Lotus knows ...

The beginning of this year was very interesting. In January, a Lotusphere conference was held in Florida, where IBM talked about the future development strategy of the Lotus product line. The conference was prepared under unusual conditions - in sunny and hot Florida, the temperature suddenly dropped to zero. Oranges on trees, covered with ice, warmly muffled by passersby. I do not know what caused it, sharp warming the day before or something else, but the whole Lotusphere was bright and unusual, both in organizational terms and in information.

You can see how it went externally in a short clip:



As for the information component of the conference, one cannot do without a single clip.
')
Lotusphere is a major global event in the collaboration market. It was here that this year, under the slogan “Lotus Knows,” thousands of people from around the world gathered to learn about the strategies and news of Lotus and WebSphere Portal.

Collective work in the future has become the main theme of the conference. Within its framework, IBM announced the “Vulcan Project”, a new cloud platform for collaboration tools and social services. At the conference, it was stated that this platform would bring together traditional and cloud solutions, combine the capabilities of business tools and social networks, and also allow the use of a wide range of devices from desktop computers to mobile devices. It is in the context of this project that the development of existing products such as Lotus Notes / Domino, LotusLive, Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr and WebSphere Portal will go. Vulcan will be available for developers in beta testing mode in the second half of 2010 on the LotusLive Labs portal.

At the Conference itself, the LotusLive Labs team presented four of its developments: Concord (an online text editor and spreadsheets for LotusLive with collaboration tools); Slide Library (tool for creating and showing presentations online); Collaborative Recorded Meetings (web conferencing and voice-to-text recording service); Composer (LotusLive mixed web application creation tool).

Improving cloud services is the second major topic at Lotusphere. E-mail and calendar support is a burning issue for so many companies, and IBM is actively seeking ways to provide cloud-based business alternatives. Using LotusLive, organizations can install e-mail, calendaring, contact management, and messaging software for all or some of their employees without installing Lotus Notes on a computer. This solution is especially attractive for organizations with branches where it is economically unprofitable to install a separate server or for those who are constantly on the move. LotusLive Notes will support the collective work of employees in the clouds, which will give flexibility to the organization of the workflow. For organizations using a mixed approach, i.e. With the use of traditional servers and clouds, it is possible to synchronize directories between off-premises and in-house infrastructures, and invisibly to end users.

There was a lot of talk at the Conference about the importance of developing products for mobile devices for the corporate sector. Research In Motion has released a new client software for BlackBerry devices with support for Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections. In addition to BlackBerry, IBM launched the first iPhone application, Lotus Notes Traveler Companion, and announced plans to create clients for Android devices.

Of course, this week the Conference was also told about many new products, such as Lotus Connections and Lotus Symphony, was announced by the “App Store” - an add-on store for Lotus products, as well as various integrations with other services (Tungle and Gist).

Overall, the Lotusphere conference showed a clear commitment by IBM to facilitate the work of individual users and groups, as well as the development of new technologies in the teamwork market, and confirmed its reputation as a leader in corporate sector solutions.