IBM’s Lotus Notes, Domino 8 launched in India

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has announced that Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Domino 8 will be available in India now.

According to the company, Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Domino 8 come to India after two years in development and testing by more than 25,000 businesses around the world.

Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Domino 8, being the latest versions of a collaboration software, bring together e-mail, calendar, instant messaging, office productivity tools and custom applications.

The two also represent the industry’s first enterprise collaboration solution largely designed with input from its customers.

IBM said that research and insight gained from IBM R&D laboratories and businesses worldwide indicate that overall collaboration has email as the key characteristic of their desktop experience. Consequently, Lotus Notes 8 is designed to transform the inbox into an integrated workspace.

Over 93% of customers of Lotus Notes are using the most recent two releases, a high adoption rate, says IBM. Further, annual service subscription renewal rates within Lotus Notes licenses exceed 20% of the industry average, indicating fast adoption.

IBM claims that Lotus Notes 8, which is much more than email, integrates work by building in instant messaging and presence awareness, office tools to create and edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets and infusing a business’ custom applications, including Help Desk, CRM, Sales Force, Discussion Forums, Blogs and more.

Chetan Yardi, country manager of IBM Lotus Software, said “our customers are calling Lotus Notes 8 the ‘desktop of the future’ because it consolidates
all their collaboration tools into one screen.”

Lotus Notes 8 provides instant productivity through immediate access to people, current projects or activities and information without leaving the inbox. Time can be saved through a new search tool that lets users automatically extend searches beyond email and contacts to Web and hard-drive file searches.

Yet another feature is that users can quickly recall an email message after it has been sent by mistake if it is saved through the ‘message recall’ feature.

Besides, through the new ‘conversation’ feature, users can view all individual messages in their inbox – the traditional approach – or they can now view their emails grouped together in related conversations. Hundreds of emails can be immediately reduced to dozens of conversations.