Lotusphere 2004: Show roundup

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- Although they came to learn more about the road map for their IT investments in Lotus Notes, Domino and Workplace, the more than 5,000 attendees here at this week's Lotusphere 2004 conference are also researching a variety of niche applications from smaller vendors that help them complete their software deployments.
About 168 vendors fill the exhibit hall, offering Notes and Domino add-ons designed to improve e-mail handling, spam control, content management capabilities and more.
Here's a sampling of some of the new products and updates announced at the show:

• Bright Ideas Software Inc. unveiled its Presentation Foundry for IBM Lotus Domino presentation management application, with full support for Domino 6. Presentation Foundry for Domino can be accessed from a standard Web browser and allows users to create, edit, download and e-mail Microsoft PowerPoint presentations using a browser.
  Edison, N.J.-based Bright Ideas offers the product for $8,500 for the initial server and 50 client licenses, with 50 additional client licenses priced at $1,500.


• Big Sky Technologies released new versions of its Remark Unified MessagingAssistant and Remark Voice Server products, offering new features in Remark Version 4 that support presence management and text chat support in IBM Lotus Instant Messaging. The Remark Unified MessagingAssistant expands Lotus' IM integration with a new "IM Call Screening" feature that checks the user's IM status before transferring outside calls to them. If the user is online, Remark sends a chat message to notify them of the incoming call. The chat message includes the caller ID and/or name and a menu of actions, including "accept the call," "take a voice message" or "transfer the call to someone else."
  San Diego-based Big Sky provides unified messaging and workgroup products to enhance communications and collaboration within the workgroup and enterprise. Pricing for the updated software wasn't available.


• DYS Analytics announced its new Email Control Desktop Edition for Domino, which is aimed at helping companies with between 1,000 and 5,000 e-mail users manage e-mail. The product provides real-time and historical analysis of the corporate collaboration infrastructure to improve service and diagnostics. DYS also announced Control products for the IBM Lotus Workplace and IBM Team Workplace offerings to expand their application management capabilities.
  The Wellesley, Mass.-based company's new Control 4.2 Platform will be available starting in April.


• Group Technologies unveiled a new feature in its securiQ.Wall Content Recognition Engine that allows Lotus Notes users to scan and classify e-mail attachments based on attachment content, instead of just by file type. The feature allows users to improve document archiving and disposal, records and document management, order processing and information safeguarding. The product opens an e-mail attachment, determines the attachment category and uses an algorithm to determine its content.
  Group Technologies, which specializes in e-mail content security, management and organization software, is based in Karlsruhe, Germany.


• ZipLip Inc. has begun shipping its Unified Archival for Lotus application, which integrates e-mail archiving and attachment offloading.
  The product is aimed at companies seeking to improve their regulatory compliance by establishing complete archives of all messages, including those from blind copies (bcc's), group lists, e-mail blocked by content filters and e-mail generated by other applications such as CRM products. The Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor provides software for e-mail management and related needs.


• PeerWire unveiled its free PeerWire peer-to-peer client for Lotus Domino developers, which is aimed at helping users collaborate online in their development projects. The application, which can be downloaded from the Houstoncompany's Web site, features encrypted XML data transfer and advanced search capabilities, in addition to chat and presence awareness for users.


• Sybari Software Inc. unveiled expanded server operating system support for its Antigen antivirus application, which will now run on servers using IBM AIX or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris OS. The Antigen for Domino offering allows administrators to protect their Notes users from viruses, trojans and other attacks, according to the East Northport, N.Y.-based company.


• Teamstudio Inc. announced a new migration filters database and Linux and Solaris support for its latest Teamstudio for IBM Lotus Notes Edition 19 offering. The Beverly, Mass.-based company also plans to launch maintenance release 19a for Teamstudio in the next several weeks.

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