This was one of the lower-profile but higher-impact announcements from Lotusphere’s OGS yesterday – that IBM/Lotus will be supporting Ubuntu in a much bigger way in the future. IBM’s press release states the following:
Ubuntu
By combining the innovative user experience of the Ubuntu platform with the re-designed Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Symphony, customers will experience greater ease-of-use and comprehensive management of the desktop. Full support for Ubuntu within Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony is planned with Lotus Notes 8.5 in the second half of 2008. The Lotus Symphony office productivity suite is included with Lotus Notes 8 and is available as a separate download, at no additional charge. Ubuntu is released on a regular six-month cycle in more than 50 languages, and is backed with commercial support from Canonical.
“IBM’s plans to deliver the IBM Open Collaboration Client Solution with Lotus Notes on the Ubuntu platform is a win for customers everywhere,” said Mark Murphy, vice president of alliances, Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu. “Canonical is committed to bringing the best available productivity tools to its users on an open platform. Ubuntu users will now have an outstanding choice with Lotus Notes, while businesses will have a great choice with Lotus Domino. From a technical viewpoint, we are impressed how Lotus leverages the Eclipse platform to build and deliver rich client applications. This is an exciting development for Ubuntu users, too.”
The Open Collaboration Client Solution includes advanced email and calendar capabilities, proven unified communication and collaboration functionality and lightweight yet powerful word processing, spreadsheet and presentation capabilities with Open Document Format (ODF) support. Because the Open Collaboration Client Solution is built on Lotus Expeditor, which is based on the open source Eclipse Rich Client Platform, business-ready social networking, team collaboration and portal technologies can easily be added to a Linux PC user’s desktop.
I will be very interested to find out whether there are plans to port the Quickr connectors to Ubuntu and also whether Ubuntu Server will ever be supported for server versions such as Domino? Anyway, small steps and all that…
