Lotus Moves To Next Generation Software
Lotusphere is an annual gathering
of the clan, a chance for Lotus users and the developers who support
them to get together and enjoy their community while getting a
preview of things to come. We’re
there mainly for that preview – and to see some friends.
There were a number of important
announcements, both for existing Lotus users, and potential new
customers:
Next-Gen
E-Mail
Lotus announced a new, less
expensive, standards-based e-mail solution, based on IBM WebSphere
and DB2. It allows
organizations to offer email to deskless workers such as retail
clerks, factory floor and assembly line employees. These users
typically receive a lower volume of messages and require a solution
that is both intuitive and easy to use with little or no training.
The solution is browser-based and can be used to complement
an existing IBM Lotus Domino messaging system or for an organization
that needs a from-scratch environment.
This new e-mail environment can help provide customers a
cost-effective method to extend and tailor their overall messaging
solution to help maximize communication and employee productivity.
For example, it might provide e-mail to factory floor workers
through a walk-up kiosk or a shared terminal.
This
new e-mail solution is built for enterprise customers and provides
high levels of e-mail fidelity and interoperability across
heterogeneous computing environments with high scalability and
overall performance. IBM's new e-mail product supports the directory
integration and administration of an organization's existing
messaging infrastructure to allow customers to extend their IBM
Lotus Notes and Domino infrastructure while maintaining the ability
to adapt to evolving business needs.
New
E-Learning Components
IBM
has upgraded its e-learning offering with The Lotus Learning
Management System, a flexible, standards-based portfolio of
e-learning components. The enterprise-class learning management
system enables integration with existing infrastructure as well as
other e-learning systems and can scale smoothly from departmental
implementations to enterprise-wide applications.
IBM
is also launching an e-learning content validation offering which
can simplify the implementation of course content for Lotus Learning
Management System customers and business partners.
This answers what has, in the past, been a problem for
customers who wanted an easy and less expensive way to get started.
The "Ready for IBM Lotus Learning software"
offering validates third-party content for compatibility with Lotus
e-learning software. .
The IBM Lotus Learning Management System is designed to help
businesses rapidly set up a centralized training environment that
can scale to accommodate geographically-dispersed employees,
customers and business partners.
The
Learning Management System complements IBM's portfolio of e-learning
offerings including strategy development, content development,
integration and outsourcing. The Lotus Learning Management System is
the second module in IBM's e-learning portfolio. The first module,
the Lotus LearningSpace - Virtual Classroom shipped in October 2002.
The Lotus Learning Management System solution, comprises an
Authoring Tool, Learning Management System, Content Delivery Server
and Offline Learning Client, is a strategic blend of advanced
administrative and technical features.
Collaboration Tools For The IBM WebSphere Portal
IBM
has added collaboration tools to its WebSphere Portal offering which
will allow users to more easily work with team members without the
need to integrate additional applications.
They
allow users to interact with multiple collaboration applications –
corporate white pages, organizational charts, instant messages, team
workplaces and virtual meetings – quickly and efficiently to
increase individual and organizational productivity. These
pre-configured capabilities of WebSphere Portal, which IBM is
calling Collaboration Center, help companies support their global
workforce by delivering collaborative portal applications to
business users. This
allows users to support activities easily regardless of location and
to firm inter-location, inter-disciplinary teams.
IBM
also used Lotusphere to announce enhancements to its mobile IM
platform with the announcement of Sametime Everyplace 3, which
offers presence awareness with mobile phones, the Pocket PC and Palm
devices.
IBM
Research Lab
Of course, my favorite time at any Lotus
conference is a visit to the IBM Research Lab, where IBM Fellow
Irene Greif and her colleague Dan Gruen have arranged for a number
of IBM researchers to share their projects-in-progress.
This time they also held a conference session on Glimpsing
the Future: The
Research Behind Lotus Products.
Here are some highlights.
IBM
Researchers continue to look at the problem of how to usefully
manage our overflowing In Baskets.
They consider ways to visualize email via customized
interfaces, perhaps sorting by time, user rules, or various
collections (such as topics or networks of people).
A
particularly interesting demo was MoMail, a look at the problem of
mobile mail, with its small screen and difficult problems of data
entry. It emphasized innovative ways to navigate quickly to related
groups of items, a quick first pass, the ability to browse, defer,
annotate, delete, and to search on-line or off-line.
Researchers have progressed to building prototypes and can
apply their lessons not only to mobile mail, but also to desktop
environments such as portals.
Instant
Collaboration is a bridge between ad hoc communication and formal
communication. It
offers tools to explore how collaboration evolves, in context.
It does this by building blocks of collaborations, each
containing one shared item. These
possess awareness, membership and persistence and are, in effect,
small shared workspaces.
We also
revisited ongoing work on Reinventing Email, which we saw (and wrote
about) last year. We
continue to campaign for this to appear in productized form.
We also
had fun interacting with a “help design calendar and scheduling”
research project and an opportunity to see BlueSpace, an Office of
the Future that is a joint project of IBM and SteelCase.
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