Users can sign up for free access during a 60-day trial period.

Written by Chris Smith

IBM is aggressively moving forward with its Lotus-based social networking and collaboration offerings, but it seems the company continues to ignore hundreds of thousands of IBM i customers it apparently believes are fat, dumb, and happy using yesterday's legacy Lotus Notes and Domino solutions.

Groupware applications, project tools, Web portals, and other apps for IBM i facilitate messaging and collaboration between employees.

Written by John Ghrist

Teamwork is essential to successful businesses, and teamwork can't thrive without information sharing. Particularly among workers with similar jobs in the same organization, staying abreast of what one's counterparts are up to, what they've recently learned, and what new policies and practices the enterprise is following can all be key pieces of data on any given day.

"Social business" is the term IBM has coined for the latest trend in collaborative solutions that today involve voice, text, data, video, and now even radio communications.

Written by Chris Smith

One of the most profound changes that computers have facilitated in the past five years lies in the area of collaborative communications. Having an application like Facebook available on the Web is creating huge shifts in political power, even inspiring revolutions in the Mideast. Such shifts are the result of people being able to share ideas and come together with single purpose. Similar changes are occurring in business. Starting slowly at first, the momentum is accelerating today as young, educated people move into the workforce and assume junior management positions. They expect to have the same tools at work that they have come to rely on for personal social networking.

This article describes the current offerings from IBM Lotus and explains why IBM Power Systems running i5/OS is the platform on which you should be running them.

Written by Steven C. Pitcher

Lotus Domino Server—it's just an email server, so let's move on.... Just kidding!

Many shops use Domino just for the simple task of running their email. That's all well and good, but Domino offers a number of different servers for Web, database, applications, and LDAP. If you have a Domino server and you're only running email, then get informed!

Real-time, heterogeneous data sharing puts information where it is needed, when it is needed, and in the formats that best serve diverse needs across the enterprise.

Written by Andy Chase

Editor's note: This article is an extraction from the Vision Solutions white paper "Real-Time Database Sharing: What Can It Do for Your Business," available free from the MC Press White Paper Center.

Managers striving to use smarter data to create smarter businesses need clear pictures of the state of their enterprise, without having to rely on isolated snapshots from a variety of incompatible data sources. Yet, in many organizations, data silos segregated by department and/or business function are built on incongruent platforms. In these environments, fashioning an integrated enterprise view presents major data formatting, transformation, and consistency challenges.

In today's highly competitive business climate, companies must ensure secure, reliable and integrated communications.

Written by Kyle Parris

Editor's Note: This article introduces both a white paper titled "Best Practices in Managed File Transfer Solutions" and a Webcast titled "nuBridges Exchange i—10 Minutes to a Whole New World of Managed File Transfer for IBM i." They are available free from the MC Press White Paper and Webcast Centers.

Globalization, increased competition, and compliance demands are creating new challenges for enterprises. To meet these challenges and gain competitive advantage, today's enterprise must be collaborative, responsive, and agile. This requires secure, reliable, and integrated communication among the people, systems, and applications that enterprises rely on to create, use and move business-critical, sensitive and regulated information.

With all the BI solutions in the marketplace, finding the right one for your company can be very challenging.

Written by Bill Langston

Editor's Note: This article introduces the Webcast "Migrating from IBM Query/400?" and the white paper "Business Intelligence on the IBM i: Finding Your Way" available free from the MC Press Webcast Center and the MC Press White Paper Center, respectively.

Analytics and business intelligence (BI) are center stage in IBM's software and consulting strategy. Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of the IBM Software Group, recently said IBM views the broad analytics marketplace as a multi-billion-dollar business opportunity, and he has positioned IBM on the analytics fast track with a stream of announcements and acquisitions in recent years. Ironically, considering the topic, the frequency and variety of IBM's announcements have created a serious case of information overload for many customers who don't have time to follow these moves and analyze what they might mean to their business.

Businesses demand immediate, ready access to real-time data integrated from disparate sources. Software-based data sharing fulfills that need.

Written by Craig Johnson

Editor's note: This article is an extract from "Get the Facts: Real-Time, On-Demand Information for Business Intelligence and Data Integration," available free from the MC Press White Paper Center.

Business moves at the speed of light. At one time, the preceding statement would have been rhetorical. Today, it's often literal.