Posts Tagged 'israel'



Coolest Lotus video

I know, Ed has already written about this, but I just saw it and had to complement my creative Lotus colleagues in the UK for making this a very cool video !

A simple scenario, with a simpler solution – Lotus Collaboration.

Speaking of collaboration, our event page at FB is up and running, KM and Collaboration User Forum. It’s a month and something away, but better be safe (and RSVP now) than sorry.
Speakers list (not final, so don’t blame me for changes):
Bank Hapoalim, Israel Securities Authority, Ministry of Finance, Menora Insurance, TEVA and Standards Institute of Israel.

Links:
Lotus on Youtube – Everyone Collaborate, Ed Brill
IBM Lotus Blackout – youtube video
KM and Collaboration User Forum
Lotus Collaboration Solutions

Magic over Lotus – The Ministry of Finance

Spend couple of hours this morning at The Ministry of Finance (MOF), a veteran Lotus customer, with some 1,200 employees spread out mostly in Israel and some in locations worldwide.

Lotus was introduced to the MOF back in 1997 (!), with Lotus Notes 4.5. Since then, dozens of applications were developed, including SMS (text messages), fax server, document manager, scanner, meeting rooms reservation, car pool and many more. Particularly I liked the SMS application: open up a new email, and instead of inserting an email address in the ‘To’ field, you write ‘mobilenumber@SMS’, and Lotus Notes identify the ‘@SMS’ and changes the ‘Text’ field into SMS template. Brilliant !

The MOF is also a green business, paperless office. Their internal document management repository was developed back in 2002, and currently holds over 15GB of data – documents, spreadsheets, presentations, faxes, scanned newspapers and more. Nothing is printed, everything is saved in a Lotus Notes DB and the users can share content easily, across the network.

Brilliant usage of Lotus Notes and Domino. I was trully surprised of what they did.

While on the matter of customer successes, here’s an event worth writing down.
Mark your calendars for Monday, September 8th: KM and Collaboration User Forum, where IBM customers will present some of the work they’re doing over our Software solutions. The IT manager of MOF is already in the speakers list.

Links:
Ministry of Finance, Israel
IBM Software for a Greener World
KM and Collaboration User Forum – Monday, Sep. 8th, IBM Israel HQ

E2.0?! Can you start from Web 1.0 please?

Today I had the privilege of speaking at a management workshop of one of the largest banks in Israel. The workshop was held at the bank’s education center, 30min outside of Tel Aviv, with a beautiful view of the ocean. This was one of the cases that I came to lecture through the community. The management workshop was given by an outside consulting company, that heard me speak at a recent conference. Another proof of the power of social media.

I was told to present ‘the IBM story’ of E2.0 adoption (Web 2.0 goes to work), meaning what we’re doing, internally, to foster knowledge sharing and participation. I took couple of my presentations, consolidated slides, made some adjustments, added the IBM angle, and I was ready to go.

The population was mixed in age, all in managerial positions at the bank, youngest one in the room was me 🙂 Only when I asked people if they knew what twitter is, I realized that most people had no idea what Web 2.0 is all about, not to mention E2.0. That’s when I decided to skip some slides and explain over a whiteboard what we’re talking about…

I won’t tell the entire 90min presentation here, only summize with this:
At the beginning of my presentation a lady asked me what’s the benefit in all that user generated content (blogs, comments, wikis, articles, etc) if most of them are garbage (or below average), and why should any organization consider adopting such tools. At the end of the presentation, she asked me what’s the top 7 blogs to follow. And she’s also the one responsible for the title of this post. Folks, change is possible! even in a ‘traditional’ business as a bank.

As for the slides: I had to make some ad-hoc changes during the workshop, so the slides will be posted later this week.

BTW – if you haven’t subscribed to Jeremiah Owyang by now, shame on you!
His posts are right on the mark, and his knowledge in social media is infinite!
Only today we were talking at the workshop about FSS examples for social media (ROI/VOI), and there’s a list availble. We also talked about Gen Y and why they care if a bank has IM or a facebook thing, and here’s another post.
Subscribe. Now.

Sent from Lotus Notes 8.0.1 Hebrew Client

Started using the Hebrew client of Lotus Notes 8.0.1 this week, as a personal experiment on one hand and from a business stand-point on the other.
Even thou most organizations in Israel are using an English UI of their messaging client (Outlook or Notes), Hebrew is (and always will be) a preferred language in Israel. IBM has been investing heavily into bidi (Bi-directional) these past years – part of the ‘holy’ work my friend Dina Ben-Elissar was doing, at IBM Globalization Center in Israel.
Developing a client is Hebrew includes two major steps: First, language – Hebrew (and Arabic) are written from right to left; second, UI (user interface) – which means the client needs to be mirrored. As with any software product, there’s no 100% QA – that’s the nature of software, and some things can only be found from daily usage.

I hope my usage of Lotus Notes 8.0.1 will encourage other IBMers to follow my suit – it’s a very cool looking client !! (click here for a larger screen shot)

Dvir, you’re a star !

The past week have been pretty difficult for me walking the IBM office in Petach Tiqva. It was a true ‘marketing’ week for Lotus, appearing twice in printed magazines, and three times in online sites – that’s excellent PR work. Thanks Joseph !

First off, I’ve been ‘posted’ at every coffee-area’s wall, with the social software article (pictured here), published at Israel BusinessWeek. The article first appeared at businessweek.com (Stephen Baker), and was picked up quickly by the Lotus community, myself included.

Since its the first issue of BusinessWeek Israel (Magazine, no website), we wanted to publish some pictures with the article – luckily I still have some connections in marcom…

The two page article is somewhat an exact translation of the English article, but we did manage to insert two pictures: the first showing me (excellent profile shot) and my cool X60, looking at My Connections visual map, and the second picture is the map itself. Since it shows some of my 42 IBM connections, I quickly got photos responses in FB. IBMers – it’s worth ‘adding me to your network’ !!

The second Lotus publication this week was at TheMarker IT and TheMarker newspaper, the leading IT/Hi-Tech news site in Israel. We translated some of the buzz surrounding Enterprise 2.0 Conference face-off last week, positioning Lotus Connections lead in the enterprise social software space. TheMarker IT published an article based on some words I wrote down, along with our PR Mgr. – the end result is not what I hoped for, but still a good presence.

Links:
TheMarker IT: IBM and Microsoft charge the enterprise portal’s space (Hebrew)
BusinessWeek Israel: Big Blue Embraces Social Media (pictures, Hebrew)
BusinessWeek.com: Big Blue Embraces Social Media (original article, by Stephen Baker)

IBM Stuff: I’ve opened up a photo album in FB, where you can see relevant Lotus PR, as they appear.

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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.