The rest of the Lotus universe: Connections, Quickr, SameTime, and more

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LOTUSPHERE ANALYSIS
The rest of the Lotus universe: Connections, Quickr, SameTime, and more
By Mick Moignard

This is the last of four articles I've written on Lotusphere 2007 and all the new Lotus announcements. In the first article, "The buzz is back at Lotusphere 2007", I talked about the event itself, and provided some of the broad strokes of what was announced. In the second article, "An in-depth look at the Notes 8 announcements", I took an in-depth look at the Notes 8 announcements. In the third article, Diving deep into Domino 8, we looked into the Domino 8 announcements and in this last article, I'll go further in-depth on each of the key announcements and provide you with more perspective and analysis.

SameTime 7.5.1
SameTime 7.5.1 is pretty much a catch-up release, containing some new features and some that fell out of the original 7.5 release. It ships in April.

The biggest new feature is one-to-one video chat, started by a move to video button on the chat window, if Sametime knows you are video-enabled. This is seen as one of those things that starts in the upper levels of your company where discussions need an element of visual face to face, and then spreads down into other parts of the business, virally rather than necessarily planned in -- needing nothing more than people get hold of cheap webcams and plug them in.

Other new features include tabbed chat windows to keep the number of windows on the screen down, and support for presence on names in Office and Outlook via SmartTags. There's also some extra functionality to do with connectivity of SameTime to public providers, and the addition of a Linux server and native Mac client. The current Mac client is a Java-based client, similar to the one that's embedded in the Lotus Notes 6.5 and 7 clients.

It's worth noting that the non-Eclipse Notes 8 client will still use the Java Sametime client, and there seem to be no plans to enhance that from its current capability. Just as with the Sametime 7.5 and 7.5.1 clients, there seems to be a clear intention that the Eclipse world will be the premier client, and non-Eclipse clients will fade away.

Lotus Quickr
Lotus Quickr -- fully buzzname equipped -- can be thought of as the next version of QuickPlace, and a full-on competitor to SharePoint. It's an in-place upgrade to existing QuickPlaces, but that would be to underestimate it rather.

Like everything else, Quickr is componentised, consisting of connectors, services and repositories. Connectors work in various parts of the users' interface to connect what they are doing back to the Quickr services, and there are connectors for several versions of Microsoft Office, for Windows Explorer, Sametime 7.5, Notes 7 and 8 -- Notes 6.5 may also be supported by the time it ships -- and for the IBM Productivity editors that ship with Notes 8.