IBM/Lotus: here in the house of mouse

In Tuesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches IBM's announce a boatload of news stuff for Lotus lovers. Not to mention how YouTube users can't spell or punctuate...

Juan Carlos Perez reports:

IBM has introduced LotusLive, which it describes as a portfolio of integrated Internet-hosted services for social networking and collaboration in workplaces. LotusLive's Web site is now the portal where all of IBM's Lotus "cloud" offerings are located, including e-mail, collaboration and Web conferencing, IBM announced Monday at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando.
...
Built on open standards, LotusLive is designed to allow for simple integration with third-party applications ... IBM has also announced partnerships with Skype, LinkedIn and Salesforce.com for LotusLive.

Timothy Prickett Morgan adds:

IBM kicked off its annual Lotusphere event dedicated to its Lotus Notes and Domino groupware and collaboration environment this weekend ... First up at the Orlando, Florida, event was a peanut butter-and-chocolate combination of the Notes and Domino groupware software from IBM with mySAP Business Suite, SAP's flagship business-applications suite.
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There was mobile news, too. IBM said it has created some development tools that link the Lotus and Domino software stack to Research In Motion's (RIM's) BlackBerry smartphones. The tools allow for Lotus Symphony documents - stored in the Open Document Format - to be opened on a BlackBerry smartphone ... Smartphones will be able to run IBM's Quickr team software.

Jason Kincaid has more on LinkedIn:

LinkedIn has partnered with IBM to create a new plugin that integrates its professional social network into Lotus Notes ... making its debut to the public at Lotusphere, with plans for its release in the first half of 2009.

For users who spend much of their day ‘living’ in their Email client, the new plugin could be a welcome addition. Its primary purpose is to display information relevant to the people in your Emails, as well as providing a handy way to browse through some of LinkedIn’s most oft-used features (like your news feed and search).
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The two companies are also announcing LinkedIn integration into Lotus Connections (an internal social networking product for businesses), as well as an option to launch a Bluehouse web conference directly from someone’s LinkedIn profile.

IBM's Todd Watson spins up:

This will allow folks using Notes and the LinkedIn plugin to see relevant information to the people in your emails in the Notes inbox. For example, you could see the job title of the person, how many connections they had, where they're located, etc.

So, in short, it's a dynamic mashup of your LinkedIn profile information directly in the Lotus Notes inbox.  How convenient will that be??.

But Ex-Lotus CTO, Nick Shelness, doesn't sound too happy:

Two of the strongest Lotusphere 2009 messages are those that are going un-said:

Lotus has quietly withdrawn support for DB2 as an alternative to Notes Storage Facility (.nsf) repositories on Domino servers ... [which] was always a half-baked idea ... [and] yet another example of IBM general management weaknesses when it comes to evaluating technical software issues. IBM general management has, sadly, a long history of not understanding technical software issues
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There are no posted sessions on Domino Designer-based development of native Eclipse-based Domino applications ... Having to develop each application twice--one for Eclipse, and a second for Web deployment, makes no sense.

John Fontana has the ob. iPhone angle:

IBM/Lotus for the first time ever will provide users of the iPhone and other mobile devices that support ActiveSync with real-time access to their email, calendars and contacts.

The company plans to announce on Wednesday that it will add support for Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol, which will enable instant over-the-air email delivery to Apple's iPhone 2.0 mail client and other handsets that support the protocol ... Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Sony Ericsson, Symbian also support ActiveSync on their mobile devices.
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The ActiveSync technology will be added later this year to Lotus Notes Traveler, which provides real-time replication for Notes.

And finally...

• Yo Comments Are Whack!
  

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Office 14 leaked screenshots: da!
• Nortel turns page; starts Chapter 11
• Patch Tuesday serves critical fixes for all