Foundations, Bluehouse and Lotus Protector
Lotus in Hardware, huh? Yep, Lotus is serious about small business support, with offerings based on recent acquisitions.

At the opening session, Mike Rhodin removed a Lotus Foundations server from an envelope, and explained that it, based on the Net Integration Technologies acquisition, is a complete Linux-based commodity server, pre-configured and ready to go. The idea is that the server is predefined, and when it arrives, is merely connected to the network and started. It then supplies the relevant services and pretty much looks after itself, requiring minimal intervention.

Bluehouse, also aimed at small businesses, is a set of IBM-hosted services also aimed at small businesses, supplying cross-business collaboration services such as contact sharing, files, activities and chat and web meetings. Nice to see focus on the needs of the smaller business, recognising that they have limited IT budgets and limited time to spend on IT.

Lotus Protector is another appliance with the Lotus brand on it, based this time on the acquisition of Proventia. It's an email virus check and spam control device intended to sit between the Internet and your Domino servers. Exactly how it will compliment or replace existing in-Domino solutions such as Group's iq.suite remains to be seen.

Innovations Lab
Lotusphere would not be complete without a visit to the Innovations Lab, where Lotus and IBM show off ideas that have progressed far enough to be seriously demonstrated. These are things that may well be seen as product in the near future -- even some based on games and virtual worlds technology. Before you dismiss these as toys, remember that much of what is now Lotus Connections -- Activities and Dogear -- were shown off in the Innovations lab not that many years ago.

Some of the items shown seem pretty humdrum, but that's a matter, in most cases, of applying imagination. Let's sample a few.

CoScripter is a record/playback mechanism for Firefox, and is intended to allow end-user automation of repetitive tasks, or those performed infrequently and where the script acts as a reminder; scripts can be shared. It's a way of gathering simple how-to knowledge.

Spectacular is a feed repository and aggregator, that aims to explore the relationships between the feeds you read and the way you read them to improve the targeting. With feeds being more important these days -- check out Lotus Mashups -- this one may well be part of your toolkit in the not too distant future.