Lotusphere 2009 Announcements
Category Lotusphere 2009Bookmark :
We had a few exciting announcements at the Lotusphere's opening session on Monday, Jan 19, which I was very lucky to attend.
- Jim Balsillie (Co-CEO of RIM) had some great news to share on the day that marked 10 years since the BlackBerry was born. The latest maintenance release of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) will offer support for Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5 which was released and officially launched only 10 days earlier at MacWorld (see this story).
- New Sametime client for the BlackBerry will offer several significant improvements over the existing one.
- Symphony (free open-standards office suite) will now be available on the BlackBerry devices.
- The 2 year old Quickr will also be available on the BlackBerry devices.
- Lotus Connections client will also be available on the BlackBerry device.
- XPages, a new feature in Domino 8.5, will be supported on the BlackBerry platform. This will be a nice alternative to the RIMs MDS. You can use XPages to give a new front end to your existing Domino databases/applications (nsf), and as long as your new page works in a browser, it will work on a BlackBerry device.
- What was known as Bluehouse, which was announced at Lotusphere 2008, is now available as Lotus Live (IBM's hosted software-as-a-service model). This seems to be IBM's response to Microsoft's Office Live. LotusLive includes tools for networking, e-mail, file sharing and Web conferencing.
- Lastly, IBM will now promote, distribute and offer support for OpenNTF.org , a move that was very enthusiastically received by the Lotus community.
