Messaging & Groupware

In Part 2 of my series on rolling out the iPhone as a business device, I talked about integration in an Exchange environment. Though the iPhone supports all common e-mail protocols, Exchange is the only business-oriented option for offering push notification of new messages as well as over-the-air updates to calendar and contact items. Sure, push notification and update is supported by Apple's MobileMe -- and push e-mail notification is supported for Yahoo Mail accounts. But neither of these would be considered viable options for most businesses.

Integration of traditional on-premises Notes-based collaboration, new unified communications tools, Symphony productivity applications, content management, Web-based services and the potential to mash it all together with new-fangled development tools and social networking innovations pouring out of IBM's research labs are just a few of the challenges facing IBM's Lotus Software division chief, Bob Picciano.

The Internet was built on a very simple idea: People should be able to communicate more easily with one another, using their computers. So it should be no surprise that communication -- particularly in the form of e-mail and instant messaging -- is still at the heart of why most people go online.

Novell Monday shipped GroupWise 8, adding interface and administrative upgrades to its messaging and calendaring platform.

Nokia and IBM are linking mobile phones to Notes, the companies announced Thursday.

IBM on Wednesday will roll out its first hosted Lotus Notes service for as low as US$8 a month, per user, as part of the company's effort to compete with Microsoft's hosted Exchange messaging service, an IBM spokesman said Tuesday.

Microsoft on Friday defended the redesign of its Windows Live Hotmail e-mail service, which has been blasted by some users, but said it would stick with the new interface.

Google is extending its hosted e-mail archiving service to hold messages for up to a decade, the company said Wednesday.

Yahoo has developed a new online calendar that the company said offers significant improvement over the current product because it makes it easier to share items and has a more interactive interface.

Cisco is buying PostPath, a maker of e-mail and calendaring software, for US$215 million and plans to add those capabilities to its on-demand Web Ex Connect collaboration platform.

Microsoft this week added calendar synchronization to the long-running beta of a free tool for users of its Office 2003 and Office 2007 suites.

Many Lotus Notes users are concerned with how to manage their employees' growing Notes mail files and the associated impact on storage, servers and database performance. This article looks at the key requirements for archiving and how the functionality available in Lotus Notes and Domino can help address those needs.

Over the last few years, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other organizations looking to eliminate the illegal swapping of digital media files have attacked the problem through the courts, publicity campaigns, and other means. But while they've managed to close down some peer-to-peer operations, and have successfully (and not so successfully) sued individuals who were uploading movies and music to the Web, there is one part of the Internet that has, until now, been operating under their radar: Usenet.

Microsoft's Exchange Server may be the king of corporate e-mail, but it has plenty of haters, especially among smaller companies that find managing the software and dealing with e-mail backups to be a huge hassle.

Is Linux on the enterprise desktop finally ready for prime time? IBM apparently thinks so as it prepares to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0 sometime in the second half of this year.

Google this week unveiled Google Message Discovery, a new hosted service for searching, protecting and archiving e-mail for corporate users.

OpenGroupware.org is relatively unknown outside the Open Source developer scene, yet it's one of the oldest projects around: This groupware has origins dating back to 1996.

It looks like Microsoft's proposed Yahoo acquisition is already attracting its share of buzzards: Open-Xchange, a prominent open source competitor to Microsoft Exchange, is looking to lure customers of Yahoo subsidiary Zimbra with an offer of steep discounts.