September 19th, 2007
Summary of Lotus Collaboration Summit
So where to begin! I've been negligent in blogging for the last week, but after all of yesterday's announcements, I think you might understand why! For those of you that don't read any of the other blogs or press sites that have covered the news from the Lotus Collaboration Summit, below is my summary for you.
On Sept 18th, Lotus rented the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, as the site for the Lotus Collaboration Summit. The event began with a presentation by IBM Senior Vice President, Steve Mills. Yes, the head of the entire IBM Software Division was the opening speaker. This is VERY important, as it has been a while since Steve was part of a Lotus specific event. His talk was titled "The Convergence of Collaboration, Information and Processes". He discussed the growth of digital communication, the amount of time we spend on email, instant messaging, and searching for information. He explained how an IBM study with 750 CEOs from around the globe highlighted the importance of collaboration in driving innovation, and how Lotus knows collaboration! Let me be REALLY CLEAR about this, Lotus is really high on the IBM Software Group's radar screen!
Next, Lotus General Manager Mike Rhodin spoke about the current state of affairs at Lotus. He explained our mission, "Empowering people to be more effective, responsive and innovative in the context of the work they do."
Mike highlighted how in just the first 8 months of 2007, Lotus has delivered Lotus Sametime, Connections, Quickr, and Notes/Domino 8. A live demonstration was done showing the integrated collaborative capabilities of the Lotus portfolio. Focus was on how from an employee's perspective, the tools and features needed are available where you need them, integrated in the context of what you are working on, rather than jumping around from program to program to get your work done.
After the demo, Erica Driver from Forrester Research spoke for a few minutes about where she sees the collaboration industry today, and some thoughts about the future. She then hosted a question and answer session with three Lotus customers: The FAA, Avon, and the NYSE. They each explained their use of Lotus software, and the plans for their future upgrades.
At this point, the audience had absorbed a lot of information about how important collaboration is, the state of the industry, and what the current Lotus portfolio delivers. However, the day had just begun! Now it was time for the new announcements, and boy were there lots of them!
IBM Lotus Symphony. When we released IBM Lotus Notes 8, customer were introduced to the integrated Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and Presentation editors. Following that, last week IBM joined OpenOffice.org, letting the world know that IBM would be contributing code to OpenOffice and vice versa. Now, we're introducing Lotus Symphony, providing customers an IBM branded choice for using (free) stand alone versions of the editors we put in Notes 8. The Symphony editors are surfaced via Eclipse, similar to Notes 8 and Sametime 7.5.
Several announcements were made about Lotus Notes/Domino 8.0.1. Below is a partial list, and different items will be more or less important depending on your needs (ex: Citrix might be critical, or irrelevant), but the two that are getting the most attention are the a new, lightweight Domino Web Access email/calendar/PIM client, and the introduction or IBM Lotus Notes Traveler, providing out-of the box (no extra cost!) push of e-mail, calendar, address book, journal and to do lists.
Repeating the announcements first made at VoiceCon, Mike explained that IBM Lotus Sametime 8 will come in four different versions; Entry, Standard, Advanced, and Unified Telephony.
I hope you have all heard by now about Lotus's acquisition of WebDialogs, now called Lotus Sametime Unyte. This now provides customers a Lotus web conferencing solution, hosted on the web as a service, rather than having to run a conferencing infrastructure within your own company.
For Lotus Quickr 8.1 we announced integration into both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, as well as Lotus Quickr Content Integrator, which will allow customers to synchronize or migrate data from Microsoft Outlook Public Folders, Microsoft SharePoint, Lotus Domino TeamRooms, and Lotus Domino Document Manager. Yes, FROM SharePoint to Quickr!
For Lotus Connections, new integration points were announced, enabling seamless access to some of the capabilities of Profiles, Activities, and Blogging from within Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Windows File Manager, and Microsoft Office applications. For example, within Lotus Notes you can search the Lotus Connections Profiles system for the name of an email sender, and it will return their contact information and allow you to see their reporting structure.
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Or from a Microsoft Office document, you can add a file directly to an Activity.
For the WebSphere Portal customers, we announced Collaboration Accelerator for IBM WebSphere® Portal, which adds many of the features of Lotus Sametime, Quickr, and Connections to WebSphere Portal.
And finally, for customers looking to outsource the management and administration of their infrastructure, there is now IBM Applications on Demand hosting for Lotus Notes/Domino 8. This is per user, per month, hosting of Lotus Notes/Domino based email and applications.
Ok, I'm tired just typing it all up, so I am sure you are reading it. There are so many good things happening at Lotus right now, it is amazing to be able to talk about this much, in September! I can't wait for Lotusphere 2008 in January.
