Lotus Gets Tighter BlackBerry Integration

Written by Adam Gosling

Tuesday, 23 January 2007

Research In Motion (RIM) has demonstrated new levels of integration between its popular BlackBerry platform and IBM Lotus platform. Currently running at Disneyland in Florida, this year's Lotusphere event is being heralded as something of a new start for the Lotus platform with commentators and users reporting a heightened focus on collaboration and convergence. As part of a series of planned initiatives focused on extending the voice, presence and location-based services of Lotus Sametime to BlackBerry users, IBM and RIM are demonstrating integration of the Lotus Sametime instant messaging system and presence with enterprise voice services in a wireless setting. "As the leader in enterprise collaboration solutions, IBM is committed to providing our customers intuitive, anytime, anywhere access to their most important communication and collaboration tools," said MichaelRhodin , General Manager, IBM Lotus. "Working together with RIM, we are making it easy for customers to find, reach and collaborate across their desktop, mobile and telephony environments." "The ability to securely extend voice, email, intranet and real-time collaboration applications to mobile workers is becoming a competitive imperative and BlackBerry Enterprise Server is proving to be a unique and powerful advantage for our enterprise customers," said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO, Research In Motion. "In this next phase of our continuing collaboration with IBM, we are focusing on enabling seamless access to the collaborative elements of the robust Lotus Sametime and Lotus Domino environments with new levels of convergence, efficiency and usability." A Lotus Sametime client on a BlackBerry handset allows users in an instant messaging group chat to instantly convert their text-based discussion into a multi-party conference call, which is initiated and managed through the enterprise PBX or a conference server. The "Convert to Call" function works through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server to seamlessly collect the presence information of each user from Lotus Sametime, then invokes the enterprise PBX or conference server to initiate outbound calls to each user, pulling them together into a voice conference. When the conference call ends, the users are automatically returned back to their group chat session exactly where they left off. Another feature, called "Click to Map", allow users to generate maps on their BlackBerry which illustrates a colleague's location based on presence information retrieved from Lotus Sametime. Related news items Tiny Rugged UMPC WIth Vista -10/10/2007 Garmin Does Phone Nav -04/10/2007 Consumers Want FMC: Companies Don't See The Benefit -02/10/2007 Nokia Buys Map Company For US$8 Billion -02/10/2007 Seven In Unwired Takeover Bid -26/09/2007 Newer news items Nokia Tips Navigation As The Next Must Have -25/02/2007 Sony Ericsson W880i Launched On 3 -22/02/2007 Talking To Your HP iPaq About FMC -22/02/2007 Dopod Quick To Add 6.0 -20/02/2007 Treo 750 On Telstra NextG -18/02/2007 Older news items Get Ready For The 100GB Smartphone -06/12/2006 Finish Is First With See Through Z310 -06/12/2006 Nokia Announces Base Line CDMA Phones -05/12/2006 New LG Music Phone On 3 -04/12/2006 Nokia Ranges New Quartet -28/11/2006 Tag This Now: