Posts Tagged 'quickr'

Lotus Sametime in Action

Published September 23, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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Only when you’re in a sales position you understand the meaning of the end of a quarter. It’s like everyone has another personality, that kicks in at the last 10 days of each Q. Time is always a luxury, offer to the customer was due yesterday, and everyone is on the phone/mobile/chat – closing deals.

At times like this I feel fortunate for having Lotus Sametime at my disposal. Instead of going on and on about the different attributes of the product, I’ll explain with a real life example.
Last week we learned that a customer had already started a project that involves a portal and a web content management system. Since the project was already underway, we needed to adopt ourselves to existing requirements, which meant asking for a special price. Within 12 hours (usually takes more than a day) of applying the offer, it was approved and ready to be delivered to the customer. In order to do so I had to ‘sametime’ (open a chat with) my manager in Spain, open another chat with my local manager and a final chat with my colleague in the UK, who gave the final approval. using Lotus Sametime I was able to reach all these people in an instant, since I saw their ‘Presence Awareness’ and location in my chat window. I knew that the person was available for a chat, at home or office – in 5 seconds. And with the chat history feature, both of us were right on track, with our past transcripts available as a reference.

Now imagine doing all that with emails… NOT.
If you’re working for a company that is branched across various locations (country or global), you need a tool that would enable you to collaborate in real time, within the safety of your network firewall. Lotus Sametime is your product of choice, with over 16 million corporate users worldwide, that care about security just like you. Watch more here:

Continuing on that issue, IBM Software Group will hold a 3 day Lotus Technical Workshop, also known as a PoT (Proof of Technology). The workshop will cover 3 products from Lotus portfolio: Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and Lotus Connections, 1 per day.
We have a senior IT specialist coming from Madrid (he’s actually British, but works in Spain), to showcase Lotus professionals how to make their software work better, during face to face labs and (some) presentations. Participation is free, but requires registration (dvir at il dot ibm dot com). You can download a preliminary agenda here (pdf).

Last day in Brussels

Published September 14, 2007 Uncategorized 2 Comments
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The last day in Brussels was very productive.
I managed to visit all 3 attractions I planned for, although I walked to the Mannaken Pis on Wednesday evening.. closer to my hotel than I thought.
The Royal Museum of Art and History is located a metro ride away, and coupled with 2 other museums, The Royal Army Museum and Autoworld Brussels. I only visited the first, but I think AutoWorld is definitely worth a visit, next time in Brussels – I’m a big car junky… and from the sneak peek I took they have a wide collection.
As for The Royal Army Museum – living in Israel makes one feels comfortable around military, firearms and army, so I think I’ll pass.. I get my share of army twice a year during my army reserve training.

It was a nice day in Brussels, 20C, more clouds than I’m used too, but no complaints. I spent about 3 hours in the Art and History museum, and particularly liked the non-European exhibition. You can see collections from the Americas, far east, Tibet and Nepal, China and Japan, the Oceanic cultures and more. Highly recommended.

After that I decided to visit the Belgian Center for Comic Strip Art, located at the center of the city. After several circles in the same block I found it, but had no time to enter, only to enjoy the freebies at the entrance. If you’re a comic fan, you’d appreciate this museum. Next time I’m in Brussels, will make some time for it..

I had some time on the plane (4 hours), so I decided to take my Google Reader content offline, and catch up on some reading. A very wise decision I might add. Carl Tyler wrote about this article, a very interesting piece published on InstantMessagingPlanet.com, titled “Is Sametime Losing Ground in the EIM Race?” Although the title sounds a bit intimidating, it makes a fair analysis of the corporate IM market, and the 2 major players: IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Live Communication Server. When discussing the future landscape of this market, the article says both players are here to stay, without major changes in marketshare.
“I am not aware of any company which has ditched one platform in favor of the other. If you are already running Notes and Domino then you get Sametime for free, so choosing Sametime is really a no-brainer.” There are other good insights in the article, and you can access the full version here. Concluding the article, the author states what most of us already know: “Lotus does have one major factor in its favor: no-one ever gets sacked for buying IBM.“

Another interesting post was published at The Quickr Blog – Top 11 reasons for using Lotus Quickr. I particularly liked reasons 2-4:

  • No to proprietary tools – Support for multiple HW/SW environments, open standards
  • No Rip and Replace – No need to replace your workstations to upgrade to Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007
  • Batteries are included – All components (RDB, LDAP, etc.) are in the box – and can scale

Here’s the link to the full post.

Power 2 the People

Published August 10, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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I’ve been talking a lot this past month – customers, analysts, business partners, friends and family – on how important it is to empower people. Why it is so important to provide people with the right tools so they in turn can perform more effectively. Some of the people I meet acknowledge the fact that the world will rely on real time collaboration in the near future, and that we have to act on empowering people, while others are less reluctant to think so.
It’s hard to belong to the 1st group. It’s not something the IT/CIO can take for granted, being dependent on real time collaboration, which automatically brings public IM softwares to mind, with security issues. And making that step, that giant leap, is hard.

IBM Software Group in Israel will hold a SWG Community Day, on Wed. Sep. 5th, at Cinema City, just outside of Tel Aviv. The community day will be a joined one for all 5 SWG brands – Lotus, Rational, Information Mgmt., WebSphere and Tivoli. The Lotus brand community will focus on how businesses of all sizes can harness the power of their employees, and improve their productivity, performance and eventually – happiness.

Power 2 the People is the chosen theme, and we will present a fraction of Lotus software that enables you to do just that – give Power to your people, your most valuable asset. We will focus on 3 products, 2 of them were announced a month ago: Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections and the veteran Lotus Sametime.

The main attraction in Lotus brand day will be the hands-on session – the audience will have the opportunity to experience, first hand, the mentioned 3 products. All you need is to register and bring your own laptop.

The registration site isn’t ready yet, so I can’t post the link, but will update you asap.
If you have any request for the community day, a unique software you wish to see, product demo, particular subject you’re interested – feel free to post a comment. I’ll do my best to accommodate, but no promises…

See you there.

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.



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.