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Enhanced collaboration capabilities and open standards were the key talking points for IBM executives kicking off Lotusphere 2006 in Orlando, Fla., this week.

With rumors swirling about the future of IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino products and where its Workplace offerings fit in IBM's plans, the company's executives used their platform at what they called the most successful Lotusphere event in years to clear the air.

"We wanted to stand up and state our position," said Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM's Workplace, portal and collaboration software.

The Lotus line of collaboration software has come under increased attack lately by Microsoft, which released a collaboration toolkit to help users migrate their Lotus applications to Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint less than a week before Lotusphere kicked off.

Rhodin said the Lotus products saw year-to-year growth of 10 percent in 2005, and this was the best attended Lotusphere for both exhibitors and attendees since the Sept. 11 attacks.

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IBM announced version 7.5 of Lotus Sametime, which will be the centerpiece of new real-time collaboration capabilities, on Monday. The new collaboration platform will include the integration of audio, video, and VoIP. The Sametime IM client will get a new look and feel in 7.5 and will support Apple's Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" and Linux. IBM also announced interoperability with AOL and Yahoo!, the two largest consumer instant messaging networks, as well as Google Talk.

"Collaboration is becoming a key technology — it's not just about e-mail, Rhodin said. Version 7.5 of Lotus Sametime will be available in the first half of 2006.

Extending Investment in Version 7

According to IBM, more than 3 million users have upgraded to Lotus Notes 7 and 70,000 users have downloaded Domino 7 server software. The company also made a number of announcements it said would extend the value of those investments on Monday.

IBM will provide expanded support for Mac OS X, including support for Lotus Notes 7 on Apple's Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" with integrated Lotus Sametime instant messaging, and plans to support Apple's new Intel-based Macs. In addition, IBM will introduce new Macintosh support for Domino Web Access, IBM's browser-based messaging client, via the Firefox browser.

A number of partnerships that will expand Lotus availability to mobile devices were also announced, including agreements with Research In Motion, Nokia, Good Technology, and Intellisync.

Vijay Sonty, CIO of the Broward County (Fla.) Public Schools spoke about the attractiveness of IBM's open standards approach on Monday. Broward is the sixth largest school district in the United States, with users and a budget that match many Fortune 500 companies. The district is Apple's biggest single customer, and has a mix of Apple, Microsoft, and open-source products.

"We have Macs, we have PCs, and we're moving to Linux," Sonty said, explaining why he chose IBM for a massive integration project.

The New Lotus Sametime client will include emoticons, timestamps, and directory information as part of its new user interface.

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