Posts Tagged 'notes 8'

Spreading the Lotus joy around

Published November 1, 2007 Uncategorized 1 Comment
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I met several focus customers this week, all around the latest products from Lotus portfolio: Lotus Notes and Domino 8, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Sametime. They are considering migrating/upgrading/purchasing one or more Lotus software, and were interested in documentation, including some best practices and migration success stories. There are also some marketing actions I’m taking internally at IBM, to promote the use of the recent Lotus products.
Well, a bit late, but just in time, I found some more PDFs to stack my hard disk with, courtesy of Ed Brill. MediCorp were very kind in sharing their internal campaign of implementing Notes 8 at their company, dubbed “Feel Good About Notes”, giving all of us access to some excellent materials. In the package MediCorp provided there are a total of 7 PDFs:
3 cheat sheets, on Notes 8 Basic, Calendaring & Scheduling and Quickr;
4 internal newsletters published part of the campaign.
Go and check it out: Feel Good About Notes [MediCorp]

Lotusphere 2008
Registration to Lotusphere 2008 is already underway, with an impressive number so far. Every Lotus customer I talked/met with these past few weeks are encouraged of course to participate, as this event, the 15th, is going to be the biggest one yet, with plenty of announcements, workshops, hands-on labs, and much more. The opening session will be held simultaneously with 2 top-secret guest speakers. It’s gonna be a hugh event, with probable glimpses of Lotus Notes Traveler, Lotus Notes Next, Lotus Quickr Next, Lotus Connections, WebSphere Portal and many more. Just head down the registration page and enroll today.
ibm.com/software/lotus/events/lotusphere2008/

Blog-roll
Adam Gartenberg wrote about Alcatel-Lucent integration with Lotus Sametime, from their OmniTouch Unified Communication software.
You can find a new Lotus Sametime case study, this one from GE [PDF] and another one from Celina Insurance [PDF] – courtesy of Adam Gartenberg
Apple announced Leopard this week, and Adam (again), was quick to publish that Lotus Sametime 8.0 will support the new Leopard OS. Leopard support joins the already supported Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms.
Ed Brill’s experiences in Tokyo
Another Lotus Sametime video, this time on the connection between the real and virtual world of Second Life (again, from Adam)

Extending Lotus Notes 8

Published October 27, 2007 Uncategorized 4 Comments
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Decided to tweak my Lotus Notes 8 Client a bit over the weekend, as I have some client meetings coming up this week, and I wanted to highlight the best feature Notes 8 possess (in my opinion): Open, Eclipse based, platform.

What is Lotus Notes 8 sidebar? It’s actually a list of plug-ins that you can add to your Notes 8 client, located at the right hand side. The defaults includes your Lotus Sametime contacts (an integrated Sametime client within Notes 8), Day-at-a-glance view and RSS feed reader. The sidebar has 3 viewing options: Close, Thin or Open. To the left you can see the thin mode. Just below there’s the open mode of the sidebar, much more clearer…

After tweaking, my sidebar has much more features, without any performance issues, btw. Working smoothly on my Intel Core Duo, 1GB, ThinkPad X60 machine.

Besides the default Sametime Contacts, I’ve added a Primary Contacts plug-in (that I “stole” from my Sametime Connect 7.5.1 client), to which I can drag-and-drop the people I communicate more often, and see their picture, instead of the name. I also added today the cool feature of BluePages Client (developed initially for Lotus Expeditor), which basically adds a BluePages (IBM’s internal employee directory, with over 4M searches per week!) application, that allows me to search and view information from the employee directory without leaving my Notes client. There also an Activities plug-in, one of the 5 services within Lotus Connections, IBM’s social software. If an activity (to-do) is signed to me, I can view it right there. Another cute plug-in is the Sidekick. I discovered it by accident, as I was reading through a Lotus presentation and saw this plug-in in one of the screen shots. It basically provides a relational overview of the document currently highlighted. If there’s a url, the Sidekick will provide a preview of the page; an address – a little map pops out, with directions. I think you get the idea.

You’re probably arguing that you must have some technical knowhow in order to do this. Not at all. I’m a bit of a geek, but programming is not my thing. I had to make a small change to an .ini file – but as long as you keep a copy of the original, there’s no harm. The sidebar is definitely one of my best reasons for loving Lotus Notes 8.

Alan Lepofsky also commented about Notes 8 sidebar, here and here are the latest. Oh, another one, here. There are couple of places you can visit if you want to learn more on Lotus Notes 8 Sidebar and how you can extend your working experience:
Alan Lepofsky
developerWorks
more developerWorks

Back from vacation

Published October 20, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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Just got back from my vacation, and there’s a lot going on…

Actually I landed yesterday, and I’m still on Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5) – go to sleep at 3-4 a.m and wake up after 1 p.m, but I’m working on it..

This vacation was long planned, and the timing was great – just as the 3Q closed and after the high holidays in Israel. Our vacation had 3 parts: 6 days in NYC, 3-4 days in New England (Yale University and Boston) and the rest back in NYC. You can see (some) pictures of my vacation at Flickr.

The flight

Our flight had its highs and lows. The high was definitely the individual, touch-screen-operated, entertainment/communication system, with games, music channels, flight info, tv shows, full-feature movies and air-phone. Also, you’re not confined to El-Al’s timing anymore – everything is on demand, courtesy of HOT Cable Company. We decided to start the evening (it was a midnight flight – landing in NYC at 7am) with Die Hard 4.0 – an OK movie, knew there was a reason I waited for the DVD.. Owen Almighty was much better, only because of Steve Carrell – so talented, and The Office [NBC] is a living testament.

The low point has to be the leg-room. Just not enough.
El-Al are still the national airline, but sometimes I wish I picked another airline. I don’t know who did the math and seating arrangements, but seating for 11 hours in a 32.24 cm cubicle isn’t a pleasant experience. Especially when you know it’s possible to make it wider.

My childhood friend who’s traveling a lot on business always tells me he’s upgrading to business (with Miles) on transatlantic flights – now I understand why.

Staying in-touch

I had my laptop with me, so was able to track my Inbox, and reply to some emails, but I kind of neglected my feeds. So I’ll paste some important links I read these past 14 days, just in case you haven’t seen them yet.

There’s a new demo video on YouTube for Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1. It’s an excellent video, showcasing some of the new features, such as Lotus Notes Traveler (push e-mail/calendar/contacts for mobile devices), Domino Web Access and Lotus Notes for Blackberry.

Ed Brill wrote a post earlier this week, titled “Nobody wants to be first“. There’s a lot of interest going around ND 8.0, and also requests from customers, wanting to talk to a ND 8 reference. So, just to strengthen Ed’s point – 60 days into the product not many businesses have finished a roll-out of ND 8, especially in large enterprises (>5k employees). And some languages (including Hebrew) will only be available during January 2008. Still, if you are in the process of a ND 8 roll-out, and are willing to be a reference, please contact us.

There’s another interesting video recently posted on ZDnet.co.uk, with Lotus’s Darren Adams. Darren talks about the benefits of integrating VoIP, video, presence, telephony, unified messaging and other technologies. You’re welcome to watch that as well.

Lotus Notes and Sametime 8 updates

Published August 24, 2007 Uncategorized 4 Comments
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Finally, I have Lotus Notes 8!!
It wasn’t easy thou, and let me explain.

I’ve been using Lotus Notes 8 Beta 3 for 6 months now. As soon as Lotus Notes 8 was available, and Ed had already installed it, I just couldn’t wait to get to the office and download the source files for myself.
The first mistake I did was to interrupt the un-install process of Notes 8 Beta 3. Never interrupt a process like that. I though the Add/Remove action was stuck, and it stuck my laptop, so I ended the process. Hugh mistake, I know. ‘Cause now I had an incomplete installation of Notes 8 Beta 3 in my registry, that cannot be removed! I tried installing the Beta 3 version again, which kinda worked, but when I wanted to un-install it, I had the wrong install package for product on my registry.
An advice from a colleague and one more Google search I found Your Uninstaller 2006! software, that suppose to do what Add/Remove can’t – remove those programs that stuck on you, and there’s nothing you can do to remove them, other than formatting your entire HDD..
And it worked – like a charm ! So thank you Your Uninstaller 2006. You saved the day.

It’s a brand new world.
The past week was filled with coverage on Notes 8 release, and new announcements in VoiceCon, on Lotus Sametime 8, along with the release of IBM’s recent acquisition – WebDialogs, which will be added to the Lotus brand, and its solution incorporated into the next version of Lotus Sametime. As Adam Gartenberg commented, a picture is much better than words, so in a nutshell, here’s the new Lotus Sametime 8 family.

There will be 4 versions:
Sametime Entry 8.0 – a new offering designed to get companies started with enterprise IM. It’s based on the embedded Sametime service available to Lotus Notes users – encrypted IM, chat history, rich text, emoticons, spell check – in an easy to adopt enterprise IM solution.

Sametime Standard 8.0 – the follow-up release of current Sametime 7.5.1 client, and the future entitlement for current customers.

Sametime Advanced 8.0 – a new offering that will package all of the capabilities of Lotus Sametime Standard together with new, advanced capabilities, such as persistent group chat, broadcast tools that will allow users to pose questions to communities of experts and tap an organization’s knowledge base in real time, a new plugin that will allow for instant desktop or application sharing, and community/server-based geographic location awareness.

Sametime Unified Telephony – a new offering that will provide capabilities both for the end user and through new middleware components. For the end users, it will provide for onscreeen alerts of incoming phone calls, rules-based phone routing for incoming calls, an integrated soft phone, and integrated phone and desktop presence. On the middleware side, this offering will simplify the process of connecting Sametime to multiple back-end PBX systems, regardless of which vendor (or how many vendors) you might be using. Key components of this offering will come through technology from Siemens OpenScape.

In closing, news roundup, for Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Sametime 8:
Lotus Notes and Domino 8 – ibm.com/lotus/notesanddomino
Lotus Sametime 8 – IBM Unified Communication and Collaboration solution
Lotus Sametime – ibm.com/lotus/sametime
IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte (WebDialogs acquisition) – ibm.com/sametime
Lotus Notes and Domino 8 shows new life – InfoWorld
Enterprise e-mail get pumped – InfoWorld
Lotus takes unified aim at MS with Sametime 8 – InfoWorld
The Lotus floats on – PCPro
IBM positions Lotus Notes for growth – TheStreet
Notes/Doomino 8 hits the streets – IT Jungle

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.

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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.