News

IBM Adds More Than 175 New Features to Lotus Notes and Domino

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• September 7, 2005

Big Blue packed in more than 175 new collaboration features and tools, such as a Web services design element, automatic monitoring tools and visual indicators, to the latest release of its Lotus Notes and Domino messaging platform.

IBM also added a slew of new tools for app developers, many of whom are moving to Web services-oriented architectures while they keep their Lotus Domino-based applications. The Web services design element allows developers to use Lotus Domino as a Web services host, extending Lotus Domino apps as open standards-based Web services. Developers also have the option of using either traditional NSF storage features or IBM DB2 for new and existing apps.

Autonomic monitoring tools alert administrators to potential performance issues.

New visual indicators help users organize and manage their in-boxes by highlighting priority messages, as well as differentiating between group e-mails and messages sent from specific users. New memory functions automatically save and open documents and apps when computers reboot, alleviating users’ concerns about lost data. Users now can switch a Sametime session over to video or audio real-time collaboration. The Sametime buddy list now allows employees to bring up a list of people they generally work with from within applications to see who is online.

Domino 7 is available for Microsoft Windows 2000 and 2003, IBM iSeries, zSeries (z/OS and Linux), AIX 5.2 or 5.3, Sun Solaris 9, and Linux (x86). Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Sun Solaris 10 is expected soon.

Lotus Notes 7 supports Windows 2000 and XP, and will support MAC OS soon. Lotus Domino Web Access 7 is available on Microsoft Intnernet Explorer, Mozilla 1.7x (Linux) and Firefore 1.0.x.

The Lotus Notes and Domino 7 line, including Sametime 7, QuickPlace 7, Domino Designer 7, Domino Web Access and Domino Express products, is now available. The Lotus Domino server software starts at $1,145 per CPU, Lotus Notes software starts at $101 per client, and Domino Web Access starts at $70 per client.