IBM Delivers New 'Social' Lotus Notes and Free Symphony Software for Macs

January 7th, 2009

At Macworld, IBM today 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.

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software, celebrating its 20th year in 2009, has grown to more than 140 million licenses sold worldwide.

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.

"To ease the mounting pressure on businesses to constrain costs, Notes 8.5 provides 'open' social computing benefits at substantial savings to businesses because less storage space is needed," said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, messaging and collaboration, IBM.

Lotus Notes 8.5 has several notable characteristics, including a user-friendly look that neatly 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 -- blending the work and personal lives of busy professionals. Using Notes, with just a check of a box, a worker can display the Lotus Notes work calendar and the family Internet calendar, with a customer meeting, lunch with the boss, parent-teacher conference, son's basketball game, and spa appointment -- all in one view.

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.

In addition to availability for the Mac, IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 software is also available for Windows and Linux devices. It also works more efficiently with Lotus Sametime for collaboration and unified communications and Lotus Quickr for file sharing among work teams at various levels.

Lotus Notes 8.5 works closely with Lotus Sametime software, allowing individuals to see who is available, and to begin instant message and voice over IP (VOIP) conversations with a click of the mouse. The real-time community tools in Sametime make it easier to find information and share expertise in real time with groups of people. Instead of spending time trying to figure out who can help solve a problem, individuals can reach out to a community of people instantly, take part in persistent chats and share screens with many others.

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 .

For more information and to download IBM's free Symphony desktop software, visit http://symphony.lotus.com .

Provided by IBM