New Collaboration Capabilities

IBM introduced a new collaboration software suite in the that gives users one-click access to collaboration and social networking services for only $10 per month via the cloud.

IBM also announced today new enterprise-class email and social networking capabilities, value pricing options and third party integrations for its flagship cloud collaboration offering, LotusLive.

The Communities feature in LotusLive enables users to tag information, share bookmarks, create activities and use a discussion forum from the IBM cloud.

As I’ve mentioned in this blog previously, LotusLive is how many of us inside IBM currently manage and communicate across great distances, farflung teams, and so on, and has, in fact, just as with the original instantiation of our enterprise instant messaging system, Lotus Sametime, become integral to how we run our business.

What’s New: LotusLive, Lotus Notes, Are In The Cloud

With this announcement, IBM is making it easier for customers of all sizes to take advantage of all the collaboration capabilities of LotusLive. The new LotusLive collaboration suite combines enterprise-class email, calendaring, instant messaging, Web conferencing, file sharing and social networking services in an easy to deploy, simplified package for $10 per user per month.

IBM also unveiled a Cloud service called LotusLive Notes, based on IBM’s flagship messaging capabilities already used by millions of people worldwide.  Building on deep experience in serving the enterprise, LotusLive Notes delivers feature-rich email, shared calendar, instant messaging and personal contact services, starting at only $5 per user, per month.

I can hear the Crazy Eddie voiceover: “Only $5 per user, per month!  Are you craaazyyy?!”

Building Community With Communities

Building on its leadership in enterprise social networking, IBM is also introducing a feature within LotusLive called “Communities” to help advance organizations’ ability to work together both inside and outside their enterprise.

Within a Community, members have the ability to tag information, share files and bookmarks, track projects and host discussion forums securely across multiple companies.

“Businesses are looking to reduce costs, do more with less, and find ways to work more closely with their customers and partners,” said Sean Poulley, IBM vice president of cloud collaboration. “LotusLive gives them the right tools to do this, delivered by a company they trust and is focused on security and reliability.”

Businesses Big And Small: Choosing LotusLive for Competitive Advantage

Businesses around the world, such as aatranslations, SIT La Precisa and Signature Mortgage, are choosing LotusLive cloud collaboration services for the unique business value it delivers in today’s competitive landscape.

aatranslations, a mid-size pan European provider of language translation services, is taking advantage of the LotusLive licensing model to easily collaborate with 7,000 clients and 700 translators in 20 countries, without the worry of firewalls or additional costs.

Working with IBM third-party provider FreshTL, aatranslations chose IBM LotusLive over Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps because LotusLive removes barriers to working together, allowing them to conduct business and collaborate with anyone and reducing the time it takes to work on every project.

SIT La Precisa, an Italian-based company that specializes in the design and manufacturing of electronic controls and equipment uses Lotus Notes and Domino on premise in their headquarters.  They chose IBM LotusLive because of the unique hybrid value, bringing together on-premise and cloud-based services easily.

With employees working all over the world, many in small offices with just a few people, it had been difficult to provide the same email service to everyone. SIT La Precisa wanted to move its disparate staff off a variety of email systems, including Microsoft Exchange, onto one email platform without having to make expensive capital investments in infrastructure. It is currently rolling out LotusLive iNotes in several markets across the globe to provide employees with essential messaging and calendaring capabilities under one domain name.

Signature Mortgage Corporation of Canton, Ohio is using IBM LotusLive and taking advantage of the integration with third-party Silanis’ e-SignLive services, delivered by IBM business partner Silanis. By allowing their clients to electronically review and sign mortgage applications from the convenience of their home or office, Signature Mortgage hopes to improve customer experiences, generate better rates for customers and increase revenues for the company.

By filing and sharing their documents in LotusLive, customers no longer need to spend time or money on printing, shipping, returning and verifying applications. Signature Mortgage expects to reduce the time to process mortgage applications from its current seven-day track record down to 24 hours.

Today IBM also announced two new integrations with third-party providers, Tungle and Bricsys, designed to allow customers to collaborate seamlessly in their day-to-day work. These latest integrations illustrate IBM’s commitment to help mid-size businesses find new and affordable ways to apply technology to solve problems and scale for future growth.

Tungle Corp. has teamed with IBM to integrate its online scheduling and calendar services with LotusLive, and Bricsys, a provider of cloud-based document, data, task and report sharing, has teamed with IBM to integrate its Vondle services with LotusLive.

For more information on IBM LotusLive cloud collaboration services, please visit www.lotuslive.com

Can We Meet?

I’ve made it through the most difficult part of my journey.  Getting safely from Austin to Dallas.

You’d be surprised at how many things can go wrong between the Austin and Dallas airports.

DFW to Tokyo Narita, no problemo.  Beijing, piece of cake.  Austin to Dallas, or vice versa, God rest your weary traveling soul, anything can and often does go wrong.

You may remember the time I was coming back from somewhere (Las Vegas, I think it was) and ended up spending what should have been an unnecessary night at the DFW Hilton.

Then there was the time it took me 1 hour and 45 minutes to fly from Dallas to Austin, typically a 35-45 minute flight (although to be fair, on that particular voyage, the weather was exceptionally bad).

It’s enough to make somebody want to have better scheduling software with their messaging systems.

So the timing is perfect for the announcement IBM and Tungle made just yesterday, whereby Tungle announced the availability of its Tungle.me software for Lotus Notes.

Already, more than 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using Tungle.me to save time scheduling meetings, and more than half of the largest global 100 corporations use IBM’s flagship collaboration offerings, Lotus Notes and Domino.

Tungle.me makes it much simpler for people to schedule meetings across organizations, calendar systems and time zones by eliminating costly double bookings and the endless back and forth of finding a time to meet.

As Tungle CEO Marc Gingras explained, “With the introduction of Tungle.me for Lotus Notes, many millions of additional business people around the world can spend more time being productive and less time playing scheduling ping-pong.”

I like ping-pong.  The real kind.  But not the how-in-the-world-are-we-going-to-find-a-good-time-to-meet kind.

The addition of Lotus Notes means that Tungle now works with all major business- and consumer-oriented electronic calendar environments, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Entourage, and is also available on the iPhone and BlackBerry.

With Tungle.me for Lotus Notes you can set custom availability and synchronize it with your Lotus Notes calendar. Once meetings are scheduled, they are automatically updated in the background.

Check out the video demonstration below to see Tungle and Lotus Notes in action:

Me, I’m off to crank up on the caffeine for my short flight to Tokyo.

See you from Singapore.

Live @ Lotusphere, Day 3: Goin’ Mobile

It’s Day  3 at Lotusphere, and my brain is slowly evolving into collaborative mush.

I had a great chat with some business partners from New Jersey over breakfast, who explained that they were Lotus faithful and had been coming to the event for over 10 years now.

They told me how they thought this was the FIRST year they’d been here where the event didn’t seem to revolve completely around the next release of Lotus Notes, and that there was a much broader view into the Lotus collaboration portfolio.

And, they seemed to be digging it.

Well, gents, I definitely don’t think that was a happy accident, but we very much appreciate the feedback and are glad you think we seem to be heading in the right direction.

As to this AM, let’s get to some breaking news coming out of the second floor of the Dolphin hotel press conference.

First, more news on the emerging IBM Lotus mobile strategy, which includes a major expansion of IBM Lotus Collaboration software and delivery of enterprise secure email for Android, the iPhone, and Nokia Symbian-based smartphones.

IBM customer General Motors related during the event this week how it’s building for an increasingly mobile workforce, connected and equipped for anything, anytime, anywhere.

Specifically, GM chief strategy and technology officer Kirk Guttman explained he has thousands of people on iPhones and BlackBerry devices using their Lotus collaboration tools while in motion, increasing their productivity while in motion…just not behind me while driving down the Interstate, please!

As mentioned the other day, the Lotus Notes Traveler Companion, a plug-in that allows you to view encrypted email on the iPhone.  Available in the Apple App store now.

Traveler will also be supported on Nokia Symbian smartphones and Windows Mobile devices, because we want to be sure Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie can securely read one another’s Lotus Notes email on their iPhones.

That was a joke!  Get it, Ray and Bill, Lotus Notes, iPhone!? (Well, let’s give Bill credit…he did apparently just get his own Twitter account after three years of critical Twittering mass).

Next up, we had some great news on the online meeting front, which is where, as you know, I spend most of my life.

In fact, I think I’m supposed to be in an emeeting right at this very moment!  Doh!

These new features in IBM Lotus Sametime offer a new online meeting experience that provides a consolidated calndar view and enables users to start or join a meeting with a single click…because taking a few clicks to open an emeeting was apparently a major labor on the part of IBMers and customers around the globe!

Just kidding…I love one click access, particularly to the delete button in my Notes mail inbox.

With this new feature, users are going to be able to easily invite participants to a meeting by dragging names from their IM contact list and dropping them into the meeting.

Participants will also be able to accept meeting invites with a single click as well as upload materials to the meeting with a drag and drop capability.

I presume this also means I can drop you OUT of the meeting if you’re misbehaving.

IBM Lotus has had a number of world class companies participating in a beta to test out these new capabilities.

Thomas Eidenmueller with Merck KGaAsaid that “With our planned deployment of Lotus Sametime 8.5 in the second quarter of 2010, we will be able to further lower travel expenses with our plans to run education sessions both internally and externally with our partners.”

Other new features of Sametime 8.5 worth highlighting: Always-ready, reservation-less meetings with password-protected meeting rooms…a zero-download Web client that makes it easier for companies to embed Sametime capabilities into their apps and Web sites…a new browser-based Apple iPhone chat client, for all you Macheads out there…and enhancements to the Sametime Unified Telephony capability, which helps users better manage their phone calls based on presence and location.

That one’s a no brainer for companies that have an exceptionally mobile workforce, and I’ve used that function when I was working remotely and didn’t want to run up a big phone bill from overseas.

Have wifi and Sametime Unified Telelphony, will travel.

Finally, for those of you on the small and medium sized business front, IBM announced today that it’s working with business partners to create solutions integrated with IBM Lotus Foundations to help small and medium business address the challenge of complexity.

Lotus Foundations is IBM’s hardware and software solution that helps SMBs collaborate with tools that include email, office apps, file sharing, and backup/data recovery and protection.

Lotus Foundations basically provides a one-stop shop for smaller businesses that want to focus on running their business (and not their IT infrastructure), and because the Foundations solution is autonomic, you can install, setup, monitor, and do problem resolution without human intervention.

Speaking of human intervention, I need to intervene with myself and cut off this post.  That’s it, that’s a wrap, and I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever typed in my life…and I’m a fast typist (they don’t call me Turbo for nothin’).

More to come later today, including our podcast interview with IBMer Rawn Shah, author of “Social Networking for Business.”

In the meantime, I encourage you to read this thoughtful post from ReadWriteWeb’s Alex Williams about IBM vs. Microsoft’s approach to the open Web.

Happy Birthday, Lotus Notes

Today is Lotus Notes’ 20th birthday.

Happy Birthday, Lotus Notes.

Lots of folks are applauding Notes’ birthday over on Facebook.  You can be one of them!

I know, it’s kinda weird to go wish an inanimate object like a software product Happy Birthday.

But you have to remember, this is Lotus Notes we’re talkin’ about!

Lotus Notes, one of the first “groupware” products that changed the way people collaborate and work together, first in their own little offices and later, via the Interwebs, around the globe.

Lotus Notes, one of the first products to have a sophisticated, built-in replication engine that allowed for the type of document change management regime that the world was screaming for.

Lotus Notes, developed by now-Microsoft-executive Ray Ozzie and his team at Iris Associates, the Massachusetts-HQed software “think tank” and Lotus Development, which was acquired by IBM in 1995.

I still remember the first day I used Lotus Notes, as IBM made its own transition away from the VM “green monsters” for email.  Talk about a culture change.

I also remember seeing Jim Manzi, the former CEO of Lotus Development, running around the halls of Somers just after the acquisition.

But mostly, I remember a paradigm shift in the way Lotus Notes helped we IBMers communicate, work with, and collaborate with one another…a practice that continues to this day.

I’m not a software developer, nor do I play one on TV…but I have helped program plenty of Lotus Notes databases.

So, happy birthday and here’s to you, inanimate software product Lotus Notes!

It’s been twenty years, you graduated at the top of your class, and you continue to bring value to your customers around this smarter planet of ours.

We’d have gotten you a cake, but figured you couldn’t eat any of it, so just imagine there’s a virtual cake, why don’t ya?