UPDATED 10:00 EDT / DECEMBER 24 2013

Lotus Notes 9 goes social with latest release

IBM’s latest update to its venerable e-mail system Lotus Notes, now called IBM Notes and Domino 9 Social Edition, is a major revision bringing with it an improved user interface and sophisticated collaboration features that incorporate social interaction.

IBM has overhauled the user interface, added a browser plug-in that provides Web access to all Notes applications, and incorporated presence awareness and instant messaging so users can find people online and collaborate in real time.

  • The inbox now allows mail to be grouped  by date (today, last week, this month) thus organizing messages in smaller, easier to consume sections.

  • Hovering over a sender’s name in the inbox reveals a pop up showing the person’s contact information, photo (if available), micro blog link and whether the person is online.

  • Right clicking on the name presents additional social interaction options, such as invite to my network, chat and collaboration history, and find an available time to meet in person.

  • Live text can be integrated into messages, for example allowing addresses to access Google Maps directly from within in the inbox. Live text can also be used to dial phone numbers or start chats with people it recognizes.

  • When creating or replying to messages, recipients can be added to a message by dragging and dropping names from the user’s buddy list. Similarly, links to documents can also be added to messages using drag and drop.

Embedded Experiences

Embedded Experiences allow developers to embed content from applications inside Open Social 2.0 containers, in other words as an interactive widget. An example of this would be viewing a photo or video without leaving the Notes application. The overall user experience when working with such widgets is very similar to Facebook and other social media applications. How to interact is very clear and easy to navigate.

Developers can create containers that allow content from applications to be viewed or interacted with directly within Notes. Here a jpeg file can be previewed, downloaded, liked, shared, etc.

Quick Find is another new feature that allows users to quickly search across all applications to find messages, files, people and other information. Users can also access Quick Find from within any application.

Social interaction

IBM’s Jeff Schick, VP of Social Software, describes the new version this way, “We think our social interaction is highly interactive compared to what other people are doing. By combining micro-blogging and sharing into the e-mail client as an in-line experience similar to Facebook, users don’t have to go someplace else to look at a video, for example. The real power here is the ability to truly interact with the stream, such as the ability to approve an expense report, change a financial portfolio, and leverage a social network to support their fundamental business processes. The objective was to present and interact with an activity stream from a single consistent view.”

IBM has taken its Connections technology, which was released in 2006, and was the first integrated social software technology available for the enterprise market, and incorporated it into Lotus Notes. Schick points out the sharing capabilities extend beyond Lotus Notes 9 itself. “We have incorporated sharing into Microsoft Outlook and plugged into Exchange and Domino 9 so when a user is on another social network, mail from our social network can also be viewed.” IBM has also added full support for all mobile platforms and devices, which Schick says is a major differentiating point. Lotus Notes 9 also has a fully integrated Web browser and offline capabilities. “If you want to have complete synergy and parity with what you can do on premise, you have the opportunity to do that with our solutions. I don’t see us as just someone that’s sitting inside the company. I see us as as somebody that’s up in the cloud.”

Lotus Notes may seem like a dinosaur in the world of enterprise communications, having been around much longer than other solutions, but Schick is quick to mention more than 50,000 organizations worldwide use Lotus Notes, more than half of which are Fortune 500 companies using Notes and Domino today running more than 10 million applications. “With Notes 9, IBM isn’t just defending our base from the likes of Microsoft and Google, etc, but also IBM is building out capabilities that are changing the game for clients who don’t work with IBM. With our ability to bring social into Microsoft accounts, IBM has reached a new level of innovation,” says Schick. “We’re seeing tremendous growth.”

“We’ve completely integrated Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin into the Notes 9 client as well as incorporating access to Web components such as Wikipedia and Youtube, with a healthy dose of analytics to understand all the data,” said Schick. “We’ve infused that into the messaging capabilities so users can see all of that in a single place and have it all work together. The setup is completely configurable using widgets and can be tailored so the social analytics brings to the forefront what is important to the user across all the different information types—whether it be new files for an operational meeting, new blogs from your boss, or new Twitter messages on the new announcements on the products you just launched. Users can create a level of granularity of notifications and messages that are consistent with this level of attention management.”

Digital omnivores

The need for collaboration and sharing across multiple platforms is evident in the rise of digital omnivores—users who engage with digital content via smartphone, tablet and desktop seamlessly. Already a quarter of the US population has earned this moniker. The foundation of IBM’s strategy is building on what it means to be social. “Collaboration needs to transition from being document centric to being people centric. That’s a prerequisite for really becoming a smarter workforce. Connecting people together and allowing them to share,” says Schick. Lotus Notes 9 provides a unified approach for enterprises to provide this interaction while interfacing with current social media platforms. The simplified user interface and drag-and-drop capabilities greatly aid the user experience and improve productivity. IBM seems ideally positioned to continue its lead in this market space.


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