An archive of my writings from 2007 till 2011. If you're interested in the recent stuff, visit my Tumblr at dvirreznik.com.
Carl Tyler has posted over the weekend a very cool and insightful video (20min), showcasing the differences between Lotus Sametime Unyte and your (and mine) normal Lotus Sametime 7.5.1.
As you probably know, IBM acquired WebDialogs Inc., and integrated its solution (WebDialogs’ Unyte) into the Lotus Sametime portfolio, announcing a whole new family, dubbed Lotus Sametime 8.0.
Carl also published a high-quality version of the video. Check out his blog and watch.
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
