Last week I attended "Lotusphere Comes To You" event held in Mumbai. IBM announced the launch of Version 8 of Lotus suite of products. What I liked about what I heard was that IBM is talking a lot about open standards. IBM is consolidating the positioning of Lotus as a solution for enterprise collaboration and communication needs. Enhancements have been made to Sametime to offer not just IM needs but also web conferencing needs. Sametime has also been integrated with some of the telephony services providers such as Siemens to allow users to connect to corporate telephone networks. IBM also announced release of new products such as Lotus Quickr for team collaborations and Lotus Connections for networking amongst corporate employees, customers, partners and suppliers.
IBM also announced that a beta version of Lotus Notes and Domino 8 will be made available before the general availability in mid 2007. Apparently the beta was supposed to be released in February. I am not sure though whether IBM have kept their promise. Here are few URLs which you may want to check-out to track developments in Lotusphere:
Lotusphere Announcements:
http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/lotusphere
Lotus Notes and Domino 8:
http://www.ibm.com/lotus/nd8
With such wide range of software offerings, IBM's solutions from one brand tend to overlap with the offerings from other brands. For example, Lotus as well as WebSphere provide solutions to cater to the the enterprise needs in the ares of Workflow and Portal. This makes IBM a very complex vendor and one needs to be very careful and cautious while making software purchases from them.
Coming back to Lotusphere. Yes, it indeed seems that IBM Lotus is on the right path. But is the future only yellow? I shudder to think of such future where there is only one colour. Life would be so boring.
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