There’s been plenty of info on Lotusphere 2008 and I’m not sure where to begin.
First, to consolidate the info, Ed Brill and Alan Lepofsky are doing an excellent work of covering Lotusphere with as much live-blogging as they can, day-by-day. You can also view Flickr for recent Lotusphere 2008 photos, or subscribe to twitter/lotusphere.
So, in the name of order and convergence, some quick announcements.
IBM and SAP announce ‘Atlantic’: Currently planned for inclusion in the first release of project “Atlantic” is support for SAP workflows, reporting and analytics, and the use of roles from within the Lotus Notes client. In addition, tools are planned to be included to provide the ability to extend and adapt these roles and capabilities, as well as leverage additional collaborative and offline capabilities inherent in Lotus Notes and Domino products. The initial release is planned to ship in the fourth quarter of 2008 and will be sold by both companies.
Lotus Foundations: Lotus Foundations is a new family of offerings targeted for the 5 to 500 user market. The Foundations family will deliver a series of servers. First, a Collaboration server that will include the Domino mail and collaboration platform, file management, directory services, firewall, back-up and recovery, and office productivity tools. Lotus Foundations is the first result of IBM’s recent acquisition of Net Integration Technologies.
Lotus Protector: Lotus Protector for Mail Security is a “black box” (hardware/software combo or software-only VMWare image) pre-processor for anti-spam and anti-virus. Protector was developed in conjunction with IBM Internet Security Solutions.
Lotus ‘BlueHouse’ – collaboration tools open to everyone: an integrated suite of collaboration services including Social Contacts, Instant Messaging, Store and Share, Activities and Web conferencing (based on the existing Sametime Unyte technology)delivered as a service. “Bluehouse” expands on IBM’s introduction of Sametime Unyte, a hosted e-meetings service, which is now incorporated into the “Bluehouse” environment. “Bluehouse” is now in beta at bluehouse.lotus.com and will be available in the second half of 2008.
Lotus Notes Traveler: Traveler provides automatic real-time replication of email including attachments, read and unread indicators, calendar, contacts, personal journal and the to do list. The user interface works with the existing email and Personal Information Manager (PIM) applications on mobile devices running the Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 or 6 platform available from a variety of device manufacturers.
Lotus previews Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5: In the area of the Notes client, Notes 8.5 will focus on incremental improvements on top of the best-in-class Notes 8 release. These include calendaring, integration, and usability improvements. We also will ship Notes 8 clients for Apple Macintosh (supported on the “Leopard” OS) and add Ubuntu to the list of supported Linux distributions. Domino Web Access will in 8.5 will also expand to support Safari as a browser, including on the Apple iPhone. From an administrator perspective, Domino 8.5 will simplify Notes Identity management and authentication. We are making ID files optional, as well as offering a way to secure Notes IDs with the ID Vault. We are federating the Domino directory, enabling use of alternative directories. To help address storage costs, Domino 8.5 will introduce a shared attachment data store and other storage reduction features.
More IBM/Lotus collaboration announcements are available online:
Ed Brill
Alan Lepofsky
Planet Lotus
Flickr
Twitter
Once again (for the 9th year), Genii Software came through and created the Lotusphere Agenda DB for PDA Synching and Session Planning. On top of the usual Notes DB, there’s Blackberry support and iPhone integration as well. Now you can plan which sessions, workshops and panels you’d like to attend during the 6-day conference, and plan accordingly. If you’re new to Lotusphere this is something you need to know. Veteran participants will recongzine and appreciate this tiny piece of resource.
