Lotus Notes

Companies like IBM and Microsoft love to confuse their customers with numerous services and titles. Not so long ago IBM launched the new mail service LotusLive iNotes, that costs $3 per month per user and provides corporate e-mail, contacts and calendar. And today IBM has unveiled another service called LotusLive Notes, that costs $5 per month and also includes e-mail, contacts and calendar. At first glance, the only difference is the price, but in fact the latest service is a multitenant SaaS version of Lotus Domino (Domino - is the name of server software in the traditional in-house Lotus Notes system). How it differs from LotusLive iNotes?

Email was the first collaboration tool in the Intarnet. Then intranet portals emerged, and they wanted to kill Email because of its lacks: instead of sending back and forth messages and documents, they are placed on a portal web-page (for example, in the news, on the forum or file cabinet). But due to the fact that people got used to e-mail and email was also used for external communications - intranet portals failed to replace the Email as a primary workspace. Moreover, recently Email launched the counterattack. And it happened because the major enterprise Email-solutions (GMail, Outlook, Lotus Notes) have become the platforms that allow third-party developers to add new functionality.

The world's most popular enterprise Email client, MS Outlook, is already equipped with various Enterprise 2.0 tools. Outlook is already integrated with social networks (Xobni and Outlook Social Connector), Google Apps, Google Docs (Harmony), Remember the Milk, etc. Now, when this place is crowded, the developers switched their attention to the second most popular enterprise Email client - Lotus Notes. Thus, the new plug-in + service Gist makes the same for Lotus Notes as Xobni for Outlook - allows you to see the social profiles of those with whom you communicate. Gist pulls the latest information about a person from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as recent news about his company from blogs and news sites. In addition, the plug-in displays in suitable form all correspondence with selected contact and files sent to/from him. It should be noted that Gist also works with Outlook, GMail, iPhone and may also be accessed as a web service.

When Google Apps Marketplace launched, we noticed that Google's partner Salesforce hadn't joined this ecosystem. Now it's clear why. Salesforce is building its own ecosystem of collaborative applications around Chatter. Although Chatter (Facebook for enterprise) is nothing like Google Apps (email + docs), however the aim of both tools is the same - collaboration. At the ChatterExchange presentation, Marc Benioff has clearly stated that Chatter will compete with MS Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Notes (he modestly omitted Google Apps). "Don't be confused that these systems have little in common" - said Benioff, - "the fact that Sharepoint and Lotus Notes were created back in these days when people didn't use Twitter and Facebook and when the top collaborative technologies were email and shared folders".

The geek-developer dream comes true: a full-on collaboration environment with an open API and a name right out of Star Trek. Today at the Lotushpere conference IBM unveiled Project Vulcan - the new cloud platform for collaboration and social tools, that is already compared to Google Wave. But unlike Google Wave, Vulcan - is not a separate application, but an integrated environment for all future and existing Lotus apps, including Lotus Notes and LotusLive. Vulcan will be available to developers in the second half of 2010, and meanwhile it will be available to LotusLive Labs team, which has already shown 4 new projects for LotusLive:

From today IBM starts providing Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging - the hosting service for the popular email and collaboration software. I.e. IBM will host Lotus Domino in its data center and users will access it either through the web interface Domino Web Access, or via a mobile client Lotus Notes Traveler, or in the standard desktop client Lotus Notes.  And IBM will outsource support, virus and spam filter. According to IBM, service is not a classic SaaS solution based on multitenant architecture. For each client the dedicated Domino server will be maintained. The cost of using Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging - is $10 per user per month.

The new version of IBM's collaborative software Lotus Notes 8.0 includes a free office suite for editing documents called Lotus Symphony. It includes a word processor, spreadsheets and presentations editor. As well as the new version of Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony applications are built on the Eclipse platform and support ODF format (Open Document Format for XML) - it's an open non-proprietary standard, which is an alternative to Microsoft's Open XML. Lotus Symphony will compete not only with MS Office, but also with online Google Docs. In addition to the office suite, the new version of Lotus Notes features a new modern interface in the Web 2.0 style and a lot of new options for managing mail, calendars and contacts.

IBM has released the next version of its e-mail and collaboration solution Lotus Notes / Domino 7. Among the new features the closer integration with Lotus Sametime and MS Office, RSS and iCal support, improved email group operations, e-mail threaded view, S/MIME support (all this works in Lotus Notes and in the Domino Web Access). In addition, Domino server now supports DB2 database. But the most interesting - is Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook - the "virtual Outlook", which allows you to migrate data from MS Exchange to Lotus Domino and access e-mail and other tools via the Web interface or Lotus Notes. According to the recent IDC report IBM Notes / Domino and Microsoft Exchange / Office virtually splited the collaboration market in half, but Microsoft is leading with 51,2% against 40,1%.

The new version of Lotus Notes 6.5 adds integration with the enterprise messenger IBM Lotus Sametime. From now Lotus Notes client users will be able to see the current online status of their colleagues and start chat with one click for example right in the address book. In addition, with the help of new Lotus Domino Designer 6.5, developers can embed the online status and chat feature in custom apps built on Lotus Domino platform.

Microsoft has introduced a free software for companies that use Lotus Domino as their e-mail server, which enables users to work with their email in Outlook rather than in Lotus Notes. Microsoft Outlook 2002 Connector is compatible with the latest version of Lotus Domino and allows you to access your mail, contacts and calendars. Thus, Microsoft is taking customers away from IBM, first switching them to Outlook, and then offering to switch from Lotus Domino to Exchange .

Today, IBM has introduced a new version of its collaboration and email management suite Lotus Notes / Domino 6.0. One of the major achievements of the new version is the improved web- and mobile access options. The updated web-client Domino Web Access (formerly known as iNotes Web Access) provides access to mail, calendar and contacts via desktop browser or via mobile devices (PDA or smartphone with Web support). In addition, the new Lotus applications feature enhanced security options, spam filter, improved user interface and new capabilities to integrate the software with external data sources.

Today as part of the Lotus Notes / Domino R5.0.8 update the long awaited web-client iNotes Web Access has been released. It allows access Lotus Notes e-mail and collaboration tools via any Web browser. This solution extends the existing capabilities of Lotus Domino server in providing web access to messaging apps. While the iNotes Web Access does not provide the full range of features available in the desktop client Lotus Notes, however, it will be an invaluable tool for employees, who are often in business trips or working from home.

According to the recent IDC report, the leader of the groupware market is changing. In the first half of this year, the number of sold MS Exchange licenses (8.1 million) has already exceeded the number of sold Lotus Notes / Domino licenses (7.4 million). The third place, as before, is occupied by Novell GroupWise, but with a considerable lag (2.69 million). Even last year, Lotus was confidently leading the groupware market, but continued delays in the new version of Lotus Notes / Domino 5 release was the main reason of why many new customers opted to go with Microsoft Exchange. Although Lotus Notes is still ahead of Exchange on the number of sold licenses in Europe and Asia, and still boasts the larger client base, acquired over the past years.

Today, on April 1, IBM has finally released the new version of its email and collaboration solution Lotus Notes / Domino 5.0. The release of this system has been postponed several times and delayed for more than a year (and due to this IBM is losing the groupware market leadership). The new version includes e-mail client-server (with support of S/MIME, POP3, SMTP and IMAP), calendars, document management, news groups, HTML editor, browser, instant messenger (integrated AOL messenger). Lotus Notes 5.0 has a revamped user interface and supports LDAP protocol and Java-applets. Starting with this version Lotus Notes client consists of three parts: Notes Client (user interface), Domino Designer (application developer interface) and Domino Administrator (administrator interface). The solution features the extended support for programming languages: Java, C++, Javascript, HTML 4.0 and XML. IBM has also denied the rumors that Lotus Domino and Notes will be sold as separate products.

Despite the fact that IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino is in head-to-head competition with Microsoft Exchange, IBM has no other choice but to integrate its product to popular Microsoft applications. Today, IBM announced the Domino Design Components for Microsoft FrontPage - a package of components that allows to create web pages, sites and portals on Lotus Domino server in the popular Microsoft's HTML-editor, FrontPage. In addition, Lotus Domino adds support for Microsoft IIS web-server, which allows to access Domino via the Internet .

This week, the research firm Arthur Andersen has published a study according to which the most effective tool for intranet collaboration is e-mail. According to the report, 90% of office workers use Email on average 23 times a week. The second position is taken by scheduling tools, then go corporate forums, workflow and task management solutions. This fact is also confirms the "big three" vendors of intranet collaboration systems: Microsoft (Exchange), IBM (Lotus Notes) and Novell (GroupWise). All these products include calendars, tasks and shared database. Nevertheless, all these systems are associated by users primarily as enterprise email solutions. The main reason for this phenomenon (according to the "big three" executives) is e-mail simplicity.

Today at PC Expo conference, IBM demonstrated a new version of the Lotus Domino server. The first version of Domino was launched a month ago. It includes an integrated Web server and allows to access information from Lotus Notes through the HTML-browser. The second version of Domino allows users to opt out of using the proprietary protocol and proprietary Lotus Notes client and use browser and any Email client. This is achieved thanks to support of open protocols: TCP / IP, HTTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, LDAP. So IBM will leverage one of the crown jewels of Notes - data replication - for browsers and email clients instead of the Notes client. Domino II - is IBM's answer to the Netscape Intranet, the intranet solution that Netscape is going to release during the next 18 months .

Though Lotus Notes has pretty strong position in the enterprise groupware market, there is a new danger - Web-solutions, which are much cheaper than traditional client-server systems. To keep up with modern trends IBM today introduced an updated Lotus Notes server under a new title Domino. Domino includes an integrated Web server and allows to access any data in Lotus database through inbuilt in Lotus Notes HTML-browser. Previously, IBM has also integrated Web-browser in Lotus Notes 4 and released the InterNotes Web Publisher which allows to publish data from Notes to the Internet.