Introduction of Sjaak Ursinus

Hi to all of you. I have been asked to blog here on ibmconnections.com by Stuart McIntyre. So first lets do an introduction of myself here.

My name is Sjaak Ursinus and I live in the Netherlands. I am working in the ICS market (IBM Collaboration Solutions formerly known as Lotus) my whole professional career. My birthday is 21 January of the fabulous year 1974 so that makes that I am currently 40 years. In the beginning of my career I have been working mainly with IBM Notes and IBM Domino but the last 7 Years of my career I have a 100% focus on IBM Connections.

I was at Lotusphere in Orlando in 2007 where the project called Ventura those days got introduced as Lotus Connections (later renamed to IBM Connections). As I had heard some rumors about the project Ventura would see its daylights during this lotusphere I was still completely surprised by the reaction of the crowd how good it got accepted. So at that time I decided to make a complete shift to IBM Connections. Its always hard for someone to start with a new product in their career. The best way to learn a new product is just to jump on to it and play with it as you solve customer problems. But the product just got released by the supplier so there where not yet of that day any customers yet. So my tactic those days was to get a good understanding of the product I had to have people where I would solve their problems for. So I got active on the public forum hosted by IBM for their product and tried to solve the problems people would leave over there. So back there I got a very good base and understanding of the product and use that knowledge still as a base for today’s helping out. Nowadays I have so many customers to serve with this product so I am not that active anymore on the public forum (I still scan the posted post still over there). I am very pleased to see that the product is very well accepted by the world and that it got big attraction even for IBM history.

Well for now this is enough about myself. I will post here some places where you can find me easily in case you want to contact me for whatever reason or helping out 🙂

Or you can always contact me via here on this blog.