Lotus partners ready wares for Domino with eye toward Workplace, WebSphere

Orlando, Fla. - While IBM/Lotus is busy Monday at its annual Lotusphere conference outlining its product roadmaps, the company’s partners will be showing off what they have built and how they may help users extend and breathe new life into Domino.

IBM/Lotus will detail how its Domino, Lotus Workplace and WebSphere software integrates and co-exists as IBM/Lotus tries to move corporate users toward its On Demand infrastructure.

Third-party vendors will continue to line up behind Domino, however, and its huge install base of more than 100 million even as they test the waters with the emerging Lotus Workplace platform, a set of collaboration components that run on WebSphere and DB2.

“The key with Domino is that it is an easy way to reach more than 100 million users,” says Mark Ramos, president of Granite Software. The anti-spam software vendor will unveil spamJam 1.1, which features new administration features and support for iNotes and Web clients, and several usability enhancements. The software was honored before Lotusphere with a Lotus Award in the “Best Messaging Solution” category beating out 14 other anti-spam tools. The spamJam software is a filter that helps administrators and end-users effectively detect and manage spam.  The software uses whitelist, "spoof" detection, and blacklist filtering.

Some vendors will be releasing software that tests the waters with Workplace.

“We see that customers will be looking to migrate or deploy e-mail and collaboration out to deskless workers,” says Andrew Wolff, vice president for DYS Analytics.

The company is adding support for Workplace and IBM Lotus Team Workplace to its lineup of four e-mail and collaboration management products. The company also will unveil upgrades to its Control Software suite, which includes management tools for e-mail, replication, applications and collaboration. The new features include new chat logging, instant messaging and key phrase searching, and alerting services to ensure compliance with corporate guidelines for instant messaging usage. The 4.2 version adds health monitoring for IM and Web conferencing servers, and reporting tools for mailboxes and mail traffic. Email Control has been upgraded with new reporting and altering capabilities, and Replication Control includes interface improvements to ease the monitoring of server-to-server replication. DYS also will unveil its Email Control Desktop Edition, a version of the software for companies with 1,000 to 5,000 seats of Notes/Doimino.  The software is slated to ship in April.

Some, however, are offering users the ability to step up to next generation technologies like the Java Platform 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) without abandoning Domino.

Brightline Technology will introduce its Brightline Application Server - Enterprise Edition, which is a Java application server platform integrated with Domino. It allows users to host J2EE applications within Domino, and to use J2EE to extend and scale existing Domino applications.

Company officials say it provides the ability to manage J2EE from within Domino and eliminates the need to move to WebSphere.