Lotusphere 2010 Review
Widgets & RSS FeedsIBM’s annual Lotusphere conference was held last week in Orlando, FL. There were a range of announcements focusing on IBM’s go-forward roadmap for Lotus, enhanced mobility support, and improved cloud-based offerings.
The future of collaboration was the first major theme at Lotusphere. To this end, IBM announced an umbrella work-in-progress—“Project Vulcan”—which is focused on developing a range of new capabilities such as reducing personal information overload and improving expertise location, and then embedding those capabilities across the range of Lotus offerings—LotusLive, Notes and Domino, Connections, Quickr and IBM WebSphere Portal. One idea in Vulcan is to integrate updates from the different Lotus products into a single consolidated view, thereby reducing the user reality of having to go to multiple different places to check for updates and do work, along with the creation of different silos of content for collaboration when that approach happens. This is a major step forward for IBM, and given the extensibility of Vulcan to support non-Lotus products, the beta coming later in 2010 will be very interesting.
Enhancing mobility was the second theme. Research In Motion released new client software for its BlackBerry devices to support integration with Lotus Quickr and Connections. This means that BlackBerry users will be able to access and work with their Quickr spaces while on the go, and will be able to search for internal experts through Connections, both in the sense of looking for someone (a person profile) and something (a document or entry in a knowledge library). Beyond the BlackBerry, IBM released its first application for the iPhone, the Lotus Notes Traveler Companion, and announced plans for a client for Android devices. The iPhone application supports encrypted Lotus Notes mail, and support for accepting and declining meeting invitations on the iPhone. Given our interest and coverage of mobility for collaboration systems here at Messaging News (see our September 2009 article on Mobile and Wireless Access to Collaboration Systems), it is encouraging to see IBM improving its abilities in this area.
Better cloud services was the third major theme at Lotusphere. Supporting email and calendaring services in-house is a major expense for many organizations, and IBM is one of many vendors looking at ways of offering viable alternatives. Through LotusLive, organizations will be able to sign up some or all of its employees for an off-premises Lotus Notes offering, with email, calendar, contact management and instant messaging services. This will be particularly appealing to organizations with branch offices—where it’s not cost effective to install a separate server—or with people constantly on the move. LotusLive Notes will support a mix of employees in the cloud, and others supported from in-house infrastructure too, thus giving organizations flexibility in the way they offer messaging and collaboration services to its employees. For organizations taking a mixed approach, there is directory synchronization between the off-premises and in-house infrastructures, so that the whole thing appears seamless to end users. That’s really important. Finally, IBM created a new Lab to encourage the rapid commercialization of new ideas from IBM Research within LotusLive, and demonstrated technology previews for slide sharing, meeting recordings, and visualizing conference schedules, among others.
Of course, in an almost week long event, there were other announcements too—what’s coming with Lotus Connections, the roadmap for Lotus Symphony, an “app store” for add-ons to Lotus products, and a variety of integrations with other services (Tungle and Gist).
In summary, the new announcements show a clear commitment to improving the performance of individuals and groups, and the delivery of its promises will help IBM in the collaboration market.
