By EDISON D. ONG
"While some of our competition are narrowing their focus to just e-mail capabilities, IBM continues to expand and evolve Lotus Notes and Domino to deliver the extended business value of true collaborative platform," said Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM’s Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software business.
Specifically, the value of the Lotus platform he refers to is reflected in the latest release of Lotus Notes and Domino that includes more than 120 enhancements. Proof that it is experiencing rapid adoption is "after less than six months on the market, more than 3 million users have upgraded to Lotus Notes 7 and 70,000 users have downloaded Domino 7 server software," the company reported.
In a press release, the company announced IBM will now offer a choice of multiple computing and browser platforms (including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Windows, Macintosh and Linux) and a wide variety of upcoming support for mobile solutions.
With this development, Lotus Software has opened up new markets for Lotus Notes and Domino. Ed Brill, Business Unit Executive, Worldwide Lotus Messaging Sales, IBM Software Group, said in hindsight the single limitation of Notes, for example, is it talks only to Domino, "so we want to open it up to a new service-oriented architrecture. Notes now will no longer be an island by itself."
At the recent "Lotus Comes to You" conference at Makati Shangri-La, Brill discussed with the local press some of the new technology innovations, relationships and programs of IBM that can help its customers and business partners extend the value of their Lotus Notes and Domino investments.
First, IBM plans to enhance the next major versions of Lotus Domino with support for service-oriented architecture (SOA), composite applications, activity-centric computing and support for server-managed clients.
Designed to work with the next major release of Lotus Notes, code named, "Hannover," the next major version of Lotus Domino will include portal services from WebSphere Portal, updated document library services and team spaces. The next major versions will be available in 2007.
Second, IBM Lotus Notes Suites for SAP Solutions has been designed to integrate and extend common end-user tasks in Lotus Notes into SAP business processes. Based on IBM and SAP’s existing integration tools, available since 1997, this new solution expands this integration into calendaring, time tracking, contact management, report generation, approval workflows and other common business tasks. This solution is planned for availability in the first half of 2006.
Thirdly, IBM will provide expanded support for Mac OS X, including support for Lotus Notes 7 on Apple’s Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" with integrated Lotus Sometime instant messaging, and plans to support Apple’s new Intel-based Macs.
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