The new upgrade has the competitive advantage because it supports Linux, Windows and Unix, said Surjit Chana, IBM vice president for marketing, partners and workplace client technology.

Chana expects more customers of IBM to upgrade to the new version of Lotus Notes as well as attract new customers to deploy Domino 7 particularly from the small and medium enterprises.

"A lot of users of Microsoft Exchange are now migrating to Lotus Notes 7 because of the many innovations, security features, reduced total cost of ownership and a strong support by IBM," said Chana.

With Lotus Notes and Domino 7, IBM has created a vastly improved collaboration platform designed to meet the evolving and expanding needs of knowledge workers.

End-user productivity is a driving factor in companies’ uses of collaboration software and with Lotus Notes 7 users will benefit from more than 100 new features that will allow them to manage an increasing volume of information and work more efficiently.

New visual indicators can help users organize and manage their in-box by highlighting high priority messages, as well as differentiating between group e-mails and messages targeted for specific users.

New memory functions will automatically save and return to open documents and applications upon shut down and restart, which will give users additional mobility without worrying about losing data or hindering productivity.

And instant messaging and presence technology, already integrated in the Lotus Notes client, has been expanded across the platform, including emails and calendar items, facilitating productivity and responsiveness by instantly connecting users with experts and key contacts.

"IBM recognizes that our customers need more than just e-mail for their collaboration needs — as a result, IBM has evolved Lotus Notes and Domino forward as an extensive platform built to meet the business objectives of a wide variety of corporate communities, including end-users, IT administrators, application developers and the CFO’s office," said Chana.

"Today, tens of thousands of customers are relying on Lotus Notes and Domino to help drive their overall business, so we’ve built Lotus Notes and Domino 7 with capabilities that can increase productivity from the organizational level down to individual knowledge workers."

Chana noted that companies are concerned on how to improve their productivity, what services are needed to be changed, how to drive revenue and how to integrate business process from sales to marketing as well as how to make people more productive by at least five to 10 percent.

Lotus Notes and Domino 7, a key component of the IBM Workplace strategy, marks a major milestone in IBM’s product roadmap for the Lotus product family.

Customers have indicated that a critical factor when choosing a software platform is a reliable, long-term product plan that won’t require additional software purchases or major migrations to upgrade.

IBM is helping customers plan their software purchases and deployments by delivering new versions of Lotus Notes and Domino every 12-18 months and making it simple for customers to upgrade to new versions.

As a result, IBM’s clear product roadmap and consistent delivery of new Lotus Notes and Domino technology has resulted in more than 90 percent of customers working on the most recent version of the product, which is an unprecedented rate of adoption in the software industry.

Chana also noted that Lotus Notes has posted a double-digit growth in the first half of 2005 compared to the collaboration market’s single-digit growth or less than 10 percent.

"With 120 million users worldwide, it is very important that we provide them with the necessary support and both forward and backward compatibility," Chana added.

Faire Ann Co, SWG country manager of IBM Phil said that local clients are expected to upgrade to the new version of Lotus Notes and Domino 7.

Some of the major users of Lotus Notes are BPI, Equitable PCIBank, RCBC, UCPB, Central Bank, Land Bank and Development Bank of the Philippines.

There are over 120 installed base of Lotus in the country and still growing, said Co. She also noted that many of the users in the country are migrating to Lotus Notes from Microsoft Exchange.

IBM works with two distributors of Lotus Notes ­ TechoPac and MSI Digiland and 70 resellers nationwide.

"The response of the market was very positive and they are excited because of the new features that are incorporated in the new version of Lotus Notes," said Co. Lotus Domino 7 also includes new tools for application developers.

According to customer feedback, more than 65 percent of IBM customers are building as many or more Lotus Domino-based applications this year than one year ago.

The number of applications is predicted to increase with the improved development capabilities in Lotus Domino 7.

However, these customers have indicated a need to protect their investment in Lotus Domino-based applications as they move closer to Web services-oriented architectures.

To help meet this need, IBM has upgraded the Lotus Domino 7 toolset to expand the reach of Lotus Domino applications while protecting their investment in Lotus Domino-based applications.

For example, a new Web services design element lets developers use Lotus Domino as a Web services host, giving customers the benefits of extending Lotus Domino applications as open, standards-based Web services.

Additionally, Lotus Notes and Domino 7 provides developers with the option of using either traditional NSF storage features or IBM DB2 as the foundation for new and existing applications.

This new capability gives developers the option of leveraging open-standard SQL (Structured Query Language) and choosing the technology that best fits their skills and business needs.