Posts Tagged 'lotus quickr'

Lotusphere, SWG Community Day and more

It’s hard to talk about anything these days other then Lotusphere happening right now in Orlando. Some of us (such as yours truly) couldn’t attend, but we have enough blogs/flickr/twitter/announcements to follow as it is. In my opinion that’s the true power of the web and collaboration for that matter – getting the feel of Lotusphere, the excitement, without actually being there in person. And I haven’t started talking about Lotusphere in Secondlife
Anyhow, things are happening other than Lotusphere which are worth mentioning, but I must link to a Lotusphere post I saw over at Rob Novak – Lotusphere 2008 Keynote Bingo (see above). Cool!

Now, to other news.
Software Group Community Day – Feb 18th 2008, Israel
Similar to the September 2007 event, the coming SWG Community Day (half-day actually) would provides a glimpse of IBM Software solutions: Information Management, Tivoli, WebSphere, Rational and Lotus (including WebSphere Portal). We’ll meet at Cinema City (again) at 3pm, 2.5 hours of professional sessions and then a movie (popcorn on us), The Kite Runner. The Lotus session will include 2 presentations: the first on a new dashboard software from IBM, SaaS (Software as a Service) based, called Sonata; the second is not final yet, but will focus on messaging and collaboration using mobile devices. Participation is free, but registration is required (phone only for now). Mark your calendars, Monday, Feb. 18th at 3pm.

Lotus Quickr Content Integrator
Folks over at Lotus Quickr Blog posted their view on Lotus Quickr Content Integrator (announced in Lotusphere), a new middleware software (available Feb. 21st) designed to help you integrate and migrate content from existing repositories into Lotus Quickr team places.
Lotus Quickr Content Integrator can migrate content from:

  • Lotus Domino Document Manager 3.1 and later versions
  • Teamrooms on Lotus Domino 5 and later versions
  • Public folders on Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 or above, using Microsoft Outlook 2000 or above to connect to the Exchange server
  • Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003
  • Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2003 and 2007
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Lotus Quickr Blog: Lotus Quickr Content Integrator announced

Last but certainly not least is this short movie about my dear friend and colleague, Lotusphere Evangelists and ‘producer’, Ed Brill. Everyone wants to be Ed…

IBM 2.0

Gave a short presentation earlier this week, at New Blue – the internal course our HR dept. gives to new IBMers, couple of months on the job. I lecture every course, about 3-4 months apart, and I always updated my slides couple of days before.. The title of my lecture is ‘Internal Communications at IBM’, which was chosen when I was still responsible for internal comms at IBM, and discussed about IBM’s strategy and how we (as a company) convey our message internally, parallel to the external path.

With each lecture, as I update the slides, I notice that our evolution, in terms of communicating what IBM is, internally, has really matured and grown over the years, as we (IBM) are starting to adopt web 2.0 tools and technologies, and make them available to the general public. IBM is a strong believer of ‘use what you sell’ lifestyle, and our 350,000 employees worldwide serve as a pretty good test group. We have internal technology adoption programs, that provides evangelist employees (such as myself) to explore new tools and technologies at an early Alpha and Beta stages. But it doesn’t stop there – each evangelist provides valuable feedback on the tool/technology/solution, enabling the developers to perfect the product even more, before it’s ‘matured’, and available for the rest of the company, or released to the public.

As I was building the presentation, I started creating a slide that shows what web 2.0 tools/solutions we’re using internally.. After 20 text boxes or so, I stopped. I don’t know of any other company in the industry that enables its workforce to such an abundance of web 2.0 tools, aiming at making their work enjoyable, effective and in context. And most of the stuff we’re using internally is available to our customers, so it’s really a win-win situation.

Lotus integration with MSFT

I had a meeting Thu morning, straight from the airport, on Lotus Quickr. The meeting was organized by one of our BPs, prominent in the content management arena. In preparation to that meeting, I search our internal website for new Lotus Quickr material.

Lotus Quickr is widely in use internally by IBM, with thousands of virtual spaces, team spaces, forums, blogs and libraries. I personally created half a dozen places (content libraries and team places), which I use mostly for demos and file storage.

Obviously I installed the Lotus Quickr Connectors, and it works flawlessly. I have my Lotus Quickr places in my Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 client (see picture), and I can chat about any document with a simple right-click. There’s also the Lotus Notes plug-in, that prompts me to ‘save to library’ or ‘send attachments’ just before sending the email. Not to mention the MSFT Office plug-in, that creates another top-menu, Lotus Tools, that enables instant access to my online content, check-in/check-out, version control, basic workflow management and more. You can learn more about the Lotus Quickr Connectors here.

If you happen to surf the Lotus Sametime website, there are 4 newly added webcasts: the first (and highly recommended) is Lotus GM Mike Rhodin’s speech at VON 2007 [requires registration] – an hour long video explaining IBM’s strategy in the unified communication and collaboration arena. If you can’t spare the entire 60 minutes, pay special attention to the first 15 minutes. The other 3 are references of customers using Lotus Sametime: PGA Tour, Colgate-Palmolive and IBM [registration required for all]. There are also new resources and white papers [PDF] available. There are 2 more resources on the integration of Lotus Sametime with Microsoft applications: a brochure [PDF] and a demo.

All here: http://www.ibm.com/lotus/sametime

The week is (finally) over

This was a very long week for me.

On Sunday and Tuesday I had Army Reserve Training, so no work done there.
Monday and Thursday were very busy working days.
Wednesday was the SWG Community Day event – so little work was done during that day.

Friday-Sat – my best friend’s bachelor party !! We drove to the north of Israel, 30min from the northern point, set camp on the banks of the river, brought some food and drinks (well, plenty of meat and a lot of beers) and spent the night, eating, drinking and playing drinking games.
I’ll post some pictures later.

As you can see – a very busy week, hence why my writing this week has been kinda slow.

SWG Community Day was a big success. It was the climax of the week for me – the first event in which I led the Lotus brand session. As I’ve written before I thought a lot of what to talk about, what presentation to build, and from the responses I got I know it went well. We had some 35-40 people in our session, mostly BPs and customers, and I hope they all learnt a little bit more about Lotus Collaboration Strategy and enjoy the UC2 demo we showed.
The presentation I gave will be available shortly in the event website, I’ll keep you posted.
There’s also an article you can read (in Hebrew) on the event, right here.


Speaking of articles, there are 2 on the recent Web 2.0 Goes to Work initiative and related Lotus software (Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections), in InformationWeek and The Marker IT. These exposure we’re getting only shows just how important social software is for businesses, who are thinking of solutions on how to adopt and implement web 2.0 technologies and tools into the business. You can see a scan of the InformationWeek article to the left.

Adam has posted earlier this week about Sametime latest achievement, “IBM Lotus Sametime tops Corporate IM Platform review” at NetworkWorld.
Another excellent example of Lotus Sametime lead in the corporate market. Speaking of corporate IM, and Microsoft’s latest attempt to penetrate that market, there’s an interesting post from Simon Barratt, who installed Microsoft’s Office Life Communications Server 2007, and has some notes on version adaptability… worth the read.
Ed Brill also commented on Microsoft denied OOXML appeal. For those not in the biz, Microsoft has appealed to the ISO that its Open Office XML format be voted as an industry standard early last week. It was denied.

It has also been a good week for Notes and Domino 8 release! Some very cool stuff appeared on the web, here’s a selection of stuff I found, courtesy of Ed, Adam, Alan and more.
First there’s this demo on ibm.com of Lotus Notes 8, high level marketing. Really good, highly recommended.
Then we have some videos:
Lotus Notes 8 on Linux

Lotus Notes 8 customer testimonials

Lotus Notes 8 new features demo

Mental note: not all companies are IBM…

It’s has been an interesting week for me, in my 2nd week as Portal, Lotus and Collaboration Software Sales, for IBM Software Group. I met with customers, business partners, colleagues and drove a lot. But, no complaints. It’s good to see the interest some of my products arose within the industry. I had 3 different meetings this week on Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections and next week I have some more. Not to mention the interest our real-time collaboration (pdf) software has made, Lotus Sametime, with its versatility, set of features, level of security and openness.

As this is my first sales role, I always remind myself that not all companies are IBM. In many ways, not just revenues and global reach. Also in adaptation and implementation of software, especially collaboration software such as Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections and Lotus Sametime. Innovation is more than just a buzz word. It’s a way of doing business, both internal and external. If you don’t sponsor a culture of innovation within your employees, it’s almost impossible to foster such a culture externally.

That’s why I think Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections are the right software at the right time. We’re right at the crossroads, of businesses trying to figure how to “deal” with web 2.0, collaboration and innovation. How can my business grow from those trends? how can I stay ahead of the competition?

I met this week with Blink IT, a web 2.0 consulting company, relatively new (under 12 months), that has good ties with business and corporations. Their business is consulting companies on how to implement web 2.0 technologies in the business. What tools to adopt, where to begin, what is the name of this new department, etc. They told me that many of the customers they meet don’t know where to begin. They want to adopt collaboration, foster innovation, create more business, but not sure how. And we’re not talking about old, traditional businesses, also new and hi-tech businesses – that are simply lost. Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections provide a good first step for business wanting to join the collaboration trend, innovate from within and stay ahead. I hope our products and their skills will benefit more and more businesses in Israel, looking to put their feet at the web 2.0 door, just a notch, and continue from there. It’s possible, and some have already done it.

To conclude this post, I thought you might be interested in some articles, published recently by my colleagues from Lotus in the US. I “starred” them for later reading, maybe you’d like to do the same.
Collaboration University (CU): With the first session in Kansas City ending this week, and the second one coming up next week in London, there are amazing responses from participants. There was also a live coverage of several lectures, that you can replay and also tune this week, for CU in London, UK (July 18-20).
Quickr Demos: lots and lots of Quickr Demos (for QSite, QActivities, QContacts, QIssues, QMeeting and QAnnounce) – all courtesy of Rob Novak.
Lotus Sametime: new demo of Sametime 7.5.1 now available, courtesy of Adam G.
Ed Brill came back from Japan Lotus Conference.
and there’s always something interesting over at The Quickr Blog.




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.