I discussed some of the detail of this with the Lotus Usability lab, and what I saw will go a long way to solving the issues that I've seen personally when using Quickr. And of course Quickr will also be able to use the new Wiki and Personal File Sharing feature from Connections, too.

Foundations
One new Foundations feature may well prove to be one of the key announcements from Lotusphere. Organizations already using Notes and Domino will, through Foundations Branch Office, be able to add Foundations servers to existing their Notes domains - something this customer among many has eagerly looked forward to.

Now add to that the ability to run Windows in VMWare, so that you can run Windows-based special purpose applications for accounting, or maybe to run a set of tills, and satellite operations based on Foundations start to look simpler and easier to set up and run already.

A new partnership with Xerox will enable Xerox copier/printers to be attached to Foundations, enabling such things as scan direct to Symphony, or to email, and Foundations starts to look very attractive to large businesses as well as to small ones.

Add in a new partnership with RedHat to offer a Lotus platform - Notes and Symphony - on RedHat Linux, and migration to lower-cost servers and desktops for these customers looks attractive. A complete server and client installation run pretty much out of the box, and with the potential for no Microsoft licenses being required.

The growing attractiveness of Foundations was borne out at Lotusphere: complete Foundations servers with 5 client licenses were on sale for $1,699 (US), even at the back of some of the sessions; I heard that over $30,000 (US) was taken in one session alone.

Protector
Announced last year, Protector still rumbles along. Available as both a software download of a VM image, or as a ready-to-go appliance, this is intended to be installed between the Domino server and the Internet SMTP cloud.

The first release provides spam filtering, virus scanning using Sophos's virus scanning technology, phishing protection and checking of URLs in inbound email. Outbound, it will do content filtering to protect individuals and the business to prevent data leakage. All of this, with automated updates on an interval as short as 15 minutes, if required.

Lotus Live
I guess the biggest set of announcements as far as Lotus were concerned was the set around the "productionising" of Lotus "Bluehouse" as LotusLive.

It provides email, collaboration and Web conferencing as a set of cloud services. Somewhat surprisingly it is to lean heavily on the Outblaze purchase announced the week before Lotusphere for email as well as offering Notes and iNotes. This seems to be more around the need for billing and accountability more than any email functional issues.

More interestingly, LotusLive will be connected to both Salesforce.com and Skype, enabling these applications and services to be used in conjunction with the LotusLive features.