitive product. I had never seen such a thorough demo of Lotus Connections. It had a terrific UI, more 2.0 features than I could even keep up with, and the woman who was taking us through the demo, clearly “got it.”
agile in atlanta: IBM shows Microsoft that social computing is about the people
Apparently Microsoft focused on email and document management, which did not wow the crowd. IBM got points for talking about how social networking is about the people.
The Intelligent Enterprise: IBM-Microsoft shootout at Enterprise 2.0
IBM came off looking better for various reasons. They fielded a more focused demo team — never to be underestimated — but also because Connections has some slick, Ajax interfaces, and SharePoint does not. Ajax does not necessarily bring better usability, but done right, it can simplify complex interfaces.
The twitter message quoted here belongs to Lawrence Liu, Microsoft’s SharePoint Senior Technical Product Manager, which sums up nicely the difference between IBM and Microsoft, in the enterprise social software space.
To follow up my previous post today on the same subject, IBM updated its ‘Web 2.0 Goes to Work‘ website, with recent success stories and best practices, RSS feed to Web 2.0 blog, recent news, Web 2.0 TV and more.
Here’s the link: ibm.com/software/info/web20
There’s also a twitter to follow, if you’re in to following people/stuff: @web20work
Seen first on The Connections Blog.
Just wrapped up my presentation at KM Annual Conference (another one), where I got 20min (but took 30) to talk about Enterprise 2.0, or ‘I want a facebook thing. I think‘.
The event was more about traditional knowledge management (aka – documents), and how to maintain a document library within your internal portal, so my Enterprise 2.0 portion was unique and different. I like to be unique.
I adopted some tips from Ed and Alan and came with Jeans and a buttoned shirt (short sleeves – it’s Israel), instead of my usual dress-code. Being the last speaker before lunch is not easy, especially where you consider who came before me. If you happen to follow me on twitter, you know I was up with some fierce competition, as all the speakers before me, and sponsors outside, were MOSS/WSS/Sharepoint integrators. One hilarious moment came when a presenter took the stage to demo a solution over Powerpoint 2007 – but the main hall laptop had Office XP.. :-)) The laptop refused to open the Office 2007 file. LOL
The important thing, I ROCKED !!
And mentioned how IBM beat Sharepoint in Enterprise 2.0 face-off earlier this week.
And gathered some business cards for future opportunities.
I talked about social computing in general (what is facebook), then dived into Lotus Connections (I want something like this…) with references from Ernest & Young and Sprint, and finished with three first steps for piloting/adopting (COOL!! How to get started?).
With little time to spare I didn’t talked about the barriers to adoption, but Enterprise 2.0 Conference already covered this in one of their discussions.
You can view the embed slides below, or download from slideshare.net/dvirreznik.
The slides are in Hebrew – will prepare an English version over the weekend.
