ISW Social Ignition for Lotus Notes 8.5.3

For those that have not noticed yet IBM has just announced the release of IBM Lotus Notes & Domino 8.5.3. This is a great release and one that I know many clients have been looking forward to. You can find out all the information on the formal IBM Annoucement here.

Of particular note however is the following:

Entitlement to IBM Connections Files and Profiles, for no additional charge, allows you to tap into the knowledge of networks of professionals with a single click. This helps users to quickly find skills within their organization and to easily share content with other people and remove the need to send large files through email.

THIS IS AWESOME! ISW has been working with many clients implementing IBM Connections and now to have a entitlement to Profiles and Files as part of your Notes/Domino 8.5.3 licensing adds significant value at no extra cost. So as IBM are adding so much value ISW has decided we had better join in.

ISW are excited to announce a special limited time only Ignition offer on the back of IBM's release of Lotus Notes 8.5.3. The latest release of Lotus Notes includes, at no extra charge, license entitlement to two IBM Connections 3.0.1 features; Profiles and Files. What an opportunity for Notes customers to begin their journey as a Social Business! We all know Notes has been a social platform for many years but now this takes it to a whole new level.

In order to take full advantage of these Connections features, ISW has created Social Ignition, available until December 31st 2011.

What is Social Ignition?
Sure, IBM have given you ‘free’ access to these features, but we want you to enjoy the complete benefits that come from a professional, experienced installation and integration. Get started quickly without the hassles of learning how to install and implement Connections.

This limited time offer will get your Connections Profiles and Files installed and seamlessly integrated into your Notes environment at a pace we challenge you to beat.

$4,500+GST will get you set up either on premise or in the cloud. You will be enjoying your brand new social features faster than Mark Webber does a lap of Albert Park (well almost)!

To make it even better, clients that make the move this year will receive a free entitlement to ISW’s Wildfire Social Aggregator Sidebar Plugin and for clients that we really like a free entitlement to iWildfire ISW's iPhone and iPad App for Connections.

Don’t have the Infrastructure? Need some hosting?
That’s OK, we can do that too with full integration into your Notes/Domino environment. Just ask us for a quote on monthly hosting in the cloud.

To find our more about the offer, visit ISW's website. Or contact us in Australia on 1800 456 001. Or you can tweet me at adambrownaus.

Are you a Lotus Notes Nomad?

Are you one of these users that wants to access Lotus Notes from everywhere? Don't like the browser interface to your Notes Apps and would much rather use a Notes client when on the road. End up lugging around your Laptop when on holidays so you can still access Notes?

Well here is a great innovation from IBM with Lotus Notes 7.0.2. Notes on a USB memory stick install . With Notes installed onto your USB memory stick you can just plug it into a computer and wammo you have Notes. When you leave that machine you take everything with you.

This would be great when travelling, in lets say Phuket Thailand. Simply get into an internet cafe at 1 Baht per minute (28 Bahts is about $1AUD), plug in your USB memory stick and off you go.

Or maybe you are travelling thru an airport, quick jump on that PC, plug in the USB stick, and off you go. Full Notes access.

This is a great innovation from IBM and I can see many of our clients making great use of it. 

Lotus Notes Hannover (Notes 8) to include Word Processor, Spreadsheet, & Presentation Tool, based on Open Document Format

A huge announcement from Mike Rhodin while demonstrating Notes "Hannover" at DNUG/IBM Lotus Technical Conference keynote- The Notes "Hannover" release will include spreadsheet/presentation/word processing productivity tools supporting the newly ratified Open Document Format .  "We are going to provide an open alternative".  Here is a screen shot of this in action (More work to be done to UI apparently):



This is pretty exciting stuff. While I am sure they won't have the full functionality of Microsoft Word 2007 etc, I am also sure it will probably suffice for 90% of users. We have had many clients wishing this kind of functionality will be added to Notes so that their users can drop Word etc.

Here is some more info. 

Sametime 7.5 Feature Blog

There is a neat Sametime 7.5 blog running over at IBM developerWorks. Ted Stanton has been posting Sametime Sunday (I am guessing this in on the same theme as Show N Tell Thursday). There is some great insites into some of the new features coming in Sametime 7.5.

I particularly like the Click to Talk (VOIP), and the automatic changing of your status depending on what you are currently doing is also neat. An example is Can't Chat Now, In a Meeting. When you are in a meeting it automatically changes your status to match. This is great as how many times does it happen that you are in a Sametime Conference and hence online, but as you are in a meeting you actually want to have a status of Busy. 

Using a Wiki for Workflow

searchSMB has an interesting article on using Wiki's for tasks that used to be done using basic workflow.

Wiki's are becoming far more common place and organisations are starting to accept them for corporate applications. An example given is the instance of a group meeting where notes are taken which are then sent around everyone in the meeting for approval/correction. With 4-5 people this might take a few days with normal sequential workflow. Put it in a wiki and everyone can update it when they want with an automatic history of what has changed.

Off course this could be done using a smarter workflow process in Lotus Notes. Using our workflow engine you would just set this up as parallel workflow rather than sequential. Off course there are complications to deal with such as replication conflicts but there are ways to manage this (another topic). I guess the point is though that a Wiki can be used for this purpose without the complexity of extensive workflow.

The one thing that seems to worry a lot of our clients regarding Wiki's is that anyone can modify anything. The point here of course is that there is a detailed history of changes automatically generated. Hence there is full visibility of what has been done by whom.