Posts Tagged ‘expeditor’
Lotus Expeditor
This post has been sat in draft for the past two weeks with only the title going for it - hardly an auspicious start to providing some meaningful prose related to the ‘way ahead’ for Domino Apps and the new Lotus applications heading our way.
Still, it’s here now, so I can start to fill out a bit more detail and make use of the whole two words typed whilst I was away.
IBM® Lotus® Expeditor is IBM’s universal managed client software to extend composite applications to laptops, desktops, kiosks and mobile devices and is the follow-on release of IBM WebSphere® Everyplace® Deployment. It can be used to extend your IBM Lotus, IBM WebSphere, IBM® Workplace™ or Eclipse™ infrastructures to a managed client environment. An alternative to Microsoft®.NET client software, Lotus Expeditor provides the flexibility that comes from service oriented architecture (SOA) and open standards based on Eclipse.
Why is this of particular interest to us? Well - this is how we are going to be expected to implement our offline portal delivery in the future.
With Lotus Expeditor software, WebSphere Portal installations can deliver composite applications that can operate in connected or occasionally connected environments—on a desktop, laptop, kiosk or tablet computer. This is ideal for mobile workers or for environments where an Internet connection is expensive, unreliable or simply not available, such as places where consumers use kiosks.
How does Lotus Expeditor software provide this support? It enables local portlet support on the client with a toolkit to help you transform JavaTM Specification Request (JSR) 168 portlets into rich client applications running on Microsoft® Windows® or Linux® platforms. And with the Lotus Expeditor network client installer, portal administrators can use WebSphere Portal software to remotely deploy and manage these applications based upon user roles, helping to reduce administration costs.
It was all a lot more interesting in the flesh, so to speak. Bottom line is that it’s actually something else that we will need to develop and not really a setup.exe for us to run.
Tags: eclipse, expeditor, ibm_websphere, jsr_168, kiosks, lotusphere2007, lotus_software, mobile_workers, service_oriented_architecture, websphere
What Gartner Thought Of It All
Well, I’ve finally dragged myself across to Gartner to see what they made of Lotusphere, and so here are their pearls of wisdom for your digestion.
Significant updates to Lotus Notes and Quickplace, as well as the introduction of some compelling new products, were the reason that IBM’s Lotusphere 2007 was buzzing with positive feedback from IBM customers and partners.
Perhaps the best news coming from Lotusphere is the near-disappearance of the bewildering “Workplace” name. The folding of Workplace into WebSphere Portal has helped to reduce the confusion regarding its strategy, messaging and products. While Workplace was, in Gartner’s view, a failed marketing effort, its underlying concepts embracing the Web have provided a critical foundation for Notes 8, Quickr, Connections and Sametime — which are all built on Eclipse with the Expeditor tool. Combined with the recently added representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces, Atom syndication capabilities and “mashability,” these concepts serve as a strategic architecture for all future Lotus products.
IBM hopes Lotusphere 2007 will launch an updated, more competitive and appealing Lotus. The demonstrations and product sessions have been successful among the Lotus users who come to these events. However, several challenges persist. The relationship of Quickr to existing products like Domino Document Manager, DB2 Content Manager and new document-oriented clients remains murky. While the mashups and possibilities of social software are promising, the lack of consumer-focused or Web 2.0 software-as-a-service offerings limits penetration.
Fairly-dos then. Not entirely sure that IBM have offered ‘consumer-focused’ software for a considerable length of time now. They tend to leave that to Apple and Microsoft, but there you go.
Tags: expeditor, gartner, lotusphere2007, mashups, notes, quickplace, sametime, websphere