IBM ships Lotus Notes & Domino 8

IBM Lotus Notes 8 and IBM Lotus Domino 8 represents the industry's first enterprise collaboration solution largely designed with input from its customers.

Research and insight gained from IBM R&D Laboratories and businesses worldwide indicate overall collaboration has superseded email as the key characteristic of their desktop experience. Consequently, Lotus Notes 8 is designed to transform the inbox into an integrated workspace that brings together email, calendar, instant messaging, office productivity tools and custom applications.

Lotus Notes 8 is much more than email, it integrates work by building in instant messaging and presence awareness, office tools to create and edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets and infusing a business' custom applications, including Help Desk, CRM, Sales Force, Discussion Forums, Blogs and more.

'Lotus Notes 8 provides businesses in the Middle East the flexibility to conduct their work in a collaborative environment that will help them save time and reduce costs,' said Bashar Kilani, Manager of IBM Software Business, Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. 'It is designed to transform the inbox into an integrated workspace that brings together email, calendar, instant messaging, office productivity tools and custom applications, taking businesses to new levels of performance and flexibility.'

Lotus Notes 8 provides instant productivity through immediate access to people, current projects or activities, and information without leaving the inbox. Time can be saved through a new search tool that lets users automatically extend searches beyond email and contacts to Web and hard drive file searches. Users will be able to work on documents, presentations, spreadsheets, as well as their email and calendar all in a single integrated interface, rather than doing so in traditional stand-alone applications. The new productivity tools will let users create, edit, and save a variety of documents in Open Document Format (ODF) allowing users to import and export supported file formats used by Microsoft Office and save them either in the original format or ODF.

Building on its leadership in the business social networking, IBM is enabling Notes and Domino customers to add the Activities component of Lotus Connections directly into Notes. Licensed separately, the Activities option enables the worker to share collaborative content such as documents, email, instant messaging and other items related to a project into one logical unit. Inspired by IBM Research Labs and developed by Lotus, the Activities feature of the Lotus Notes 8 release uses Web 2.0 technologies, completely revolutionizing the way people work. Notes 8 provides a central place for 'activities' that helps users manage and work with content previously spread out through different applications.

'Lotus Notes & Lotus Domino 8 software allows businesses to work in a smarter way, integrating their workspace to achieve increased productivity at reduced costs,' added Kilani.