Lotus Notes

IBM’s Lotus Notes is a new and successful communication technology for many large companies and organizations. Lotus Notes is a client-server application that is mainly used for e-mail. That’s not all though! This program combines e-mail, calendar and scheduling capabilities, instant messaging, web conferencing (optional) and collaborative tools. These options allow fast and easy internal and external communication for many companies. One very effective and important tool on Lotus Notes is its scheduling capability. In order to schedule a meeting all you have to do is choose a date and time and then type in the names of the people invited to the meeting. After the meeting invitation is completed it is sent out to the people invited where they can then accept the invitation or decline. The program will even allow you to check your colleague’s calendars when scheduling a meeting to make sure the invitees are available. In addition to scheduling meetings within the office, Lotus has a centralized management of conference rooms. This enables the chairperson scheduling the meeting to see what rooms are available to have the meeting in. This easy scheduling tool avoids miscommunication and double booking of meetings in the same room. In addition, Lotus has one of the best security systems. According to Wikipedia, “Notes was the first widely adopted software product to use public key cryptography for client-server and server-server authentication and for encryption of data.” Lotus also enables users to forward e-mails to personal BlackBerries which can be set up by the company’s IT/IS department.

Some disadvantages to this software are that it is not easily assessable for the blind. Successful business people that are blind have a hard time navigating around Lotus Notes and cannot easily schedule meetings as well as see weather or not they are bcc’d on notes. Although, talking software can be used with Lotus it still makes it difficult to communicate to others efficiently.

I would rate Lotus Notes at a 4 for usefulness as a communication technology.

More information about Lotus Notes can be accessed through IBM’s website or by clicking on the following link: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus.