Collaboration Products Make Debut At LotusphereCollaboration Products Make Debut At Lotusphere

Lotusphere's opening brought with it a host of product announcements from companies riding the coattails of IBM's pledge to integrate collaboration technologies with a full gamut of business processes.

"It is important that we provide our customers with a scalable, flexible, and secure set of solutions," said Ambuj Goyal, the new general manager of Lotus Software, in an opening statement Sunday to the conference and trade show in Orlando, Fla.

Among the vendors pushing out new products into the market are:

- Symantec, which announced AntiVirus/Filtering for Domino and a virus and filtering guardian for Domino databases running on Solaris, AIX, iSeries, Linux, and Windows NT/2000. AntiVirus/Filtering now supports the newest Domino, version 6.0. The Windows edition features new policy-based filtering, while the other versions now include rules-based content filtering and real-time protection against malicious code and spam attacks.

- Pumatech, best known for its synchronization software, introduced MobileXtension for Lotus Notes, a plug-in for its Satellite Forms MobileApp Designer and Enterprise Intellisync Server. Together, the three let developers bring Lotus Domino and Notes data to Palm and Pocket PC handhelds.

- Avaya debuted Avaya Unified Messenger for Lotus Domino, which gives Notes users single-mailbox access not just to Notes E-mail, but also to voicemail and fax messages from any phone or PC. Unified Messenger had previously supported only Microsoft Exchange.

- Stampede has enhanced its TurboGold data controller and accelerator by, among other things, improving its storage management with a transparent compression engine (using the popular Zip format) that squeezes databases and E-mail attachments. Stampede also claims that TurboGold's simultaneous updates to all Domino database users can cut network traffic by as much as 85%.

- DYS Analytics released Collaboration Control for Lotus Sametime 3, IBM's collaborative workspace platform. Control identifies Sametime performance issues or interruptions, generates reports that IT can use to diagnose Sametime health and usage, and allocates costs for charge-backs to individual departments or workgroups.

- BVRP Software launched MailMeter, an E-mail-monitoring application that works with both Exchange and Domino servers. Unlike content-filtering or anti-spam software, MailMeter uses a variety of techniques, including capturing of address pairs, subject lines, and attachments, to uncover E-mail misuse that can drain productivity.

- Extended Systems said the upcoming release of XTNDConnect Server, scheduled for early February, will support Notes and Domino 6. This next version will offer new password-authentication features for mobile users connecting to Domino and extend group scheduling to Palm devices so users can view attendees and meeting rooms logged into Notes.

- AttachStor is touting its AttachStor for Lotus Domino, a server-based product first announced in December, that manages E-mail bandwidth- and storage-hogging attachments by eliminating duplicate attachments from the mail server. It also features attachment compression and encryption.