Collaborating
at Lotusphere
Lotus is now 21 years old
and Notes is 15. That
would be cause enough for celebration, but the 5,500 Notes users
who gathered at Lotusphere in Florida last week had other reasons
to be happy.
For one thing, they were
in Florida, while the Northeast was in the throes of an icy
blizzard, closing many airports.
It’s always more fun to be in Florida when it’s snowing
up north.
For another, many of Notes
past uncertainties are behind it.
The product now seems to know what it is, whom it’s for,
and where it’s headed. Listening
to the keynotes, reading through the program, or talking to
exhibitors in the showcase or customers attending the conference,
you could hear the Notes audience segmenting itself into tidy
piles.
No longer is there any
uncertainty about whether Notes (or its underpinnings) might be
replaced before loyal followers are ready to move on.
Lotus used the conference to show the latest versions of
Notes 7 (currently in Beta), which will ship in midyear. For customers who have made big investments in Notes
applications (or those who might do so in the future), Lotus has
assured customers that Notes 8 and 9 will follow.
These are not just lackadaisical follow-on versions for a
mature products, but rather exciting new versions with many new
features. For
example, Notes 7 includes:
-
Stronger ties with IBM
Workplace. This
includes supporting Notes applications within Workplace
clients as a plug-in.
-
Important improvements
to scalability. Domino
will increase number of users per CPU from 8,000 on V6 to
15,000 on V7. This
makes Domino less expensive in three ways – it requires
fewer servers, less software, and fewer administrators.
-
Supporting
both the Notes Storage Facility and the IBM DB2 database as
data stores (administrator option).
-
Presence
awareness will be integrated with calendar and scheduling.
Workplace was a major
focus of both keynote sessions and breakouts.
It’s clearly a new way to approach collaboration,
especially for users who have had little or no need for personal
productivity applications (like Microsoft Office Suite), so that a
server-centric solution will be appealing.
It’s particularly appropriate, of course, for groups of
users where integration with Line of Business (LOB) applications
and organizational data are key.
IBM used Lotusphere to
kick off new branding and packaging versions of Workplace. It announced Workplace Collaboration Services (the new name)
and Workplace Version 2.5 (the newest version).
Workplace Collaboration Services is a single integrated
environment which will include email, calendaring, instant
messaging, electronic learning, Web conferencing, document and Web
content management.
IBM also announced:
-
The IBM Web Services
for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Self-Service Validation Site, a
program designed to give business partners the ability to
validate, test, and ensure their WSRP services are easily
integrated with IBM's WebSphere Portal.
-
A Hosted Service, IBM
Workplace for Business Controls and Reporting (WBCR), to help
customers manage documents and reports in connection with
Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. It provides
an alternative to building and running a technology
infrastructure in-house by tapping into computer systems in
IBM data centers worldwide to provide sophisticated management
of software applications.
-
Developer
Tools for the IBM Workplace family designed for easy use by
Domino developers. These tools permit those familiar with the Domino scripting
environment and Visual Basic to build J2EE-based applications
and components for
the IBM Workplace platform.
Extensive information
about Lotusphere announcements can be found at http://www.lotus.com/engine/jumpages.nsf/wdocs/5f73fe131bb8bb6985256f7f00767f5c.
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