Posts Tagged 'sametime'

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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)

Lotus integration with MSFT

Published October 20, 2007 Uncategorized Closed
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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

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.

The week is (finally) over

Published September 8, 2007 Uncategorized 4 Comments
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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

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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.