Making Headlines

IBM plans to update Lotus Notes e-mail and Domino messaging software in the months ahead as it looks to chip away at Microsoft's dominant position in the market for software used by knowledge workers.

Making this announcement in late January, IBM said it plans to release a minor update to the current Lotus Notes and Domino 8 package in February, with bigger changes planned for Notes and Domino 8.5.

Lotus and Domino must be updated frequently for IBM to stay on pace with Microsoft, which maintains control over the majority of the e-mail and messaging market with its Outlook and Exchange products for Windows.

Industry analysts say Microsoft held more than 47 percent of the e-mail market as of the end of 2006, with IBM hovering around 42 percent.

Lotus and Domino 8.01 will introduce a feature called My Widgets.

This will allow users to quickly gather data from many external sources that is related to content found in Lotus Notes files.

To use one example, a user could click on an airline flight number in an e-mail message to obtain the status of said flight.

My Widgets works by virtue of new IBM technology called Live Text.

Live Text is context sensitive and will have the ability to associate the words or phrases in Lotus documents with functions delivered by many third-party widgets - including Google Gadgets - on the user's desktop.

Among other things, experts say this technology could be used by people to call up weather reports, stock quotes, or business data.

IBM also has eyes on Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 - the first significant revision to the popular software since IBM introduced Notes and Domino 8 in August 2007.

For Lotus / Domino version 8.5, IBM says it plans to update Lotus Domino Designer application development software to include greater support for Web 2.0 tools such as Ajax and RSS and Atom content feeds.

A ship date for Lotus and Domino 8.5 has not been disclosed.