IBM is building tighter integrations between its Lotus
Notes e-mail suite and SAP enterprise software.
The company used last week's Lotusphere user conference in
Orlando, US, to unveil the IBM Lotus Notes Suite for SAP Solutions,
which provides integration between SAP and the calendar, time
tracking, contact management, report generation, approval workflows
and other common business tasks within Lotus Notes. The product is
due to launch in the first half of 2006.
Along with SAP support, IBM has been bolstering third-party
support for its e-mail platform, with third-party device
manufacturers and software providers announcing plans to develop
versions of their products to support Lotus Notes and Domino.
At the conference, Research In Motion said it would support IBM
Lotus Domino 7 with integrated IBM Lotus Sametime on its
Blackberry handheld devices. Nokia said it would support Notes and
Domino in its Business Center mobile application platform.
IBM has also released Sametime 7.5, an instant messaging
business application that works with instant messaging platforms
from AOL and Yahoo.
With the software, which works under Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM
is aiming to offer users a single platform from which they can
click a button to send e-mail, chat using instant messaging, or
hold a video conference, telephone call, or website-based
discussion.
Sametime 7.5 also features "presence", which automatically
displays a user's physical location and allows up to five people to
talk on the phone simultaneously.
David Ferris, president and senior analyst at Ferris Research,
said, "Lotus has been pumping thought and resources into Sametime,
and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future."
Although these developments demonstrate the viability of Notes
and Domino, IBM's e-mail platform is still missing some of the
functionality available in its main rival, Microsoft Exchange.
Jim Mofatt, founding member of Lotus user group Collaboration,
said IBM needed to develop its real-time collaboration technologies
to offer a better alternative to Microsoft's Live Comm- unications
Server.
Other plans revealed by IBM at Lotusphere included improved
support for the Apple Mac platform, with an integrated Sametime
instant messaging client. Notes version 7 and Domino Web Access are
being developed to work better with Apple's OS X v10.4 Tiger, and
there are also plans to support Apple's Intel-based Macs.