As IBM Lotus showcased its new 'mega server' bundle at the annual Lotusphere conference, the company's partners on Monday joined in to tout a slew of new products for Notes, Domino, and IBM's WebSphere.
Dubbed IBM Software Solution for On-Demand Workplace, the collection of J2EE-based application server, portal server, content manager, and collaborative tools is the company's latest move to integrate the wares from Lotus with those created by other divisions within the Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant, particularly IBM's WebSphere Portal Server.
Along with the bundle, Lotus rolled out the newest version of Lotus Notes and Domino and previewed a new rich client for its Workplace platform. Notes/Domino 6.5.1 offers embedded instant messaging, an optional portal-style interface, and a new connector that links Microsoft Outlook users with Lotus' Domino mail server, said Lotus executives at the conference, while the new client is designed to compete on features with software such as Outlook and Notes, but still provide the low cost of ownership associated with browser-based access.
Announcements from third-party vendors, however, outnumbered those from IBM. Several companies lined up behind Lotus Monday to ring out new products at Lotusphere, which opened Monday in Orlando.
DYS Analytics, for instance, unveiled a major upgrade to its Control! suite of management tools for e-mail, collaboration, and instant messaging that adds support for IBM Workplace Messaging and IBM Team Workspace. Control! 4.2, which will release in April, will include new tools for logging instant messaging chat sessions, add integrated mailbox and mail traffic reporting for defining actual storage use by an organization's e-mail system, and offer up tools and alerts for IM and Web conference servers. Other enhancements range from per-portal access control -- so that administrators can define which sections of a portal are available to individual users -- to improved replication analysis of Domino servers as they're duplicated for backup.
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