It's so easy to forget something important, when summarizing a week so packed with input and impressions from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. (at least...).

Even though; here are some keywords that can serve as talking points, and we'll love to meet you and discuss the impact of this to Your business. Events are held across the nordics this spring, so contact your local Symfoni office or web sites (no/dk/se)!

Great customer stories, presented live on stage: Coca-Cola, Netjets og HSBC. These world wide and demanding customers told their stories of collaboration and how they are building next generation businesses with tools from Lotus and IBM. It's trustworthy and persuasive when "the world's local bank" (HSBC) explain how they aim to give customers an experience of ONE bank. Even if you're speaking to an employee who's never seen you before, and your account manager is on the other side of the globe, HSBC brings their 250.000 employees together using Sametime, Connections, Notes and Portal.

LotusLive.com - IBM launched their new online- service for businesses (formerly known as "Bluehouse", as well as newly aquired Hong Kong-based Outblaze). LotusLive offers readymade connections to LinkedIn (and others), giving customers a potential network of at least 40 million people from day one. Outblaze brought in more than 40 million paying business users. LotusLive is set out to offer a wealth of services and applications in the future. The initial offering is: Email (Notes, iNotes), Web Conferencing (SametimeUnyte Meetings, & StUnyte Events) and Networking & Collaboration (Engage and connections). Going ahead, LotusLive will be offering applications from business partners like Symfoni.

Mobility - Support for business "on the go" is increasing and across the board; from Lotus Notes Traveller (mail/cal/contacts on Nokia and WindowsMobile), via Blackberry (Notes 8.5, Connections etc), iPhone (iNotes ultra-Lite, and ActiveSync-support i.e. embedded Iphone sync) and generally  "Lite"-mode on near any device (mini-browser-interface) supported in an increasing number of applications (Connections at.el.).

This means "all" major smartphone platforms are covered with rich/semi-rich clients, and the lower segments are covered by the Lite-browser approach. This means the end of "PIM-only" mobility players like Sybase/OneBridge, intellisync, seven, etc) and actually; Nokia closed down their "intellisync" enterprise products just two years after aquiring the company behind intellisync. Mail, contacts and calendar is now a commodity and freeware (included) from IBM and Microsoft.

Missing from this picture are applications and business processes, and players supporting these applications (Symfoni Mobile, mNotes, and a few others) still have a role to play. The also applies to device management and security software.

Mac, Linux, Windows - after 20 years of Notes, IBM and Lotus' cross-platform-strategy is more loud and clear than ever. The Eclipse framework, on which both Sametime 8 and Notes 8 are build on, is the best foundation to build and deploy a rich client for business applications across all major platforms. Notes 8.5 is already available on all of these three operating systems, launched simultaneously last december.

Lotus Symphony - our charming namesake, is IBM's heavy push on the commoditization of office productivity suites, to break Microsofts until now defacto monopoly in this market. And, at the same time, to promote the open and free ODF-format (open, ISO-standardised and widely (politically) accepted document format, as opposed to the Microsoft formats). 

FREE, and more than sufficient for 70-90% of the employees in any organisation, Symphony is an efficient game changer that can help businesses to significant savings on their microsoft office maintenance costs (software assurance). Symphony version 1.2.1 has an attractive user interface, now also available on Mac's, and the soon-to-be-released 1.3 will add support for the office2007-formats (".docx", ".xlsx" etc). Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org, and IBM is contributing in large ways back to the open source community with this effort. The reception from the market and analysts are great, and Symphony received the "Best Desktop Application" award from CRN ChannelWeb in december 2008.

Notes and Domino 8.5 - was released in december, now with support for iCal-calendar overlay enabling users to superimpose e.g. their family or leisure calendars from google, tripit.com etc onto their Notes business calendar, and taking this information offline and mobile. A feed like that could of course originate from Symfoni Projectroom (mysymfoni.com) or Symfoni Global Calendar, as well as many other applications able to publish xml. Also a new feature, your personal email signatur (html) now is stored in the mail database (and thus follow the user, not be locked to that computer). The Domino server has received another overhaul on performance enhancements (50% more I/O, 30% less servers needed), a brand new "attachment store", ID-Vault etc.

XPages and Domino Designer 8.5 - now on Eclipse! Application development has always been easier and a lot more rapid than in other development tools, and Domino Designer has been "the prototypers friend". Finally, this RAD-tool also has arrived on the same Ecplipse-framework used by Notes og Sametime. This gives developers a world wide reputable development platform (Eclipse IDE is the IDE of choice for "all" the major software development tool players), and in addition will hopefully ease the cross platform support issues for the Designer...

IBM has managed to keep most of the simplicity, point'n'click, drag'n'drop philosophy from earlier versions of Domino Designer, but added incredible arrays of tools and possibilities. One major new feature (or design element) is the xPages technology. xPages can be compared to Java Server Pages/Faces and other very flexible models to build advanced web applications without the limitations formerly known to Domino.

Designer 8.5 comes with embedded support for AJAX, JSON, EXT, DOJO-type javascript and dynamic HTML-techniques and libraries, in fact the Domino server now ships with the DOJO-library included. Maybe a bit messy with regards to versioning of the DOJO toolkit, but a strong commitment and direction from IBM and with support to the DOJO-opensource-framework (another FOSS-project IBM is heavily invested/donative in).

Server-side javascript-execution and complete @formula-support in javascript means that javascript (and java) are the main language(s) of Designer 8.5. If you are a developer (reading this far down this paragraph you should be...) then take the cue; get on with that Lotusscript-to-Javascript transition! It's "easy", although a slight dialectic change... (So say those now on the other side of the stream...)  :-)

Domino.Doc is dead - long live Quickr. Lotus Document Manager (formerly domino.Doc) is supported throughout 2012, but is merged into the Quickr-portfolio (customers get Quickr-entitlements instead). Quickr on its part gets new connectors to FileNet P8 and DB2 Content Manager, as well as to Sharepoint, Documentum and others. An industry effort for ISO-standardisation of access and storage between document management solutions is set forth by IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and the rest..., with working code since august 2008 and the ISO standard probably ratified late 2009.

This is GREAT news for anybody working with Document Management and/or Enterprise Content Management, as front-end and back-end systems in the future not necessarily need to come from one vendor.

Sametime UC² - "Unified Communication and Collaboration" is the slogan covered by the Sametime family. From "Entry"; enabling chat and awareness, via "Standard", "Advanced", and at the top of the range: "Sametime Unified Telephony" ('SUT'). With precision demos by Loti Ron Sebastian and his team, great and relevant examples and use cases was shown integrating desktop, chat, phone, mobile, conference and webmeetings.

Sametime (all versions) are shipping now (and has been for a long time), except SUT. Sametime Unified Telephony is slated for release in the second quarter this year (Q2-2009), also with a NEW web client for sametime and web meetings, this time without any need for loading java applets and possibly creating pitfalls for external users entering meetings. This is very much welcomed by those of us who have experienced external guest participants not being able to enter a web meeting due to "funny" firewalls etc.

Connections - Analysts has rated Lotus og IBM's role in the business Social/web20 space as 12-18 months ahead of the competition (and Gartners Magic fourth quadrant) due to IBM/Lotus' "Facebook and web 2.0 for the enterprise" - Lotus Connections - "Social Software for business". Great customer stories exists in abundance, like the one from HSBC this year (and last year's newly merged Bank of New York Mellon). Soon release 2.5 is ready with even more possibilities; even more mature, even more social, user friendly, addictive and value oriented for the enterprise. Ask us about Connections and social tools for your organisation!

Websphere Portal - was presented and featured in sessions, but it's fair to say that when it comes to the spotlight it had more of a background role this year. Well covered in technical sessions as well as customer panels on "good, bad, or ugly portal projects" yielding a wealth of experience on what to do and not to do with portal. Otherwise, we quickly spotted Portal (now in release 6.1) behind the scenes in both Quickr- and Connections-demonstrations, so it's fair to say that Portal this year was more of an "enabler" than "poster boy". That also, by the way, fits well with how we in Symfoni has described Portal as a powerful "facilitator" for workspaces.

Lotus Mashups - is an exciting and strange bird for many of us. It's invigorating to watch a well prepared demo on a "situational app", i.e. an application created on-the-fly out in "line of business" based on a need to combine and present data in a totally new way. - Grab a customer database, an excel-list from your computer and a few googlemaps, and VOILA! there you have a fantastic workspace to view customers in a brand new or different way....

As they say, "preparations is halv the game", so a few tricks are necessary on the existing applications to prepare them to deliver the correct feed to the mash-up. Keywords; SOA, simple federation, dragndrop etc. It doesn't take us very long, so ask us about Mashups and SOA!

WHEN was the last time you bought a server (5 - 500 users), that self-installed in less than 30 minutes after hooking up power and network? No keyboard, mouse, cd/dvd etc, JUST two buttons on the front; "power" and "Restore from backup", it doesn't get much easier than that: Meet your friend "Lotus Foundations".  It comes complete with EMail, web, and everything an SMB customer needs... Foundations is administered simply through a web interface, by the customer or by a business partner like Symfoni.

We (Symfoni) actually brought home a brand new Foundationserver from Lotusphere, ready to demonstrate the concept including one-click deployments of Symfoni and other applications. Look out for a breakfast seminar about Foundations,  or contact us! IBM is launching Foundations' bigger brother, called SmartBusiness, in USA and India in 2009. Smartbusiness will not be available in the nordics until at least 2010, and by that time the two (foundations and smartbusiness) will probably be merged into one common concept. Both is a combination of an appliance (black box for customers) and remote admin services.

Both supports the addition of business applications like Symfoni and other business partners. Both runs on linux, supporting windows machines in VMWare (Q2-2009), and the server will update and repair itself.

We're so much looking forward to be hearing from you, to discuss how all this input can be handled. Please do not hesitate contacting us, to book a meeting or have a quick chat!

//trond-are