The Lotus Workplace initiative is designed to help organizations become more focused, responsive and better able to compete in today's marketplace by combining the collaborative capabilities from IBM Lotus Software with WebSphere Portal and DB2 Content Manager.

Web content management technology is a vital step in building an On Demand architecture, and this new IBM offering will help our customers in the timely creation, approval, publishing and archiving of content for intranet and e-business solutions.

I had the opportunity today to speak with Dr. Ambuj Goyal, general manager of IBM Lotus Software, and Tim Birdsall and Adam Ginsburg of the newly acquired Aptrix. The three executives outlined details of the acquisition (all of Aptrix will become part of IBM), although they declined to discuss the terms of the deal because the acquired company is privately held.

Aptrix products will continue to be sold for some time, but it is expected that they will shortly become part of Lotus Workplace Content Development. Aptrix products integrate with Domino, WebSphere, and even DB2, although because of the "people nature" of the content management products, the Aptrix line and the forthcoming integrated IBM products will be part of the Lotus Software operation.

Obviously, this is an important topic and we'll continue to cover news on this new product area for IBM.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com.