Will pack my things now. See you in sunny Florida tomorrow evening.
Archive for the 'Lotus' Category
Today I had the time to read all the comments to last weeks posts about Lotus Notes‘ core strengths and weaknesses. Finally Volker asked: What would you do, if you were in charge of Lotus?. And Alan Lepofsky, now Director of Marketing at Socialtext, hits the mark:
[…] DRAMATICALLY simplify the product portfolio down to only 3 offerings: Notes/Domino, Sametime, and Connections.
Gone as standalone products would be Quickr, Doc, Workflow, Portal, Forms, Portal, Mash-ups, Traveler, Symphony, and anything else I’ve left off. Not gone as features, just gone as stand alone purchasable units which require marketing, confuse customers and press, etc. Take their code, and weave it appropriately into the 3 products above.
For example, Quickr does two things, file/attachment sharing and team sharing sites. The main confusion over Quickr is Domino or J2EE? Fine, remove any talk about that, by taking the Domino Quickr code and moving it into… Domino. Take the J2EE Quickr code, and make it part of Connections. Don’t talk about parity across the platforms, talk about how Domino now has file sharing and team spaces, and how Connections now has file sharing and team spaces. That is not overlapping product functionality, as both products need those features. […]
I know IBM is listening. I hope they will understand.
Heute gehts nach Bremen. Dort wird das hohe Lied auf Social Software for the Enterprise gesungen. Bin gespannt, wer von den Anwender-Unternehmen da schon mitsingen kann. Und wer der Esel und wer der Hahn ist. Ich persönlich kenne nicht allzu viele, die mitsingen können.
Freue mich jedenfalls auf die alten und die neuen Gesichter – sofern diese nicht eh alle in Irland sind.
Interesting article on ReadWriteWeb about enterprises spending money on Web 2.0 technologies:
[…] However, newer, „pure“ Web 2.0 companies hoping to capitalize on this trend will still have to fight with traditional I.T. software for a foothold, specifically fighting with the likes of Microsoft and IBM. Many I.T. shops will choose to stick with their existing software from these large, well-known vendors, especially now that both are integrating Web 2.0 into their offerings.
Microsoft’s SharePoint, for example, now includes wikis, blogs, and RSS technologies in their collaboration suite. IBM offers social networking and mashup tools via their Lotus Connections and Lotus Mashups products and SAP Business Suite includes social networking and widgets.
What this means is that much of the Web 2.0 tool kit will simply „fade into the fabric of enterprise collaboration suites,“ says Forrester. By 2013, few buyers will seek out and purchase Web 2.0 tools specifically. Web 2.0 will become a feature, not a product.
From an IBM Business Partners perspective we just see very much interest in learning about Web 2.0 technologies when we talk to our customers. But we don’t see any of our customers investing in these technologies right now. When we talk about Lotus Connections and its blog, wiki, RSS, social web features we do it to show our competence and to create awarness. But I fear we will not earn any money with it right now.
It is an investment which hopefully will pay off in the future according to this Forresters report.
via Ed Brill, order here. No, I still don´t know how to spent my money in the Apple Store 😉
Bereits auf der Herbst-DNUG im November deutete es sich gelb am Horizont an. Diesmal gab es auf der DNUG zwar wenig Neues, dafür aber umso mehr Gelb.
Jetzt wird es anscheinend richtig gelb. Eine gelbe Initiative. Ein gelbes Online Spiel. Und endlich wieder gelbe Tassen. Stefan hat mir zwei Paletten mitgegeben in Dresden. Jetzt wird es endlich wieder gelb auf unseren Schreibtischen. 😉
Domino Spam again. Subject: „Contact 72,000 IBM Lotus Professionals (Summer Promotion)“. Author: Heather Schein. If you look at this picture you might guess why we would rather rent the space on vowe. net than paying for this service.
Added this to my Spam list.
The Lotus Museum opened its virtual doors. Even though I have never been a Lotus employee I have tons of memorabilia. So today I made my first donation with a simple Mousepad. Lots of T-Shirts could follow for the „clothing gallery“ if I find the time to take pictures. But where can I put all the promo videos?
The Lotus Museum. Open 24 hours every day. Even on Mondays.
(via Ed Brill)
Volker started it yesterday. Yes, we all are Sales Master. But what would happen when someone chooses „HP“ for this question? Probably a deadly fault. Maybe IBM will disclose your company from the IBM partner program 😉
Yesterday I received my Lotusphere Online registration information. And I realized that Lotusphere is only a few days ahead. Until now there I felt no real excitement about going to Orlando this year, but now I am looking forward to meet the community at Lotusphere. I am not sure, but I think it is my seventh or eighth Lotusphere I will attend. Have to count my t-shirts these days…
Over there at Gonzo´s Unoffical Lotusphere Site nothing has changed. Same old 2001 design, first rumours about the wednesday night party, usefull tips and lots more what you should read if you are a first time visitor. Pictures will go to flickr as in the last year, and someone proposed to use youtube.com for Lotusphere Videos.
So I am tuned in now. See you in Orlando.
I am not allowed to talk in depth about it. But I spent two days with IBM here in Berlin talking about Sametime 7.5 and the upcoming Hannover-Release aka Lotus Notes 8. And I am feeling much better about all this. As an American I would probably say: I am excited, but I am German 🙂
First it was a great success starting the dialogue in our XCOM development teams – the Eclipse guys AND the Lotus Notes guys. Both started talking with each other. And they begin to understand both worlds and see value in it.
Second I learned a lot about Eclipse, Lotus Expeditor and the J2EE environment. While we as the Notes guys preferrable look at Lotus Notes 8 in terms of the new UI or the new features within the Notes environment, the Ecplise guys look at the technical foundation and new ways of building composite apps. I learned a lot about „perspectives“, „view parts“ and „contributions“ – and I see a huge potential to integrate our Eclipse based application into the collaborative environment of Lotus Notes with the upcoming release.
Finally I can say that this session was the best „IBM technology enablement“ we ever had. Its always about people. You can have great software engineers talking to you – but you will not understand if they don´t speak your language. Volker speaks both languages – the Notes and the J2EE language. And additionally he could translate everything into my non-technical business guy language. So here is a big thank you. And look forward to have our first „Hannover“ application ready to present in December.
Kassel ist im November nicht unbedingt eine Reise wert, aber der DNUG Besuch war es wider Erwarten doch.
Geredet habe ich viel. Denn zweimal durften wir sprechen über Signatur und Verschlüsselung mit Lotus Notes / Domino und über Sametime Web Conferencing mit Audiointegration – nur bleibt es ein Rätsel, warum genau bei der Demo mein Notebook den Dienst versagen mußte. Murphy´s Law.
Gelernt habe ich viel. Aber die wesentlichen Erkenntnisse kann eigentlich kein besserer als Volker zusammenfassen: Lotus Expeditor ist nichts weiter als die Eclipse RCP „premium edition“. Und Notes 8 setzt man entweder ganz oder gar nicht ein – wenn die Hardware das verträgt.
Gelacht haben wir viel. Und das ist eigentlich das schöne an diesen Treffen einer immer kleiner werdenden, aber emsigen Gemeinde.
Ach, und falls ich es noch nicht erwähnt habe, liebe Lieferanten und unserer favorisierten Mobilfunk-Partner: Ich will nen Pearl.
Da beschwere ich mich gerade noch über das IBM Branding, und schon werde ich angenehm von einer neuen Kampagne überrascht: Gelber gehts nicht. Lotus ist wieder da. Wir werden davon wohl noch mehr sehen.
Vor einigen Tagen kündigt IBM den Lotus Expeditor an. Seitdem jagt ein Expeditor Witz den nächsten. Bei uns im Büro wird man schon begrüßt mit den Worten „Na, heute schon Deinen Expeditor gestartet?“. Und eine vernünftige Übersetzung für das Wort „Expeditor“ scheint es im Deutschen auch nicht zu geben. Leo kennt das Wort erst gar nichts und Google übersetzt es gleich mit „Expeditor“. Vielleicht liegt es ja daran, dass der Expeditor eine Art Disponent ist – und in Fachkreisen bei uns auch Expeditor heißt.
Immerhin wäre damit die Frage gelöst, wer so einen Expeditor braucht: Thyssen-Krupp sucht immerhin schon einen. Werde nachher mal ein Akquise-Gespräch führen.
Since I reviewed several Beta versions of Sametime 7.5 I stopped using it because of some annoying error messages in the final release – and waited for the first fixpack. Today I installed IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5 Cumulative Fix Pack 1 and played around with it for a few minutes. I added multiple communities, configured location settings – and installed is-phone from iscoord. is-phone is a plug-in for the IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5 client. So I downloaded the beta code, installed it, restarted the Sametime client – and voilá: Sametime is now my favourite softphone. It connects now to our Asterisk pbx as well as to my sipgate account. I can place my calls from my Lotus Sametime client, record the call if I want to, make notes, see call history, and so on.
This is really adding value to the Sametime client.
This is a real IBM tongue twister: IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5 Cumulative Fix Pack 1. Here is the Fixlist.
Seems they fixed the 40 MB download when attending a voice enabled web conference. So now we are ready for production.
