August 20, 2007; 02:01 AM
IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced new technology that is designed to arm professionals
with the ability to combine information from different sources to
create just-in-time applications needed to help close a big deal,
deliver an important presentation or just get through the weather. Key
to employee productivity, these situational applications or "mashups"
blend Web services like news feeds, weather reports, maps or traffic
conditions, with enterprise content and services from databases, spread
sheets and documents, helping to create a fast, flexible and affordable
application for specific, timely business needs.
IBM (NYSE: IBM)
today announced new technology that is designed to arm professionals
with the ability to combine information from different sources to
create just-in-time applications needed to help close a big deal,
deliver an important presentation or just get through the weather. Key
to employee productivity, these situational applications or "mashups"
blend Web services like news feeds, weather reports, maps or traffic
conditions, with enterprise content and services from databases, spread
sheets and documents, helping to create a fast, flexible and affordable
application for specific, timely business needs.
IBM Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1 software is a standards-based managed
client that can extend mashups in the enterprise to a wide variety of
desktop, laptop, and mobile devices on the market, helping to give
customers immediate access to critical business information such as
insurance and expense forms, inventory data and mobile customer
relationship management (CRM). Using the next generation of the Web, or
Web 2.0, IBM's Lotus Expeditor gives users the ability to be productive
both on the road and on their desktops.
For developers, Lotus Expeditor is designed to provide an easy way
to create integrated mashups independent of the implementation
technology on the client, delivering new capabilities such as
aggregation of both browser-based as well as non-browser applications
in mashups, helping to reduce the need to go back and forth between
different applications on the desktop. Lotus Expeditor provides this
mashup capability for Lotus Notes 8 and Domino 8, the newest version of
IBM's collaboration platform available to customers this month.
"Lotus Expeditor is a flexible client infrastructure for composite
applications that brings together a wide range of application types,
from .Net, Eclipse and Java to Web 2.0," said Larry Bowden, vice
president of portals and interaction services. "While other middleware
provides only a small subset of APIs on a mobile device, Expeditor
software can extend most of what is found on the desktop to an online
or offline environment, creating more powerful and flexible
applications."
Enhanced new security features give administrators control of the
desktop, which means end users have role-based controlled access to the
applications.
Key features include:
- A server-managed composite platform -- spanning desktop
and mobile -- that integrates and aggregates applications and
information: Using Lotus Expeditor software, developers can incorporate
elements from disparate sources including Microsoft .NET, Swing,
native, Eclipse-based components, Flash, and components that have the
business processes contained in back- office applications. Workers can
be more productive with quick and easy access to aggregated
applications on the client.
- Integration with real-time
collaboration (IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1): Lotus Expeditor includes an
embedded version of the Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 client to help developers
integrate real-time collaboration with line-of- business applications.
This allows them to further create composite applications that embed
real-time collaboration and have a custom look and feel. In addition,
developers can enable offline support, allowing users to send messages
or process information even when disconnected.
- Integration
with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and IBM WebSphere Portal Express:
Developers can use WebSphere Portlet Factory software to rapidly build
and deploy portlets that run on the Lotus Expeditor platform, helping
to increase the time to value of their rich applications. This same
value is extended to the Portal Express product, allowing our small and
medium business (SMB) customers to take full advantage of the same
benefits offered to our large enterprise accounts.
- End
to end government-grade mobile security for customers: IBM provides
end-to-end security features for managed client apps by coupling
capabilities like encryption, authentication, plus the single sign-on
features of Lotus Expeditor software with the government grade mobile
VPN support provided by IBM Lotus Mobile Connect software. With the
recent addition of support for Windows 2003 server in the Lotus Mobile
Connect product, SMB customers can benefit from government-grade mobile
security features.
- The ability to transform Microsoft
Visual Basic applications: Expeditor can provide a landing pad for a
myriad of end of life Visual Basic applications. Through Lotus
Expeditor, developers can host existing VB applications, and
incrementally transform them to take advantage of open middleware
services. With third party tools provided by IBM Business Partners such
as Diamond Edge, they can automate much of the transformation of their
VB applications, often using their existing developer skills.
Lotus Expeditor software is based on open standards such as OSGi,
the open source Eclipse framework, and serves as the foundation
technology for a number of other IBM offerings including Lotus Sametime
7.5 and Lotus Notes 8. The software has been designed to easily
integrate with key IBM products such as WebSphere Application Server,
WebSphere Portal, Lotus Sametime, IBM Workplace Forms and Lotus Notes 8
software.
IBM Business Partner Openstream (www.openstream.com)
has helped leading energy company Hess Corporation implement its
Expeditor-based Mobile Force Automation (MoFA) to help Hess's retail
store managers who rely on handheld devices for everyday tasks.
Expeditor helps ensure that tasks such as running inventory updates and
Supply-Chain Management work more securely with improved performance
and less risk of data-loss.
"Our leading energy services client Hess needed a secure, high
performance solution to run applications in connected and disconnected
modes. They were also looking for a solution that could integrate
components for an end to end solution involving bar-code scanners,
multimodal interaction as well as the ability to manage and monitor
devices, applications & data through a web-browser-based monitoring
and deployment tool," said Raj Tumuluri, President of Openstream.
"Openstream's MoFA solution running on Expeditor software was able to
handle the average data synchronization four times faster, making
Expeditor the client middleware of choice for Hess, as well as a key
component of our business strategy to integrate crucial applications
for our customers using open standards-based middleware."
Cost and Availability
Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1 software is available now. The SRP* for Lotus
Expeditor client is $99.25** per authorized user and comes with a set
of development tools. An end-to-end Lotus Expeditor package, including
the optional Lotus Expeditor server for management, transactions, and
disconnected data has an SRP* starting at $5500** for 25 users and can
scale upwards to extend and manage applications to thousands of client
desktops, laptops and supported mobile devices.