IBM adds enterprise blogging to Lotus Notes

IBM has added enterprise blogging capability to its venerable Lotus Notes/Domino e-mail and collaboration software in an incremental update available now.

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In Lotus Notes and Domino Version 7.0.2, an update IBM announced Wednesday, the company has added the ability to install log templates on the Domino database. With them, enterprise employees can create, design and update Web blogs working within Notes, said Alan Lepofsky, a manager in marketing intelligence and communications for IBM.

While consumers have had a choice of Web-based blogging services, building blogs within Notes gives enterprise users a secure infrastructure on which to produce either internal or external blogs, he said.

IBM already runs several of its employee blogs on the new Lotus functionality, Lepofsky said. Examples of those can be found at the following sites: alanlepofsky.net, edbrill.com, adamgartenberg.com, jeffeisen.com, and stevecastledine.com. 

Another new collaboration feature in the 7.0.2 release is the ability for users to publish feeds from any Notes application to most standard RSS readers, Lepofsky said. "Rather than having to check and see if something new has been updated in a database, you will have an update to your RSS reader that can automatically let you know," he said.

IBM also added new mobility technology to Lotus Notes. For the first time, mobile workers can run Notes from a USB pocket storage device with a small-footprint version of the application that fits in 512MB of flash memory, Lepofsky said. When a user installs Lotus Notes 7.0.2, one of the options they have is to install the client directly onto a USB stick, he said.

Lepofsky said the feature should be a big hit with workers who travel frequently and may need to access their Lotus application on the road, even if they don't have their laptops handy. "This is a great addition to the mobile story for Lotus Notes," he said.

Also new in the 7.0.2 release is support for more operating systems The software can now run on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server R2 X64 Platform, Novell SUSE 10 Linux (32-bit and 64-bit versions), and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Sun Solaris, and IBM AIX, i5/OS, and z/OS.