At this week's Macworld, IBM has announced the availability of
Lotus
Notes 8.5 collaboration software with social computing features
for all Mac OS X Leopard-powered computers.
In addition, IBM's
free Lotus Symphony document, spreadsheet and presentation
software will be available later this month for the Mac.
Lotus Notes 8.5 provides significant storage savings over
previous versions. Notes has an intelligent storage savings feature
that ensures that only one copy of an attachment is kept on the
mail server, resulting in an estimated 40% space savings.
"To ease the mounting pressure on businesses to constrain costs,
Notes 8.5 provides 'open' social computing benefits at substantial
savings to businesses because less storage space is needed," said
Kevin Cavanaugh, vice-president of messaging and collaboration at
IBM.
IBM also announced new Lotus iNotes 8.5 software, which allows
anyone with a Notes user licence to access Notes through a Safari
browser from anywhere. iNotes allows the user to integrate the
Notes calendar with Google calendar and also supports most standard
widgets. One example of a widget is the mapping of a street address
in an e-mail note.