Notes-worthy news from Lotusphere '08 21 January, 2008 By Steve Wexler

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"Channel partners are going to be looking for where's the money," Rhodin said. IBM will be very aggressive in pricing, but will leave room for business partners to make money too, he added at a press conference following the keynote.

The SMB initiative, called IBM Lotus Foundations, will be a line of software servers, installed on-premise, and based on Linux. The first component is expected to include a pre-loaded, one-stop-shop solution with Lotus Domino mail and collaboration platform, file management, directory services, firewall, back up and recovery, and office productivity tools. Last week's acquisition of Toronto-based Net Integration Technologies is expected to provide a key technology for this offering. Bluehouse is available now as a limited beta at www.bluehouse.lotus.com.

For the enterprise market, IBM announced a partnership with SAP around a software product code-named Atlantic that will integrate Lotus Notes with SAP Business Suite. The first release, due in Q4, will create a richer collaboration environment. "Businesses are looking to find better ways to collaborate and manage their business processes. This IBM-SAP solution addresses both challenges in one seamless package for millions of users."

IBM announced that it plans to ship Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 in February, with a number of new features that revolve around Web 2.0. Rhodin said Lotus has always been about collaboration, but we're now entering the third generation of collaborating, evolving from the document-centric approach of the past, and today's people-centric approach to a new paradigm that is community centric. "It's much more revolutionary than evolutionary."

New capabilities in 8.0.1 include: My Widgets, enabled by a new technology called Live Text that can identify patterns and phrases and associate them with an appropriate widget; and Lotus Notes Traveler, which will provide automatic, real-time wireless replication of email including attachments, calendar, contacts, personal journal and the "to-do" list for Microsoft Windows Mobile devices.

IBM also previewed: Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5, the next major release; Lotus Symphony Beta 4, the next version of its no-charge desktop productivity tools; as well as a new email security appliance called IBM Lotus Protector for Mail Security. Also coming in the near future is an integrated Open Collaboration Client Solution with support for Ubuntu, a popular Linux flavour from Canonical Ltd., as well as a new marketing initiative with Red Hat.

Targeted at SMBs, it will enable solution providers that are Red Hat Advanced Business Partners and Lotus-authorized IBM Business Partners to sell the Red Hat and IBM Lotus products with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform Premium subscription and a six-month Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop trial. There will also be a services component for rapid deployment.