
IBM reports it will announce at Macworld today its first-ever social version of the Lotus Notes collaboration application for the Apple Inc. Macintosh. Lotus Notes 8.5 is now available on all computers running the Mac OS X Leopard platform, the company said.
The Macworld conference begins today in San Francisco. The move marks the first Lotus Notes update to be made available for the Mac in four years, officials said.
The new version of Notes, developed largely by employees at the former Lotus headquarters in Cambridge, turns an email application into “Facebook for the office,” according to Lotus Notes product manager Dwight Morse. Blogs, profiles and social bookmarking are all connected to the email, he said.
“If you think of the reason why you go to look for information in the first place it’s normally because you get an email. What we’re doing is we’re connecting the impetus to all those places,” said Morse, who began working at Lotus in 1991. IBM (NYSE: IBM) acquired the Cambridge software developer in 1995 for $3.5 billion.
Notes 8.5’s social features also include integration with Google, Yahoo and other public Internet calendars. According to IBM, Notes 8.5 also offers an intelligent storage savings feature that ensures only one copy of an attachment is kept on the mail server, resulting in space savings. IBM said the platform’s Mac licensees include Cardiff University, Discovery Communications and the Salvation Army international headquarters.
The version’s integration with the Mac OS was made possible by changes in the Leopard operating system and the open-source Eclipse 3.2 rich client platform that allowed the two systems to work together, Morse said.






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