Lotusphere 2007: Extending the Old, Unwrapping the New for Big Blue
by Michael Sampson
Loti from the around the world, customers, business partners and the usual contingent from Microsoft converged on Orlando, Florida earlier this year to hear what's coming next from IBM Lotus. It is an opportunity to meet-and-greet the developers, and to get a renewed level of excitement about how IBM contributes to businesses through its range of products, most notably IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino. Lotusphere this year saw five major IBM announcements: three of them were about product updates, but the other two announcements signaled a major change for Big Blue.
Product Updates
Lotusphere is generally when IBM officially announces updates to its core products. This year was no exception. Lotus Notes and Domino, its email and collaboration platform, will feature a major upgrade during 2007, with the release of Version 8.0. The two most significant changes in 8 are a remarkably enhanced Notes client, including a reworked mail template, which has lagged Microsoft Outlook in look-and-feel for too long. And secondly, Notes will come bundled with a suite of office productivity applications-for writing documents, creating spreadsheets, and crafting and delivering presentations. IBM is hoping that customers will abandon Microsoft Office in their favor, at least for some percentage of office workers. Sametime 7.5.1 was announced, with point-to-point video conferencing being the major news. Sametime is a real-time communications platform, offering presence, instant messaging, voice calling and now video conferencing capabilities from a presence-enabled list of contacts and colleagues. Quite a number of IBM's partners announced integrations or extensions with Sametime. IBM WebSphere Portal Express 6.0 was released, bringing portalbased collaborative tools to organizations with less than 1,000 users. The offering includes capabilities for document management, Web content management, enterprise portals, and team collaboration. It's a licensing slant on the WebSphere Portal product.
Lotus Quickr
Lotusphere also saw the announcement of two new products, both of which are aimed at positioning IBM as a provider of "Web 2.0" platforms for the enterprise. The first is the beautiful new Lotus Quickr, a browserbased team collaborative workspace product aimed at the same space as Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. It's got a hot look to it, and embraces various user interface constructs to make it easier for users to see what's going on. To be totally honest, it's actually not a new product, but rather a very significant update to the too-long neglected Quickplace offering. Based on earlier Quickplace version feedback I've received from customers, Quickr's either too late to stop people from going to SharePoint, or it's not a moment too soon.
The essence of Quickr (so-named to capitalize on the Web 2.0 naming trend of dropping some vowels from product names) is the creation of a virtual workspace for a specific project or activity. It's intended to provide a new way for teams to work together, outside of their email client. Discussions can be held, files can be shared, meetings and milestones scheduled, and task lists created and monitored-all without sending email messages around. Everyone on the project team logs into the Quickr space for their project or activity and can view what's been happening and then choose to engage with others through the various artifacts and tools in the Quickr space.
Quickr takes what was Quickplace and adds greater integration with Microsoft Office. For example users can save documents directly into a Quickr space from Microsoft Word, check a document directly from within Word when it's time to update it, and mount Quickr spaces as a type of virtual drive in Windows Internet Explorer. The intent of such integration is to make it super-easy for anyone to use Quickr by removing some of the hassles of previous versions- which lacked such tight integration with the user's existing range of desktop tools. Another new feature is the ability to monitor what's happening within a Quickr space via RSS-a newer, better, more intelligent way of notifying people than sending email. The third major new piece of goodness for users is the ability to use IBM's new office productivity suite for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, rather than being tied to Microsoft Office. There's also new goodness for IT administrators, again aimed at easing the integration of Quickr into the existing IT infrastructure, with intentional support for various database engines. Lastly, there is a revamped set of Quickr templates to enable common business processes to be facilitated via Quickr with a minimal amount of in-house developer time and expertise. IBM said that Quickr will ship in mid-2007, so look for it somewhere in the June-July timeframe.
Lotus Connections
The second new product announced at Lotusphere was Lotus Connections, a suite of five social networking tools for businesses. "Social networking" is the buzzy term to indicate the use of computing technologies to build relational links between people across the world, generally based on common interests. The new Lotus Connections offering has a within-the-enterprise slant, and is particularly interesting to the large, diverse and complex organizations, for which it is aimed. The product delivers five capabilities: a way of tracking projects across multiple people; support for interest- and practice-based community formation and development; a way of sharing web pages of interest; a structured way of telling your enterprise what you're good at-enabling others to easily find you when they need your expertise; and finally a blogging engine for internal and external blogs.
For those organizations that embrace new trends and tools slowly, Lotus Connections will help validate the idea of social networking within the enterprise environment. For those organizations that have independentminded CIOs and senior executives (that don't need vendor validation to decide whether something is good for business or not) Lotus Connections will be just another option from a palette of many.
Keeping the Faithful
Lotusphere delivered good things to the Lotus faithful: a very strong forward commitment from IBM around customer's investments in Notes, Domino and Sametime, and equally the unveiling of new and significantly upgraded IBM product offerings. With Microsoft's continual marketing banter around Exchange and SharePoint, we'll know in 12-24 months whether the new IBM announcements are sufficient to keep the faithful, faithful. And equally, with respect to IBM's 2.0ish announcements, with the new cool vendors on the block offering 2.0 products and platforms-will IBM have sufficient pull to gain a large foothold amongst its current customer base, or will it see defections to the new-new? MS/TMP