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As we're all painfully aware, the current economic climate is far from wonderful. Businesses are looking for ways to cut corners and reduce costs whenever possible, and many times that leads to belt-tightening in your IT departments. I want to share with you some ways that products from Lotus can help you reduce costs in some obvious, and not-so-obvious ways.

Lotus Symphony

Lotus Symphony provides the most obvious savings cost wise. Lotus Symphony is a free office productivity suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software packages. Out of the box, this should be able to replace Microsoft Office for a high percentage of your users, saving you hundreds of dollars per user in licensing fees. You can learn more about Symphony at my previous article here: http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200811/ij_11_24_08a.html

Use Sametime for IM and Web Meetings

If you have current Lotus Notes licenses, Sametime instant messaging is included for free by default. All you have to do is install the Sametime Limited server software and you can get your users using instant messaging.

Encourage your users to communicate via IM instead of picking up the phone. It will save you on the phonebills, and can be done for free with your existing licenses.

And if you already pay for separate Sametime licenses, that will allow you to install and use the Sametime Meeting server. The Sametime Meeting Server is an online web meeting space. It utilizes slides, whiteboarding, screen sharing, polls and chat capabilities. It also can use voice and video.

So instead of flying people to a meeting, use Sametime. You can utilize your company's bandwidth to have meetings online. It saves on hotels, airfare, parking and any other costs you can attribute to a normal travel schedule. Even if you don't currently have licenses for Sametime, you might find that the cost in buying them can be recouped by using a couple of web meetings instead of a few short trips.

Upgrade your servers to Domino 8.5

If you are under maintenance, upgrading to Domino 8.5 is a no-brainer. The new code on the server actually increases I/O performance and some new compression features can reduce the size of databases by anywhere from 30 to 60 percent.

Since Domino actually runs better and utilizes less disk space in 8.5 you can keep your servers in production longer. Fewer upgrades mean less money spent on hardware or OS upgrades and a simple upgrade to 8.5 can help prolong your servers length of service.

In addition, some new 8.5 features can help reduce costs. Domino Attachment and Object Storage takes multiple copies of the same attachment and saves it once to the file system and references it internally. What that means is, if someone sends a 10 MB attachment to 100 People, that would normally take 1GB of space on the server. With DAOS that only takes the 10MB. That is a huge savings of disk space and can help extend your server life even further.

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