Welcome to this weeks Lotus Competitive Newsletter. Tried a new thing and took 2 weeks getting some information to you.

For more information on anything Lotus, don't hesitate to contact me via email at benbrame@au1.ibm.com or +613.9626.6712

NEWS YOU CAN USE
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IBM Offers No Charge Software Trial to Companies for Real-Time Text, Video and Voice Collaboration

PCLinuxOS 2007 Final Released

Sametime 7.5.1 - Best Practices for Enterprise Scale Deployment

IBM Acquires Security Vendor Watchfire

Building Composite Applications for IBM Lotus Notes 8 Beta 3

The Grill: IBM's Steve Mills on the Hot Seat

IBM goes 'green' to save energy

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 education offerings

Blog Presentation - Extending IBM Blog Template

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IBM Offers No Charge Software Trial to Companies for Real-Time Text, Video and Voice Collaboration
Friday 8th June, 2007
We just issued a press release about the 90-day Lotus Sametime Trial available for download from DeveloperWorks.  (Of course, all of you knew about it already, right?)

If you haven't had a chance to try it out, why don't you head over now?  And while you're at it, head over to the Sametime Code Exchange, where you can try out some plugins (including some recently posted ones, including a Plazes plugin and one for a Hong Kong Map) or the Lotus Sametime Solution Catalog where you can also find a number of recent additions.

PCLinuxOS 2007 Final Released

Written by Texstar
Sunday, 20 May 2007

Texstar and the Ripper Gang are pleased to announce the final release of PCLinuxOS 2007. Featuring kernel 2.6.18.8, KDE 3.5.6, Open Office 2.2.0, Firefox 2.0.0.3, Thunderbird 2.0, Frostwire, Ktorrent, Amarok, Flash, Java JRE, Beryl 3D and much much more. Almost 2 gigs of software compressed on a single self bootable livecd that can be installed to your hard drive provided it is compatible with your system and you like the distribution. Over 5000+ additional packages available after hard drive install through our Synaptic Software Manager. Please note PCLinuxOS does not ship with Win32codes or DVD decryption software. Proprietary Nvidia and ATI drivers available after hard drive install.

In addition we'd like to give out a special thanks to the PCLinuxOS community who stepped up last month to help us out and kept us going. Thank you for all your support and we'll keep working hard to bring you a good Linux distribution you can be proud of. We also want to thank Enki Consulting for providing hosting for our website and ibiblio.org for hosting our distribution.

 Torrent: http://linuxtracker.org/torrents-details.php?id=4143

Download mirrors: http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_ionfiles&Itemid=28

Purchase disk from On-Disk.com

Sametime 7.5.1 - Best Practices for Enterprise Scale Deployment

The objective of this IBM Redbook is to provide a best practice framework for an enterprise-scale deployment of Sametime 7.5.1. It covers a range of business collaboration requirements which might typically be found within many large enterprises with geographically dispersed user communities and diverse business requirements for realtime collaboration.

Specifically, we discuss how to plan, install and configure a Sametime 7.5.1 infrastructure which will scale to meet the needs of a large, globally distributed enterprise. We approach the installation and configuration of Sametime in deployment phases, beginning with implementing the community services (chat functionality) and setting up load balancing. We next implement the online meeting services. Building upon this infrastructure, we then discuss how to integrate Sametime functionality with other IBM / Lotus products, including Microsoft Office. Finally we complete the environment by discussing aspects of security, administration and recommended maintenance. Other topics covered in the Redbook include a discussion of the Enterprise Meeting Server, and the Sametime Gateway

With the release of IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5, and the subsequent release of Sametime 7.5.1, IBM provides a family of enterprise-class collaboration products providing real-time awareness, communication, screensharing capabilities, and IP audio/video services. Lotus Sametime brings the flexibility and efficiency of real-time communication to the enterprise by interconnecting employees, customers, business partners and suppliers.

Sametime is much more than just chat and web conferences; it is an open-standards-based platform for real-time collaboration. Businesses and IBM Business Partners use Sametime 7.5’s APIs and toolkits to build innovative new real-time collaboration applications, and to improve any application, business process, or 3rd party application.

IBM Acquires Security Vendor Watchfire

Deal shows the importance of Web application security for enterprises.

Jun 7, 2007

IBM this week said it as agreed to acquire security software vendor Watchfire. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Watchfire provides Web application security and compliance testing solutions. Watchfire and IBM Rational are already business partners, and IBM said it would use Watchfire's technology to extend its existing governance and risk management products.

Watchfire, working in conjunction IBM Rational software, will help customers integrate Web application security and compliance early on and throughout the software development process--enabling customers to define, test, and track security compliance.

Watchfire has more than 800 customers in many industries, including financial services, government, technology, pharmaceutical, energy and utilities, education and manufacturing.

Watchfire's operations will become part of IBM's Rational software brand, IBM said.

Building Composite Applications for IBM Lotus Notes 8 Beta 3
Monday, June 11, 2007, 09:06 AM - Lotus

A new tutorial was posted to the Lotus Sandbox last week.

Following this tutorial, build the sample Customer Interests composite application with IBM Lotus Notes 8 and IBM Lotus Domino Designer 8 Beta 3.

The tutorial can be downloaded here.






The Grill: IBM's Steve Mills on the Hot Seat
The senior vice president and group executive of IBM's software group talks about the benefits of open-source software, Web 2.0 tools for business and taking programming for granted.
Gary Anthes

June 04, 2007 (Computerworld) -- In the 1990s, IBM made a big push into services but now seems to be placing more emphasis on software. Is that right? Over the past 20 years, we have been increasing our investment in software pretty steadily, so there’s nothing new in the sense that we suddenly discovered the idea of being a software business. But the press and Wall Street analysts have paid more attention to the software part of IBM’s business in recent years.

"Information on demand" seems to be a big deal at IBM right now. What’s that about? There is a lot of data available to [our] customers, in a lot of formats, often in lots of places. They are trying to move the right data closer to the people who need to make decisions with it. Companies want to be as real-time as possible for rapid decision-making as things in the business and the market change. The challenge is, where does the data sit and how complex is it to get to the data? What we have done is create the capability of dealing with every type of data — whether text, image, video, audio — and transform it into the form it needs to be in to be analyzed and "federate" many different data sources.

How does that compare with what your competitors are doing? A company like Oracle has been fixated on traditional databases.
Read the rest of the article here

IBM goes 'green' to save energy

New Delhi: IBM on Friday announced "Project Big Green" in India, aimed at inclusion of new products and services for IBM and its clients to sharply reduce data center energy consumption.

The initiative also aimed at transforming the world’s business and public technology infrastructures into “green” data centers.
IBM launched this initiative as part of the global Intelligent Energy campaign, aimed at helping economies cope with the existing and impending energy crisis. Last month, IBM announced that it will redirect $1 billion a year, globally, across its businesses, to mobilize the company’s resources to dramatically increase the level of energy efficiency in IT.

IBM’s efforts under the Intelligent Energy campaign will be channeled through four specific initiatives – IBM’s Client Innovations in Energy, IBM’s Application of Technology & Services for Energy Efficiency, IBM’s Activities with Energy Influencers, and Environmental Efforts at Big Blue. With its work under each of these pillars, IBM aims to create a holistic approach to addressing the energy issue facing the globe.

“Project Big Green” is an initiative under one of the four pillars of the Intelligent Energy Campaign – IBM’s Application of Technology and Services for Energy Efficiency. It targets corporate data centers where energy constraints and high costs can limit growth.

As part of this initiative IBM will create a global “green” team of over 1000 energy efficiency specialists from across the company, to offer “green” solutions comprising IBM’s hardware, software, services, research, and finance offerings.

IBM is using its expertise and energy-smart technology innovations to outline a five-step approach that is designed to dramatically improve energy efficiency for clients:

• DIAGNOSE: Evaluate existing facilities – energy assessment, virtual 3-D power management and thermal analytics
• BUILD: Plan, build or update to an energy efficient data center
• VIRTUALISE: Virtualise IT infrastructures and special purpose processor
• MANAGE: Seize control with power management software
• COOL: Exploit liquid cooling solutions – inside and out of the data center

The savings are substantial – for an average 25,000 square foot data center, clients should be able to achieve 42 percent energy savings. Based on the energy mix in the US, this savings equates to 7,439 tons of carbon emissions reduction per year.

IBM expects this will also help save more than five billion kilowatt hours of energy per year, globally.

By using these technologies internally, IBM expects to double the computing capacity of its data centers within the next three years without increasing power consumption or its carbon footprint.
India houses one of the largest IBM data center in the Asia Pacific region with more than 4,800 sq feet.

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 education offerings
Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0 continues to help you protect your existing investment while extending the reach of the Notes/Domino platform.
This new version offers:

·	greater versatility with an open application infrastructure
·	a fresh, more intuitive user interface
·	broader capabilities such as composite applications
·	improved collaboration
·	activity-centric computing

Blog Presentation - Extending IBM Blog Template

This is a presentation done by top bloke Sean Burgess at ILUG. I'm guessing it is a repeat of a Lotusphere 2007 session done with the super cool Jon Vaughan.

Have a great week!

Regards,

Ben Brame
Competitive Software Specialist
Specialist Engagement Team
Lotus Software
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Phone:     + 61 3 9626 6712
Mobile     +61 416 187 733
Email:      benbrame@au1.ibm.com
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Linux: The choice of a GNU generation. This message was sent using the IBM Lotus Notes 8 Client on Red Hat Linux 5
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Lotus Competitive News is produced by Ben Brame, Lotus Competitive SWAT Specialist for Software Group in Australia

Lotus Competitive News is a mailing list which I send news items relating to IT in competition with Lotus, Portal and Open Source.

Please note that this is done in my spare time. This means that if a project or other activity takes precedence, it may be sparse in its coverage.

To subscribe, unsubscribe, make comments or contribute articles, send an appropriate email to benbrame@au1.ibm.com or Ben Brame/Australia/IBM@IBMAU