Permessa Control! v6 is the Most Comprehensive Monitoring, Reporting and Compliance Solution for IBM Lotus Domino and Lotus Sametime available today.

LOTUSPHERE, ORLANDO, FL. (PR WEB) January 18, 2010 – New versions of the award-winning Permessa Control! products were announced today by Permessa Corporation at Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida. These products enable enterprises to both lower costs and improve compliance with their mission-critical messaging systems. Permessa Email Control! won the 2009 Lotus Award for Best Tool or Utility and was a finalist for the prestigious 2009 IBM Beacon Award. Permessa IM Control! was a finalist for the 2009 Lotus Award for Best Collaboration product.

See the full announcement here.

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Only a couple of weeks left until Lotusphere is upon us again.

Permessa will be exhibiting at Booth# 326, featuring live demonstrations of the newest enhancements to our award-winning Email and IM product line.

This year, we have teamed up with Mayflower Software and Sherpa Software to host a “Tailgate Party” on Sunday, right before the Welcome Reception.

Please register here to join us.

Update: Here’s a map to the party. Given the current cold-snap in Florida, we may relocate to an indoor location. Stay tuned.

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I’m sure there was a collective sigh amongst Domino admins, getting their iPhone touting execs back onto corporate email. But the catch-up game continues, as the cool new Droid arrives on the scene. Traveler doesn’t yet officially support Android devices, although both Traveler and Android have ActiveSync support. Ed Brill mentioned on his blog that Android support is coming, but what to do in the meantime? There are a number of 3rd party apps that can bridge the gap – Touchdown by NitroDesk is one of them.

The droidStory blog has a post on how to get it working and the trade-offs and compromises of the solution.

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Cage Fighter – Bruce
(flickr)

IBM Lotus Vice President of Unified Communications and Collaboration, Bruce Morse called out Microsoft at the Enterprise 2.0 (E2) conference in San Francisco earlier this week. The Demo Gods weren’t with IBM that day.  After suffering through a very glitchy demo presumably caused by an overloaded conference network (hey, we’ve all been there), he declared:

“Trust me, this stuff works. We use it every day in business and we have a lot of customers who’ve deployed it,” he said. “But obviously we’re having a bit of difficulty I presume with the network today.”

“I’m here today to tell you I’m not afraid to get in the cage with Microsoft – in their closed cage,” said Morse. “And so, I’d like to issue a challenge today for Microsoft at VoiceCon in the spring, to put up or shut up. I’ll be willing to match up our capabilities against Microsoft and let the audience judge.”

In order to differentiate itself from Microsoft, IBM Lotus is enabling its customers to leverage their existing communication infrastructure by integrating with Lotus Notes and Sametime. It is great to see IBM taking the offensive and I can’t wait for VoiceCon 2010 to witness the public solution shootout – cage or no cage.

Microsoft, are you biting…?

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This is long awaited relief for corporate iPhone users, since the previously announced Domino “integration” was a rather underwhelming light web client, missing crucial offline capabilities.

Lotus Traveler now provides full push-email, calendar and contact synchronization that enables the user to work offline. In addition, new enterprise features like remote wipe, to erase data on lost or stolen phones, are critical to gain corporate acceptance.

It is good to see that IBM Lotus is finally closing this critical gap in mobile integration.  Support for these new mobile devices and the already existing, strong integration with the Blackberry enables Lotus Notes Domino for the vast majority of all smartphones currently available.

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Last night was the September meeting of the NE Lotus User Group in Waltham, MA.  A good turnout overall with a nice mixture of Domino customers, partners and IBM’ers.  The technical presentation was about DAOS as it appears in Domino 8.5 and the big improvements now in Domino 8.5.1.   Not only was the subject matter well-received by the audience generally — who doesn’t like to save more than 40% on their storage and backup costs? — but being able to discuss technical aspects was especially nice for us.  We had a lot to contribute, based on our own experience with large enterprise customers.

Pat Mancuso and Collin Murray ably handled the technical side of the discussion.  We asked some tough questions of our hosts — so much so that I did not have the heart to rise to the ‘Stump the Experts’ challenge  offered at the end of every meeting.  Overall, I was reassured that the implementation seems very solid, based on simplicity and information hiding.  What was especially neat was that in Domino 8.5.1 the email pathway from the client through the servers will be able to inquire whether an attachment needs to be copied across the wire during mail transfer and if DAOS already has it just a ticket stub is copied.  A big performance win for the network.  This is a bit of change from the traditional store-and-forward mail contract which generally is ‘pushed’ without asking questions about the data along the way.  One sticking point for us is that there are now two sizes floating around — the logical size of the message and the size of the actual network transfer — and it appears that the LOG.NSF transfer records are now going to include the actual number of bytes transferred, making correlation with actual mail documents harder since those are only expressed in logical size.  Grrrr.

Pat touted the ‘transparency’ of DAOS — the expansion of attachment tickets happens at such a low level that no API calls need to change.  We applaud this backward compatibility from IBM — at least one other large vendor I can think of might have asked us to rip-and-replace our code.  However, it is not the ‘transparency’ but rather the ‘opaqueness’ that mars this excellent feature in our eyes.  Permessa has been asking for more than one year to have additional APIs to provide access to both the physical as well as logical sizes.  Both pieces of information are vital for our customers’ planning and measurement needs.  Imagine performing a server consolidation where you are dealing with ‘logical’ disk space taken by mailboxes and not the ‘physical’ disk space once DAOS is taken into account!  Yuval Shimoni, our CTO, summed it up nicely.  To paraphrase:  the current DAOS is geared more to the tactical than the strategic needs of the IT staff.  To better help IT measure, model and plan their future environment we need access to the true size information.  The Domino Admin client uses undocumented calls to gather this information — we are just asking for this same info to be available via public APIs and would be happy to contribute effort to their design.  While I am asking, how about exposing the logical checksum value of each attachment — I can see possible optimizations from the A/V vendors to avoid redundant checks and free up CPU, giving DAOS an even higher effective performance boost.

Overall it was a great presentation.  I very much appreciated IBM answering our of myriad questions and taking notes on the issues we raised.  I actually look forward to attending these gatherings every month, as the positive energy and momentum from IBM is inspiring.

For folks who want to be on the mailing list for the NE Lotus User Group, you can sign-up here.

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Similar to this blog, the newsletter is covering various topics about corporate messaging infrastructures while also providing specific insights and advice on how to handle some of the challenges in managing today’s mission-critical email, IM and collaboration systems.

For subscribers, we will also include in every newsletter a different, free product or service offering to help cope with tough economic times.

You can sign-up for the newsletter here.

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Permessa is proudly showing-off its LotusAward and announcing a number of new things as well, including:

• A ROI calculator that shows ways how to cut down Notes/Domino messaging costs by up to 40%.
• A free Sametime license auditing tool that enables companies to quickly assess how many active users are connecting to Sametime services and what client revisions are being used.

If you happen to be a Lotusphere, please see us at Booth #308.

Technorati Tags: LS09, Lotusphere 2009

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I think, this signals two things:

1. IBM acknowledges the growing popularity of the Mac, and its increasing usage worldwide. Macworld in particular is a great venue to connect with real end-users, many of which may not even know that Notes still exists. The success of MS-Exchange has been largely driven by the ubiquitous nature of Outlook, and IBM must rebuild end-user awareness and street-cred to regain market share.
2. Lotus is hoping to leverage years of heavy investment in Eclipse, which gives Notes instant cross-platform capabilities and feature parity on non-Wintel systems, including the Mac and of course Linux.

While there has been much focus on the long-overdue client-side improvements, since the release of version 8, Notes/Domino 8.5 is now bringing significant enhancements to the server.  Domino Attached Object Storage (DAOS) is a welcome feature that helps enterprises cope with rapidly growing storage demands and the rising costs for email storage. DAOS stores only one attachment per server, regardless of how many recipients received a copy of the message.

The chart below shows the projected storage savings with DAOS deployed. The report was produced on actual email traffic data and is representative of the savings that one can expect to see in large environments.

Technorati Tags: macworld, lotusphere, Notes 8.5, ND8.5, DAOS

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As a nice holiday present, our hard work has been recognized and rewarded in form of the prestigious Lotus Awards.

Permessa Email Control! won the 2009 Best of Lotus Award for Best Tool and Utility while Permessa IM Control! was named a finalist for 2009 Best of Lotus Award for Best Unified Communications Solution.

I would like to thank the entire team at Permessa for all the hard work that went into this, our loyal customers for helping us drive innovation towards new and improved solutions and the Lotus Awards judges for recognizing Permessa’s continued contribution to the Lotus customer base.

The countdown is now on for Lotusphere 2009.

Happy holidays – I hope to see many of you in Orlando.

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