Lotus Notes Sticks With USB

Blogging and RSS received attention too, as IBM announced the 7.0.2 release of Lotus Notes and Domino, which provided some new feature releases for end users and administrators of the productivity suite.

“We didn’t want to go dark in the market,” explained Ed Brill, the Business Unit Executive for Worldwide Lotus Messaging Sales at IBM, during a chat on Monday. Since they had a slew of features ready to go, and so much attention being paid to the productivity space this week, IBM decided to release the latest version of Lotus Notes/Domino.

We talked about three specific aspects of 7.0.2 that Notes users should appreciate. The first one is the ability to place Notes on a 512MB USB stick or other storage device like an iPod, and take it along on trips. This allows the person to take a personalized Notes environment and plug it into any USB-compatible PC.

Once deployed on that machine, the user has a replica of the usual Notes workplace ready to use. Users can download a utility to create the installation, and place that on the portable storage device.

Although the second notable feature, blogging with Notes/Domino, has been part of Lotus for the past three years, Brill noted how the application IBM acquired to provide this functionality has been updated to meet IBM’s standards.

This takes the form of an out of the box template for Notes, where users can design and create blogs. Entries can be created offline, and when the user next connects to Domino, new and updated entries will be updated to the blog automatically.

The third new feature of mention brings the ability to publish RSS out of Lotus. I asked if this would be more likely used internally within an enterprise or externally, and Brill felt it is mostly meant to be internal. “It’s a great way to be alerted to changes,” Brill said of syndicating content this way.

Additional features like SAP integration and iCalendar compatibility offer improved methods of working with other processes and people in the enterprise.

Plenty of focus on productivity suites and portability has been generated this week with the opening of the Office 2.0 conference, the rebranding of Writely as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and the efforts of companies like Zoho and ThinkFree to create desktop-less office applications. The portability option for Notes now adds to this mix.

Brill highlighted a number of the features coming out in the latest update on his blog. That and his running battle with a blogger named Rod Boothby over Lotus Notes makes for some interesting reading today.

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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.