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!
CIO.com has published Thomas Duff’s (aka Duffbert) article, titled ‘7 thing IT manager should know about Lotus Notes‘. In the article, Tom goes over some basic Lotus features, that in my opinion are the differentiators between Lotus Notes/Domino and other messaging solutions. Both Ed and Alan have caught this up early.
Particularly I connected to #5, one of Lotus Notes strongest feature: Replication lets you work both offline and online:
Today’s knowledge workers don’t come to the office at 9:00 am and leave at 5:00 pm. They are “always on,” and they need to access their data whether or not a network connection is available. The Notes client accommodates this requirement by replicating data between server and local versions of your mail files and applications. It’s among Notes oldest and most cherished features—for good reason.
When a network connection exists, Notes synchronizes data between the server and client. The replication occurs at the field level, so two people can update different fields in the same document (such as an invoice or travel request); the server merges the updates so that the document shows both sets of changes. Frankly, this is slick. Nobody else has ever achieved this level of WayCool synchronization sophistication, particularly because it’s so trouble free that the feature is usually invisible.
Notes e-mail users replicate their mail files to local versions on their laptops, so they can be productive offline. When they once again connect to the network, all the changes are replicated with the server and messages are sent to the appropriate people. That applies to Notes databases and applications, not just e-mail.
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.
Slightly delayed (had a busy Wed-Thu last week), but here’s another article covering IBM’s initiative to offer Linux-based software package, that runs on a back-end server and is accessible to customers on thin clients, pricing $59-$289 (depending on level of software and service).
Customers would also save on labor costs, because moving to a server-side system would cut maintenance needs, said Inna Kuznetsova, director of Linux strategy at IBM. The server-based setup could also reduce hardware costs by extending the life spans of desktop PCs.
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.
