Giving Some Love to the Lotus Community

For those of you who have been following this blog since it's inception a few years ago, you've heard us talk a lot about the Microsoft platform and our deep integration with Exchange, Outlook, Active Directory, SharePoint, IE7 and Vista. On the Enterprise side however, we've also been providing support for other platforms along the way, namely around non-AD LDAP stores and Java-based portals, but we weren't providing e-mail client readers for non-Outlook users. A large number of our customers and prospects, particularly in financial services, telecom, pharma and chemical industries, are longtime users of Lotus Notes. Today, we're happy to announce that we have new client-based plug-ins for the Lotus environment.

The support revolves around two different products. The NewsGator Plug-in for Lotus Notes, which is currently available, provides a client-based reader for the most popular installed versions of Notes, 6.5 and 7.0, as well as the recently unveiled Notes 8.0 product. The functionality is similar to what we offer in NewsGator Inbox, but shows up as a separate application in Notes as opposed to part of the mail system. See the screenshot below:

The other component to the announcement is the NewsGator Plug-In for Lotus Sametime, which will be going into beta shortly. Lots of people are excited about this enterprise-class instant messaging client (for those of you who are Forrester Research clients, Erica Driver has a nice report about what IBM is up to ), and we're delivering the capability to read articles within the Sametime client. Like all of our other RSS feed-reading options, both of these clients will synchronize subscriptions and read states with all of their counterparts.

One of our many key differentiators is that we've always provided customers with the broadest range of options for their employees to read their feeds, giving them the ability to deliver the right information and the right time to the right place and minimizing the need to learn new apps. Today's announcement adds another important component to our catalog and gives Notes shops the same option to deliver content to the Web, e-mail clients, mobile devices, portals and desktops.

On a totally different note, for those of you who have been posting comments to the blog, I apologize if it's taking a long time for them to appear. We've been getting hitting by the same "spam bot" who keeps putting inappropriate links in comments. I now have to accept or delete comments manually and sometimes it takes a day or two for me to do so. Typepad used to have the option of blocking comments with specific words or from specific domains, but they either took it out or hid it. (Hello Six Apart folks- can one of you let me know how to fix this?). So in any event, apologies in advance.

Technorati Tags: enterprise+rss, rss, NewsGator, Lotus, Notes

Comments

[John Head]

This is great news Todd ... congrats on supporting the IBM Lotus products. Couple questions ..

1) If I do not have an enterprise server, but have a newsgator account for myself from FeedDemon, can I use the Notes application?

2) How can we be involved with the beta? :)

Thanks - John

[Todd Berkowitz]

Hi John, at this time, we're not planning on delivering this as a standalone product, but instead as a reading option for NewsGator Enterprise Server and NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand. The latter offering is ideal for groups or departments and we offer a free 30-day trial with it. My suggestion would be to sign up for NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand, http://www.newsgator.com/enterprise-on-demand.aspx and then I'll ping you offline about the Lotus reader and getting that configured to test against NGEOD.

[Simon Scullion]

I think there could be a lot of interest out there in a standalone version of this.
I imagine there are plenty of us FeedDemon users who would love to see the possibility to embed it in the new Notes 8 client as a sidebar plugin.

[Greyhawk68]

Todd. Count me in as another user would would really like this in a standalone version rather than with the Enterpise offerings. It's something I would gladly pay for above and beyond FeedDemon and synchronization with NewsGator online!

Please think about it. There are 120 million + seats of Notes out there, and I'm sure you would sell some copies!

[Chris Miller]

I just blogged about this not knowing these comments were here. A personal edition would do wonders in the market also

[talatta]

I agree with Simon and Greyhawk. Would love to see a standalone for us FeedDemon users.

[bdr130]

Thanks - John

[ibraheem]

thank you