The last couple of weeks have seen a wave of product launches and announcements at IBM Lotus, coinciding with the Lotus Collaboration Summit which took place on 18th September. A new version of Quickr is expected in the spring, along with a new product, Quickr Content Integrator, which will enable import of content from Domino libraries and teamrooms, FileNet P8, Microsoft Outlook public folders and Microsoft SharePoint sites into Quickr. Tuesday also saw the release of Lotus Forms 3.0, IBM's XForms-based technology gained through its PureEdge acquisition in 2005.

Also announced was the release of Accelerators for WebSphere Portal—packaged portlets and connectors for integrating key IBM products into the portal, reducing implementation time (and cost). Five were shipped—Dashboard, Self-Service, Content, Collaboration and Enterprise Software Suite. Of greatest interest to me was the Collaboration Accelerator, which provides integration for Sametime, Quickr and Connections.

Perhaps the most interesting announcement from IBM is the release of Lotus Symphony, a suite of office productivity tools which are available for free, and which are also shipped within the latest Notes release. IBM reported over 100,000 downloads during the first week of the beta availability of the Symphony software, highlighting the growing interest in alternatives to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Suite. Based on OASIS' ODF (Open Document Format) standard, Lotus Symphony supports Office formats as well as Lotus Smartsuite formats, and runs on both Windows and Linux.

This news was followed last week by the announcement of Microsoft Office Live Workspace—a Microsoft-hosted SharePoint workspace which allows users to access and share documents online. Described as an extension to the desktop Office suite, it can also be accessed by other desktop suites such as OpenOffice, and will be available in beta sometime in November. Widely touted as Microsoft's answer to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Microsoft claims it is not targeted at the enterprise market, rather at small businesses and home users.

These announcements, along with those services from vendors such as Google and Zoho, highlight the emerging transition in how people want to use their desktop software—personal productivity, which so successfully established Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop, is now giving way to collaborative productivity. It is no longer enough just to create, we now need to work with others to do this, and we are demanding that the software market catches up to support and enable this. All this activity is healthy for the desktop software market—which has been pretty stagnant for the last 10 years—and the entry into the market and buzz from players such as Google and Zoho are clearly making the giants sit up and take notice.