This is most definitely one to watch. Start by downloading a copy, if you don't have it already. Check the Symphony support forums and template downloads, too, at http://symphony.lotus.com.

Sametime
It's hard to imagine that Sametime is 10 years old, this year, but I saw the birthday cake. Sametime is coming of age as a real competitor to Notes itself as the core product of personal collaboration, with examples and case studies of what it can now do.

Carestream Health is working on Sametime integration in their medical imaging systems, to enable users to collaborate on diagnoses directly while in the context of examining X-ray images. Colgate-Palmolive sees Sametime as a personal collaboration centre with direct and measurable benefit.

There were also announcements of new partners and new OEM sales agreements with industry names such as Ericsson, NEC, Cisco and Nortel. The integration of Sametime into the Expeditor framework has already spawned a splurge of Sametime composite applications, where an incoming IM can cause other applications to react, displaying information about the caller on the screen.

There's more, coming, too. Advanced, later in 2008 will bring some very cool new features. There's going to be a facility for broadcast chat, which when combined with the idea of groups of people as communities of interest, means that you'll be able to start a broadcast chat with that group, which can be picked up by those that are on line. A skill-tap process is coming, where those who are willing and have the time to answer are able to do so, thus simply and easily making their skills and knowledge instantly available, merely by signing up to the group. Lotus even plans to add some soft of self-filtering later on, so that the question can be aimed by the software more accurately at those members of the community most likely to be able to answer.

There's also unified telephony coming, a merging of Sametime with corporate phone switches -- most common ones from companies like Siemens, Avaya and so on will be supported. There's not yet an open standard for this, but most exchanges offer SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) as an interface.

This offers some interesting opportunities. Sametime can tell you about an incoming phone call and do the usual CRM actions of displaying related data. But it also knows about your online/offline status, and now, will be able to tell, and display to other Sametime users, your phone status -- whether you are on the phone or not. Given that, and some profiles, it can then determine whether to divert the call to another user, to your mobile, or to voicemail. You will even be able to divert the call yourself as the call appears, if you wish.

Quickr
By this time I was beginning to tire. Quickr 8.1 is coming in March and will offer more integrations to Outlook. There's new connections on the way for IBM Content Manager and Filenet V8, now of course also an IBM product.

Connections Connections version 2 is on the way. This is going to add Attention Management via a widget-based homepage that will highlight current activities and other things that need attention now. Atlas extends the communities to display graphically your social network based on what you've done, documents dogear-ed, contacts made, and so on. There's to be offline and Blackberry support, federated search across all the services, and more.