Collaboration: January 2009 Archives

Ephox announced the release of a new integration of its rich text editor into IBM's Lotus Quickr. Lotus Quickr is team collaboration software that helps enterprises share content, collaborate and work faster online. It goes beyond traditional document sharing by adding web-based collaboration with wikis, blogs and team web pages. EditLive! addresses this need with a Word-like authoring experience. It also offers capabilities for image editing, track changes, table editing and accessibility checking. EditLive! integrations for the WebSphere Portal and the Lotus Domino versions of Quickr are available now. The integration for the Quickr Domino platform was co-developed by the PSC Group, a Lotus consulting firm. http://www.ephox.com

LinkedIn announced a partnership with IBM's Lotus to integrate LinkedIn's functionality and networking capabilities with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and the just announced LotusLive.com. The companies will work together to provide Lotus customers, including Lotus Notes users, new ways to interact with their trusted professional network. Professionals will be able to start web meetings, add business context to e-mail senders, and learn more about collaborators, colleagues, potential partners and prospects through integrated LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn plans to integrate with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections, and LotusLive.com. LotusLive will bring its collaboration capabilities to professionals on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn integration will be available at no additional cost to Lotus users. The partnership is non-exclusive. http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/01/19/linkedin-and-lotus-partner-to-improve-enterprise-software

Content Circles, a provider of distributed content management and collaboration solutions, announced the availability of Content Circles 1.0, a new approach to enabling distributed and mobile teams to collaboratively create, share, and manage documents within and among companies and organizations on a worldwide basis. Today's workgroups and teams are often distributed across companies, highly mobile, and must quickly assemble around key tasks and need easy, secure access to the right documents at the right time. Web-based content management solutions eliminate IT resource issues but can still be expensive and require training to use. More importantly, they require companies to put all of their confidential documents on the web exposing the companies to significant security as well as business continuity risks. Content Circles understood that unless the solution could be set up and used by virtually any computer user, there would not be broad acceptance and adoption. Some of the elements of the solution include: Instant replication of shared content across users computers; Unlimited file size, storage and usage; Online and offline access to all content; 100% confidential, secure, and spam/ad free; Role-based access control; Version management, including comments per each version; Content synchronization with other repositories including Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs, FTP Servers and Network Drives; Cross-platform application runs on Mac and PC; One-click, server-free download and installation; and, Subscription pricing model similar to Web conferencing. The company founders realized that well established models of viral software distribution were a perfect fit for Content Circles. Revenue is derived from workgroup leaders and content creators. The Content Circles model takes advantage of the best and most proven elements of these models. Anyone can open and view documents created by a "Circle" owner in a Circle they have been invited to participate in. Participants in a circle can even add content to the circle. A recurring subscription fee is only assessed when an individual needs to create and invite participants to a circle they need to control. http://www.contentcircles.com

BA-Insight announced the release of the Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint. Co-developed in partnership with Axceler, an IBM Business Partner and Certified Lotus Advisor, the Notes Connector enables organizations to automatically connect SharePoint to Notes, and expose the data to users securely through a search interface. The Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint brings automatic security mapping from Notes to Active Directory, and automatic property extraction and mapping. The Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint fits into an Enterprise Search strategy that provides end-user unified access to content across SharePoint, Notes, and other repositories, or a Notes migration strategy that enables instant integration of Notes into SharePoint, while content is migrated to the SharePoint platform. http://www.axceler.com/, http://www.ba-insight.net/

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the availability of Lotus Notes 8.5 collaboration software with social computing features for all Mac OS X Leopard-powered computers. In addition, IBM's free Lotus Symphony document, spreadsheet and presentation software will be available later this month for the Mac. Lotus Notes 8.5 provides significant storage savings over previous versions. Notes has an intelligent storage savings feature that ensures that only one copy of an attachment is kept on the mail server, resulting in an estimated 40 percent space savings. Lotus Notes 8.5 arranges all collaboration tools on one screen in fewer clicks. This screen shows links to team rooms, instant messaging, to do lists, calendar, Internet browsers and other tools. Social characteristics include new integration with Google, Yahoo, and hundreds of other public Internet calendars. IBM also announced new Lotus iNotes 8.5 software, which allows anyone with a Notes user license to access Notes through a Safari browser from anywhere. iNotes allows the user to integrate the Notes calendar with Google calendar and also supports most standard widgets. One example of a widget is the mapping of a street address in an e-mail note. IBM sells Lotus Notes and Domino in a variety of ways, including packaged with hardware for small and medium businesses; via a hosted service, where the software is stored on a server at IBM; and through Passport Advantage on http://www.ibm.com/lotus/notesanddomino.