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Software Community Day – Update

Published August 21, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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I wrote about it 2-3 weeks ago, and promised an update. So, here it is.

IBM Israel Software Group Community Day will be held on Wednesday, September 5th, starting at 15:00, at Cinema City, just outside of Tel Aviv. The event will include user groups of all 5 Software Brands: Information Mgmt., Tivoli, WebSphere, Rational and Lotus. Each brand will host a 2 hour session, that would focus on updated offers and solutions.

The Lotus brand session theme is Power 2 the People and it will focus on Lotus Collaboration Strategy for the enterprise. The general concept of our session is to provide you, the end user, with the tools to increase your productivity by providing a set of collaboration tools, in the context of the work you’re doing.

Since Lotus User Group had an event during June 2007, we’ll try to focus our presentations on new offers and solutions, and give you, the end user, the opportunity to explore some of the products first hand, using Lotus Greenhouse. If you want the chance to explore the products, you must register in advance at the website ibm.com/il/news/event/community/ .
We’re still working on allowing free Wi-Fi access for our customers at the event.

As a first step of using the tools we’re talking about, our entire session will be available on Sametime Meeting Center! In order to attend the session online (from home or from the cinema itself), you must have permission to Lotus Greenhouse – so pls register today! All registered participants will receive a user id and password for Lotus Greenhouse, approx. 1 week prior to the event.

Once you have your user id and password to Lotus Greenhouse, simply follow this link to enter SWG Meeting Day meeting. Enter you Greenhouse userid/pass and you’ll see the SWG Meeting Day meeting details, similar to the one screenshoted below. Click ‘Attend Meeting’, enter the meeting password (lotus4u) and you’re in! You’ll have to install a tiny Java plug-in, so permit your firewall as needed.

I’m looking forward to seeing you in 2 weeks time!

If there’s anything in particular you want to see at the Lotus session, comment below and I’ll try to integrate it in my presentation.

Lotus Notes and Domino 8 available now !

Published August 16, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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On Tuesday August 14th, IBM announced the general availability of Lotus Notes and Domino 8, previously known as Hannover. The sales talk that started that launch was one of the popular slaes talks in Lotus history, as IBMers and Business Partners dialed-in to the e-meetings to hear and see the new features.

I’ve been using Notes 8 Beta 3 for almost 3 months now, on 3 different laptops. In the very few days I had to use Notes 7 (standard on IBM machines), it was as if I went back in time. The new user interface is remarkable. It’s a big leap compared to version 7, and gives the user much more freedom and customization.
Notes 8 is built on the open Eclipse platform, which gives developers the option to extend Lotus platform with plug-ins and extensions. Also worth mentioning the integrated support of RSS Feeds, as well as an embedded Lotus Sametime, IBM’s leading real time collaboration solution.
Ed Brill (who hosted the sales talk on Tuesday) talks extensively on Notes & Domino 8 release in his blog, and you’re most welcome to read.

You can also watch this 10min video on YouTube, of IBM’s Ron Sebastian, Executive Architect for Lotus, showcasing Lotus Notes and Domino 8. (can’t see? click the link)

I commented last month about some of the difficulties we have in Israel, not only from the competition aspect, but also from the language aspect. For those not familiar with developing software for other languages, we’re not talking merely on changing some characters.

Hebrew is written from right to left, so the entire software UI’s needs to be mirrored. So the usual menus you have from the top left (File, View, Edit, etc) should be in Hebrew from the top right. And that’s not easy.

We (IBM SWG) have been doing a wonderful job these past years, working hard to supply as many international languages as possible (Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, German, ect), at launch date (like with Quickr and Sametime), but unfortunately, for Hebrew, we’ll have to wait until January 2008. But look at the bright side – we’ll have 4 months to build the buzz, showcase the product and its advanced features. If you want to purchase the English version, you can do that right now.

Meanwhile, read some more insights on Lotus Notes and Domino 8… or attend a birthday party for Notes/Domino 8… or read this Bloomberg article on Notes/Domino 8.

FYI – more comments from Carl Tyler on Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 integration with Office.

Open Collaboration Client with Novell SUSE’s Linux

Published August 12, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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IBM opened LinuxWorld in San Francisco with an announcement of an integrated open collaboration client for Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

The open collaboration client includes IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime and the IBM productivity tools. In addition, IBM Lotus Connections, IBM Lotus Quickr and IBM WebSphere Portal can easily be added bringing social networking, team collaboration and portal capabilities to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. In addition, the server components required to support the open collaboration client are also available as one click install solutions and include IBM Lotus Domino and Lotus Sametime servers powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell.

“Effective desktop management is a challenge for organizations today,” said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell. “Novell is collaborating with IBM on the open collaboration client bundle powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise to help customers meet that challenge and benefit from improved collaboration, increased end-user productivity, strengthened security, and reduced total cost of ownership.”

InfoWorld: IBM, Novell strengthen desktop, server ties
IBM: http://www.ibm.com/lotus/opencollabclientwithnovell

33% are IM-ing in secret… WHY?!

Published August 7, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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Read an interesting article recently, that was published late July in The Wall Street Journal, entitled Instant Messaging Invades the Office. The author, Carola Mamberto provides her insights on how instant messaging is entering the corporate world, backing it up with real life examples. She mentions in the article that roughly one of every 3 people (33%) of US employees are using instant messaging at work (which is good, provided it’s a secured enterprise solution), although many without the employer’s knowledge (2006 survey). On top of that, many employers are reluctant to endorse IM, fearing security breaches.

Hello?! reluctant? IBM has been using Lotus Sametime for almost a decade now, with 335,000 users worldwide, 4,000,000 unique chats per day while saving some costs. Not to mention the increase in employees’ productivity! IBM Lotus Sametime, now in version 7.5.1 has over 16 million corporate users, with 27 of Fortune 50 companies as customers. I think the Fortune 50 companies have very strict security restrictions, and Lotus Sametime gave the answer.

Even Gartner has concluded that instant messaging will be “de-facto tool for voice, video and text chat” in 5 years. What are businesses waiting for? to be the last company in the industry to adopt instant messaging solution?

Instant messaging is much more than the buddy list – it’s a platform for unified communications and collaboration (UC2), enabling for text, voice and video.
IBM Lotus Sametime gives you just that.

Top 8 reasons for loving Lotus Notes

Published August 2, 2007 Uncategorized 1 Comment
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Shalom everyone, sorry for the long pause…
I had couple of very long days this past week, as 2 sales managers from Spain visited Israel, in order to familiarize themselves with the local market, our unique business climate, meet some customers and business partners. As you can probably imagine I had very little time to do anything else, even write a post… I’ll comment about the visit at a separate post.

During the many meetings I had this week, with BPs, customers and IBMers the sales manager and myself always stressed the one aspect that differs Lotus brand from the other 4 brands in IBM Software portfolio: Lotus is the people brand. You’re probably wondering why WebSphere Portal is here, it’s not yellow ! But, WebSphere Portal allows people to increase their productivity in the context of the work they do, so it’s ours.. (Lotus).
Lotus brand, which includes 5 families of products – Notes/Domino, Sametime, Quickr, Connections and WebSphere Portal – is the only brand that appeals to the end-user. We are obviously interested in the IT managers, CIO/CTO, but the person who will eventually use Lotus software is not the IT guy but the every employee the company has. And that require some of us to change the way we do business. At least from my view.

I saw an interesting article this week on w3 (IBM Intranet) – “Top 8 reasons for loving Lotus Notes”. And here they are:

  1. Enjoy working with a new and improved interface
  2. Improved productivity with quick access to your critical business applications in a single interface
  3. Save time with new, easy to use email, contact and calendaring features
  4. Conveniently edit and create office documents without leaving your IBM Lotus client
  5. Make decisions faster with integrated instant messaging and presence awareness
  6. Manage inbox overload with personal and public document libraries and activities
  7. Find information faster with advanced search options built into the IBM Lotus Notes client
  8. Complement the way you work, don’t change it

There’s also a neat article on Lotus website, with Top 10 reasons to choose Lotus Notes for corporate messaging and collaboration.

Do you have another reason? feel free to comment below.

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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.