Chicago (IL) – IBM made two big
Mac-related announcements today that may positively impact Mac’s
perception in enterprise. The company said its Lotus Notes 8.5
collaboration software is now available for Macs with OS X Leopard, and
announced that Lotus Symphony suite (document, spreadsheet and
presentation applications) will be available for Macs free of charge
later this month. In addition, a new Lotus iNotes 8.5 software now
allows anyone with a Notes licence to access Notes through a Safari
browser on desktop and mobile Safari browser.
The company
claims that an all-new Lotus Notes 8.5 business collaboration suite
also incorporates social computing elements, in addition to savvy storage
technology, sleek interface and speedy performance.
With over 140
million licences already in use worldwide, and twenty years in existence, Lotus
Notes is a viable corporate email and communications platform that
competes with Microsoft Exchange. Lotus Notes availability for the Mac
makes Apple’s platform more appealing in business environment, and many
major organizations, like Discovery Communications, are already using
Lotus Notes 8.5 for Mac.
The software, also available
for Windows and Linux, integrates with Lotus Quickr to enable file
sharing among teams, and Lotus Sametime to deliver unified communication
solution across the web, mobile and desktop worlds.
For instance, users
can easily see who is online or available to initiate VoIP or instant
messaging session. More complex features include persistent chats and
screen sharing to ease knowledge sharing with large groups in real time.
Lotus
Notes 8.5 employs an intelligent storage handling that decrease storage
expenses, especially in large business, by ensuring that only one copy
of an attachment is kept on the mail server, resulting in around 40
percent space savings.
Speedy performance of Lotus Notes 8.5 on the Mac
draws from code that’s optimized for the latest Leopard features
and Apple hardware. Social networking features include integration with
online calendars from Google, Yahoo and others which can be shown along
business calendars in one view.
Anyone with a Notes user licence can also use the new Lotus iNotes 8.5
web application to access business email, calendarand contacts on a
corporate Lotus servers through a Safari web browser on your Mac or the
iPhone.
Lotus iNotes lets users see their Lotus inbox on the handset,
read email messages and reply to them, attach and send files in a
message, get access to the calendar, meetings, events, reminders, and
anniversaries, access the corporate contacts database and create new
contact entries. The application also supports most widgets that extend
capabilities and enables users to integrate the Notes calendar with
Google calendar.
