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your hard drive is precious, and having excess capacity is far more important than saving a lot of previously read, out-of-date, and often silly messages that just clutter up your drive and slow your computer.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).

In 2008, companies will be working harder to develop a culture of innovation in order to drive the market. Having access to internal and external information will be critical to this effort.

By Chris Smith

We worked through 2007, and, with the exception of a long and grisly war, it was a pretty good year. Looking ahead to 2008, we see signs that there may be an economic slowdown spawned in large measure by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Regardless of whether that comes to pass, the U.S. has assumed a huge national debt that will have to be paid off essentially by the nation's business output. You wonder why they keep letting immigrants into the country? Hey, we need as many taxpayers as we can get! Can people work any harder? Maybe, maybe not. But they sure could work a lot smarter.

Social software takes a step forward as IBM announces Atlas for Lotus Connections a month ahead of the year's main Lotus event.

By Chris Smith

It's time to get those requisitions in for anyone headed to Florida for Lotusphere in January.

If your accounting department is a little slow to cough up the $2,095 registration fee, just remind your head bean counter that if he doesn't pay up by January 17, it will cost the company another two hundred bucks! The conference runs January 20–24 in Orlando .

With 7,000 attendees registering for Lotusphere last year, one hopes that the $14 million or so that was collected went back into R&D.

Can the IBM magic that launched Eclipse into the stratosphere strike again in the office automation arena?

I promise I will do everything I can to avoid the musical allusions. It's much too easy to dredge up phrases like "music to my ears" or " cleverly orchestrated" when dealing with a product called Symphony. The good news is that I really don't have to use contrived techniques; the product itself presents plenty to talk about.

This is going to be something of a comparison between Symphony and Office, but be forewarned: Not only am I a green-screen dinosaur in the midrange world, but I'm also something of a Luddite in the desktop as well. Not only am I using Windows rather than Linux or a Mac, but I am using Windows XP and Office 2003 (I also drive a gas-burning car and use incandescent bulbs in many of my fixtures). So those of you using Office 2007 on Vista, please feel free to chime in when one of my comments is outdated because of my technological backwardness.