With a host of collaboration features, we can save on travel, help the environment, and still carry on business--somewhat--as usual.

By Chris Smith

IBM announced this week that it will release the gold version of LotusLive Engage next Tuesday, giving Business Partners an opportunity to capitalize on the recession.

That sounds a bit crass, perhaps, but this could be the perfect solution for the times, at least for small and medium businesses. If businesses were flush with cash and could afford all kinds of new hardware and custom software solutions, would they really want a SaaS collaboration solution? No, they would just keep getting on airplanes, spending bucks at the Marriott, and coming home with a fistful of business expenses after calling on Joe in Minneapolis. Who would need to collaborate online?

Despite being labeled a toaster, Lotus Foundations may be just what SMBs truly need.

By Chris Smith

As Lotusphere in Orlando wraps up this week, the IBM Lotus product-marketing strategy continues to come into increasingly sharp focus, much the way a football game does as you take your seat in the bleachers and bring in the players on the field by dialing in your binoculars.

I concede that for some time I have wondered how all the products that were under development at Lotus were supposed to work together and how the company was ever going to make money once that happened--if it ever did. I have to confess that I'm beginning to see the light now, and I appreciate more the value of the various collaboration tools companies can choose from to complement the core Lotus Notes and Domino offerings.

Lotus Notes 8.5's new social computing features integrate with Internet calendars.

By Chris Smith

One of the things that you notice when you attend a presentation by IBM's Scott Handy is that his laptop of choice is a Mac.

You don't get a chance to digest this fact on your own because Handy tells you straight out that it's his slide presentation and he prefers that it not get screwed up, so he's choosing to deliver it on an Apple MacBook.

Product enhancements and a worldwide distribution agreement signal a move to ramp up Web conferencing.

By Chris Smith

The downturn in the economy, increased energy costs, and emphasis on green technology in order to reduce our collective carbon footprint on the environment are all coming together in a perfect storm that is propelling collaboration solutions. IBM Lotus may be headed for the eye of the hurricane.

Large companies are signing up to equip their employees and partners with integrated communication solutions based on IBM Lotus Sametime.

By Chris Smith

With all of this software that IBM now offers, one might wonder what the hottest-selling title is? The answer may be a surprise to many when they learn it is IBM Lotus Connections used for business social networking. Knowing that, it may not seem so surprising that IBM Lotus Sametime is the number one instant messaging software used by corporations today.

The free plug-in for Outlook promises to advance the state of social networking--for good or bad.

By Chris Smith

There are two ways to look at email: the masculine view and the feminine view. The masculine view says that your hard drive is precious, and having excess capacity is far more important than saving a lot of previously read, out-of-date, and often silly messages that just clutter up your drive and slow your computer.

The feminine view says that each one of these emails is precious and deserves to be preserved, that there is a rich fabric of emotional and factual content in the collective accumulation of these messages, and that you should have a means of mining all this data in order to make intelligent decisions now and in the future. The legal view is a subset of the feminine view and says, "thou shalt preserve thy email" because it may be subpoenaed as evidence in court.

A new release of Notes and Domino will be coming in February that will contain numerous enhancements. More products and upgrades will arrive before midyear.

By Chris Smith

Lotusphere 2008 opened Sunday in Orlando, and this week's show promises to be a high-energy conference with a spate of announcements starting at today's general sessions (there will be two in order to accommodate the anticipated crowd).