IBM Collaboration Software to Support the Android Platform

IBM today announced it is delivering a beta version of business-grade collaboration software for use with devices that run the Google Android operating system.

More than ever, businesses are embracing the model of a mobile enterprise. According to analyst firm IDC, there will be more than one billion mobile workers worldwide by year end 2010.

“IBM is committed to supporting the vast array of mobile devices out there including the Android platform,” said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, messaging and collaboration, IBM.

Lotus Notes Traveler for Android beta version is no-charge software that can be downloaded by Lotus Notes customers and provides two-way, over-the-air synchronization of information between Lotus Domino and mobile devices.

The software allows Lotus Notes users who synchronize their Domino mail, calendar, and contacts via Lotus Notes Traveler to view that data on the devices that run the Android 2.0 or higher operating system. This includes the Droid, Nexus One and many other devices.



Additionally, the next version of IBM Lotus Connections social software plans to support the Android platform.

According to a recent news report, approximately 100,000 Android based phones are being activated each day, with more than 60 models on the market.

“Employees at Memorial Health System use Lotus Notes Traveler on other devices, and I am now getting many requests for Lotus Notes Traveler on Android devices as well. We look forward to trying out the functionality on the Android platform as participants in the beta program,” said John Cherry, Programmer and DBA Manager, Memorial Health System.

IBM also has Lotus Notes Traveler software that supports Nokia Symbian, Windows Mobile Devices and the Apple iPhone and iPad. “I have seen an increase in the use of enterprises using IBM Lotus software with mobile Apple devices as new support and devices have become available, for example, most recently the iPad.” Employees of General Motors, Hyatt, Roto-Rooter Services and many companies have employees using IBM collaboration software on a variety of mobile devices including Apple's.



More than half of the largest 100 corporations use IBM's flagship collaboration offerings, Lotus Notes and Domino. These companies include the top aerospace and defense organizations; the top nine automotive firms; the top eight banks; the top four makers of consumer products; the top seven electronics firms; the top eight insurance companies; the top seven pharmaceutical organizations; and the top nine telecommunications carriers.

Jive What Matters

Jive What Matters is designed to be the first place for everything users need to see, know, and do. It aggregates relevant information on a single page, enabling faster action taking and decision-making.

Jive What Matters combines information from social business applications, existing enterprise tools and the external social web into a simple, breakthrough user experience. It includes the following functionality:

• 'Now' -- an aggregated view of everything a user needs to know, including activity and critical information from the web, legacy systems and other social sources;
• 'My Communications' -- a single place to go for everything a user needs to see, including relevant comments, direct messages, or anything else that impacts the user; and
• 'My Actions' -- a streamlined summary of everything a user needs to do by prioritizing action items, alerts, and critical project notifications.

"Jive is helping us drive innovation and collaboration across the company," said Greg Lowe, Social Media Strategist, Alcatel-Lucent.  "In less than 60 days, over 10,000 employees have joined Engage, our Jive-powered community.  Managing the information explosion so we can focus on the crucial data is an ongoing challenge and Jive What Matters will help us do just that."

Jive What Matters is powered by Jive Chatter Filter and Jive Genius. Jive Chatter Filter delivers a pure stream of relevant information. It gives each user a personalized view of the information they want and the actions they need to take by intelligently cutting through the noise from a myriad of sources. The Jive Genius proactively recommends useful content based on learned preferences and behaviors of each Jive user.

From within their Jive What Matters page, users can invoke Jive apps. Jive apps are lightweight, powerful applications that deliver critical functionality without the overhead of outdated user interfaces.

Jive Apps Market
Jive Apps Market will function as a gallery of applications, tailored for various industries, business functions and processes. Businesses will be able to select and adopt the most innovative and easy to use applications. They will have a direct line of sight into usage, performance and budget control.

Jive applications can be built by cloud application providers, third party developers and system integrators.

Jive is launching an application developer community in September at JiveWorld 2010 with full API documentation, example applications and tutorials on how to leverage the Jive platform. Developers will be able to combine their knowledge of the Open Social framework with the Jive apps services to build and test apps that reside inside Jive. They will have access to the rich Jive enterprise social graph to develop compelling applications with engaging user experiences that, to date, have not been possible.

As a first step towards Jive Apps Market, Jive is announcing the Jive Widget Studio. The Jive Widget Studio will allow employees to personalize their Jive experience by making and adding popular Open Social widgets such as YouTube videos, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and Flickr streams. The Jive Widget Studio will be available next month to Jive customers with Jive 4.5 and later.

Jive is building the application framework using Open Standards such as OpenSocial and oAuth. This is consistent with Jive's strategy and commitment to pursue and adopt an open strategy.

"Several IBM collaboration products now offer browser based support of the iPad including Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr for social networking and team collaboration and Lotus Sametime for instant messaging," IBM said.

• Why would Notes and Domino suddenly jump from c.130 million seats sold (which is what the general consensus suggests IBM's published number means) to 192 million by the end of this year and to 266 million by the end of 2014?
• The report states that it refers to "on-premise and hosted mailboxes" - one assumes this means Notes/Domino CALs purchased via Passport Advantage and ELAs, plus subscribers to LotusLive Notes (the hosted Notes/Domino solution).  Are they including LotusLive iNotes in this calculation (as this is the cloud-based solution expected to see most growth in the near future - which isn't Notes/Domino based of course)?
• These numbers appear to be pretty optimistic by most accounts.  Sarah Radicati is (ahem) not known as being the biggest fan of Lotus Notes on the planet, why would she change her stance so significantly now?
• Did IBM 'sponsor' the report?

Peppermint is a Linux based Operating System that is Cloud / Web Application Centric, Sleek, User Friendly and Insanely Fast. Download a copy and get going today

Peppermint was designed for enhanced mobility, efficiency and ease of use. While other operating systems are taking 10 minutes to load, you are already connected, communicating and getting things done. And, unlike other operating systems, Peppermint is ready to use out of the box. Why spend hours tinkering and tweaking? Install Peppermint and get going !!

As long time Linux users and supporters we have seen certain levels of divide in the Linux community. We have also seen over the years the tendency to not kindly invite new users to Linux who are exploring and looking for an answer beyond the two seemingly defacto systems that dominate the market. The biggest breath of fresh air in the past few years have been Ubuntu and Linux Mint with their commitment to community and offering a welcome place for all to explore.
The notion that in order to use, enjoy and be proficient with Linux is that you will need uber-geek hacking skills is completely False. And, this is just the stigma surrounding Linux that needs to be erased once and for all with Peppermint. There hasn’t been one person we have shown Peppermint OS to who hasn’t understood how to operate it as a desktop environment by just putting it in front of them and turning it on…

Team Peppermint is committed to welcoming new Linux users, offering them a product that is fast, easy to understand, and offering them an arena to experiment with Linux and all the while offering avenues to educate them further. Empowering the planet with Linux is our goal. Will you join us in this journey? We certainly hope so….

People have been trying to create an effective web centric operating system for years now. This is especially true in Linux with projects like the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Google Chrome OS, and Moblin all coming to the forefront in recent years. On the downside of things, these systems, though great for surfing the web, lack a lot of the familiarity that people demand from something they use on a day to day basis. Here at Peppermint, we’re committed to giving you a system that won’t throw you for a loop while trying to get things settled in.

While conceptualizing Peppermint, we toyed around with a lot of ideas trying to determine how best to meet our goal of providing a fast, web-centric operating system that’s easy to learn and effective when put in use. The end result was a decision to use an interface that stays out of your way and let’s you go about your business. The default desktop environment for Peppermint is LXDE(literally, “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment”) which has shown itself time and again to be user friendly, easy on the eyes, and wicked fast.

Hoping to emerge above a pack of companies racing to bring social media software tools popularized by Facebook and Twitter to the office cubicle, Jive Software is relocating its headquarters to Palo Alto from Oregon, with plans to quadruple its local workforce and issue an initial public offering by the end of next year.

Jive, which calls itself the world's largest and fastest-growing social business software company, says it has over 15 million users -- the employees and customers of a list of companies that includes Nike, Intel, Lufthansa Airlines, and VMware. Jive specializes in collaborative and social software that allows connections between internal communities of employees and external customer communities.

With Microsoft entering the social networking enterprise software market in a big way with its SharePoint 2010 release, and IBM's Lotus Connections providing strong competition, Jive needs to rely on faster innovation and providing compelling integration with other technologies to maintain its strong market position, said Rob Koplowitz, an analyst with the research firm Forrester.

"They are doing well and an IPO run is certainly not out of the question," Koplowitz said in an e-mail.

Often, due to organisational security policies, communication with external IM is considered a breach of the organisational IT policy. With Web 2.0 and social networking beginning to become more and more rampant, IT staff need to find a balance between providing such secured connectivity to their users.

YES! The Lotus Sametime Plugin to MSN (developed by Startin Point Pte Ltd) provides organisation with a Secured Internal IM and Secured connectivity to external IM such as MSN.

The main objectives of plugin are as follows:-

Allow the IBM Lotus Sametime Connect Client to have connectivity to MSN.
To ensure that all communication to MSN is secured, auditable and logged.
Clustering support for High-Volume users
Enable / Disable File Transfer
All conversation are audited
Content Filtering

The plug-in is available from the IBM Lotus and WebSphere Portal Business Solutions Catalog.  I can see a number of organisations that we work with loving this so will be downloading and installing it in our test suite.  Give it a go!