Project Liberate - Reducing your Software expenditures by Software License Optimization

"For the past several years, IBM's Project Liberate team has been engaged in helping mid-size and large customers to understand their alternatives with respect to Microsoft Enterprise Agreements, and, in most cases, guiding them to save money.

A Project Liberate Consultant helps customers understand these Agreements, and shows them alternative strategies to purchase their Microsoft licenses that often result in lower costs than are available via the Enterprise Agreement. Customers benefit by learning to buy what they need versus buying into a bundling of products that they may not fully utilize. In the process, customers have "liberated" budget dollars to fund other projects or initiatives.

Customers with Microsoft Enterprise Agreements might be able to save up to 40% or more on the cost of their renewal through this "no-charge" evaluation of their current Enterprise Agreement."

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/info/reducecost/license_optimization.html

"The Project "Liberate" team recently put together a white paper with case studies from real-world customer engagements. This ten-page paper can help you save significantly, just at a time when such savings are more and more the focus for businesses. I went ahead and posted the paper on my Slideshare:"

http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/project-liberate-for-cios-reducing-licensing-costs-paper

aDesigner

"A disability simulator that helps Web designers ensure that their pages are accessible and usable by the visually impaired."

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/adesigner?open&S_TACT=105AGX59&S_CMP=GRsite-lnxw07&ca=dgr-lnxw07awadesigner

Build custom templates for your data-driven Web sites

"Most developers dread dealing with HTML tables and cells to build their Web sites. For one thing, tables make it difficult to modify the site later or to change its appearance. Discover some basic techniques for writing Web sites that you can later re-skin by using templates during the site's initial creation. Also, learn why you should use data-driven techniques for your own Web sites."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-customtemp/?S_TACT=105AGX08&S_CMP=EDU

Take THAT, Microsoft - IBM is switching to the Mac

"Yes, I know - what an overly dramatic title. But if you checked out some of the other blog entries surrounding the article in RoughlyDrafted about IBM’s Mac pilot program you’d think that IBM was tossing every ThinkPad it could find into the dumpsters (or worse) and bringing in MacBook Pro’s left and right."

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/decisioncentral/?p=102&tag=nl.e019

IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet

"The Register has unearthed a research paper that shows IBM working on a computing system capable "of hosting the entire internet as an application.""

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/05/ibm_bluegene_web/

4 Ways To Help the Government Adopt Open Source Technologies

Find champions who are respected in the community of government decision-makers

Speak the language of the decision makers

Make it easy for those in the government to become educated about FOSS

Engage an honest broker

http://www.opensourceconnections.com/2008/01/30/4-ways-to-help-the-government-adopt-open-source-technologies/

Cruel truth surfaces in the OOXML war

"Tsilas is admitting, more explicitly than implicitly, that Microsoft's profit depends on it controlling standards and that OOXML is a product designed to do exactly that. The mask has slipped and the nature of this particular war is on display."

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/leader/0,1000002982,39292519,00.htm

Lotus Notes 8.5 to fully support Ubuntu Linux 7.0

"IBM believes Linux on the enterprise desktop finally ready for widespread adoption. To meet future demand it is preparing to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.0."

http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/applications/enterprise/news/index.cfm?newsid=7193

IBM revs MS Office challenger, Lotus Symphony

"Lotus Symphony is a suite of software tools for creating text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents - the most frequently used desktop tools - based on OpenOffice code. It supports the OpenDocument format (ODF), Microsoft Office, and Lotus SmartSuite formats."

http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1008362/

"For users, the increasing popularity of ODF means it is less necessary to stick to Microsoft Office when seeking to ensure compatibility with other office documents, whether created inside or outside their own organizations"

IBM Translates Lotus Symphony for a Globally Integrated World

" Downloaded for use in English by more than 400,000 individuals at work and at home, IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Lotus Symphony suite (www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony) of desktop office software is now available in 24 languages serving major markets worldwide."

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0350350.htm

Scheduling a meeting in Lotus Notes

http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/dw/lotus/learn/viewlets/notesdomino/notes8/schedulemeetfinal_viewlet_swf.html

And other tutorials here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/demos/viewlets.html

Jazz

"Jazz is an IBM Rational project to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for integrating work across the phases of the development lifecycle. We believe Jazz will help teams build software more effectively while making the software development activity more productive and enjoyable."

https://jazz.net/pub/index.jsp

Learning more about clustering WebSphere Process Server V6.0

Clusters are sets of managed servers that provide high availability and workload balancing for applications. A cluster can be distributed over multiple physical systems and platforms. Clustered servers provide a better capacity and availability to your applications than a single server environment:

• Workload balancing by running an application on multiple servers that are managed by a cluster. The cluster balances the workload across all servers in the cluster.
• Extensibility and flexibility are guaranteed by adding more processing power (hardware) to the cluster and configuring new cluster members dynamically.
• High availability through failover and recovery support. Outages on one server are compensated for by other members in the cluster, which handle the workload and proceed without interruption in service.
• Maintenance is simplified because you can stop specific cluster members. It is not necessary to stop the application.

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=2307&context=SSQH9M&dc=DB520&dc=DB560&uid=swg21283726&loc=en_US&cs=UTF-8&lang=en&rss=ct2307websphere

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 : PREVIEW

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI-TiEtcYsw

IBM Lotus Symphony - Lotus Symphony Beta 3 Now Available

" We've just posted our Beta 3 release of Lotus Symphony. Why not download it and give it a try today.

If you like Beta 3, you can take advantage of a new function on our website and Invite your friends and family to try it for themselves. Simply click on the invite a friend link and we'll let you create a personal invitation that you can send to anyone.

Thanks for your continued support and feedback .. Happy Holidays from the entire IBM Lotus Symphony team."

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/buzzentry!default.jspa?threadID=3615

"IBM® Lotus® Symphony™ offers something for everyone – a community-oriented site, a template gallery, and tips and support to help you succeed. Your business can get more control over spiraling upgrade costs while protecting and maintaining documents into the future. If you’re a developer, Lotus Symphony supports Microsoft® Windows® and Office applications, which means you get even more from your current investments."

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa

IBM Seeking 'Patent-Protection-Racket' Patent

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/20/1031236

"For IBM to patent the process of patent abuse raises legal sarcasm to a fine art form. This is a legal hack of the first order."

The History of Notes and Domino

Notes and Domino began in the work of Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen, and Len Kawell, first on PLATO Notes at the University of Illinois and later on DECNotes. Lotus founder Mitch Kapor saw the potential in Ozzie's collaboration project and the rest is history.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistory/

Lotus Symphony

Lotus Symphony is based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard-which means you're not locked into proprietary file formats, software licensing agreements and upgrades. Finally, free tools and freedom of choice!

With Lotus Symphony, you can import, edit and save a variety of file formats including Microsoft Office files. You can even export your documents to Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF). The tools work with computers running both Microsoft Windows and Linux- environments, with support for Apple Macintosh planned for the future.

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa